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.