Abandon

She crested a hill, and below in the rainy gloom, a collection of lights appeared, and a green road sign flashed by:

WELCOME TO SILVERTON

POP. 473

ELEV. 9318

She veered through a hairpin turn, straightened out onto Greene Street, drove over a bridge that spanned all twenty feet of Cement Creek, and eased onto the brake pedal.

To her immediate right stood the San Juan County Courthouse, gold-domed and surmounted by a clock tower.

Ahead, streetlamps lined either side of Silverton’s main thoroughfare, each illuminating spheres of slushy rain. It was a quarter past seven on a raw Thursday night, and with the buildings dark and scarcely a single occupied parking space as far as she could see, it seemed the town had already gone to sleep.

She drove a few blocks past rows of refurbished Victorian-style buildings that would have looked like something out of a Western, if not for their ostentatious paint schemes—Silverton Clinic, Fred Wolfe Memorial Carriage House, a Church of Christ no bigger than a trailer, Silverton City Hall, Wyman Hotel, Pride of the West Restaurant, Rocky Mountain Funnel Cakes and Cafe, Blue Raven Fine Arts, Outdoor World.

The saloons and brothels had long since been replaced with trendy coffeehouses, galleries, ice-cream, candy, and gift shops. There was even a photography studio where they would doll you up like a cowboy or a whore and take your portrait, so when you went home, you could show your friends you’d been in the real West.

The West for tourists, she thought. You could probably order an appletini from one of the bars and stand a good chance of not being shot between the eyes.

At the corner of Greene and Twelfth, Abigail pulled into a parking space in front of the Grand Imperial, a three- story white-brick hotel with lavender trim, red brick chimneys, and topped by a row of shed-roofed dormers.

She killed the engine, climbed down onto the street, and glass fell out of the window when she slammed shut the Suburban’s heavy door.

Beyond the ticking of the engine and the splatter of icy rain, Silverton stood silent.

Looking through the windows, she could see into the lobby of the hotel, where a clerk read a paperback behind the front desk.

As she started toward the entrance, she heard the groan of a revving engine.

At the north end of town, headlights appeared.

1893

EIGHTY-FIVE

 M

ilton wiped his mouth and shuddered. After a day of deadpan drinking in the Blair Street saloons, he’d just aired the paunches into a snowbank, noting bitterly to himself that he’d never touched liquor prior to coming west.

As he staggered up Twelfth Street toward the boardinghouse, even the glow from all that rotgut wasn’t sufficient to ward off the loneliness or the early-evening chill.

The lights of Silverton had begun to wink on.

He passed a butcher shop, a grub house, a pharmacy, a Chinese laundry, and was thinking of his wife and son back in Missouri and choking on guilt, having had his thorn sucked that morning by a whore named Maribell, when he tripped over something and tumbled into the snow.

He sat up and scratched the ice out of his beard and shook his head in an attempt to right the spinning world. When at last he did, he found himself sprawled near the entrance to the Grand Imperial Hotel.

It took some doing, but he managed to regain his feet.

“Son of a bitch.”

He stared down at what had toppled him—some bindle-stiff whore in a white cape, either drunker than he was or stone-dead, lying facedown in the filthy snow.

Voices washed out, distant.

“You a diploma doc?”

“I’m the best chance she’s got of . . . This a whore?”

“I don’t know. What’s it matter?”

“I don’t treat whores. Find Dr. Stout. He makes the rounds on Blair—”

“I’m not certain she’s a—”

“You know how many dead prostitutes he’s seen since Christmas Eve? Five. Had to pump the stomachs of seven. They all take to suicide this time of year. Morphine. Carbolic acid for the more desperate.”

“She ain’t poisoned. She’s frozed.”

“Or maybe she’s poisoned and froze.”

“She needs your help, whichever the—”

“Should it come to my attention she eats cock for her bed and supper, you can double the amounts on my fee bill.”

“All right. She gonna die?”

“More than likely.”

A man stood hunched over at the foot of the bed, chewing on a stogie, and even through skewed vision, she could see his smooth-shaven face glistening with sweat, his arm jerking back and forth, shirtsleeves rolled up, arms red to the elbows, the air pungent with the charred reek of friction—steel grinding through rotted bone.