Abandon

dark.

“Hold his head, Jerrod. You watching, Lar? I’m gonna cut a hole right here,” he tapped Abigail’s belly button with the knife point, “and reach in, start yanking stuff out.”

When the blade touched her stomach, she went to another place, without sound or feeling. She imagined a Long Island beach, middle of summer. Isaiah’s headlamp became the gentle sun.

Her father’s voice brought her back. “I lied,” Lawrence gasped. “I lied to you, Isaiah.” Isaiah still pushed the knife, Abigail sucking in her gut, pressure and pain beginning to build.

“Hear what he’s saying?”

“I got ears, Jerrod.”

“The gold isn’t here,” Lawrence rasped. “I’ll help you find it. I swear. Just leave her—”

Isaiah suddenly sheathed the knife, stood up, left Abigail shaking on the floor. He lifted Lawrence and slammed him into the oven, the professor’s feet off the floor.

“What would you have done?” Lawrence said. “You spend years trying to find something, then someone sweeps in last second to steal it all from you. I couldn’t—”

Isaiah rammed him into the brick again, dust showering down from the ceiling.

“Your ass better start making sense in a fucking hurry.”

“That secret room in Bart’s wing is where the gold was kept, until Christmas 1893. For a long time, I was sure the bars were in Emerald House. I searched every room, even scoured the south-wing rubble. I’d given up, when I found Gloria Curtice’s diary. Something big was going down on Christmas in Abandon. She wrote that two men—Oatha Wallace and Billy McCabe—had murdered Bart Packer and his servants and made off with a load of gold. Apparently, her husband and some other men rode up toward the mine in pursuit.”

“So fucking what?”

“So . . . when you’re in a tiny town, dead of winter, and you’ve just stolen two thousand pounds of gold, you have to hide it.”

“Look in my eyes, Larry, and you better have an answer to this. Where’s the gold now?”

“I haven’t found it yet.” Isaiah simply dropped him, slipped a clip out of his belt, popped it into the Glock, and racked the slide. “No, listen. Oatha and Billy had already been prospecting together. They had this claim up at Saw-blade Pass. Gloria mentions it in her diary, because Billy’s wife had blabbed to her about it. It would make perfect sense. They stash the gold up there, and first chance they get, it’s a straight shot down the mountain into Silverton. They’re home free and set for life.”

“Then it’s gone, right? They would’ve taken it.”

“Would have, yes. Except, remember, every resident of Abandon disappeared on Christmas Day, so they probably never got the chance.”

“You telling me the gold’s up at the pass?”

“I’m telling you I think that’s where it is, but I haven’t had a chance to explore up there since finding Gloria’s diary. Scott and I had planned to do that during this trip.”

Isaiah paced around the butcher-block island.

“Isai—”

“Thinking, Jerrod.” Three more trips around the island, then Isaiah stopped and looked at his partner. “Go help Stu and that woman down from the library, and get them set up in the foyer.” As Jerrod disappeared into the west-wing stairwell, Isaiah walked over to Abigail and her father, now huddled together at the base of the brick oven. “You know where this old claim hole is or not, Larry?”

“I think—”

“Motherfucker, let me hear the word think come out of your mouth one more—”

“I can find it. I know where to look, and I’ll take you up there at first light, when—”

“First light? Tomorrow?” Isaiah laughed, then reached out, caressed Abigail’s face with the back of his hand. “I don’t think you grasp the situation, Lar. This is your daughter, right? Well, know this. If I don’t have these gold bars in my possession before first light, you’re gonna watch me do terrible things to your little girl before I go to work on you.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

 T

he storm wound up into such a flood of snow, they lost sight of Emerald House just fifty yards out from the portico, Stu and June staying behind in the mansion’s foyer.

Within the hour, Isaiah, Jerrod, Lawrence, and Abigail had reached the mine, the professor leading them beyond the snow-blasted remnants of the mill to the canyon’s end, where they started the long, steep climb to the pass.

Jerrod had roped Abigail to her father in an effort to impede an easy escape, and she was trying not to cry in the face of the surreal horror of it all—the throbbing gash above her left eye, the blood sliding down her leg from that deep cut on the back of her thigh—when a crushing realization sunk in: We’re going to die in these mountains.

She could find no reason to believe these men would ever let them live.

Worst-case scenario—they don’t find the gold bars, and we die horribly. Best case—they find the gold and we die quickly. Is that what I have to hope for? A bullet in the back of my head?

Lawrence put his arm around her.