Abandon

“Wait here,” Lawrence whispered.

“No, I’m coming with you.”

Lawrence tapped his boot. “I’ve got crampons. You don’t. Wanna end up like Jerrod?”

Abigail watched her father work his way down.

Isaiah smiled when he saw him coming, said, “Larry, you must have cantaloupe-size nuts. You’d have made a helluva soldier, because that jumping off the cliff shit was pure badass.”

“Where’s your gun?”

“The strap’s twisted around behind my back. I can’t reach it without slipping.”

Lawrence squatted down by Isaiah’s head, jammed his left crampon into the ice.

“I was thinking, Larry. Wanna call it square?”

“No, Lawrence,” Abigail said.

“Man, I just wanna get the f**k off this mountain, home to my family. You understand.”

“Give me your hand,” Lawrence said.

As he reached up, Lawrence stomped his right crampon onto Isaiah’s left shoulder. Isaiah’s boots lost their purchase and he slipped down the ice along the same path Jerrod had blazed, making no effort to self-arrest, just staring upslope, his eyes never leaving Lawrence.

“You better hope this f**king kills me,” he said, and disappeared over the edge.

FORTY-ONE

Abigail gripped her father’s arm as they traversed the mountain, moving at a crawl on a fifty-degree slope, Lawrence taking his time to thrust the teeth of his crampons deep into the ice, since they bore the weight of two.

“I would have liked to have seen their bodies,” Abigail said. “Just to be sure.”

“Yeah, but way too risky to edge up to the cliff and look over. We might have joined them. Trust me, they’re either dead or wishing they were.”

They pushed on, Lawrence’s dimming headlamp doing little to guide their way. After awhile, he stopped. They’d left the steepest stretch of ice several hundred feet back.

“This isn’t good,” he said. “We should’ve run into our old tracks by now. I was hoping to follow them back into the canyon. That’s the only safe way down.”

They went on, Abigail covering her face with the hood of her Moonstone jacket, unsettled by the disturbing numbness that had begun to diffuse through her cheek from a patch of burning cold under her left eye. Every step sparked a needle of white-hot pain that shot from the tip of her tailbone up into her throat. She’d begun to cry when Lawrence said, “Thank God.”

Abigail looked up. Through blowing snow, she glimpsed a two-story building perched on the edge of a cliff. “What is that place?” she asked. “Are we back at the mine?”

“No, we’re a thousand feet above it. That’s the ruins of the Godsend’s upper boardinghouse. Forty men used to live up here, so they’d have easy access to the mine’s upper reaches, where all the richest ore deposits were located. Oatha Wallace lived here.”

“So is it good that we found it, or—”

“It means I at least know where we are, and I can get us down to the canyon floor from here. Come on, let’s get out of the storm.”

The exterior of the boardinghouse stood in dire disrepair, the wood spongy and soft, the porch overgrown with moss, animals having gnawed partway through the support beams.

The ground floor was bisected into two rooms by a hall that linked the front door to the back porch. The west door frame opened into the kitchen and dining hall, its floor rotted through. All that remained were a couple of cookstoves, four benches, a barrel, and the remnants of a screened cage where the food had been stored to keep it safe from rodents.

Abigail and Lawrence picked their way through the debris of a fallen staircase and turned into the living room. The furniture—rustic handmade pieces—still survived, and aside from a hole in the northeast corner, the flooring was largely intact. As they collapsed before a stone fireplace in the back corner, Abigail said, “I think I have frostbite on my face.”

Lawrence removed his pack, got up again, limped over to a table in the middle of the room, its surface gray with age, still encased in bark. “You didn’t see me do this,” he said, then lifted one of the chairs and smashed it over the table. He carried an armload of broken wood to the fireplace and went to work arranging it on the rusted grate. From the emergency kit in his pack, he took a bar of trioxane compressed fuel and a plastic matchbox. “This may catch the whole place on fire,” he warned. Lawrence struck a match, held it to the fuel. Soon the fire starter glowed and then the old wood began to pop and hiss, flames licking up between the stones for the first time in more than a hundred years.

Abigail scooted up to the edge of the hearth and extended her hands toward the warmth. “Thank you,” she said. Her father had taken off his parka, and he inspected her face by firelight. “Is it bad?” she asked.

“It’s just the top layer of skin that’s frostbitten. It may always be sensitive to cold, but no serious damage. That gash above your eye looks worse than anything.”

Abigail stared into the flames, shadows playing on the warped-board floor, the raw, unfinished walls. The accumulation of everything was pressing down on her, a meltdown coming, though she knew she didn’t have the luxury of falling apart just yet.

“What’s upstairs?” she asked.

“Just a big room with a stove in the middle and twenty built-in wooden bunks.”

A pile of rat-chewed paper lay in a stack near the hearth. Abigail picked up an old catalog, thumbed through the brittle pages. She saw an advertisement for a wedding dress with a check mark by it, wondered if the miner had ever gotten home to marry his love, or if he’d disappeared with the rest of Abandon. She noticed some writing on the nearest wall.

“Who would come up here and defile this place?”

“That’s not vandalism, Abby.” Lawrence crawled over and shone his light on the tiny scrawl. “Some of the miners wrote this. You can tell because it was done with pencil, and the handwriting isn’t like ours. It’s very small and fine, almost like calligraphy.”

Abigail, too sore, too warm to move closer, said, “What’s it say?”

“Well, this is just a column of numbers. Over here, someone wrote, ‘John owes Bill two dollars.’ Below that one, ‘This is hell.’”

“What’s that drawing a couple feet above your head?”

Lawrence stood. “How lovely. I haven’t seen this one. It’s a miner’s Nellie. Someone sketched a woman’s face. You see a lot of these in boardinghouses, since the men were so lonely up here. . . . Abby.” He looked back at her. “I had no idea he was gonna kill Emmett.”