Abandon (47 page)

When Abigail awoke, they were sitting at the foot of her bed, whispering. She shut her eyes and eavesdropped on a debate concerning the merits of parallel versus telemark turns in champagne powder.

Silverton’s size didn’t warrant a hospital, so the undersheriff had put Abigail up in the Grand Imperial for the night and asked two nurses from San Juan County Public Health to check in on her every few hours.

She liked the undersheriff, Hans, a tall, lanky man in the neighborhood of thirty, who looked more like a snowboard instructor than a lawman—longhaired, bearded, and with a tattoo of a rock-climbing skeleton inked into the skin of his left forearm, just visible where he’d rolled up the sleeve of his khaki button-up shirt.

The special agent with the Forest Service made her nervous. She couldn’t recall the redhead’s name, but despite her rustic wardrobe, she managed to exude the cool, impassive confidence of a fed. And she’d hardly asked Abigail a thing, letting Hans lob questions while she leaned back in her chair in her muddy hiking boots, jeans, and down vest, not even bothering to veil her scrutiny and suspicion.

The special agent cut her eyes at Abigail.

“She’s awake.”

They dragged their chairs over into patches of afternoon sunlight that spilled in through the second-floor windows.

“How you feeling?” the undersheriff asked.

“All right.”

Hans leaned forward in the chair, clasped his hands together.

“Search-and-rescue just got back a half hour ago. You might’ve heard the helicopter.”

“They didn’t find my father.”

“They spent forty-five minutes hovering over the mountainside you think you came out on, with two men combing the area with binoculars.”

“I told you: There was a chimney I climbed out—”

“I believe you, Abigail. Thing is, that’s steep terrain up there. They spotted numerous avalanches, and they’re thinking a slide may have swept down the mountain at some point in the last twenty-four hours, buried the opening to the chimney.”

“So they’ve given up?”

“No, of course not. But there’s another storm coming in tonight, blizzard warnings already up, so our window for finding your father is shrinking.”

Abigail glanced at the special agent, could have sworn she caught a glint of compassion through the federal facade. “Maybe my father left that chimney room, tried to find his way back to the cavern where we first entered.”

“Okay, even assuming he was able to find his way back, this morning an avalanche swept down that hillside where you say you entered the cave. So wouldn’t the entrance be buried? And as you said, it was practically impossible to find in dry conditions in broad daylight.”

Abigail shook her head, the tears coming. “He thinks I’m coming for him. Please. Fly me back there. Let me—”

“You honestly believe you can find it?”

“Tell me something, Hans. At what point would you quit looking for your father?”

Now only moans and soft bellows disturbed the silence, the whimpers of those waiting to die, wanting it more than a drink of water, worse than air.

She looked up at Rosalyn. “Hey,” she whispered.

Rosalyn’s eyes were open, but the old whore made no answer. She had died while Gloria slept, her mouth inflated by the gigantic tongue, eyelids cracked, blood rolling out of them and down her cheeks. Even while she’d been alive, the absence of water had allowed the mummification of her body to begin, the skin on her face shrinking, lips shriveling, gums blackened, nose withered by half, flesh leathered into the color of ashen purple, with livid streaks where the blood had pooled.

Gloria felt a glimmer of release that her friend had passed.

Again, she obsessed on water, imagined bending down on the shore of Emerald Lake, splashing her face on a bright summer day. She kept replaying the last drink she’d ever taken—snow melted in an iron pot over the fire in their cabin. She could still picture Zeke filling her cup on Christmas morning, remembered how the water had chilled the tin, how when she touched it, her fingerprints had appeared as ghostly, fading condensation on the metal.

The sound of weeping drew her attention. She could barely raise her head from Rosalyn’s lap, but when she did, she saw a woman lying ten feet away against the wall of the cavern, touching the blond hair of a boy perhaps two or three years old. The woman had managed to pull him into her body and she kissed his eyebrows and his parched little lips and cried tearlessly. Her
husband had died several hours ago and his body lay sprawled nearby on the floor.

The woman rolled her son across the rock toward his father and lay down between them. She held their hands and stared up at the ceiling, her lips moving, and she would not get up again.

Gloria closed her eyes. She thought about her husband and her son, wondered if they could see her dying in this cave.

Then she sensed him, opened her eyes, and across the cavern stood Ezekiel, dapper in that four-button sack coat, his Sunday best, and shining as if illumined by footlights.

Though his lips did not move, she heard his voice perfectly.

He said he was sorry she’d suffered, but that it was almost over, that he’d glimpsed the place where they were going, and there were no words for pain or loss there, and no past.

Our boy’s there,
he said,
and I’m told he’s been askin for us. There’s some kind a beautiful place waitin on our souls, Gloria.

What’s he look like, Zeke?

Like Gus, I suppose.

He ain’t grown?

I don’t know.

Will he always be a little boy, or will he grow up into a man?

I don’t know the answer to that.

You go on to him.

I wanna wait for you, Glori.

You won’t be waitin long.

The woman occupied a table near the street, shaded by an umbrella, a copy of the
Times
spread out across her lap.

