She eased down in the gravel and stared at the prayer flags, frosted with snow and flapping in the wind, Silverton all hushed and still.
She was cold and itchy from the opiate, but she didn’t care.
After awhile, she got up and staggered toward the porch, climbed the steps, stopping at the front door.
Jennifer lay on her back in a pond of black blood, her eyes open and glazed, her lips barely moving.
Abigail said, “Your nightgown’s ruined.”
Then she stepped over the sheriff and went inside.
EIGHTY-NINE
The sun had roused Lawrence Kendall from sleep on Wednesday and Thursday, but not on Friday. His third morning in the cave, a noise woke him, his eyes opening to pure black, his head lifting from the folded parka he’d used for a pillow the last three nights, fearing he was hallucinating again, but the sound held strong—the muffled yet unmistakable whop-whop of rotors chopping the thin air. He smiled, could have wept. Abby had made it out.
As he felt around on the cold rock for the last functioning light, he wondered why a helicopter would be searching for him after dark, but he instantly dismissed the thought as near-death confusion.
His fingers grazed the straps, and he slipped the headlamp on and twisted the bulb. He dragged Abigail’s pack over to the granola-bar wrapper in the middle of the room, which marked the spot under the chimney.
Every time he’d slept, he’d dreamed of this moment, on the brink of deliverance, wondering if the smoke would make it all seventy feet up the chute to the surface, and, if so, whether he could generate a sizable-enough plume with what he had to catch anyone’s attention.
As he unzipped Abigail’s pack and grabbed the Doubletree matchbook and a handful of paper he’d already torn out of her notepad and balled up in preparation, his eyes fell upon the mound of snow nearby that had undoubtedly fallen from the surface.
The moment he got the paper burning, he’d fill the two water bottles with the snow, maybe have enough willpower to wait, let it turn to delicious slush in the cavern’s thirty-seven degrees.
He gathered up the wads of paper and stacked them into a little pyramid before tearing out a match. It ignited on the first strike, the flame motionless in the stagnant room. He held it to the base of the pyramid, got seven pieces lighted before the match burned down to his thumb.
The helicopter sounded closer, Lawrence figuring if he could hear the rotors this well, it must be hovering right over the chimney.
All the paper seemed to combust at once, and the room flared with firelight as a dense cloud of smoke lifted toward the low ceiling, Lawrence picturing it just missing the hole and diffusing through the room, but this didn’t happen.
In spite of his weakened state, he’d planned and executed perfectly. Like a vacuum, the chimney inhaled the smoke. Lawrence struggled to his feet, neck splitting, head pounding with dehydration as he stared up the chute, watching his precious smoke curl toward the surface.
Far up the shaft, something gleamed in the dimming beam of his lamp. It resembled snow, and the smoke had collided into it and stopped, hanging like mist in a hollow against the ice-plugged opening of the chimney.
The whop-whop of the helicopter blades pulsed as loud as he would ever hear them.
It was daylight out there, permanent night in here, and if he couldn’t find his way back to the main cavern, he was going to die.
NINETY
Sunlight streamed through the tall windows with a brilliance that suggested the world outside had turned to glass. Abigail’s head throbbed, as if someone had shoved a hot coal deep into the base of her skull, and with the woodstove extinguished, the living room was cold, particularly where she lay shivering on the futon by the window.
She had no idea how she’d come to be in this house. The last piece of memory that felt like solid ground seemed ages ago—driving Scott’s Suburban away from the trailhead at dusk. Whatever came after had shattered against the back of her mind, and based on what few frames she’d glimpsed, she didn’t want those memories reassembled. Her eyes watered with pain as she eased her weight onto her feet.
The nearest archway opened into a kitchen, and something about the table and the stainless-steel refrigerator and the shelf of bottles over the sink made her nauseous with fear—an inexplicable familiarity.
She limped into the foyer and pulled open the front door to cloudless early-morning cobalt, Silverton buried under a foot of new snow, spruce and aspen in the front yard sagging under the weight, the town silent save the murmur of a snowplow scraping north up Greene Street.
At her feet, a woman dressed only in a pink satin nightgown lay unmoving on her stomach, her skin tinged blue and powdered with snow, her bare legs smeared with blood.
“Oh my God.”
“And then you shot them both,” the woman said.
“Yes.”
“Because you believed your life was in danger.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me again why you thought the sheriff of Silverton and her brother wanted to kill you?”
“You’re looking at me like you don’t believe me.”
“It’s not that we don’t believe—”
“Then what?”
“Ms. Foster, we’ve got the sheriff and her brother dead here in town, and you’re telling us there’re six more bodies in the backcountry, most of which we won’t be able to locate until sometime next summer when the snow breaks, and forget the small concern that none of this jives with the Jen Primack I’ve known and worked with for three years. Look, I know you’ve been through quite an ordeal, but for a small-time undersheriff in a sleepy town like Silverton, this is a helluva lot to choke down.”
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.