Every Vow You Break(70)
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.