“Wait here,” Lawrence whispered.
“No, I’m coming with you.”
Lawrence tapped his boot. “I’ve got crampons. You don’t. Wanna end up like Jerrod?”
Abigail watched her father work his way down.
Isaiah smiled when he saw him coming, said, “Larry, you must have cantaloupe-size nuts. You’d have made a helluva soldier, because that jumping off the cliff shit was pure badass.”
“Where’s your gun?”
“The strap’s twisted around behind my back. I can’t reach it without slipping.”
Lawrence squatted down by Isaiah’s head, jammed his left crampon into the ice.
“I was thinking, Larry. Wanna call it square?”
“No, Lawrence,” Abigail said.
“Man, I just wanna get the f**k off this mountain, home to my family. You understand.”
“Give me your hand,” Lawrence said.
As he reached up, Lawrence stomped his right crampon onto Isaiah’s left shoulder. Isaiah’s boots lost their purchase and he slipped down the ice along the same path Jerrod had blazed, making no effort to self-arrest, just staring upslope, his eyes never leaving Lawrence.
“You better hope this f**king kills me,” he said, and disappeared over the edge.
FORTY-ONE
Abigail gripped her father’s arm as they traversed the mountain, moving at a crawl on a fifty-degree slope, Lawrence taking his time to thrust the teeth of his crampons deep into the ice, since they bore the weight of two.
“I would have liked to have seen their bodies,” Abigail said. “Just to be sure.”
“Yeah, but way too risky to edge up to the cliff and look over. We might have joined them. Trust me, they’re either dead or wishing they were.”
They pushed on, Lawrence’s dimming headlamp doing little to guide their way. After awhile, he stopped. They’d left the steepest stretch of ice several hundred feet back.
“This isn’t good,” he said. “We should’ve run into our old tracks by now. I was hoping to follow them back into the canyon. That’s the only safe way down.”
They went on, Abigail covering her face with the hood of her Moonstone jacket, unsettled by the disturbing numbness that had begun to diffuse through her cheek from a patch of burning cold under her left eye. Every step sparked a needle of white-hot pain that shot from the tip of her tailbone up into her throat. She’d begun to cry when Lawrence said, “Thank God.”
Abigail looked up. Through blowing snow, she glimpsed a two-story building perched on the edge of a cliff. “What is that place?” she asked. “Are we back at the mine?”
“No, we’re a thousand feet above it. That’s the ruins of the Godsend’s upper boardinghouse. Forty men used to live up here, so they’d have easy access to the mine’s upper reaches, where all the richest ore deposits were located. Oatha Wallace lived here.”
“So is it good that we found it, or—”
“It means I at least know where we are, and I can get us down to the canyon floor from here. Come on, let’s get out of the storm.”
“That’s not vandalism, Abby.” Lawrence crawled over and shone his light on the tiny scrawl. “Some of the miners wrote this. You can tell because it was done with pencil, and the handwriting isn’t like ours. It’s very small and fine, almost like calligraphy.”
Abigail, too sore, too warm to move closer, said, “What’s it say?”
“Well, this is just a column of numbers. Over here, someone wrote, ‘John owes Bill two dollars.’ Below that one, ‘This is hell.’”
“What’s that drawing a couple feet above your head?”
Lawrence stood. “How lovely. I haven’t seen this one. It’s a miner’s Nellie. Someone sketched a woman’s face. You see a lot of these in boardinghouses, since the men were so lonely up here. . . . Abby.” He looked back at her. “I had no idea he was gonna kill Emmett.”