Abandon

EIGHTY-EIGHT

S

he thumbed the brittle pages, coming midway through to handwriting that looked different from the doctor’s—smaller, less methodical, and nearly illegible, like it had been scrawled under duress.

There were eight lines in haphazard succession down the middle of the page, the first of which read Lana Hartman.

“You found it.”

The sheriff stood in the archway adjoining the kitchen and the office, and Abigail couldn’t exactly nail it down, but her posture evinced tension—Jennifer’s arms hanging at her sides, knees slightly bent, her body coiled as if for a race or a fight.

And Abigail felt different—seismic shifts in the unavowed frequencies. She was edgy, a little nauseous, her awareness heightened, and she realized it wasn’t that her body didn’t ache anymore—she just cared less and less with each passing moment.

“You’re a historian, too?” Abigail asked.

“You could say that.” Jennifer walked into the office and stood beside Abigail at the bookshelf. “This guy”—she touched the portrait of the young man with the ruined face—“came out to Silverton from Chicago in 1891 with investment money. Lost it all on poorly chosen claims in less than a year.”

“But he stayed.”

“Julius had studied a little medicine in the mid-eighties, and since you didn’t actually have to have a diploma to be a doctor where they were in high demand, he started a practice, kept prospecting on the side. If you read his notes”—Jennifer pulled the journal out of Abigail’s hands, placed it back carefully under the photograph—“it becomes clear he was a very driven but very frustrated man.”

“Why frustrated?”

“He became obsessed with finding some gold that went missing in Abandon, thought he knew where it was, that he had the key that would open this secret mine. But he could never find it. He went crazy, shot himself in 1924.”

“Why do you have his picture and journal? Are you studying—”

“I’m his great-granddaughter. My brother and I are fourth-generation Silverton Primacks.”

The sheriff slipped out of focus, and Abigail had to rub her eyes to bring her back.

“What’s wrong?” Jennifer asked.

“I don’t know . . . it’s weird.” It wasn’t a bad feeling, just a sudden, blissful calm, and the only thing that unnerved Abigail was how fast it had bullied its way in.

Jennifer said, “That’s probably the Percoset I crushed up in your tea.”

Abigail’s heart hammered so hard, she thought it would explode, then realized that the beating hadn’t originated within her. Someone had knocked at the front door.

Jennifer had left the room.

Abigail looked down, saw a puddle and four pieces of ceramic on the hardwood floor.

She almost fell moving past the stainless-steel refrigerator, braced herself against the kitchen table, which turned over—place settings, her glass of water, and a vase of plastic lilies crashing to the floor.

She sat down on the tile.

In the foyer, Jennifer reached the front door and pulled it open.

A man loomed in the porchlight. Abigail knew him from somewhere. His shoulder-length brown hair was tied up in a ponytail, his silver-and-black down jacket dusted with snow.

He wrapped his arms around Jennifer, nothing remotely sexual or romantic in the embrace, the energy reflective of close friends or siblings.

He said, “We did it, Jen.”

Abigail leaned against the refrigerator, her head humming as she watched Jennifer redo the locks.

The mosaic of pastel-colored tiles ensnared Abigail’s attention, and the next time she looked up, that tall man stood at the sink, washing his hands.

Her eyes slammed shut, and when they opened again, her face lay pressed against the cold tile and the kitchen table had been righted and the sheriff and that familiar man sat across from each other.

“. . . this storm, we won’t be able to get back to Abandon until next summer. I told you it might come to . . .” His voice left audible trails, as if he were speaking in triplicate.

Abigail had been stoned before, drunk, even took Ecstasy a couple years back at an ill-advised rave in the Meatpacking District. This was nothing like that. She didn’t feel euphoric, just tranquil and dreamy and wise. On some disassociated level, she understood the danger, but it was knowledge without emotion or investment, no more upsetting than hearing of a stranger’s death on the evening news.

“I fucking hate this.” The sheriff’s voice.

Somewhere in the kitchen, a crow squawked nine times.

“This isn’t the first blood spilled for those bricks. But we do this right? Finish it? Maybe it’s the last. You thought of it that way?”

“I don’t know if I’m wired for—”

“Remember what you said to me four days ago? ‘There’re people going into Abandon, and I think they’re going for our gold.’ You told me, ‘Don’t let it happen.’ ”

She went out of time again, wading amid thoughts jumbled and irrelevant and absurd, vaguely aware that she needed to bring herself down, untangle her mind from this exquisite high.

“. . . four-hundred-foot drop off Peace Falls. There’ll be no chance of anyone finding her until . . . Jesus, Jen, I told you to get her loaded.”

Abigail tried to sit up.

“I spiked her tea with thirty milligrams of oxycodone.”

If Abigail didn’t move her head, she could actually bring their faces into focus.

“What’d she say, Quinn?”

“I couldn’t tell.”

This time, she got the words out, though they slurred against her thick tongue, sounded as muddled as everything else. “Why’d you drug me?”

Jennifer said, “Just to help with your pain. Nice, isn’t it?”

“Lovely.” Abigail stared at the man at the table, her mouth and eyes gone dry. “I know you.”

“Yes, we’ve met.”

Abigail managed to sit up against the cabinets, had to close her eyes to shut out the chaos of light and noise.

“In the mine?”

“No, Packer’s mansion. But I did lock you and your father and June into the mine. More than a little surprised you found a way out.”

