She went to the wall that hid the refrigerator and debated whether it was worth it to slide it open and grab a bottle of water. No one had heard the flushing of the toilet, but it was far more likely that someone might see light from inside the bunk, especially since all the bunks were so dark. She decided not to risk it and went to the closet instead.
She pulled the door closed behind her and slid into the large alcove off to one side. It was an even better hiding place than she’d remembered, about three feet of empty space with shelving built into it to hold extra linens and pillows. But underneath the shelving there was enough space that she could push herself back into the corner, even sit up a little. With her feet tucked under her, the only way she could be spotted was if someone peered inside and looked directly into the corner. It was risky, she knew, but she was counting on the fact that everyone would assume she had gone into the woods to try to escape. Would they look for her here? They might, but not immediately. Not until they’d convinced themselves she wasn’t hiding in the woods.
She pulled a pillow from the shelf and settled herself into the pitch-black corner. She thought of eating some cheese and an apple, but she wasn’t hungry. She stowed the food and the knife below the pillow and leaned back, closing her eyes. She didn’t think for a moment that she’d be able to sleep, but she must have dozed off, because she was woken by the sound of movement in the bunk. She braced herself. Were they searching for her, or had Bruce come back to the bunk to sleep?
There was the flush of the toilet, then water running, then there was silence for a long time, broken by the sound of three quick coughs. Bruce’s coughs, easily identifiable.
She slid the knife out from behind the pillow. If he did step into the closet in order to search it, she’d have the jump on him. She could strike out with the knife, maybe slash at his Achilles tendon.
She listened some more. Nothing, and then there was the faint rumbling of snoring. She relaxed. He was a deep sleeper, and she knew that once he began to snore, waking him was extraordinarily difficult.
Go kill him.
She ignored that voice in her head, loosened her grip on the knife.
It would be easy, though, sneaking out of the closet, plunging the knife into his chest while he slept. But how would that help her?
He tortured you.
And it would feel good.
It wouldn’t help her get off this island.
One less person looking for you.
She loosened her grip on the knife, stretched the muscles in her neck.
Imagine how it would feel.
So she let herself imagine it. Standing above the bed, Bruce on his back, the way he usually slept, one hand touching the side of his face. She’d have a choice: either the exposed neck, or straight to the heart. But it wasn’t what she wanted to do. Her goal right now was to survive. To tell her story. Tell people what they’d done to her, and what had happened to Jill.
She settled herself back onto the pillow, then realized she was hungry. She ate half the cheese, almost passed on eating an apple because of how loud it would be, but then did it anyway, chewing quietly and making sure she could hear Bruce’s snores while she was doing it.
She wrapped all the food back up, hoping that the smell of the cheddar cheese in the small space would dissipate, then closed her eyes again, drifting in and out of sleep until she heard a loud knock on the bunk door.
“You found her?” came Bruce’s querulous voice, muffled but clear. Abigail could hear the hope in his question. He was out of bed and at the door.
There was a response, but she couldn’t make out the words, then Bruce said, “You searched the girls’ camp?”
Again, she couldn’t hear whoever he was talking to. “Fine, I’ll be right up,” Bruce said, and then there was the sound of the door closing. He moved about the bunk, using the bathroom, grabbing some food from the kitchen. She thought maybe she was going to be spared the terror of his going through the closet, but he swung open the door, quickly rattled through some of his hanging clothes, grabbed something, and left, leaving the door open. She held her breath, then listened as he opened the front door and shut it behind him.
Abigail stayed crouched, barely moving, in the closet for what felt like an hour but was probably only fifteen minutes. Bruce had been headed to the main lodge, probably to discuss strategies for finding her. It was possible that he’d be back, but she doubted it. The search was the most important thing, and if they didn’t consider it a possibility that she was back in her own bunk, then she was safe, at least for a while.
It suddenly occurred to her that Bruce had opened the closet in order to get some clothing. She wondered if after she’d been subdued at the airfield he’d come back to the bunk and unpacked again. Or had he never packed in the first place, simply bringing along his empty suitcase as a ruse? And where was her suitcase now? Somewhere in this bunk, or in the lodge? She’d been thinking so much of the nightmare by the firepit that she’d almost forgotten that horrible moment at the airfield when she realized that she was simply a pawn in a cruel game. A bunch of men wanting to humiliate a woman. Or two women. Her and Jill. First play with them, then humiliate them, then make them think they were about to die. Abigail briefly thought about that moment, the fake knife, the certainty that her life was about to end, and the cold helplessness she had felt. And then she pushed it from her mind. What she needed to think about was how to get off this island. She wondered if she could play a waiting game of sorts. Hadn’t Chip said that a bunch of guests were due soon? No, that was most likely a lie. Even though this place probably had genuine guests, the real purpose of this island was as a place for a bunch of rich, sadistic men to toy with women. It was off the grid. No doubt the staff had to sign nondisclosure agreements. She would need to get off the island, one way or another.
