by Blake Crouch
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.
EIGHTY-NINE
T
he sun had roused Lawrence Kendall from sleep on Wednesday and Thursday, but not on Friday. His third morning in the cave, a noise woke him, his eyes opening to pure black, his head lifting from the folded parka he’d used for a pillow the last three nights, fearing he was hallucinating again, but the sound held strong—the muffled yet unmistakable whop-whop of rotors chopping the thin air. He smiled, could have wept. Abby had made it out.
As he felt around on the cold rock for the last functioning light, he wondered why a helicopter would be searching for him after dark, but he instantly dismissed the thought as near-death confusion.
His fingers grazed the straps, and he slipped the headlamp on and twisted the bulb. He dragged Abigail’s pack over to the granola-bar wrapper in the middle of the room, which marked the spot under the chimney.
Every time he’d slept, he’d dreamed of this moment, on the brink of deliverance, wondering if the smoke would make it all seventy feet up the chute to the surface, and, if so, whether he could generate a sizable-enough plume with what he had to catch anyone’s attention.
As he unzipped Abigail’s pack and grabbed the Doubletree matchbook and a handful of paper he’d already torn out of her notepad and balled up in preparation, his eyes fell upon the mound of snow nearby that had undoubtedly fallen from the surface.
The moment he got the paper burning, he’d fill the two water bottles with the snow, maybe have enough willpower to wait, let it turn to delicious slush in the cavern’s thirty-seven degrees.
He gathered up the wads of paper and stacked them into a little pyramid before tearing out a match. It ignited on the first strike, the flame motionless in the stagnant room. He held it to the base of the pyramid, got seven pieces lighted before the match burned down to his thumb.
The helicopter sounded closer, Lawrence figuring if he could hear the rotors this well, it must be hovering right over the chimney.
All the paper seemed to combust at once, and the room flared with firelight as a dense cloud of smoke lifted toward the low ceiling, Lawrence picturing it just missing the hole and diffusing through the room, but this didn’t happen.
In spite of his weakened state, he’d planned and executed perfectly. Like a vacuum, the chimney inhaled the smoke. Lawrence struggled to his feet, neck splitting, head pounding with dehydration as he stared up the chute, watching his precious smoke curl toward the surface.
Far up the shaft, something gleamed in the dimming beam of his lamp. It resembled snow, and the smoke had collided into it and stopped, hanging like mist in a hollow against the ice-plugged opening of the chimney.
The whop-whop of the helicopter blades pulsed as loud as he would ever hear them.
It was daylight out there, permanent night in here, and if he couldn’t find his way back to the main cavern, he was going to die.
NINETY
S
unlight streamed through the tall windows with a brilliance that suggested the world outside had turned to glass. Abigail’s head throbbed, as if someone had shoved a hot coal deep into the base of her skull, and with the woodstove extinguished, the living room was cold, particularly where she lay shivering on the futon by the window.
She had no idea how she’d come to be in this house. The last piece of memory that felt like solid ground seemed ages ago—driving Scott’s Suburban away from the trailhead at dusk. Whatever came after had shattered against the back of her mind, and based on what few frames she’d glimpsed, she didn’t want those memories reassembled. Her eyes watered with pain as she eased her weight onto her feet.
The nearest archway opened into a kitchen, and something about the table and the stainless-steel refrigerator and the shelf of bottles over the sink made her nauseous with fear—an inexplicable familiarity.
She limped into the foyer and pulled open the front door to cloudless early-morning cobalt, Silverton buried under a foot of new snow, spruce and aspen in the front yard sagging under the weight, the town silent save the murmur of a snowplow scraping north up Greene Street.
At her feet, a woman dressed only in a pink satin nightgown lay unmoving on her stomach, her skin tinged blue and powdered with snow, her bare legs smeared with blood.
“Oh my God.”
“And then you shot them both,” the woman said.
“Yes.”
“Because you believed your life was in danger.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me again why you thought the sheriff of Silverton and her brother wanted to kill you?”
“You’re looking at me like you don’t believe me.”
“It’s not that we don’t believe—”
“Then what?”
“Ms. Foster, we’ve got the sheriff and her brother dead here in town, and you’re telling us there’re six more bodies in the backcountry, most of which we won’t be able to locate until sometime next summer when the snow breaks, and forget the small concern that none of this jives with the Jen Primack I’ve known and worked with for three years. Look, I know you’ve been through quite an ordeal, but for a small-time undersheriff in a sleepy town like Silverton, this is a helluva lot to choke down.”
When Abigail awoke, they were sitting at the foot of her bed, whispering. She shut her eyes and eavesdropped on a debate concerning the merits of parallel versus telemark turns in champagne powder.
Silverton’s size didn’t warrant a hospital, so the undersheriff had put Abigail up in the Grand Imperial for the night and asked two nurses from San Juan County Public Health to check in on her every few hours.
She liked the undersheriff, Hans, a tall, lanky man in the neighborhood of thirty, who looked more like a snowboard instructor than a lawman—longhaired, bearded, and with a tattoo of a rock-climbing skeleton inked into the skin of his left forearm, just visible where he’d rolled up the sleeve of his khaki button-up shirt.
The special agent with the Forest Service made her nervous. She couldn’t recall the redhead’s name, but despite her rustic wardrobe, she managed to exude the cool, impassive confidence of a fed. And she’d hardly asked Abigail a thing, letting Hans lob questions while she leaned back in her chair in her muddy hiking boots, jeans, and down vest, not even bothering to veil her scrutiny and suspicion.
The special agent cut her eyes at Abigail.
“She’s awake.”
They dragged their chairs over into patches of afternoon sunlight that spilled in thr
ough the second-floor windows.
“How you feeling?” the undersheriff asked.
“All right.”
Hans leaned forward in the chair, clasped his hands together.
“Search-and-rescue just got back a half hour ago. You might’ve heard the helicopter.”
“They didn’t find my father.”
“They spent forty-five minutes hovering over the mountainside you think you came out on, with two men combing the area with binoculars.”
“I told you: There was a chimney I climbed out—”
“I believe you, Abigail. Thing is, that’s steep terrain up there. They spotted numerous avalanches, and they’re thinking a slide may have swept down the mountain at some point in the last twenty-four hours, buried the opening to the chimney.”
“So they’ve given up?”
“No, of course not. But there’s another storm coming in tonight, blizzard warnings already up, so our window for finding your father is shrinking.”
Abigail glanced at the special agent, could have sworn she caught a glint of compassion through the federal facade. “Maybe my father left that chimney room, tried to find his way back to the cavern where we first entered.”
“Okay, even assuming he was able to find his way back, this morning an avalanche swept down that hillside where you say you entered the cave. So wouldn’t the entrance be buried? And as you said, it was practically impossible to find in dry conditions in broad daylight.”
Abigail shook her head, the tears coming. “He thinks I’m coming for him. Please. Fly me back there. Let me—”
“You honestly believe you can find it?”
“Tell me something, Hans. At what point would you quit looking for your father?”
1893
NINETY-ONE
G
loria’s head lay in Rosalyn’s lap, and she saw that lonely lantern still burning in the middle of the cavern, its flame a little lower than before. The pain had intensified into something like the worst aftereffects of drunkenness she’d ever experienced, her body begging for water as it slowly dried and wilted. Still alive, she thought.