“Oh, that’s right.” She tried to suppress a giggle. It all seemed so terribly funny. Then it hit her. “Jennifer,” she said, “there were gold bars in that mine. I’ll bet that’s what your—what was he?”

“Great-grandfather.”

“What he was looking for. I can show you—Wait.” She pointed at Quinn. “He knows. He was there. He had a key. How does he have your great-grandfather’s key?”

Quinn and Jennifer laughed.

Abigail laughed, too, her eyes catching on the clock above the sink, a different bird assigned to each hour.

It read 9:10 P.M.

Impossible. It had been hours since she’d walked into the office and looked at the Silverton photographs and Primack’s journal.

“I need to get going, huh?” Quinn said. “Before this snow gets any deeper.”

“I should go with you. I won’t lie—I don’t want to, but—”

“No, I’ll take care of it. Abigail, wanna go for a ride?”

She thought about it. “Where to?”

“Just up into the mountains a little ways.”

“Why?”

“To meet up with search-and-rescue, so we can get your dad out of the cave.”

She smiled. “Know what I think?”

“What?”

“You don’t mean the words you’re saying.”

“No? Then what do I mean?”

“Something bad.”

Quinn stood up and reached down, grabbed Abigail’s hands and pulled her to her feet.

“Help me get her boots on, Jen. Don’t want her found barefoot.”

“Actually, it doesn’t matter.”

“Sure it does.”

“No, when people get hypothermia, start freezing to death out in the wilderness, they’re often found half-naked. They go out of their mind, think they’re warm, start stripping off layers of clothing. Just leave her boots here. I’ll make sure they disappear.”

“Can you walk, Abigail?”

“Of course I know how to walk.”

She felt weightless on her feet, moving slowly and deliberately out of the kitchen into the hallway. At an ovular mirror, she stopped and regarded herself, leaning in close, her nose flattened against the glass.

“We could still not do this, Quinn.”

“Stop now? After everything I’ve done? No payoff for any of it? That’d be the worst outcome. No, we’re all in.”

Abigail’s pupils had been reduced to grains of black sand.

She turned away from the mirror and continued on toward the front door.

“Jen, this won’t have been worth it . . . for Julius, for Grandpa, Dad, you and me, if we let the guilt crush us.”

As Abigail reached for the doorknob, she saw her muddy jacket hanging from the coatrack. She lifted it off the hook, kept turning it around, searching for the armholes.

Quinn took it from her, held it by the collar, and Jennifer helped guide her arms into the sleeves.

“Would Dad have taken it this far?”

“Hard to say. We’re doing this for all of them, you know.”

Jennifer unlocked and opened the door and Abigail stepped out onto the porch.

Snow tumbled in the vicinity of distant streetlamps, and Abigail wondered how it could be snowing only in those select globes of light.

“God, it’s beautiful,” the sheriff said.

Abigail found the zippers and worked them open, shoved her hands into the pockets.

They helped her down the steps into snow not quite deep enough to cover the spear tips of the longest grass blades.

“We doing right here?” Jennifer said.

“If you can live with yourself, does it matter?”

“Can you?”

“I think so. We just have to forget a few days of questionable behavior.”

They moved down past the grove of baby aspen and the sheriff’s Expedition, gravel crunching under their boots and slippers and Abigail’s bare feet, unfazed by the cold.

They arrived at the Bronco, Quinn already opening the front passenger door.

Abigail stopped at the grille, Jennifer beside her, snow melting on the warmed metal of the hood.

Quinn slapped the roof. “Come on. Get in.”

In the right pocket of her jacket, Abigail’s fingers touched something cool and hard. It took five seconds of feeling it to identify the object, and still she couldn’t think of its name, only its function.

“Jennifer,” she said, “you know, I forgot all about this.”

“What?”

Abigail turned and pressed it into her satin nightgown, then faced Quinn, ears ringing as the sheriff went groaning to her knees, blood sprinkling in the snow.

“You didn’t mean what you said about helping my father, did you? You just want—”

“Abigail, you’re fucked-up on the meds. We’re trying to help you and your father here.”

Jennifer crawled back toward the house, and for a moment, Abigail wondered if maybe Quinn was right.

“You didn’t mean to shoot her, Abigail. Now give me the gun. My sister’s gonna die if we don’t—”

It made a small black spot an inch below Quinn’s right eye.

Blood ran down his cheek.

He reached up and scraped at the hole with his fingernails, like he’d been stung and was trying to dig out the stinger.

Abigail looked back at the Victorian house, where Jennifer had dragged herself up onto the porch and come to an impasse at the front door.

The sheriff cried out, “Oh God!”

“You just shot two people, Abigail Foster,” Abigail told herself.

Snow slanted down through the porch light, Abigail figuring the full thirty milligrams of Percoset must be raging through her, because she was so stoned, so detached, her thoughts derailing and becoming unmanageable again.

She eased down in the gravel and stared at the prayer flags, frosted with snow and flapping in the wind, Silverton all hushed and still.

She was cold and itchy from the opiate, but she didn’t care.

After awhile, she got up and staggered toward the porch, climbed the steps, stopping at the front door.

Jennifer lay on her back in a pond of black blood, her eyes open and glazed, her lips barely moving.

Abigail said, “Your nightgown’s ruined.”

Then she stepped over the sheriff and went inside.