Why had she not figured it all out earlier? Why had she not been immediately alarmed by the fact that the island was almost entirely populated by one gender? She remembered a story from childhood, a frog getting boiled alive in water that was slowly getting hotter and hotter, so slowly that he didn’t notice. Maybe that was her excuse. There were signs, but they were little ones. And now the water was boiling.
What movie am I in? she asked herself. She was hiding in a dark closet, and that made her think of Halloween, but that wasn’t right. She wasn’t being hunted by one psychopath, but by a group of them. In truth, it felt as though she were in a zombie movie, except the horde chasing her weren’t zombies. But that’s what it felt like. She was in a bad dream being chased through the dark.
As terrified as she was, there was a part of her that felt strangely alive. The fact that Bruce had spent the night just twenty feet from where she was hiding gave her a giddy sense of elation. She’d outsmarted them. It might be temporary, but she’d come this far, and, more than anything, she wanted to get off this island. It was her only purpose. Survival. Then revenge. And it was a purpose that she didn’t feel as though she was only trying on, like a new dress, or a new job, or a new boyfriend. This purpose fit her. She felt, right now, like all her life had been leading to this moment, crouched in the dark, a knife in her hand.
She crawled from the closet, then stood up, her knees clicking and her muscles stiff. The curtains at the front of the bunk were half pulled, but it was dawn outside, early morning light filtering through. She stretched her back and her legs, then used the bathroom. Peering out through a crack in the curtain nearest the unmade bed, she spotted someone crossing the lawn, dressed in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. He was too far away for Abigail to see who he was, or decide if he’d been one of the men who’d tortured her the night before. Even if he wasn’t, though, what difference did it make? Mellie hadn’t helped her and that meant no one would. She needed to wait until nighttime again. Her job right now was to survive the day, get some food and water inside of her. She was in the best place for that. If Bruce, or someone else, did decide to search the bunk, then she’d most likely be fo
und, but not before she could do some damage with the kitchen knife.
She grabbed the apples and the cheese from the closet and brought them to the refrigerator, shoving the bag way in the back of the vegetable crisper. Even wrapped in cellophane the cheese smelled too sharp and it was too much of a risk to keep it in the closet. She drank a bottle of water, then ate a yogurt, hiding both containers at the bottom of the trash. In one of the cabinets in the kitchen she found an opened bag of smoked almonds and ate two handfuls, then took a risk and opened a package of some all-natural salmon jerky, eating about three pieces, then shoving the package toward the back of the cabinet. Chewing the smoky fish, she was suddenly struck with how good it tasted, amazed that she was finding pleasure in the food, and then just as suddenly she remembered what was happening to her and how slim her chances of survival were.
Saliva pooled under her tongue, and the food started to come back up. She bolted toward the bathroom, but once she was kneeling in front of the toilet the feeling passed and she wasn’t sick.
She returned to the closet to wait, curling herself into a ball as though she were a hibernating animal. Something hard pressed against her hip bone and she dug into the front pocket of her jeans and pulled out the small stone that she’d kept from the beach when she’d been building that pile of stones. She rubbed her thumb on the stone’s smooth surface. It was too dark for her to look at it, but she remembered the stone well. An almost lucid white with a light red ring that went all the way around it. She curled up again, this time with the stone gripped tightly in her hand.
CHAPTER 30
Abigail slept intermittently throughout the day, at times allowing herself to stretch out along the closet floor.
In the afternoon she was hungry again and forced herself to make a brief foray into the cabin’s kitchen area for some more food, plus another bathroom break. It took her all of about five minutes, but her heart never stopped speeding the whole time.
When she wasn’t sleeping she tried to keep her thoughts ordered, following her father’s system and breaking down her problems into pieces, forming lists. Still, she kept imagining what they were going to do to her if they caught her. And she kept seeing Jill, her skull broken, her leg spasming, dying by the light of the fire. The image of it went through her mind on repeat, like a catchy scrap of music, and eventually she stopped trying to block the bad thoughts from coming. Along with terrifying her, they also provided motivation. If she could somehow survive this … this thing that was happening to her, then she’d tell her story, make sure these men were locked away, so that it would never happen again.
Her other motivation was her parents, their faces flashing through her mind at odd intervals. She kept thinking of what their lives would be like when they learned that their only daughter had died on her honeymoon. It filled her with a terrible grief. They had already lost each other, not completely, of course, but partly. She knew that her death would be a final blow to them both. They would grow old with no one to take care of them, and that thought alone made her determined to make it off this island, to survive.
Another persistent thought—or was it a dream?—was that her death on this island would mean the death of her own children, children who didn’t exist yet. She could almost picture them, almost feel the desperate, scary love that they would arouse in her. They were teetering in the ether right now, as was she, as were her parents, all subject to a crazed, entitled coven of men. Survive, she told herself, survive.
She didn’t know the exact time that Bruce returned at night, but she thought it was about eight o’clock. It had been dark inside the bunk for about three hours. He entered and slammed the door behind him. At first she wasn’t one hundred percent sure it was him, but then he coughed and she recognized his sharp hack. She was squeezed into the closet gripping the knife and taking some satisfaction in the fact that she had managed to hide out for an entire day, and that no one had thought to look inside the bunk.
