Abigail laughed, too, her eyes catching on the clock above the sink, a different bird assigned to each hour.
It read 9:10 P.M.
Impossible. It had been hours since she’d walked into the office and looked at the Silverton photographs and Primack’s journal.
“I need to get going, huh?” Quinn said. “Before this snow gets any deeper.”
“I should go with you. I won’t lie—I don’t want to, but—”
“No, I’ll take care of it. Abigail, wanna go for a ride?”
She thought about it. “Where to?”
“Just up into the mountains a little ways.”
“Why?”
“To meet up with search-and-rescue, so we can get your dad out of the cave.”
She smiled. “Know what I think?”
“What?”
“You don’t mean the words you’re saying.”
“No? Then what do I mean?”
“Something bad.”
Quinn stood up and reached down, grabbed Abigail’s hands and pulled her to her feet.
“Help me get her boots on, Jen. Don’t want her found barefoot.”
“Actually, it doesn’t matter.”
“Sure it does.”
“No, when people get hypothermia, start freezing to death out in the wilderness, they’re often found half-naked. They go out of their mind, think they’re warm, start stripping off layers of clothing. Just leave her boots here. I’ll make sure they disappear.”
“Can you walk, Abigail?”
“Of course I know how to walk.”
She felt weightless on her feet, moving slowly and deliberately out of the kitchen into the hallway. At an ovular mirror, she stopped and regarded herself, leaning in close, her nose flattened against the glass.
“We could still not do this, Quinn.”
“Stop now? After everything I’ve done? No payoff for any of it? That’d be the worst outcome. No, we’re all in.”
Abigail’s pupils had been reduced to grains of black sand.
She turned away from the mirror and continued on toward the front door.
“Jen, this won’t have been worth it . . . for Julius, for Grandpa, Dad, you and me, if we let the guilt crush us.”
As Abigail reached for the doorknob, she saw her muddy jacket hanging from the coatrack. She lifted it off the hook, kept turning it around, searching for the armholes.
Quinn took it from her, held it by the collar, and Jennifer helped guide her arms into the sleeves.
“Would Dad have taken it this far?”
“Hard to say. We’re doing this for all of them, you know.”
Jennifer unlocked and opened the door and Abigail stepped out onto the porch.
Snow tumbled in the vicinity of distant streetlamps, and Abigail wondered how it could be snowing only in those select globes of light.
“God, it’s beautiful,” the sheriff said.
Abigail found the zippers and worked them open, shoved her hands into the pockets.
They helped her down the steps into snow not quite deep enough to cover the spear tips of the longest grass blades.
“We doing right here?” Jennifer said.
“If you can live with yourself, does it matter?”
“Can you?”
“I think so. We just have to forget a few days of questionable behavior.”
They moved down past the grove of baby aspen and the sheriff’s Expedition, gravel crunching under their boots and slippers and Abigail’s bare feet, unfazed by the cold.
They arrived at the Bronco, Quinn already opening the front passenger door.
Abigail stopped at the grille, Jennifer beside her, snow melting on the warmed metal of the hood.
Quinn slapped the roof. “Come on. Get in.”
In the right pocket of her jacket, Abigail’s fingers touched something cool and hard. It took five seconds of feeling it to identify the object, and still she couldn’t think of its name, only its function.
“Jennifer,” she said, “you know, I forgot all about this.”
“What?”
Abigail turned and pressed it into her satin nightgown, then faced Quinn, ears ringing as the sheriff went groaning to her knees, blood sprinkling in the snow.
“You didn’t mean what you said about helping my father, did you? You just want—”
“Abigail, you’re fucked-up on the meds. We’re trying to help you and your father here.”
Jennifer crawled back toward the house, and for a moment, Abigail wondered if maybe Quinn was right.
“You didn’t mean to shoot her, Abigail. Now give me the gun. My sister’s gonna die if we don’t—”
It made a small black spot an inch below Quinn’s right eye.
Blood ran down his cheek.
He reached up and scraped at the hole with his fingernails, like he’d been stung and was trying to dig out the stinger.
Abigail looked back at the Victorian house, where Jennifer had dragged herself up onto the porch and come to an impasse at the front door.
The sheriff cried out, “Oh God!”
“You just shot two people, Abigail Foster,” Abigail told herself.
Snow slanted down through the porch light, Abigail figuring the full thirty milligrams of Percoset must be raging through her, because she was so stoned, so detached, her thoughts derailing and becoming unmanageable again.
She eased down in the gravel and stared at the prayer flags, frosted with snow and flapping in the wind, Silverton all hushed and still.
She was cold and itchy from the opiate, but she didn’t care.
After awhile, she got up and staggered toward the porch, climbed the steps, stopping at the front door.
Jennifer lay on her back in a pond of black blood, her eyes open and glazed, her lips barely moving.
Abigail said, “Your nightgown’s ruined.”
Then she stepped over the sheriff and went inside.
EIGHTY-NINE
T
he sun had roused Lawrence Kendall from sleep on Wednesday and Thursday, but not on Friday. His third morning in the cave, a noise woke him, his eyes opening to pure black, his head lifting from the folded parka he’d used for a pillow the last three nights, fearing he was hallucinating again, but the sound held strong—the muffled yet unmistakable whop-whop of rotors chopping the thin air. He smiled, could have wept. Abby had made it out.
As he felt around on the cold rock for the last functioning light, he wondered why a helicopter would be searching for him after dark, but he instantly dismissed the thought as near-death confusion.
His fingers grazed the straps, and he slipped the headlamp on and twisted the bulb. He dragged Abigail’s pack over to the granola-bar wrapper in the middle of the room, which marked the spot under the chimney.
Every time he’d slept, he’d dreamed of this moment, on the brink of deliverance, wondering if the smoke would make it all seventy feet up the chute to the surface, and, if so, whether he could generate a sizable-enough plume with what he had to catch anyone’s attention.
As he unzipped Abigail’s pack and grabbed the Doubletree matchbook and a handful of paper he’d already torn out of her notepad and balled up in preparation, his eyes fell upon the mound of snow nearby that had undoubtedly fallen from the surface.
The moment he got the paper burning, he’d fill the two water bottles with the snow, maybe have enough willpower to wait, let it turn to delicious slush in the cavern’s thirty-seven degrees.
He gathered up the wads of paper and stacked them into a little pyramid before tearing out a match. It ignited on the first strike, the flame motionless in the stagnant room. He held it to the base of the pyramid, got seven pieces lighted before the match burned down to his thumb.
The helicopter sounded closer, Lawrence figuring if he could hear the rotors this well, it must be hovering right over the chimney.
All the paper seemed to combust at once, and the room flared with firelight as a dense cloud of smoke lifted toward the low ceiling, Lawrence picturing it just missing the hole and diffusing through the room, but this didn’t happen.