Abandon

Quinn opened the second bottle of water and took another long drink. “I arrived in Abandon last Wednesday morning. Wednesday night, very late, I woke to the sound of footsteps near my tent. Frightened me pretty bad. I called out, asked who was there. No one answered. Of course, I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I unzipped the tent and crawled outside. There were two men in masks with guns standing there.”

He shivered, as if just speaking about it rekindled the fear. “Isaiah and Stu brought me to this mansion. They kept demanding that I show them where ‘it’ was. I told them I had no idea what they were talking about. They said I was lying. They beat me. Tied me up and left me in one of the rooms on the third floor. Several times a day, they’d come back, ask if I wanted to tell them or if I needed another beating. I would always say the same thing: I didn’t know what it was they wanted.

“Tonight, after working me over for a while, they blindfolded me and slapped a piece of tape on my mouth. Few hours later, I heard a ruckus on the floor below and voices I hadn’t heard before. Suppose that was you guys. I managed to find an edge on the old chair they’d strapped me to, finally cut through the tape around my wrists about an hour ago.”

“You made all that racket up there that caught Stu’s attention?” Abigail asked.

“Yeah. I’d crept downstairs, seen there was only one of them guarding June, and I knew it was my only chance. When Stu came up, he was drunk, and I managed to overpower him.”

Quinn sipped his water. Outside, the wind still made that strange unnerving sound like ghosts humming.

“So why’d you come to Abandon in the first place?” Lawrence asked.

Quinn smiled. “Well, why are you here?”

Abigail sensed something in the current between the two men.

Lawrence said, “I was giving June and her husband a tour of the ghost town. They’re paranormal photographers.”

“That’s all, huh?”

Abigail realized what it was: distrust. These two historians sizing each other up, attempting to gauge how much the other one knew, what to let on, what to keep to themselves.

“What was it again that you were looking for up at the pass? I think I heard Abigail say something about—”

“All right, should we quit jerking each other off here?” Lawrence said. “Anyone who’s studied Abandon in depth knows that a sizable quantity of Packer’s gold has never been accounted for.”

“And you’ve been searching for it.”

It got quiet for a moment. Then Lawrence said, “Yeah. And you?”

Quinn nodded. “You an honest man, Lawrence?”

“Guess that depends.”

“What if I were to tell you that I have something in my jacket that might be able to help us out?”

“I’d be interested.”

“Interested enough for full disclosure?”

“Assuming it cuts both ways.”

Quinn reached into his pocket, handed Lawrence a rusted key attached to a nylon rope.

“Where’d you get this?” Lawrence asked.

“Full disclosure?”

“Yeah.”

“From an old man on his deathbed.”

“What’s it open?” Abigail asked.

“I’ve spent the last ten autumns of my life trying to find an answer to that. I know it doesn’t open anything in this crumbling mansion or the ghost town or the mill.”

Lawrence got up, limped over to the entrance of Emerald House, threw the doors open, stood watching the snow.

Abigail called out, “You all right?”

After a moment, he returned, stared down at them, and Abigail could hear the change in his voice as soon as he opened his mouth.

“There’s almost two feet of snow on the ground,” he said. “I know it’s late, and we’re all past the point of exhaustion, but with the snow dumping like this, an avalanche would make it impossible to find. We’d have to wait until next summer, when the snows broke. Besides, it’s not safe to be in Emerald House with all this snow piling up on the roof.”

Quinn stood up, said, “I don’t understand. What are you getting at?”

“I might know what your key opens.”

1893

FIFTY-TWO

Under calmer circumstances, Gloria might have noticed the sky—clouds striated with a thousand tones of orange, like you were staring up into the guts of an overripe peach, and some of them still bleeding pink curtains of snow.

But she couldn’t see anything through the window of tears.

Someone yelled her name.

Gloria stopped, turned back, looking downslope at the chapel far below, the clang of its bell echoing through the canyon.

The last of Abandon’s residents trudged up the web trail, the closest of them Emma Ilg, wrapped in a black manta, her purple gown bulging out of the bottom, encrusted with ice. Emma stopped below Gloria and hunched over to catch her breath in the thin air.

When she looked up, she said, “Have you seen Russ—What’s wrong?”

Gloria shook her head, tears streaming.

“Billy McCabe and Oatha Wallace . . . know ’em?”

“Know of them. Why?”

Gloria went to pieces. “I think they killed our husbands.”

Emma’s ruddy face turned cold, rigid. “No. Don’t you say that to me. Russ and Ezekiel are up ahead. They’re trying to find us—”

“Listen to me, Emma.”

“I will not hear—”

“Billy and Oatha murdered Mr. Packer last night and made off with his gold. That’s why our husbands rode up to the pass. But it’s been four hours and Zeke hasn’t come back to me.”

“How do you know they’re gone?”

“ ’Cause Billy came to my cabin and was on the verge of killin me before—”

“You’ve seen them dead?”

“No.”

“Then they aren’t. My husband’s up ahead.”

“Please, Emma—”

“Don’t speak another word to me!” Emma pushed her way up the trail, knocking Gloria down into the snow as she passed.

A ways up the mountain, a woman screamed.

“Al, get your f**kin hands off me,” Joss said.

“Come on, they’s children up ahead a you. Watch that mouth—”

“Don’t tell me how to be. You got these wrist irons too tight. They’re strangulatin my hands. And I need a brain tablet.”

“I’ll fix ’em when we get there and get you a smoke. Simmer down.” Joss glanced up toward the end of the canyon. With the storm having passed, she could finally see the steep white slope two miles south that led up to the Sawblade. She squinted her eyes, trying to raise the black specks zigzagging down like a line of warrior ants, thought she’d rather go it alone, take her chances in Abandon, than holed up with this miserable bunch of pilgrims.