by Blake Crouch
“Is that him?” the clerk asked.
“Does the sheriff live in town?”
“Yeah, end of Fourteenth.”
“Which way is that?”
A door slammed.
“Two blocks north.”
Boots clomped on the sidewalk.
“Tracy, get down behind the desk and keep quiet.”
Quinn stepped under the awning, and as he opened the door and started into the foyer, Abigail bolted up a carpeted staircase under a sign that read TO THE ROOMS.
She turned left, climbed twenty steps, already breathless.
In the lobby, a man yelled, “Where’d she go?”
She reached the second floor.
Left or right?
She went left, then right, heard footfalls racing up the steps behind her as she came to an intersection of corridors and stairs.
Left, right, or climb?
She turned left, sprinting down a hall—pink walls, white trim, white doors, squeakiest floor she’d ever encountered, past room 201, under a chandelier with two fried bulbs, room 202, then a series of black-and-white photographs of old steam engines, room 203, right turn, long, narrow hallway: 214, 215, 216, 217.
It dead-ended at a door with a sign under the metal handle: DO NOT OPEN. FIRE DOOR ONLY. WILL SET OFF ALARM.
Bursting through into icy rain, the alarm wailing, Abigail stood on a fire escape that overlooked a sparsely populated parking lot, the globules of slush glittering under the yellow streetlamps like jewels on the hoods and windshields.
She glanced back through the glass-paned door, didn’t see him coming, prayed he’d taken a wrong turn in the maze of corridors.
She dropped to her hands and knees, lowering herself down the slippery ladder, and as her feet touched the pavement, the fire door banged open above her.
She crawled into the shadow of a nearby Dumpster. The ladder’s metal rungs resonated under the impact of his boots.
He hit the ground.
From where she crouched, she could only see his breath pluming in the floodlights.
She reached down, felt the hard bulge of the Ruger in the side pocket of her jacket, but it was zipped in and she didn’t want to risk the noise.
Ice pinged the Dumpster’s metal lid.
Quinn stepped a little farther out into the parking lot. Abigail wondered if the shadow where she squatted was as dark as she thought.
He stood there for some time, motionless.
The floodlights cut off, and she couldn’t see him anymore.
When they came on thirty seconds later, Quinn was gone.
Abigail got up and jogged through the parking lot, away from the illumination of streetlamps, the blaring alarm, into a dirt road cratered with puddles icing over.
Silverton at this hour consisted of cold and darkness and the isolated lights of little Victorian houses, some run-down and vacant since the mining bust, others polished up and slathered with bright paint by mountain-worshiping Yuppies.
She ran up Reese, blinded by sweat and freezing water that trailed down the back of her neck and along the curved ridge of her spine.
Somewhere in the dark, a truck engine mumbled.
She glanced over her shoulder, saw twin light beams slash through the pouring rain, the Bronco speeding up Twelfth Street.
She ran harder, splashing through puddles crusted with paper-thin ice.
A dog yapped at her through the window of a nearby house, and several blocks away, the courthouse clock tolled 8:00 P.M.
One street up, the Bronco bounced along a dirt road. She saw it streak between the houses, make a right turn onto Thirteenth, then haul ass for a block before initiating another hard right, the high beams now blasting head-on, accompanied by the roaring engine.
She dived off the street, her head just missing a mailbox, then flattened herself in wet grass against a chain-link fence as the Bronco screamed past, mud slinging into her hair, slopping down all over her clothes.
Abigail waited, listening to the engine dwindle up the road and the distant fire alarm and the deep, almost imperceptible static of the Animas River on the opposite side of town, running low in advance of winter.
When the Bronco turned onto another street, she struggled to her feet and wiped the mud out of her eyes and went on, soon crossing the intersection of Reese and Thirteenth, every footfall sending new shoots of pain up into her tailbone.
Another minute brought her to Fourteenth, where she veered left at an abandoned brick building and ran for one long block past decrepit white Victorians and a double-wide into Snowden, another muddy road, rougher and more washboarded than Reese.
She looked around—just the faint drone of the fire alarm, like some psychotic mewling cat, and shards of house light, the air permeated with the rain-mellowed odor of wood smoke, and thirty yards on, at the end of a gravel drive, blades of porch light lying in triangles upon a Ford Expedition with a modest suspension lift, giant tires, a wench, and a light bar mounted on the roof.
