Abandon

TWENTY-FOUR

J

esus, this place is huge.” Isaiah let the beam of his headlamp pass through the foyer. “My light doesn’t even reach the far end. We safe in here, Lar?”

“No, but this is the most stable part of Packer’s mansion.”

The foyer smelled dank, redolent of mildew and wet wood. From her spot in line, Abigail shone her light on the cracked marble floor, saw piles of scat, puddles of ice. Through a hole in the roof, snowflakes drifted down. She removed one of her mittens, let her fingertips graze the stone wall—cold and soft and wet, carpeted in dead lichen.

“There’s a journal in my pack,” Lawrence said. “I need to see it.”

Isaiah unzipped it, pulled out a black spiral-bound notebook. As Lawrence took it and sat down on the cascading staircase, Abigail couldn’t stop herself. “What’s going on here, Lawrence?”

Isaiah grinned. “You don’t know?” He laughed, his southern-tinged voice reverberating through the foyer. “Nice, Larry. Very nice. More I get to know you, more I like you.”

When Abigail aimed her light in her father’s face, she recognized the guilt and the circuit closed, connecting on some primordial level to that girl who still inhabited her, and a subconscious memory, twenty-six years old, of that exact look of shame when her daddy had slipped into her bedroom one night to say that he had to go away.

“What have you done?”

“I’m sorry, Abby. I’m so sorry.”

“For what? Tell me.” Isaiah’s hand passed through the beam of light. She fell. The darkness tingled. Emmett started forward, but his nose ran into the barrel of Stu’s machine pistol. He held up his hands, retreated.

Isaiah knelt down, grabbed Abigail’s ponytail, lifting her head so their eyes met. “My man’s got some serious shit to attend to. Next time, the fist will be closed. You’ll lose teeth. Now get the fuck up.” He jerked her by her hair, pulling her to her feet. “And shut the fuck up.”

“That isn’t necessary,” Lawrence said, his voice trembling.

“Tend to your notebook,” Stu warned.

Abigail touched her cheek. The bruise burned.

“All right, Lar. Where we going?”

“I’m not a hundred percent sure, since I haven’t actually seen it. This is all theoretical, based on my research. I was gonna try to find it on this expedition.”

“You bullshitin me, Larry? Don’t make me—”

“Will you give me two damn minutes here? I’m not saying I can’t take you to it. I just need more time.” Lawrence studied his notebook, flipping through several pages.

Somewhere nearby, water dripped, followed by a faint and distant scratching. From high above, came the chirp of a pika. Lawrence finally closed his notebook, stood up. “Bart’s wing.”

“Lead the way.”

Lawrence guided them out of the foyer, toward the staircase that rose up the center of Emerald House. “Last one of these we went up collapsed,” he said to Isaiah.

“You haven’t been up here?”

“Not since last summer. I’m sure it’s weakened.”

“Then you best tread lightly. I’ll be behind you.”

Abigail was third in line, and to her relief, this staircase felt much sturdier than that flimsy death trap in the hotel. Part of the banister was missing, but none of the steps creaked.

As they reached the next floor, Stu whispered, “Isaiah, hold up. I hear something.”

Their beams of light swept through what remained of the second level—tall door frames and window frames, three wings still intact, the south reduced to a hole so gaping, you could drive a bus through it, snow blowing sideways into the mansion and slowly rotting everything it touched. Another winter or two, the water damage would reach the stairwell.

“Stu, I don’t know what I’m gonna do if this is another false—”

Isaiah suddenly lifted his machine pistol, motioned for his partners to do the same. Abigail heard it, too—the rapid patter of footsteps. Isaiah and Stu moved soundlessly, side by side, away from the stairs, toward the west wing.

Twenty feet in, Isaiah stopped and held up his hand, pointing at a closed door a little ways into the passage. Isaiah looked at Stu, counting down from three with the fingers of his right hand. He kicked the door, which exploded back off its rusted hinges.

The mansion filled with earsplitting shrieks, like those of women being murdered. A host of shadows flew out of the room, toward the stairs. June screamed, and amid blinding muzzle flames, Abigail heard panting and the muffled clatter of machine pistols.

A half dozen coyotes blitzed past Abigail, heading down the stairs and into the foyer, their yaps at once jovial and demonic as they escaped through the oak doors into the night.