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.
Abigail stopped and crouched, letting her breath return to normal and watching the boathouse for any sign of activity. There was enough light for her to see the canoes lined up along the shore, and also the kayaks she’d seen earlier that week. Each kayak was for one person, made from fiberglass, and Abigail knew from experience that it probably weighed only about fifty pounds.
When she’d been thinking about how to get off the island, she kept going back to the fact that there were no boats here, but of course there were boats, sailboats and kayaks and canoes, but they were on the pond, not on the ocean’s shore. Abigail was pretty sure she could drag, or carry, the kayak to the ocean and paddle to the mainland. What she worried about right now was whether they’d thought of that, too. Would there be a guard? And if so, where was he?
The boathouse was a simple building, more of a shell, really, with unpainted wood sides and a green plastic roof. The side of the building that faced the pond was completely open, and Abigail imagined that if there was a guard, he’d be sitting in the boathouse, waiting, maybe even dozing.
She put her bow down on the ground, alongside the kitchen knife she’d used to kill Bruce, and ran her hands through the fallen leaves and needles till she found a stone about the size of a golf ball. She stood and threw the stone as far as she could, past the boathouse. It skittered along the rocky shore of the pond, and almost immediately a figure emerged from the boathouse, running after the sound, his head swiveling. He was too far away for Abigail to make out who he might be, but she could tell that he carried a rifle with him. The sight of the gun was shocking; maybe the plane she thought she’d heard earlier had brought guns as well as dogs.
Abigail picked up the bow, notched one arrow into the string, and ran quietly down to the boathouse, pressing up against its back wall, then moving to its edge, peering around at the man, who was still scouring the area. She suddenly felt stupid with the bow, remembering how long it had taken her at the Renaissance fair to get in one decent shot. What made her think that she’d be able to hit this man on her first try, before he turned and simply shot her? She should have brought the knife and charged him while his back was turned. At least then she might have had a fighting chance. She decided to wait in the shadow of the boathouse until he gave up wondering what had made the sound, then go back and get her knife and try to get the drop on him.