Abandon

“Isaiah, just listen. I need a minute to—”

“Sorry, Larry. This is the only way.”

“Stop it, please,” Abigail begged. “He’s my father. He doesn’t know.”

“Yeah, well, we’re about to find that out for certain.”

Isaiah set the point of the dagger under the lower lid of Lawrence’s right eye.

Lawrence struggled to cover his face.

“Hold still, goddamn it! Want me to accidentally push this into your brain?”

Abigail jumped up and lunged for Isaiah, but someone tackled her from behind.

She tried to fight him off, but he had her by the wrists in no time, his weight pinning her to the floor.

She stared up into that masked face, inches from her own, didn’t smell vodka, reasoned it couldn’t be Stu. What she could see of his eyes seemed strangely comforting, something familiar about them, so deep, burdened. Because you recognize them.

Abigail whispered, “You weren’t killed. That was an act, for our benefit.”

She jerked a wrist free and ripped off the man’s mask, saw the scarred, bearded face of their guide, Jerrod Spicer.

“The f**k, Jerrod?” Isaiah said.

“You’re with them?” Lawrence said, incredulous.

“She recognized my eyes.” Jerrod got up, screamed, “Fuck! How do we walk away now?”

“You knew it might come to this,” Isaiah said. “That was always a poss—”

“It’s already come to a whole helluva lot more than you said it would. Why don’t you take off your—”

Isaiah stepped back from Lawrence, ripped off his mask. “Happy?” Abigail’s headlamp illuminated the face of a thirty-something black man she would’ve thought exceptionally handsome under different circumstances, his smooth-shaven features in perfect proportion—pronounced cheekbones, intense mud-colored eyes, dimples that caved when he let loose his broad and malignant smile.

Jerrod lifted off Stu’s face mask, and the first thing Abigail noticed were the ringlets of Stu’s curly black hair, then the week’s worth of stubble, thin lips, sunken, red-rimmed eyes, saddest she’d ever seen. He’d been handsome once, but whatever monster was eating him inside had also sucked the life from his face, drawing it into an ax-thin blade of emaciation.

Jerrod took Isaiah over to the window. Stu got up and joined them. They whispered. Abigail looked at her father. He still stood against the window, knees shaking, crying, the floor wet under his hiking boots and a dark stream sliding down his cheek and into his beard, as if he wept blood. It took him a moment to muster his voice.

“There’s one more place to look,” Lawrence finally said.

They stopped talking. Isaiah walked over, crowded him up against the glass again.

“Larry, I sincerely pray for your sake you aren’t f**king with me.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

They made their way back to the stairwell.

“What’s up here?” Isaiah asked as they ascended the second flight of steps.

“Servants’ quarters.” They reached the third floor, this level more devastated by the elements than the first or second. Up ahead, in the west wing, the gabled roof had caved, their headlamps showing snow falling through the ceiling. “We need to go up one more,” Lawrence said.

They climbed, wood creaking, bowing where they stepped.

Abigail was the third to emerge into the cupola. She shone her light on walls lined with empty shelves, the books having long since disappeared, taken by vandals or reduced by time and moisture to wads of leather, paper, glue. Two chairs and a sofa had disintegrated on the floor. Half the stones had fallen out of the two hearths. Abigail edged toward an opening in the middle of the floor, peered down, her light beam shining to the ground level.

“All right, Lar. Where is it?”

Lawrence carefully moved over to one of the bookshelves and knelt down, the floor cracking. When he stood again, he held an eight-foot brass pole, severely tarnished, with a hooked end. He looked up. They all looked up, lights converging on a square door in the ceiling. Lawrence reached up, unlatched the rusted lock, pushed open the hatch. Snow fell through the hole into the library.

“You been up there before, Lar?”

“No. I always thought it was too dangerous. If the floor were to give way, it’s a fifty-foot fall. But all things considered, I think it’s worth the risk.”

“How the hell we gonna climb up through that hatch?”

Lawrence pointed back to the bookshelf. “With that ladder.”

Jerrod and Stu pulled the ladder out from under the long bookshelf, hoisted it up, and braced it against the opening.

“Doesn’t exactly look like a Craftsman product,” Isaiah said, grazing his gloved hand across a cracked wooden rung.

“I’ll go up first. Test it.”

“No, she will.” He waved Abigail over. “What’s up there, Lar?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”

“That wouldn’t bode well for you, for any of you.” He looked at Abigail. “Up you go.”

She grasped the sides of the old ladder and began to climb, carefully easing her weight onto each rung. The fourth one snapped, but she caught herself. The tenth rung was missing. As she neared the top, snow collected in her hair. Then she scrambled out of the hatch, stepping onto the roof of Emerald House.

“Stay in one spot!” Lawrence shouted up at her. “I have no idea how stable it is up there!” She backed away from the opening, leaned against the wrought-iron railing that surrounded this small open veranda, snow blowing so hard into her face that she choked on it, had to cover her mouth with her hands.

Lawrence came up, then Isaiah, Emmett, June, and finally Stu and Jerrod.

Abigail rubbed her arms, and as she stood watching her father, it hit her: There was nothing on this veranda but an inch and a half of snow, and he looked nervous in the beam of her headlamp, like he was trying to pass off Monopoly money for true currency.

“Well,” Lawrence said, kneeling down, inspecting a corner of the veranda, brushing the snow off the stone. “I’m just at a total loss, Isaiah.”

Abigail gripped the iron railing. June and Emmett stood beside her, Isaiah with his back to her, near a skylight that had long since been liberated of its glass.

“You’re at a loss,” Isaiah said. The hood of his parka had fallen back, snow collecting in his black hair. “What exactly does that mean, Larry?”