Every Vow You Break(71)
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 blade 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.
Once she was outside, she was glad for the extra layer. It was a clear night, but the temperature had dropped since the day before, her breath billowing. She felt oddly calm, breathing in the night air, and wondered if she was in shock.
She was about to step off the back deck when she noticed a bow leaning up against the railing, maybe left there by Bruce. She wondered if he’d had it with him while he’d been searching for her, as though he really were a hunter and she was his prey. Next to the bow was a quiver of arrows. She lifted the bow by its handgrip to see how it felt, then pulled the string back as far as she could.
She’d used a bow once before, at a Renaissance fair she’d gone to with Zoe back when they’d been in high school. Zoe had shot once, missed the target, then quit. Abigail had stayed at the archery tent and fired about twenty arrows, determined to hit the bull’s-eye, which she eventually did. The overattentive man in charge had shown Abigail how to stand, how to position her arms, how to release the arrow cleanly. The memory came back now in crushing clarity, a reminder of a life in which she wasn’t being hunted. She took the bow and arrows with her.
It was relatively easy to find the path that led down to the pond, and once she was on it, she broke into a slow jog, wanting to move fast but not wanting to make any unnecessary noise. She ran through a copse of trees, the world darkening, and had to slow down to look where she was going. The woods whispered around her, black trees converging, and she felt the bubble of fear in her chest expand into a balloon. Her lungs shriveled, and her heart jackhammered. Something snapped up ahead of her—a twig breaking, a pinecone dropping from a tree—and she instinctively stepped off the path into the dark shadows, standing as still as possible, willing herself not to make a sound. The child in her remembered that if you stayed quiet, the woods would absorb you.
The fear went briefly away but was replaced by a kind of grief.
When she’d been a young girl hiding in the woods behind her house, she’d been in a world of her own making, but one that she could leave at any time. Her parents had been in the house less than a hundred yards away. Her father probably had been puttering around his study, her mother either in the garden or in her favorite reading nook in the sunroom off the kitchen. Here, now, she was all alone. She might as well be on an island floating in the coldest reaches of space. And the woods were filled with psychotic men, intent on killing her.
But not Bruce, she thought. He had bled out on the floor of their honeymoon cabin. Her mind flashed back to the way she’d slipped the point of the knife in and out of his throat as easily as popping a balloon. And the way the blood had sprung from his body. What had it reminded her of? Something in the distant past. And she thought of the tires she’d slashed all those years ago on Kaitlyn Austin’s car after Kaitlyn had said those awful things about Abigail’s parents. She remembered it all clearly, the pilfered kitchen knife slicing through the rubber, the instant deflation, her own body relaxing. And she thought of Bruce, enraged, choking her, and then a few jabs from her knife and he was on the floor, leaking blood instead of air.
Abigail told herself to stop thinking about what had happened and listen to her surroundings. There had been no other sounds since that single, horrible snap of a twig, and she steeled herself to step back out onto the path. She moved as quietly as possible, holding her breath, planting her heel on the path, then rolling forward onto her toes. The darkness was both comforting and dreadful. But then the path broke right, and the pond was in front of her, iridescent in the moonlight.