“I’m so sorry.” Lawrence wept. “This was my fault.”
June’s chest swelled, Abigail’s head lifting.
Then it fell—down, down—one long exhalation, all air expelled, and never rose again.
SIXTY-FOUR
A
t three in the afternoon, Abigail heard Lawrence say, “There’s light up ahead.”
The two of them entered the largest cavern yet, more than a hundred feet across, filled with enormous spires that rose from the floor. A spring bubbled out of a crack in the wall, speleothem deposits hanging like curtains from the high ceiling. They stood in the luminous shaft that angled down, bathing them in daylight. Forty feet above, a chimney bored through the ceiling, and Abigail saw a distant patch of gray at the end of it.
“Never get there,” Lawrence said. “Don’t even get your hopes up.” He walked over to the spring. “Abigail, bring your empty water bottle.” She went to her father and dug the Nalgene bottle out of her pack. Lawrence held the plastic lip against the rock, and with the bottle halfway full, he strode into the middle of the cavern and held it up to the natural light.
The water was cloudy, sediment already settling on the bottom. He sniffed it. “Potent sulfur smell.” He sipped the water, winced, and spit it out. “Very mineralized. Tastes bitter and acidic. Much stronger than the hot springs in Pagosa. I don’t know if this is even safe to drink.” Abigail gazed up at the window in the ceiling, beating back the despair. This was far worse than traveling through the dark zone, she decided. This was throwing it in your face, a glimpse of the unreachable—heaven from hell.
When they finally stopped for the day, a smothering depression had descended on them. It was suppertime, but there would be nothing more to eat than a nibble from the last granola bar, a sip or two of water. They would sleep in their damp and filthy clothes, in the cold, on a hard rock floor, and when they awoke, it would still be dark.
Abigail and Lawrence sat against the wall in a small room with a low ceiling, a space that resembled fifty other rooms they’d passed through during the last fifteen hours.
“We shouldn’t have left her there,” Abigail said.
“What could we do? Dragging her through the cave with us won’t bring her or Emmett back, will it?” Lawrence switched off his headlamp.
Abigail, desperate to hear his voice, anything to break the uncompromising black-hole silence, said, “You’ve found the remains of Abandon and you now know how they died, but you still don’t really understand what happened, do you?”
“Nope. And Quinn—if that’s really his name—throws a new wrench into the equation.”
“But knowing they all died in this cave?”
“My gut tells me that, like us, they were locked in here. Maybe by Oatha Wallace and Billy McCabe. But the fact that the gold was locked in as well kind of refutes that theory.”
Sitting there in the dark, listening to him talk, Abigail felt shards of cold begin to prick her face, wondered if it might be the first sign of frostbite or hypothermia.
“Why do you think Quinn did this to us?” she said. “Any idea?”
“Beyond plain old greed? No. We should probably drink some water.”
Lawrence turned on his lamp, reached for the bottle. At first, Abigail mistook them for dust motes in the light beam, then realized these white things were actually snowflakes.
“Lawrence?” she said. “It’s snowing in here.”
He looked up. “Oh my God, I saw the chimney when we first came in, but it was already dark outside. I assumed it was just another blind shaft.” His headlamp spotlighted the hole in the ceiling, snow floating down through it, melting on the cave floor.
Abigail got up. “Lawrence, can you lift me up there?”
She straddled his shoulders and he stood slowly, his legs shuddering under the strain. “Scoot to the right. You’re crushing me into the ceiling.” Abigail peered up the narrow chimney, wondered how far to the surface, if it even stayed wide enough for her to get there. “Okay, let me down.” Lawrence bent his knees, eased back onto the floor. Abigail said, “I think I can climb up there if you lift me a little farther up the hole.”
“Well, I know I couldn’t do it even if my ankle wasn’t wrecked. And with no rope, only one of us can get out. How would you feel about going alone, trying to find help? I can draw a map on your note pad, get you back to the trailhead. You’d have to find the keys to Scott’s Suburban. I’m not sure if they’re with him or in his pack at the campsite.”
“And I’ll get my cell, try to call for help from the pass.”
Lawrence sighed, relief enveloping his face like the loosening of taut cables.
“You should get some sleep before you go, Abby. A few hours at least.”
The alarm on Abigail’s watch seemed to beep five seconds after she’d closed her eyes. She’d slept for four hours on the cold rock, dreamless and deep. She turned onto her side and faced Lawrence. His breath warmed her face, and in that virgin dark, she caught his scent—a repressed relic from those precious years when he was Daddy, and not the remnants of aftershave, no superficial mosaic of man-made chemicals, but his core, lifeblood odor, and it carried her back even further than the smell of cut grass and school-bus seats and sno cones.
“You awake?” he whispered.
“My alarm just went off. Guess it’s time. You weren’t asleep?”
“Been thinking.”
“What about?”
“Those gold bricks, the greedy people they’ve killed through the centuries, people they’re still killing. But you and the Tozers didn’t come into these mountains for greed. Emmett and June are dead because of me. You’re in this cave ’cause of me. And I’m sorry. Beyond words, I’m sorry. It won’t change a damn thing now, but I need to say it, need you to hear it. I know what a selfish no-good fuck I am. And what you said in the boardinghouse? You were right, Abby. It’s all about me. Always has been.” He cupped her face in his gloved hands. “Take this with you,” he whispered. “If you make it back to me. If you don’t. My leaving . . . wasn’t your fault. Or your mother’s. I left because something inside of me was broken. Still is. I hurt people I love, who love me, and I don’t know why. But my little girl, my beautiful, perfect little girl, I’m so sorry I hurt you, so sorry you got me for a daddy.”
Abigail fought like hell against it—a realignment, the unraveling of an old stubborn knot.
With Abigail astride her father’s shoulders, she was still a foot shy of any usable handhold.
“I’m just not far enough up the chimney,” she said. “Push me higher.” As she lifted off Lawrence’s shoulders, her headlamp illuminated the closest jug, a few inches from her fingertips. “Almost there,” she said, reaching out and grabbing the jug with both hands. “Got it.”
Lawrence said, “Find a foothold.”
Abigail’s fingers had already begun to cramp, and her feet were scrambling for purchase.
“I can’t find anything. Oh God, I’m slipping! I can’t—”
“Feel that?” Lawrence yelled as he jammed the toe of her right boot into a crevice. “Let your weight rest on your feet now!” Abigail settled onto her legs. “Just take your time. Get your strength back up.” As she caught her breath, Abigail shone her headlamp up the chimney. It appeared to narrow farther up, but the handholds were plentiful. She cinched down the straps of her day pack, then reached over her head for the next handhold—a crack in the wall wide enough to slide her fist into.
She pulled herself up and moaned, the pain in her tailbone excruciating.
“Remember to climb with your feet,” Lawrence yelled up to her. “Otherwise, you’ll tire out.” She tested her weight on a big chockstone wedged in the chimney, decided to trust it, and made the next move, rested for thirty seconds, then made another. As long as she allowed her legs to bear the weight, her arms didn’t cramp. She climbed through a ten-foot section filled with bombproof buckets. Then the rock became wet, then icy, then snow-dusted. The handholds dwindling. Suddenly, she had nothing to grab.