Abandon

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, Qui

“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?”

Je

“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 fu

“Great-grandfather.”

“What he was looking for. I can show you—Wait.” She pointed at Qui

Qui

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?” Qui

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

“No, I’ll take care of it. Abigail, wa

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.”

Qui

“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, Qui

“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.

Qui

“Would Dad have taken it this far?”

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

Je

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?” Je

“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, Qui

Abigail stopped at the grille, Je

Qui

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.

“Je

“What?”

Abigail turned and pressed it into her satin nightgown, then faced Qui

“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.”

Je

“You didn’t mean to shoot her, Abigail. Now give me the gun. My sister’s go

It made a small black spot an inch below Qui

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 Je

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.

Je

Abigail said, “Your nightgown’s ruined.”