The Titanic Secret (Isaac Bell 11)

The arrangements he’d made the night before would bear fruit in forty-eight hours, with luck. He’d caught a number of breaks when he’d phoned the Van Dorn office in San Francisco and then reached his old friend Seamus Rourke, a former commercial diver who’d lost a leg in the quake of ’06 and turned his experience and skills to designing and building dive equipment. He held five patents already, doubtless with more on the way.

An experienced rider, Bell settled into a seat in the middle of the car so the pounding of the wheels over the rails wasn’t directly beneath his body. He had no real interest in watching the landscape as the train ground its way up the mountains and so tipped his hat over his eyes to sleep through the two-plus-hour trip. The locomotive had other ideas, however, and from its rough jerk out of Union Station and up the three-thousand-foot vertical climb, the engine huf

fed and wheezed and spun its wheels and bellowed such noxious smoke that Bell and many other passengers, all male with the exception of one man’s wife, tied a handkerchief over his nose and mouth like a clichéd western bandit. The view wasn’t anything dramatic or spectacular, just a long slog up a narrow canyon, and because they had used up so much extra sand, they had a delay in the mining town of Black Hawk, just shy of Central City, for a supply to be located and loaded.

Bell made a mental note to change suits at the Teller House and have the current one thoroughly cleaned.

Central City was much more modern than Bell had expected and he admonished himself for envisioning a ramshackle frontier outpost. Miners had been working the surrounding hills for almost fifty years, and Central City showed off that maturity. The town had wide, straight streets, and all the commercial buildings were brick or stone. There was even an opera house. And like so much of the United States, cars and trucks were rapidly replacing horses. Electrical wires crisscrossed the street on tarred poles. Wood-framed houses dotted the hills above the downtown district.

Stepping from the train at the little depot, Bell noticed the air was markedly colder and all the more difficult to breathe because of the additional altitude. Occasional flakes of snow, like tiny motes of dust, drifted by.

Bell had little trouble finding Eureka Street or the Teller House. He was running late because of the train delay but still went to his room first to change and make arrangements to clean his laundry. He went into the bar twenty minutes after the predetermined time to meet Tony Wickersham.

The Englishman was seated at a table, immersed in work. Notes and ledgers were spread all across the table’s surface, and there was a bag at his feet that Bell could see was filled with more. Wickersham was about thirty, with a handsome face and a mop of curly dark hair. When he sensed Bell approaching, he looked up. His dark eyes were wide-set and inquisitive.

“Mr. Bell?”

“I am indeed.” Wickersham stood, and the two men shook hands. “Please, call me Isaac.”

“Tony.”

“Tony. I am sorry I’m late. There were delays with the train.”

“There are most days,” Wickersham said. “I heard a rumor that the locomotive had been left abandoned in Mexico before the line bought it and brought it here. True or not, she’s not suited for mountain work. Her drive wheels are far too small.”

“As long as her brakes are in working order for the journey back . . .” It was a bit early in the day for a whiskey, so Bell ordered two beers, as well as a sliced-beef sandwich with mustard.

Wickersham saluted Bell with his mug before taking a sip. “I’m not sure exactly what you’re planning to do up here. I know the Brothers Bloeser think Josh Brewster and the others might not have gone into the mine, but I’ve got a witness who saw them.”

“Some things don’t add up,” Bell said. “The claim jumping, for one thing, and the fact that they were all unmarried, which means no one would miss them.”

“I don’t disagree. Brewster’s pretty well known up in these hills. People were surprised when he talked about going back into the Little Angel. Had I been here, I would have told him that the mine, though unworked since the 1880s, was still considered an open claim. He might not have known that. Bill Mahoney, foreman of the Satan Mine, just below the Little Angel, was surprised when he learned Mr. Bloeser still retained mining rights. He admitted to using the shaft for storage at times.”

“What about them all being bachelors?”

“Coincidence?” Wickersham hazarded.

Bell shook his head. “In my line of work, there’s no such thing. It means something. I want to investigate where these men lived, see if it looks like they had planned to come back after the end of their shift or were they leaving permanently. I also want to ask around about equipment. What sorts of gear did they buy to start mining again.”

“They would have bought everything in Denver,” Wickersham said with confidence. “The stuff you can buy around here is pretty used up and overpriced.”

“Okay, thanks, I’ll get my investigator on it.”

“Have him check Kendry Ironworks and the Thor Forge Company. They’re the two major players for mining equipment.”

“Does the hotel have a phone?”

“It does.”

“Okay, I’ll call him when we’re done here.”

“May I ask your plan to get into the tunnel itself?”

“Ever heard of a rebreather?” When Wickersham’s brow furrowed but no thought came, Bell continued. “When we exhale, there is still a great deal of unused oxygen in our breath as well as the carbon dioxide we produce. The idea of reusing expired breath goes back a couple of centuries, but it wasn’t until 1879 or ’80 that a practical device was built. It was an English firm that made it. Basically, it’s a mask with a hose attached to a tank with extra oxygen under pressure and a scrubber chamber that uses a chemical reaction to fix the carbon dioxide. The device was put to the test when flooding halted construction of the Severn Tunnel. A man walked a thousand feet into the flooded tunnel to close some watertight doors to allow the works to be pumped dry.”

“I had no idea such a thing had been invented.”

“Not exactly standard mining gear,” Bell said. “I have a friend in San Francisco that’s tinkering with rebreather designs. There’s a Van Dorn agent on his way here right now with one of his latest models. He says it’ll give me up to four hours underwater. That’ll give me more than enough time to see exactly what’s been sealed up inside the Little Angel Mine.”