Going solely on photographs, historians in the next century might mistake her world for a happy place, just as she’d always assigned misery and hardship to the past, prejudiced by a few grim portraits.
Abigail noted that she felt much better, the pain receding from her feet as she inspected the last portrait—a black-and-white shot of a young man with hair so unkempt that it struck her as contemporary, and for all its gravity-defying waves, might’ve run two hundred dollars, not including product, in a Manhattan salon.
The face that wild hair sat upon was handsome but uniformly pocked with tiny colorless indentations, so that he looked less like a live human being, more like a Seurat Pointillism.
The portrait’s frame rested upon a brown leather-bound book, stiff and dry, so old that as she lifted it to her face and inhaled the smell, she couldn’t detect even the faintest odor of tannins or glue.
She opened it to the first page, which contained six words handwritten in elaborate, perfect script: The Journal of Dr. Julius Primack.
EIGHTY-EIGHT
She thumbed the brittle pages, coming midway through to handwriting that looked different from the doctor’s—smaller, less methodical, and nearly illegible, like it had been scrawled under duress.
There were eight lines in haphazard succession down the middle of the page, the first of which read Lana Hartman.
“You found it.”
The sheriff stood in the archway adjoining the kitchen and the office, and Abigail couldn’t exactly nail it down, but her posture evinced tension—Jennifer’s arms hanging at her sides, knees slightly bent, her body coiled as if for a race or a fight.
And Abigail felt different—seismic shifts in the unavowed frequencies. She was edgy, a little nauseous, her awareness heightened, and she realized it wasn’t that her body didn’t ache anymore—she just cared less and less with each passing moment.
“You’re a historian, too?” Abigail asked.
“You could say that.” Jennifer walked into the office and stood beside Abigail at the bookshelf. “This guy”—she touched the portrait of the young man with the ruined face—“came out to Silverton from Chicago in 1891 with investment money. Lost it all on poorly chosen claims in less than a year.”
“But he stayed.”
“Julius had studied a little medicine in the mid-eighties, and since you didn’t actually have to have a diploma to be a doctor where they were in high demand, he started a practice, kept prospecting on the side. If you read his notes”—Jennifer pulled the journal out of Abigail’s hands, placed it back carefully under the photograph—“it becomes clear he was a very driven but very frustrated man.”
“Why frustrated?”
“He became obsessed with finding some gold that went missing in Abandon, thought he knew where it was, that he had the key that would open this secret mine. But he could never find it. He went crazy, shot himself in 1924.”
“Why do you have his picture and journal? Are you studying—”
“I’m his great-granddaughter. My brother and I are fourth-generation Silverton Primacks.”
The sheriff slipped out of focus, and Abigail had to rub her eyes to bring her back.
“What’s wrong?” Jennifer asked.
“I don’t know . . . it’s weird.” It wasn’t a bad feeling, just a sudden, blissful calm, and the only thing that unnerved Abigail was how fast it had bullied its way in.
Jennifer said, “That’s probably the Percoset I crushed up in your tea.”
Abigail’s heart hammered so hard, she thought it would explode, then realized that the beating hadn’t originated within her. Someone had knocked at the front door.
Jennifer had left the room.
Abigail looked down, saw a puddle and four pieces of ceramic on the hardwood floor.
She almost fell moving past the stainless-steel refrigerator, braced herself against the kitchen table, which turned over—place settings, her glass of water, and a vase of plastic lilies crashing to the floor.
She sat down on the tile.
In the foyer, Jennifer reached the front door and pulled it open.
A man loomed in the porchlight. Abigail knew him from somewhere. His shoulder-length brown hair was tied up in a ponytail, his silver-and-black down jacket dusted with snow.
He wrapped his arms around Jennifer, nothing remotely sexual or romantic in the embrace, the energy reflective of close friends or siblings.
He said, “We did it, Jen.”
Abigail leaned against the refrigerator, her head humming as she watched Jennifer redo the locks.
The mosaic of pastel-colored tiles ensnared Abigail’s attention, and the next time she looked up, that tall man stood at the sink, washing his hands.
Her eyes slammed shut, and when they opened again, her face lay pressed against the cold tile and the kitchen table had been righted and the sheriff and that familiar man sat across from each other.
“. . . this storm, we won’t be able to get back to Abandon until next summer. I told you it might come to . . .” His voice left audible trails, as if he were speaking in triplicate.
Abigail had been stoned before, drunk, even took Ecstasy a couple years back at an ill-advised rave in the Meatpacking District. This was nothing like that. She didn’t feel euphoric, just tranquil and dreamy and wise. On some disassociated level, she understood the danger, but it was knowledge without emotion or investment, no more upsetting than hearing of a stranger’s death on the evening news.
“I f**king hate this.” The sheriff’s voice.
Somewhere in the kitchen, a crow squawked nine times.
“This isn’t the first blood spilled for those bricks. But we do this right? Finish it? Maybe it’s the last. You thought of it that way?”
“I don’t know if I’m wired for—”
“Remember what you said to me four days ago? ‘There’re people going into Abandon, and I think they’re going for our gold.’ You told me, ‘Don’t let it happen.’ ”
She went out of time again, wading amid thoughts jumbled and irrelevant and absurd, vaguely aware that she needed to bring herself down, untangle her mind from this exquisite high.
“. . . four-hundred-foot drop off Peace Falls. There’ll be no chance of anyone finding her until . . . Jesus, Jen, I told you to get her loaded.”
Abigail tried to sit up.
“I spiked her tea with thirty milligrams of oxycodone.”
If Abigail didn’t move her head, she could actually bring their faces into focus.