“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
A
bigail’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.
Lawrence whispered, “Where’s Stu?”
Abigail shrugged, quietly unzipped her jacket, and pulled a wallet from an inner pocket. She fished out a dime, knelt down. The coin made a soft and delicate purr as it rolled across the marble, spinning out just a foot from June’s right leg.
The woman looked up, the bulb of her headlamp making it difficult for Lawrence and Abigail to see her.
“Hurry,” June whispered. “He’ll be back any minute.”
FORTY-FIVE
T
hey crept across the icy marble of the foyer, and when they reached June, Lawrence withdrew Isaiah’s sheathed dagger from his ski pants.
“You okay, sweetie?” Abigail whispered, her words reverberating through the foyer like prayers in a vast cathedral. It was hard to see June’s face with any clarity in the sole, fading light of her headlamp.
“My left leg’s cut pretty bad,” June said, on the brink of tears. Abigail touched her shoulder as Lawrence sat down and began sawing the knife through the climbing rope that bound June to the rafter.
“How long’s Stu been gone?” Abigail asked.
“About ten minutes.”
“We didn’t see any new tracks leaving the mansion.”
“No, he’s still inside. He heard something up on the third floor, went to check it out.”
“What’d he hear?”
“Sounded like wood breaking from down here. It was loud. What happened to you guys?”
“Isaiah and Jerrod are dead,” Abigail said. “It was . . . Look, I’ll tell you that story later. Does Stu still have night-vision goggles and a gun?”
“Yes.”
Lawrence unwound the climbing rope and tossed it aside. “Can you stand up and turn around for me? I’ll cut these off.” The blade sliced easily through the nylon restraints. “June, I think it’d be a good idea to switch off your headlamp.”
The three stood close together in sheer darkness.
After a moment, June spoke, her voice breaking, “I keep looking over there at him. Keep thinking he’ll get up, come over to me. Or that any second, I’ll wake in our apartment, reach over in bed, feel the warmth of him in the dark. But he’s cold now, isn’t he? Do you think I could go over and sit with him? Would that be all—”
“You hear that?” Abigail said.
“What?” Lawrence asked.
“Listen.” From some remote part of the mansion came a sound like a muted jackhammer, and it took Abigail only a moment to place it. “Stu’s firing his machine gun.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Lawrence said. “Scott’s back in town, dead. Isaiah and Jerrod are dead somewhere up near the pass. What the hell’s he shooting at?”
The machine gun went quiet. High above, in one of the upper corridors, came the thump of slow, heavy footsteps. Abigail peered up—they all did—but there was nothing to see in that expansive vacuum of light. She reached down, grabbed hold of June’s hand as the footsteps stopped.
No one whispered.
No one breathed.
Something crashed into the floor of the foyer, and Abigail and June nearly crushed each other’s hands.