“What’d she say, Quinn?”
“I couldn’t tell.”
This time, she got the words out, though they slurred against her thick tongue, sounded as muddled as everything else. “Why’d you drug me?”
Jennifer said, “Just to help with your pain. Nice, isn’t it?”
“Lovely.” Abigail stared at the man at the table, her mouth and eyes gone dry. “I know you.”
“Yes, we’ve met.”
Abigail managed to sit up against the cabinets, had to close her eyes to shut out the chaos of light and noise.
“In the mine?”
“No, Packer’s mansion. But I did lock you and your father and June into the mine. More than a little surprised you found a way out.”
“Oh, that’s right.” She tried to suppress a giggle. It all seemed so terribly funny. Then it hit her. “Jennifer,” she said, “there were gold bars in that mine. I’ll bet that’s what your—what was he?”
“Great-grandfather.”
“What he was looking for. I can show you—Wait.” She pointed at Quinn. “He knows. He was there. He had a key. How does he have your great-grandfather’s key?”
Quinn and Jennifer laughed.
Abigail laughed, too, her eyes catching on the clock above the sink, a different bird assigned to each hour.
It read 9:10 P.M.
Impossible. It had been hours since she’d walked into the office and looked at the Silverton photographs and Primack’s journal.
“I need to get going, huh?” Quinn said. “Before this snow gets any deeper.”
“I should go with you. I won’t lie—I don’t want to, but—”
“No, I’ll take care of it. Abigail, wanna go for a ride?”
She thought about it. “Where to?”
“Just up into the mountains a little ways.”
“Why?”
“To meet up with search-and-rescue, so we can get your dad out of the cave.”
She smiled. “Know what I think?”
“What?”
“You don’t mean the words you’re saying.”
“No? Then what do I mean?”
“Something bad.”
Quinn stood up and reached down, grabbed Abigail’s hands and pulled her to her feet.
“Help me get her boots on, Jen. Don’t want her found barefoot.”
“Actually, it doesn’t matter.”
“Sure it does.”
“No, when people get hypothermia, start freezing to death out in the wilderness, they’re often found half-naked. They go out of their mind, think they’re warm, start stripping off layers of clothing. Just leave her boots here. I’ll make sure they disappear.”
“Can you walk, Abigail?”
“Of course I know how to walk.”
She felt weightless on her feet, moving slowly and deliberately out of the kitchen into the hallway. At an ovular mirror, she stopped and regarded herself, leaning in close, her nose flattened against the glass.
“We could still not do this, Quinn.”
“Stop now? After everything I’ve done? No payoff for any of it? That’d be the worst outcome. No, we’re all in.”
Abigail’s pupils had been reduced to grains of black sand.
She turned away from the mirror and continued on toward the front door.
“Jen, this won’t have been worth it . . . for Julius, for Grandpa, Dad, you and me, if we let the guilt crush us.”
He reached up and scraped at the hole with his fingernails, like he’d been stung and was trying to dig out the stinger.
Abigail looked back at the Victorian house, where Jennifer had dragged herself up onto the porch and come to an impasse at the front door.
The sheriff cried out, “Oh God!”
“You just shot two people, Abigail Foster,” Abigail told herself.
Snow slanted down through the porch light, Abigail figuring the full thirty milligrams of Percoset must be raging through her, because she was so stoned, so detached, her thoughts derailing and becoming unmanageable again.