Two blocks down, the Bronco turned onto Fourteenth, barreling toward her.
She wept from the pain as she staggered up the drive, passing the driver’s door of the Expedition—gold-emblazoned with SAN JUAN COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT.
EIGHTY-SEVEN
A
bigail reached the front porch of the Victorian—cherry, with yellow trim, Tibetan prayer flags strung between the gutter and a cluster of skinny aspen, a circular stained-glass window on the second floor, backlit with firelight, chairs in the yard fashioned out of old skis.
She pounded on the front door and, looking through the inset of curtained glass, saw a light flick on, heard footsteps crossing a hardwood floor that squeaked and groaned.
A bolt turned, a chain slid out, flopped against the door frame, hinges creaking, and there stood that petite, beautiful woman who’d hassled Scott over his fishing license four days ago at the trailhead, though no braided pigtails this time. No Stetson or parka. Just a woman in a pink satin nightgown and sheepskin slippers, hair pinned up with chopsticks, breath spiced with the faintest glimmer of vodka.
“Help you with something?” she asked.
Abigail’s knees buckled. She sat down hard on the porch.
“What’s wrong?”
Abigail couldn’t speak, just pointed back toward Fourteenth, but there were no oncoming headlights, only streetlamps and darkness.
The sheriff squatted down in the threshold of the door.
“You were with that group headed out to Abandon. Last Sunday, right?”
“Yes.”
“Your face is frostbit. What happened?”
“Please, just . . . get me inside.”
The sheriff helped her to stand, then, with her arm around her waist, walked Abigail into the house and shut the door.
“Do the locks,” Abigail said.
As the sheriff relocked the door, Abigail tried to unzip her muddy jacket, but her hands trembled too much to grasp the zipper.
“Let me help with that,” the sheriff said.
“Thank you. What’s your name?”
“Jennifer.”
“I’m Abigail.”
Abigail pulled her arms out of the sleeves, and Jennifer took the jacket and hung it from the coatrack. Then she guided Abigail through the foyer, past the staircase, and up a dark hallway into the kitchen.
“Here, sit down.” She pulled a chair back from a small table and Abigail collapsed onto the seat.
“Could I have some water?”
“Of course.” Jennifer opened a cabinet and took down a glass, filled it at the tap.
Abigail glanced around the kitchen, a peculiar mix of new and old—Sub-Zero fridge, granite countertops, an old gas stove salted with rust, an ancient faucet. On a wooden shelf above the sink, she spotted an array of empty Grey Goose bottles and antique bottles that a century ago had contained bitters and tonics, and a clear flower vase full of stained wine corks.
Jennifer set the glass down on
the table and returned to the sink and filled a pot with water. Abigail caught a whiff of propane, heard the gas ignite. Jennifer sat down across from her.
“I know you’re tired and hurting, but why don’t you try to tell me what happened out there.”
The heat from a wood-burning stove slithered in from the living room.
“They’re all dead,” she whispered. “Except my father, who’s trapped in a cave.”
“How’d they die?”
The cold had scrambled and clouded her thoughts, and she tried to decant the sequence of events, but the days and nights kept mixing and running into one another and reversing, like the warped memory of a fever dream, several versions of the last seventy-two hours emerging, until she couldn’t separate with certainty exactly what had happened when and to whom and the horrible chronology of it all.
She shook with chills as she attempted to piece it back together, the events crystallizing and falling into order the more she talked.
But the version she told took a departure once they’d been locked inside the mountain. It was only a long-forgotten mine, and empty at that.
No bones, no gold, no revelation.
. . .
“Here, get this in you.”
Jennifer set a big steaming mug of tea on the table before Abigail, who cupped her hands to the warm ceramic and left them there until her fingers burned.
“How long has your father been alone in the cave.”
“Almost two days.”
“How much water did you leave him with?”
“We ran out.”
“I’ll call search-and-rescue, get that ball rolling. Go on, drink your tea. You’ll feel better.”
Jennifer walked out of the kitchen, and Abigail heard the creak of her footsteps ascending the stairs. She raised the mug to her lips and sipped the tea—piping hot, peppermint with a harsh, bitter bite—wondered if the sheriff had sneaked in a bit of Grey Goose for good measure, hoped so.
