“Let go of me, Bruce,” Abigail said, trying to keep her voice steady.
He did, and she took a step away, wanting to rub her arm but not doing it. A dark, swollen cloud had dimmed the day suddenly, and a patter of rain swept in, then swept out again. “Maybe I did,”
she said, “but you set it up. You set me up.”
She started back along the path toward the pond, expecting him to follow her. Instead, he shouted, “Don’t worry. You’re about to get what you want. That’s why I came to find you.”
Abigail stopped and turned. “What do you mean?” she said.
“I came to tell you that the plane is on the way. We’re leaving this afternoon.”
“Really?” Abigail said. Even hearing those words had made her heart start to race with the possibility they might be true.
“Any minute now, apparently,” Bruce said, looking up at the sky.
“We’ve got to go get ready.”
She finalized her packing as fast as possible, feeling that any hesitation might mean the plane wouldn’t come.
Bruce waited quietly on the couch, fiddling with the zipper of his own suitcase. The walk back from the girls’ camp felt like it had taken forever. Bruce had been quiet, walking a step or two behind her.
She had wanted to ask him more questions, to get him to admit to setting up the situation at the vineyard, but she didn’t want to upset him any further. The plane was coming. And getting on that plane was the most important thing right now.
After doing one last scan of the bunk, she heard the sound of the Land Rover coming down the row of bunks. “Chip’s here,”
Bruce said.
She sat in the back with Bruce up front. Chip had grinned at her as he stowed their bags in the back of the vehicle, but he seemed agitated and jumpy. Periodic bursts of rain peppered the vehicle.
They drove out through the wooden gates of the resort and along the dirt road to the airfield. The rain had picked up, wind whipping it in several directions. It was later in the day than Abigail thought, dusk approaching. She worried that if they didn’t get to the airfield in time the plane wouldn’t be able to fly back in the nighttime. Did small planes fly at night? What about the wind and the rain? Would they fly in bad weather? She thought they probably did, but she was worried anyway. She’d be worried until she was far away from here.
There was no plane at the airfield when they got there, and Chip got out of the Land Rover to go into the hangar and check on its status.
The two of them alone in the car, Bruce turned around and faced Abigail. “You happy now? You’re getting what you wanted.”
His voice had the same hushed tone she’d heard earlier when he’d called her a “spoiled bitch.”
“I’m not happy, actually, Bruce, but I am relieved to be leaving here.”
Chip came out of the hangar looking concerned, and a feeling of despair coursed through Abigail. The plane wasn’t coming. It was too windy, or too rainy, he’d say. They were playing with her, and the plane would never come.
But then Chip was swinging open the passenger door next to Abigail and saying, “Your winged chariot is well on its way. In fact, I think I hear it.”
Abigail got out of the car and looked up toward the sky. She could hear something, too, a low thrum, and then she could see the plane, cresting the tree line, growing larger, coming to take her away from here.
CHAPTER 24
It was the same pilot who’d flown them to Heart Pond Island just four days earlier. She’d barely noticed him during that flight, but now she looked at him the way she’d look at someone selling ice-cold water in a desert. It was all she could do to stop herself from hugging him.
“This it?” he said, coming down the short steps from the plane to the landing strip and glancing from Bruce to her and back. He was young, with shoulder-length blond hair, and he wore a puka-shell necklace tight against his muscular neck.
Chip said, “This is it. Thanks for coming out here on short notice.”
“No problem. Let me just use your commode and then I’ll be ready to roll.” He hurried off toward the hangar, just as the walkie-talkie on Chip’s hip squawked. He plucked it off his belt, turned his back on Bruce and Abigail, and had a brief conversation that was obscured by a gust of wind, the second big gust that Abigail had felt since they’d walked out onto the landing strip. Abigail looked toward the horizon, where clouds were building.
“We got one more passenger coming,” Chip said to them, reattaching his walkie-talkie to his hip. “My guests are dropping like flies.” He smiled at them, Abigail noticing his weird flat eyes again, then turned toward Bruce. They shook hands, then embraced. “Take care, my brother,” Chip said, and Bruce patted him twice, hard, on the back.