At the sound of approaching footsteps, she looked up.

“Would the defendant please rise?”

Abigail and her attorney stood.

“Madam Forelady, have you arrived upon a verdict?”

“We have, Your Honor.”

It was all happening faster than Abigail had imagined. She felt dizzy, her knees trembling under her skirt, had to put a hand on the table to steady herself.

“Is the verdict to be returned a unanimous one?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“How do you find as to count one of the indictment charging the defendant with murder in the second degree?”

Midday, mid-June on the steps of the San Juan County court house, and the sky shone spring blue, the scant deciduous trees of Silverton just beginning to leaf out, baby greens and yellows smudging this high valley where mounds of snow lingered under the eaves of Victorian houses. It had been the hardest
winter in a de cade, the snowpack still four feet deep above timberline on the north aspects.

Walter Palmer ended his cell-phone call with a curt “No” and looked at his client. “Wanna grab lunch, Abigail? Brown Bear Café, and I’m buying.”

“I’ve got a flight to catch to New York.” Abigail embraced him, this fifty-six-year-old, balding, pudgy lawyer with halitosis and no sense of humor who’d fought for her freedom as if it were his own, put a soft kiss on his cheek, and said, “Thank you, Walt. For everything. Best seventy-five grand I ever spent.”

Twenty-four hours later at Alexandra, a café three blocks from her studio apartment, Abigail bent to kiss a woman with short silver hair who was wearing a cotton summer dress that showed off the constellation of freckles on her browned shoulders.

“You look cute.”

She sat across from her mother, their table bordering the sidewalk of Hudson Street, a hot day in the city, the rectangle of sky between the buildings a washed-out summer white and the stench of the river draped like a dirty wet blanket over the West Village.

Sarah Foster said, “I ordered a bottle of wine. Best they had.”

Abigail dropped on the table the stack of mail she’d collected from the post office.

“Mom, you didn’t have to—”

“I know I didn’t, but I did. Excuse me for wanting to celebrate that my daughter isn’t going into the clink for thirty years. And you wouldn’t even let me be there.”

Abigail set her sunglasses on the wrought-iron table. “If the verdict had gone the other way, I couldn’t have watched what that did to you.”

Sarah took hold of her daughter’s hand. “Always the protector. Well, it’s all behind you now, Abby.”

“Yeah, but you know the full story. For everyone else, not guilty by reason of mental defect doesn’t mean you didn’t do it.”

“It’s nobody’s business.”

“People wonder. They’ll talk. Snow madness is what my attorney argued, what I said happened. That I went nuts for a little while ’cause of being stranded in the storm. Temporary psychosis and—”

“You know the truth. That’s all that matters.”

“Doesn’t make it easy.”

The waiter came, presented the bottle of chardonnay, filled their wineglasses.

When he’d left, Abigail pulled down into her lap the pile of mail rubber-banded together. As she perused the month’s accumulation of magazines and past-due bills, she noticed the package from the mail-order film-processing company, and her face must have darkened, because her mother said, “What is it, Abby?”

Abigail tore open the envelope, withdrew a sheaf of photographs.

“Emmett Tozer shot a roll of film on the hike in, and his wife gave it to me our first night in Abandon. I guess I sent these in to be developed before I flew out to Colorado for the trial.”

“Sure you wanna see those right now?”

The photos had been shot in black-and-white, and the first picture wrecked Abigail’s stomach—a long downhill shot of the llamas, Scott and Jerrod, June and Lawrence, with Abigail bringing up the rear, every head hung as the party climbed a steep wooded section of the trail.

“This was the first day,” Abigail said, handing the picture to her mother.

They worked their way through the bottle of wine, Abigail providing captions for each photograph until she came to a picture that closed her throat and sheeted her eyes over with tears.

Sarah said, “Honey, what’s wrong?”

The ominous skyline of Abandon was a blur behind them, the low cloud deck expressed in a few dark strokes of gray, but their faces stood out in perfect focus—Lawrence smiling, not at the camera, but at Abigail, who was pulling away.

Abigail shook her head, laid the photograph on the table so her mother could see. Whispered, “I’ve never seen a picture of us together.” She recognized herself in the way his eyes had gone to slits with his smile, saw Lawrence in the shape of her mouth. “I know you were angry that I went to see him.”

“No, honey—”

“It wasn’t a betrayal. I needed to see him, and it’s strange to say, but all this shit I went through . . . meant I at least got to know him.”

“And I’m glad you did, Abby.”

“He was a broken man, Mom. What he did to us, it wasn’t right, but he was so young.”

Sarah was nodding now, and Abigail watched her mother push back the emotion.

“And he tried, Mom, you know? Asking me to come to Colorado, that was him trying. It couldn’t have been easy.”

Sarah lifted the photograph, stared at it for a moment, and when she looked up at Abigail, she was smiling through tears.

“He’s looking at you here like you’re someone he loves.”

Abigail wiped her eyes, watched a man walk out of the watch-repair shop
across the street. “Mom, I tried to find him. Three times we flew into that box canyon, but—”

“I know.”

“—the snow was so deep, it had blocked—”