Her feet ached. She set the tea on a place mat and reached down and pulled on the double-knotted laces of her left boot. The knot slipped. She tugged out the tongue and winced as she slid her heel out of the boot, the wool hiking sock cold, damp, and pink with blood.
Abigail loved her feet—small, feminine, exuding a slender, proportionate beauty her friends openly envied. These shredded, swollen blobs of flesh did not belong to her. They looked more like battered cod, blanched and translucent, with silver dollar–size blisters on her heels and ankles that peeled back, revealing raw skin the color of watermelon pulp.
She got up, had to walk on the balls of her feet to bypass the excruciating pain.
Being down there alone unnerved her, though she still caught fragments of Jennifer’s voice upstairs. She took her mug of tea and limped out of the kitchen in search of a bathroom, came instead into a small office with a scratched-up desk, which faced a window. The desk barely provided the surface area to house its computer, printer, and fax machine.
Peering through the beaded glass, Abigail saw that the rain had changed over to snow.
Way off in all that darkness, a barb of red light slanted up and left through her field of vision and she thought she was hallucinating until she pegged it for the taillights of a car climbing the steep grade south out of Silverton toward Molas Pass.
Spider plants in need of watering hung from the ceiling, a pair of leather snowshoes from one wall, and her eyes fixed upon a framed photomontage beside them of jagged mountains under the heading COLORADO’S 54 FOURTEENERS.
She sipped her tea. Beside the desk, two unfinished pine bookcases almost touched the ceiling, but instead of books, they contained relics from the past—rusted railroad spikes, an old burro’s shoe, pitons and a pair of crampons from the forties. Perhaps most fascinating, the middle two shelves of each bookcase displayed photographs of Silverton.
On one side stood framed photos of the present-day town and the buildings of Greene and Blair streets—the courthouse, city hall, the Grand Imperial—all set against the backdrop of mountainsides blazing with aspen and blue sky the purity of which could exist only above nine thousand feet in the Colorado Rockies, and there were photos of the Durango and Silverton Narrow-Gauge Railroad, the train having stopped to unload at Twelfth Street on a summer day, tourists leaning out of the gondola cars, smiling and waving, thrilled to spend a few hours in this romanticized mining town, to lunch in remodeled saloons and brothels, watch staged gunfights, have portraits taken in old-West costumes, children destined to return home with cowboy hats and six-shooter cap guns, tortured parents having to suffer their kids saying “Howdy, pardner” and “Get along, now” for the foreseeable future.
On the opposing shelves stood more Silverton photographs, these all in black-and-white, little windows to the past: a burro train standing in late-nineteenth-century Greene Street, the mule skinners staring dour-faced at the photographer. Soot-blackened miners and whores and suited gold and silver kings in a saloon, everyone raising beer glasses and tumblers, and not a smile to be found under all those handlebar mustaches. The railroad in winter, tracks framed by fifteen-foot walls of snow, and five bundled men with iced mustaches standing in front of a steam engine’s cattle guard, shovels in hand.
But what caught her interest more than anything were the portraits of people long dead, their faces stoic, expressionless: a woman who might’ve been her age, carrying in her eyes the world-weariness of a refugee. A white-bearded gentleman, ragged bowler perched on his head, whose eyes betrayed their longing to cut loose a smile, despite having to sit still for the long exposure.
She considered all the photographs in her studio—family and friends at weddings, graduations, vacations, Christmases—and couldn’t recall a single picture where someone wasn’t smiling their heart out, thought how strange it would be if people in modern times never grinned for the camera.
Going solely on photographs, historians in the next century might mistake her world for a happy place, just as she’d always assigned misery and hardship to the past, prejudiced by a few grim portraits.
Abigail noted that she felt much better, the pain receding from her feet as she inspected the last portrait—a black-and-white shot of a young man with hair so unkempt that it struck her as contemporary, and for all its gravity-defying waves, might’ve run two hundred dollars, not including product, in a Manhattan salon.
The face that wild hair sat upon was handsome but uniformly pocked with tiny colorless indentations, so that he looked less like a live human being, more like a Seurat Pointillism.
The portrait’s frame rested upon a brown leather-bound book, stiff and dry, so old that as she lifted it to her face and inhaled the smell, she couldn’t detect even the faintest odor of tannins or glue.
She opened it to the first page, which contained six words handwritten in elaborate, perfect script: The Journal of Dr. Julius Primack.
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 ruin
ed 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.