“All right, Har, I need to hold your hand on this part.” Bessie turned around. “Harriet!” she screamed. “Harriet!” She couldn’t see anything downslope, standing high enough above town that a slice of the sun still lingered over the far side of the canyon.
“What’s wrong, ma’am?” An Englishman leading his wife and two daughters stopped on the trail just below.
“You seen my daughter? She’s yea high. Six years old. Curly black hair. She was right here with me not a second ago.”
“No, I sure haven’t seen—”
“Oh Jesus. Excuse me.” Bessie tried to scoot by, but the big bearded Englishman stretched his arm out to stop her.
“Ma’am, now you gotta keep climbing. We’re in terrible—”
“I’ve lost my daughter!”
“And someone’s gonna find her and they’ll bring her along.”
“Sir, please step out of my way.”
“You’re holding up the line.”
“Harriet! Harriet!”
As Bessie tried once more to step around him, he scooped her up, threw her over his shoulder, and continued up the steps toward the rimrock, Bessie flailing and screaming, the Englishman shushing her.
“We’re gonna get everyone safely inside, and if she isn’t there, I’ll go find her myself. That’s a promise.”
But Bessie’s desperate screaming drowned him out. She even surpassed the church bell until the mountain swallowed her.
2009
FIFTY-THREE
J
une whimpered, “I should’ve stayed with Emmett. He’s all alone in that place.”
Abigail walked with her arm around June, supporting her, and within earshot of the two professors. “I know,” she said, “but we can’t split up, and with the snow coming down like this, the roof of Emerald House could collapse.”
They made a careful descent out of Emerald Basin, down the steep switchbacks to the canyon floor, Lawrence and Quinn talking shop while they fought their way through the snow.
Even though her tailbone was in agony, Abigail felt revived by a second wind as they passed their buried tents, the llamas standing together in a mass of fur and breath clouds. It was almost four in the morning when they entered the ghost town of Abandon, a pride of headlamps moving between the dark and snow-fraught buildings—some swaying in the wind, on the brink of collapse.
She caught a fragment of what Lawrence was saying: “. . . tempting, but my first priority is getting June and my daughter out of here.”
As they approached the north end of Abandon, Abigail improved her pace, came up between the professors, said, “So where are you taking us, Lawrence?”
He glanced back. “Not much farther now. All will be revealed.”
At the end of town, Lawrence turned and led them up the east side of the canyon. After a hundred yards, Abigail’s headlamp shone on something through the heavy snow—that ruined church in the spruce, its iron bell capped with snow, its cross powder-blown and listing in the wind.
They hiked on, the snow rising almost to her knees. Soon they were climbing again, Abigail using her hands and feet now, the slope so steep that
she had to kick her boots in to avoid slipping. At the moment she didn’t think she could climb anymore, Lawrence reached back and pulled her and June up onto a wide ledge.
They’d arrived at the base of the rimrock. From here, the canyon wall rose vertically into darkness, and Abigail was on the verge of asking where they could possibly go from here when she saw it—behind Quinn, an opening to a mine shaft, seven feet high and wide enough for several to walk abreast into the mountain.
“How have I never seen this?” Quinn said.
Lawrence pointed to the rock around the opening. “Because of the way the rock overhangs, you can’t see the shadow of the tunnel from the canyon floor. You’d have to stumble upon it by sheer dumb luck, like I did last year.”
He turned and walked into the mine.
“Warmer in here,” Quinn said.
“Most of the mines around Abandon stay a balmy thirty-seven degrees Fahrenheit year round. Refreshing in the summer.”
Abigail and June followed them in.
The wind died away.
“How’s your ankle holding up, Lawrence?” Abigail asked.
“Doesn’t matter. I’m on pure adrenaline now.”
Water dripped from the ceiling onto the hood of Abigail’s jacket.
The air smelled dank, of water and minerals.
“What is this place?” she asked.
“They used to call it a ‘shoofly,’ ” Lawrence said, his voice echoing off the rock and trailing away deep into the mountain. “It’s just an entryway into the mine.”
She shined her headlamp into the distance, where the tunnel seemed to narrow, and thirty feet ahead, Abigail saw their headlamp beams converge upon a small iron door.
1893
FIFTY-FOUR
S
hadowgees had been placed every twenty feet on the wet, rocky floor, like luminarias for a subterranean party. Gloria hurried along the downward-sloping tunnel into the mountain, following the echo of voices in the darkness ahead.
The day hole narrowed, and she came at last to a small iron door built into the rock. A man she recognized as the Godsend’s assayer manned the entrance, and he offered his hand, escorting her through.
“You can head on over that way with the others, ma’am, and do watch your step on this uneven rock.”
Lanterns and candles and more shadowgees illuminated the rock in firelight, and as she passed into the main chamber, the whole of Abandon overwhelmed her in a hundred-strong chorus of weeping and shouting and voices in varying strains of panic—bawling, terrified children; mothers and fathers trying to comfort them, many failing to hold back their own tears; a handful of men barking orders, attempting to manage the chaos; huddles of roostered miners, cursing whatever breed of heathen dare descend into their canyon and making pronouncements of war and grandiose predictions of the hell they would unleash on any savage who breeched the iron door; and Emma Ilg, flitting from person to person, a manic fly, asking if they’d seen her husband.
Gloria found a spot along the wall between two distraught families, crumpled down on the cold rock, and buried her face in the sleeves of her woolen jacket. Heathens are coming and Zeke is gone. She kept repeating it to herself, as if verifying that the nightmare was real, crying harder and harder as the pandemonium lifted to a crescendo.
Someone touched her shoulder. She looked up, and for a split second, out of sheer will and hope, she thought she saw Ezekiel squatted down in front of her, and her heart ruptured for him.
But it was the shunned madam she’d met last night at the dance hall, a thousand years ago, shivering under her bright red capote, her burgundy curls dusted with snow.
“It’s Rosalyn,” the old whore said. “What’s wrong, honey? Where’s your husband? He ride up to the pass with the other men?”
Gloria shook her head, but when she tried to tell her about Zeke, the words froze in her throat. Rosalyn sat beside her, reached over, and pulled Gloria’s head down into her lap. She pushed back the hood of Gloria’s cape and ran her fingers through her blond hair.
A voice rose above the din. Children stopped crying. The rowdy miners hushed. Gloria lifted her head from Rosalyn’s lap, saw all eyes on Bessie McCabe, who was standing amid the crowd, ripping out clumps of hair, and screaming Harriet’s name, her voice filling the cavern, reverberating down the tunnels, firelit tears glistening on her bruised face.