Every Vow You Break, стр. 66
She grabbed the apples and the cheese from the closet and brought them to the refrigerator, shoving the bag way in the back of the vegetable crisper. Even wrapped in cellophane the cheese smelled too sharp and it was too much of a risk to keep it in the closet. She drank a bottle of water, then ate a yogurt, hiding both containers at the bottom of the trash. In one of the cabinets in the kitchen she found an opened bag of smoked almonds and ate two handfuls, then took a risk and opened a package of some all-natural salmon jerky, eating about three pieces, then shoving the package toward the back of the cabinet. Chewing the smoky fish, she was suddenly struck with how good it tasted, amazed that she was finding pleasure in the food, and then just as suddenly she remembered what was happening to her and how slim her chances of survival were.
Saliva pooled under her tongue, and the food started to come back up. She bolted toward the bathroom, but once she was kneeling in front of the toilet the feeling passed and she wasn’t sick.
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