Abandon - Crouch Blake (электронная книга TXT) 📗

“The furnace is over here,” she said, leading him to a potbellied stove across from the bed. “Mr. Packer has always provided assistance of this nature. He’s a dear friend and business associate of my Jack, though he hasn’t come around lately.”

Stephen counted enough logs stacked against the wall to heat the room for a day, maybe two. He balled up several sheets of old newspaper so brittle, they flaked apart in his hands. With the fire going, he said, “Why don’t you come sit over here?”

Molly knelt before the open stove, her eyes glazing as she watched the aspen logs blacken in the flames. Stephen grabbed the dusty quilt from her bed and draped it over her shoulders, then unbuttoned his coat, eased down beside her.

“Molly,” he said, “the town’s been vacated.”

“Everyone left? Even Mr. Packer?”

“Him, too, and I’ll soon be leaving, so I was hoping I might persuade you to come with me.”

“What if Jack comes and I’m not here? If no one is here?”

“We’ll send word to Jack the moment we reach Silverton. I’ll even pay for the tele—”

“But that isn’t how . . . I’m supposed to be sitting in the window, looking down on the street. And then I see him walking toward the hotel, and he sees me up here in the window, and he doffs his hat and I smile and he runs up the steps and down the hall and—”

She lost her breath.

“It’s okay, Molly.”

“I will be here when my Jack comes to Abandon.”

“Who’ll bring you food and water? Wood for the stove? Who—”

“Jack will see to these things. He is my husband, after all.”

“Molly,” Stephen said, and the words tempted him: You’ve been in Abandon ten years, this hotel for five, and you’ll die in this room if you don’t leave with me. You’ve got as much a chance of seeing Jack again as those sagebrushers did of making their fortune in this desperate town.

Instead, Stephen stood. “Would you excuse me for a moment?” He left the suite and hurried down the stairs toward the lobby and the clack of ivory balls. The child had made a game of rolling them, three at a time, into the table’s leather pockets.

The preacher slipped back into Molly’s suite, found her basking in the heat of the stove, staring into the smoldering pile of embers. The room now reeked of wood smoke, a great improvement.

He sat with her again, said, “I was hoping you’d tell me of Jack?”

Her face enlivened, and as she spoke, Molly veered into sanity, Stephen catching peeks of the woman she must have been.

She narrated their first meeting in San Francisco and the ball, their courtship, the first time he kissed her, and finally the wedding, straying into the smallest details of the clothing worn, food served, floral arrangements, guests in attendance, everything as clearly recalled as if the event had transpired that morning. Stephen marveled at how thoroughly she described her husband’s face, the tone of his voice, even the smell of him, so by the time she pulled out the crinkled albumen print of Jack, Stephen’s mind had already formed an excellent likeness of the man.

Someone knocked at the door. Molly rose from the warmed floorboards by the stove, crossed the room, and asked who was there.

“Harriet McCabe, ma’am.”

Molly opened the door, looked down at the little girl standing in the hall. “What do you want?”

Harriet’s eyes cut to Stephen, back to Molly. “There’s a man in the lobby asking for you.”

Please God, let her believe the lie she so loves.

Molly staggered back. “His name?”

“Jack Engler, ma’am.”

Molly flushed, glanced back at Stephen. He came to the door, said, “Harriet, I want you to go downstairs and tell Mr. Engler that Mrs. Engler will send for him momentarily. Hurry now.”

As Harriet ran down the hall, Stephen closed the door.

Molly glanced at her chemise, which was stained and threadbare, a pitiful garment. She whispered, “He can’t see me like this.”

Stephen went to the wardrobe, threw open the doors. The dresses and gowns hadn’t been worn in years; all were mottled with gray dust.

Molly chose a corset, much too small, but Stephen fit her into it as well as he could manage, hooked the two bones in front, and laced up the back. “Which gown?” he said. “I happen to like this blue—”

“Jack detests blue.” She detached a peach-colored evening gown with plentiful ruffles from its hanger.

“A lovely choice, Molly.” He pulled it over her head, helped slide her arms into the sleeves. As he swept the dust off her shoulders, he felt as if he were dressing an oversize child.

Her hands shook.

Stephen steadied them, said, “Don’t be afraid. Your husband is down in the lobby because he loves you. He’s come back for you.”

He sat Molly down at the dressing table. Her hair hadn’t been brushed in a long while—thin, oily, so tangled that he hesitated to run bristles through it. So he picked up the silver brush and slid the smooth backside of it down the length of her coarse black tresses.

Molly’s reflection in the cracked mirror sent back the rubble of a woman, and Stephen prayed she didn’t see herself as he did, that God might cause a beautiful distortion of the image her eyes received.

While he pretended to brush her hair, he considered Jack, wondered where this man lived today, and if he ever thought of the woman he’d deserted, this mad, pathetic creature of obsession, wished Jack could see what he’d done to his bride.

“You’re stunning,” Stephen said.

“I don’t have any rouge.”

He pinched her cheeks. “There. You’re perfect now.”

As Molly beamed, Stephen glimpsed the dignity she’d once possessed. He went to the door, cracked it open, yelled, “Harriet! Mrs. Engler is ready to receive her husband!”

Stephen shut the door. Molly walked over, her chest billowing beneath the shabby gown.

She stood three feet back from the door, Stephen behind her.

They listened to the heavy footsteps thumping up the stairs.

Molly glanced back at Stephen, grinning with all the giddy joy of a new bride, thinking of the first day she’d arrived in advance of her husband, in this fledgling camp called Hope.

And all the things she’d wanted to do, places she’d intended to see, children to bear, tore through her mind like an avalanche.

She’d waited so long.

Now he was coming down the hall, and Molly whispered “Oh Jack” as Stephen thumbed back the hammer, raised the revolver to the back of her head, and waited for the knock at the door.

SIXTY-SIX

 I

n the evening, Stephen went for water, blessed with convenience in this regard, since the hillside behind his home boasted a spring. The cabin’s previous occupant had raised a simple structure over the rock where the water surfaced, so it could be easily accessed in the winter months.

A lantern in one hand, an empty pail in the other, he webbed fifty feet up the trail, past the privy and toward the shed, the moon so bright that he could’ve left the lamp behind.

He stepped under the tin roof and traded the lantern for an ax that hung from a nail in the clapboard.

Ice had amassed around the lip of the flat rock where the water spilled over, and when he’d chipped it clear, he set the pail under the trickle and sat contentedly on a dry rock, blanketed, like all the others in this old tailings pile, with an orange flocculent mass.

He’d always assumed it was algae.

A solitary cabin glowed on the east slope above Abandon, though you couldn’t see inside, since the windows weren’t made of glass, but white cotton cloth soaked in tallow. It was a cramped, one-room, saddle-notched affair with a mud and stone chimney, a little porch out front, and a corrugated metal roof that stayed warm enough with a fire blazing underneath it to keep the snow from sticking. Inside and out, it was a spartan dwelling, severely lacking the touch of a woman.