Abandon

“Billy, you say you done this for me, but look at my face. What kind a man beats on his—”

“Won’t ever lay a hand on you again. That’s a promise.”

“I need to know what all you done before I—”

“And I’ll tell you. Everthin. No more secrets. But right now, ’til we get out a this town, I need you to trust me. I love you and Harriet. You’re my blue chips. That’s the only reason I done any a this. Will you trust me?” Bessie looked over at Gloria. “Don’t look at her. Look in my eyes. This is your crossroads. What do you want?”

“To be with the boy I fell in love with in Tennessee.”

“You’re lookin at him.”

“Am I?”

“For a fact. Gonna be different after we leave. So much better.”

“I wanna believe that, Billy.”

Gloria said, “Bessie, you didn’t see what your husband did to—”

“Shut up!” Billy touched his wife’s face, and Gloria saw it happen—a softening in Bessie’s eyes, walls coming down.

“Burn the breeze back to the cabin,” Billy said. “I want you to pack what food we got, enough clothes for us to get to Silverton.”

“We’re goin now?”

“Can’t stay in this bog hole.”

“Bessie!” Gloria said. “What are you doing?”

Bessie reached down and took her daughter’s hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But he is my husband. I ain’t got nothin else.”

Gloria’s eyes ran over. “Where’s my husband? Where’s Zeke?”

The McCabes walked onto the front porch.

Billy said, “Y’all go on. I gotta talk to Mrs. Curtice alone.”

“About what?”

“Gonna trust me or not, Bess?” As Billy closed the door, Gloria stood up, the fire nothing more than a few orange coals.

“Is he dead? Will you tell me that before you shoot me down? Is that Zeke’s blood on your . . . Oh God!” She’d noticed his cowhide custom-mades. “You’re wearing his boots!”

“I can’t shoot ye, Mrs. Curtice.” Billy jammed the long barrel of the Walker down his pants and pulled a rusted buffalo skinner with a stag-horn grip from a sheath under his frock coat.

“Please,” she said as he came toward her.

“Got no choice here. You set still, and we’ll do this quick.”

The front door opened. Billy tucked his knife into his coat, looked back over his shoulder.

“I thought I told you—”

“Something’s happenin,” Bessie said. “Oscar and Randall are ridin around yellin for everyone to come outside.”

“What for?”

Gloria could hear the shouting now, saw two men on horseback loping up the path toward the cabin.

“Somethin about Indians. Come on, they’re callin for you, Billy. Want you to ride up to the pass with some a the other men, help head ’em off.”

2009

FORTY-FOUR

Abigail’s watch showed 2:49 A.M. as the sprawling menace of Emerald House appeared through the falling snow. They’d killed their headlamps after leaving the switchbacks, and it had proved exceedingly difficult plowing their way through the basin in the total darkness of the storm. At the lake’s edge, a hundred yards from the big Douglas fir trunks of the portico, they collapsed in the snow.

“I’m dying here, Lawrence.”

“I know, me, too.”

“I don’t think I can walk much farther.” Aside from her heart beating in her ears, the only other sounds were the lake lapping at the bank and the distant drone of wind tearing over the peaks. “I still think we should just hike back to camp, get my cell, try to—”

“I told you we won’t get service in the canyon.”

“But maybe up at the pass—”

“In this storm? Are you kidding?”

“Then let’s just get the hell out of here, Lawrence. Go for help.”

“It’s twenty-seven miles back to civilization, and you just said you didn’t know if you could walk any farther. In this weather, we wouldn’t reach Silverton until Thursday morning at the earliest, and that would be hiking nonstop, hauling ass, assuming we didn’t get lost or take a fall climbing down the icy south side of the Sawblade. Look, I brought the Tozers out here. Now that Emmett’s dead, June’s my responsibility, and I’m not leaving her in that mansion with Stu.”

Oh, now you’re responsible, when it might get us killed.

“Then what do you want to do?” she asked.

He struggled to his feet, reached down, helped his daughter up out of the snow.

“I want you to follow me and keep quiet.”

They stole up to the west wing of Emerald House and Lawrence boosted Abigail into the same windowsill they’d attempted to escape through several hours earlier. Once inside, she watched her father hoist himself onto the sill, then gave him a hand stepping down into the kitchen on his sprained ankle.

Together, they slipped through the French doors and eased out into the corridor—just a gaping black hole that made Abigail temporarily forget the awful pain in her tailbone.

“I can’t see,” Lawrence whispered, “so just go slow, and make sure you don’t trip on anything. We make the slightest sound, it’s over.”

“Is the floor safe?”

“Nothing is.”

They proceeded with meticulous caution, testing the floorboards with every step to avoid a potentially fatal creak of weak wood.

The darkness never let up, and without the aid of headlamps, they had to trail their hands along the wall to ensure a straight trajectory down the corridor. Abigail followed a few feet behind her father, and she kept looking back over her shoulder, plagued by the unrelenting premonition that someone was creeping up behind them.

When Lawrence stopped, she said, “I don’t like this. I wanna get out of here right now.”

“Look.” Thirty feet ahead, a dim splotch of light shone onto the marble floor of the foyer. “It’s June,” he whispered.

In the vicinity of June’s headlamp, shapes began to materialize out of the darkness. Abigail could see Emmett’s widow sitting on the floor on the other side of the staircase, her back roped to a timber that had fallen out of the ceiling, her hands pinioned, shoulders heaving with grief.

Abigail spotted Emmett’s body, not ten feet away, at the base of the steps. It was impaled on a thick banister. She braced against the image, forced back the bile rising up her throat, made herself move on to the next moment. There was madness in the details, in the lingering.