Bruce, after rustling around in what she thought was the kitchen, came briefly to the closet, pulling out his suitcase. She wondered if he was packing, but he didn’t grab any of his clothes from their hangers. He did, however, shut the closet door.
He went out again, and about two hours passed. At one point, Abigail thought she heard the distant roar of an airplane overhead. Was it possible that Mellie had done the right thing and alerted the authorities? It gave her a brief feeling of hope, but it was short-lived. Mellie hadn’t called anyone. If anything Mellie was probably helping them look for her. That airplane above was probably just passing by, and if it was stopping on the island it would probably be bringing reinforcements, more people to search for her.
She told herself not to speculate, that it wouldn’t help her. She concentrated instead on remembering exactly how to get down to the boathouse at the edge of the pond, and from there how to get to the rocky cove where she’d walked with Bruce just a few days earlier. Even though she’d been following him, she could remember the direction they took, up through the woods onto the bluff, then east along the edge of the island to the embankment that led down to the cove. She remembered the entire walk taking twenty minutes, thirty at the longest, and she thought she could do it at night, especially if the moon was out.
When Bruce returned, she listened as he went straight to bed. Snores began almost immediately, and Abigail told herself to wait thirty minutes just to make sure he was truly and deeply asleep.
A part of her wanted to stay another day in the bunk. It felt safe here, and maybe, just maybe, help would eventually come. But she knew that she needed to make her break tonight, that another day inside would make her pursuers decide to search everywhere, including inside all the bunks. And then she heard a sound, unidentifiable at first—she almost thought it was an engine catching—but then, unmistakably, she realized it was the sound of a dog barking. A faraway sound, probably from the lodge. And then it stopped.
So maybe a plane actually had landed on the island, bringing a dog. Or, more likely, several dogs. She only hoped that they wouldn’t deploy them until morning, that they’d given up hunting for her for the rest of the night. It was time to make her move.
She crawled out from under the shelf in the alcove and stood up in the closet. She held the knife in her right hand and pressed her ear against the closet door. The snores coming from Bruce were deep and regular. Even so, she turned the doorknob as slowly as possible and swung the door open, worried it might creak, but nothing creaked here at Quoddy Resort, all its hinges well oiled. The interior of the bunk was dark, but less so than the closet, and she could see Bruce’s shape under the blankets on the bed. There was silvery light coming through the windows where the curtains didn’t meet, and she thought that that boded well for a clear night.
After taking two steps toward the back door, she doubled back in order to close the closet, worried that Bruce might wake up and notice that the door he’d closed was now open. She pushed it slowly shut until she heard a click. She was making her way toward the door again when she realized that Bruce was no longer snoring; she turned back to look at him. He was standing at the edge of the bed, his face obscured by the darkness.
“Hi, Bruce,” she said.
He shook his head once and came after her in a rush, bent low and making a strange humming sound in his throat. Even though she had the knife in her hand, she froze, and he was on her fast, grabbing her around the throat and pushing her, her head snapping back into the closet door. He squeezed her throat, and she opened her mouth wide like a fish out of water, gasping for oxygen. Darkness crept into the edge of her vision, weakness flooding her limbs, but she remembered the knife in her hand. Tightening her grip, she swung it in a low arc, hitting Bruce in the rib cage. He jerked backward, swatting at her hand as though he’d just been stung by a bee. She brought the knife back by her side, then swung it a second time, this time in an upward motion, hoping to hit him somewhere in the ribs again, but he was taking another step backward and the bl
ade hit his chin instead. Abigail felt the knife jolt in her hand when it struck bone. Bruce brought a hand up to his chin, where a flap of skin now hung, dripping blood. His face contorted in pain, and Abigail realized he was about to scream. She jabbed at his throat with the point of the blade and it sank in, only about an inch, but when she pulled it away a spray of blood immediately pumped from the wound, going in a high arc over her right shoulder. Bruce dropped to his knees, then fell over onto his side. She sucked in a long, ragged breath.
Even though she was married to him and had made love to him just three nights earlier, Abigail, watching Bruce die, felt as though she were watching a stranger.
No, not a stranger, but something worse. An animal that had to be put down.
She watched the blood pool under his head, spreading rapidly, seeping into the cracks in the floor. The raw coppery smell was filling her nostrils, and she cupped her hand over her face and turned away.
She thought about changing out of her bloodied clothes and went to her bureau, pulling open a drawer just as she realized that she’d already packed her clothes, back when she thought she was going to catch a flight off the island. She quickly looked around the bunk, not seeing her rolling duffel bag anywhere. She was about to give up when she crouched and checked under the bed, and there it was, shoved there by Bruce. She pulled it out and opened it. She decided not to change, but took her phone from the outside pocket and a hooded windbreaker that lay on top of her folded clothes. She figured it would be cold on the open ocean. Before heading out she patted her pockets, a longtime habit, and felt the stone she’d kept in her front pocket. She was not a superstitious person, but she knew that that particular stone would help her get off the island.
Every Vow You Break Page 21