Abandon

There were drifts to the second-floor windows, and a snow tunnel with fifteen-foot walls had been shoveled to the portico of unbarked Douglas fir trunks.

They arrived at a pair of oak doors and Stephen rapped the knocker three times. They untied their webs, waited. Stephen banged the knocker again.

Gloria glanced up at the long overhanging eaves, said, “You don’t think he forgot?”

The preacher speculated. “Perhaps he stayed in town last night, not wanting to chance getting trapped in a slide on the way home.”

“Well, we just hoofed it through a blizzard, and I’m gonna by God walk in there, find out if we’re gettin breakfast for our trouble.”

Ezekiel grabbed one of the large iron handles, tried the door. It opened.

“Think we should walk in unannounced, Zeke?” Gloria said.

“Yeah, I do.” He stepped through.

Gloria sighed, followed him in with Stephen, and closed the door.

Every kerosene lamp had burned down save for one at the far end of the first floor, in the kitchen—just a wink of fire from where they stood. Soft gray light slanted through the tall windows that framed the foyer.

“Hello?” Ezekiel shouted. “Anybody on the premises?”

His voice resounded through Emerald House.

They made their way through the foyer and up a cascading stairway, beneath rafters of fir timbers. At the confluence of the four wings, a staircase switchbacked up the heart of the mansion. Between the stairs, a rectangle of weak light fell upon the marble floor, having passed through a skylight fifty feet above.

“Cold in here,” Stephen said. “Hasn’t been a fire in awhile. And shouldn’t there be some servants? If I’m not mistaken, Bart keeps a staff of four or five ladies through the winter.”

He walked to the north wing, peered through French doors into a great room furnished with a chaise longue, sofas, parlor chairs.

The opposite wing encompassed a dining room on a par with a feudal banqueting hall. Ezekiel looked in but glimpsed only the chairs and the long, broad table, naked of tablecloth, silverware, china.

“Our breakfasting prospects ain’t appearing promising. Let’s check Bart’s room. You remember where it is, Preach?”

“I believe it’s in the east wing of the next floor. Overlooks the tarn.”

“What do you bet he bent a elbow in the saloon all night, came home roostered?” Ezekiel said. “Hell, might have to wake him.”

They took the steps up to the second floor, calling out hellos as they started toward Bart’s wing, not a single lamp in operation to illuminate Packer’s extravagance.

Ezekiel suddenly stopped. “Might want to step back there, Glori.”

She looked down at the hardwood floor, saw that her arctics stood in a gooey puddle of blood. She leaped back toward her husband, brought her hand to her mouth to stifle the scream.

“Well, that’s an empty saddle,” he said. “Look. More.” Faint tracks of blood led back to the staircase, up the next flight.

“Bring your revolver?” Stephen asked.

“ ’Fraid not. Didn’t think I’d be needin it of a Christmas morn. Tell you what. I’m gonna go see what in hell’s goin on here.”

“Zeke, no—”

“Glori.” By the way he said her name, with a gravity she’d not heard in years, Gloria knew better than to push the issue. “Ya’ll don’t move from this spot. Savvy?”

As Ezekiel ascended toward the servants’ quarters, he filled with an exhilaration he’d not experienced in some time. It wasn’t fear—he couldn’t recall ever having been plagued by that emotion, even as a younker in Virginia—but an airiness in his stomach, birthed by the anticipation of something he’d always had a taste for, and still did. It reminded him of the rough old days, helling around with the boys. In all honesty, he had to own up to missing aspects of his former self. Much as he loved Gloria and his life with her, he couldn’t recall the last time he’d felt this alive.

Ezekiel reached the penultimate floor, but the blood continued up, sticky little pools of it on the steps and banister. He climbed on, following the drops and spatters to a small cupola that Bart had transformed into a library, the first seven feet of each wall lined with books, the last five sloping up to a hipped roof.

It made no sense. Blood on the floor, on the spines of books, entrails draped across the back of a leather chair, but the library was empty, its two hearths fireless and this top floor cold enough to cloud his breath.

Then he noticed the ladder tucked under a long bookshelf, glanced up, saw a trapdoor beside the skylight in the ceiling, almost smiled at the needles in his stomach. Using a shiny eight-foot brass pole with a hooked end, he reached up and unlatched the lock and pushed open the hatch. Then he stood the ladder up, bracing it against the opening, snow already falling into the library.

He climbed fifteen steps before emerging onto a small open veranda, the highest point of Emerald House. The panoramic eyeful of the four wings and chimneys and the surrounding basin distracted Ezekiel for a split second before he saw them—five figures near the wrought-iron railing on the east side of the platform.

Bart Packer and his servants.

Three had slumped over, face-first and half-buried in the newly fallen snow. Two still sat upright, Bart one of them, his face black, purple, and distended beyond recognition from what looked to have been a merciless beating. Their throats had been opened, the snow in the vicinity stained with great quantities of blood. “Son of a bitch,” he whispered. “Son of a bitch.” It snowed again, but the wind whipping across the roof kept the platform mostly bare. He heard approaching footfalls, spun around.

Stephen climbed through the trapdoor onto the roof.

“Goddamn, son,” Ezekiel said, shouting to be heard over the wind. “Lucky I didn’t have my gun. You’d a been belly-up, coming up on me like that. What’d you leave my wife—” He saw Gloria coming up the steps behind the preacher. Ezekiel rushed past Stephen, stood blocking her view of Bart and the servants.

“You seen it?” he asked her.

“Seen what?”

“Oh sweet Jesus,” Stephen said.

“Glori. Glori, look at me. My eyes. They’re up here.”

“Dead?”

“Had their lamps blown out, I’m afraid, and trust me, ’less you alkalied to it, sight like this, you’ll spend the rest a your life tryin to forget.”