“Full disclosure?”
“Yeah.”
“From an old man on his deathbed.”
“What’s it open?” Abigail asked.
“I’ve spent the last ten autumns of my life trying to find an answer to that. I know it doesn’t open anything in this crumbling mansion or the ghost town or the mill.”
Lawrence got up, limped over to the entrance of Emerald House, threw the doors open, stood watching the snow.
Abigail called out, “You all right?”
After a moment, he returned, stared down at them, and Abigail could hear the change in his voice as soon as he opened his mouth.
“There’s almost two feet of snow on the ground,” he said. “I know it’s late, and we’re all past the point of exhaustion, but with the snow dumping like this, an avalanche would make it impossible to find. We’d have to wait until next summer, when the snows broke. Besides, it’s not safe to be in Emerald House with all this snow piling up on the roof.”
Quinn stood up, said, “I don’t understand. What are you getting at?”
“I might know what your key opens.”
1893
FIFTY-TWO
U
nder calmer circumstances, Gloria might have noticed the sky—clouds striated with a thousand tones of orange, like you were staring up into the guts of an overripe peach, and some of them still bleeding pink curtains of snow.
But she couldn’t see anything through the window of tears.
Someone yelled her name.
Gloria stopped, turned back, looking downslope at the chapel far below, the clang of its bell echoing through the canyon.
The last of Abandon’s residents trudged up the web trail, the closest of them Emma Ilg, wrapped in a black manta, her purple gown bulging out of the bottom, encrusted with ice. Emma stopped below Gloria and hunched over to catch her breath in the thin air.
When she looked up, she said, “Have you seen Russ—What’s wrong?”
Gloria shook her head, tears streaming.
“Billy McCabe and Oatha Wallace . . . know ’em?”
“Know of them. Why?”
Gloria went to pieces. “I think they killed our husbands.”
Emma’s ruddy face turned cold, rigid. “No. Don’t you say that to me. Russ and Ezekiel are up ahead. They’re trying to find us—”
“Listen to me, Emma.”
“I will not hear—”
“Billy and Oatha murdered Mr. Packer last night and made off with his gold. That’s why our husbands rode up to the pass. But it’s been four hours and Zeke hasn’t come back to me.”
“How do you know they’re gone?”
“ ’Cause Billy came to my cabin and was on the verge of killin me before—”
“You’ve seen them dead?”
“No.”
“Then they aren’t. My husband’s up ahead.”
“Please, Emma—”
“Don’t speak another word to me!” Emma pushed her way up the trail, knocking Gloria down into the snow as she passed.
A ways up the mountain, a woman screamed.
“Al, get your fuckin hands off me,” Joss said.
“Come on, they’s children up ahead a you. Watch that mouth—”
“Don’t tell me how to be. You got these wrist irons too tight. They’re strangulatin my hands. And I need a brain tablet.”
“I’ll fix ’em when we get there
