You failed the test, and he’s going to kill you.
No, Abigail thought. There has to be some other possibility.
Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t Bruce who set up the test in California. Maybe one of his colleagues did it, someone he worked with who was worried that Abigail was a fortune-hunter. Or maybe Eric Newman was making it up and this was all part of his plan to win Abigail away from Bruce. She didn’t think so, though it felt like the truth.
She was walking again, the woods thinning out a little, and she spotted a path, recognized it as the one that led down to the pond.
She followed it, trying to slow down her thoughts, trying to concentrate on the fresh air and the colors of the trees around her.
If she calmed herself, then maybe she’d be able to think more clearly. The path brought her to the pond, empty except for a single canoe on the west side, its single occupant fishing, casting into an area of the pond shaded by trees. The canoe was too far away for Abigail to see who was in it, but she did know one thing.
It was a man. It had to be. What she would give for it to be a woman, some guest she hadn’t met yet, maybe one of the women from Atlanta Chip said were scheduled for a visit.
Yeah, right, a bunch of women are coming to the island today.
She walked down to the edge of the pond, then took the shore path to the right, her eyes on the boathouse on the other side of the pond, and the lodge above it. Maybe it was only to have a destination, but she suddenly decided that she wanted to see the other camp. She knew it hadn’t been occupied for years and that it hadn’t yet been renovated, but she allowed herself a glimmer of hope that maybe it had an old functioning landline, or a CB radio, or anything that might help her communicate with the outside world. She picked up her pace, occasionally jogging, as she worked her way along the narrow gravel path that skirted the shore. She reached the boathouse, built near a tilting pier that jutted out twenty yards into the pond, and peered inside. The wood was rotten and speckled with dark moss. There were no boats inside, just a pile of old life jackets that looked as though they’d been chewed apart and turned into some animal’s nest.
Retreating back to the path, she walked up a short incline toward the lodge. Like its neighbor across the pond, it was fronted by a large swath of lawn, this one now choked with weeds. There was a cluster of bunks adjacent to the lodge. They all looked decrepit—half were smothered by vines—but the lodge, maybe because it was primarily built of stone, looked sturdy and habitable. Abigail waded across the lawn. As she neared the lodge, she noticed that some of its windows were boarded up and that the handles on the front doors were entwined with chains and secured by a combination lock. She walked up to the doors anyway, tugged at them, and was able to peer through an inch-wide crack. It was dark inside but not impenetrable, and what she saw at first confused her. She was looking at trees, and she wondered if the back of the lodge had somehow collapsed. But there was enough light for her to see the stone floor of the hall and part of the back wall. She looked longer, and it was clear that the trees were props, their bases crossed pieces of plywood. There were enough of these fake trees to compose a fake forest. And in the dark interior of the lodge, it looked like a forest at night. There was one other object that Abigail could just make out. At first she thought it was some sort of jungle gym, but then she realized it was a cage, constructed of metal bars sculpted to look like twisting branches. She thought of the ring she’d found in Bruce’s bag, the “green man” ring. Its band had been made to look like intertwined branches, just like the bars of the cage. She didn’t know what she was looking at, but it terrified her just the same. Breathing in the air from the lodge, she could detect a faint piney smell and realized the trees were real, just cut down and displayed inside like Christmas trees. There was something theatrical about it, and that thought triggered a realization that came and went, a fleeting certainty that everything here on this island, every person, every tree, was part of a play, and she was the one unwilling participant.
She turned and took in the view. There was the pond, its heart shape no longer evident. The sky was now creased with a few darkening clouds, and a gust of wind rippled the yellowing grass of the sloping lawn. She envisioned them coming for her, men emerging at separate points from the woods, all converging. She walked quickly toward the nearest bunk and found its door open.
She stepped inside, the air stale and acrid. Something fluttered in the rafters and Abigail looked up to see the blur of a bird leaving through a hole in the roof. The floor was warped from rain and pocked with bird shit. There were no furnishings left except for the frames of about ten iron cots. She thought about all the girls who’d slept here when the camp had been active, tried to conjure them in her mind, their faces and their voices, but she couldn’t do it any more than she could imagine the boys who used to inhabit her own luxury bunk on the other side of the island.