Every Vow You Break

on the air carried voices that sounded as though they were coming from the front of the building. She couldn’t make out the words, just the deep jokey inflections of men talking, and Abigail cut around toward the back of the building, passing the bench and finding that the path continued past a cluster of what looked like spruce trees. She peered behind her to make sure no one could see that she was entering the woods, then kept walking along the path, now paved with flat rocks. She came to a wooden sign nailed into the side of a tree. Carved into the sign were the words silvanus woods, and there was an etching of a man’s face, ringed with ornate leaves, designed as though they were growing from his skin. The sign itself looked old—it was speckled in places with dark green lichen—but the nails that held it to the tree looked new. The name Silvanus rang a faint bell in her head—she’d taken Latin in high school and remembered enough to wonder if Silvanus was some sort of Roman god.

She took a few steps past the sign, enough to see that there was a clearing up ahead. She felt trapped, not really wanting to see what was there—her mind conjuring the image of Jill, blood spilling down her side—and not wanting to turn back. She moved tentatively ahead, said, “Hello?” in what she hoped was a normal voice. If there was someone in the woods, she definitely did not want to be surprised by them.

No one answered, and she stepped into the circular clearing. At the middle was a firepit ringed with blackened stones, and a little farther out a circle of benches, crudely fashioned from logs. Abigail found a place to sit that gave her a view of the path back toward the resort, so that she could see if anyone was coming. Despite the sign with the strange face on it, she felt temporarily safe here. It probably was a feature of the original boys’ camp, a place to gather at night, light a fire, and roast marshmallows. An innocent place, unlike whatever had happened here over the past few days.

Now that she was sitting, she thought back over the words Mellie had said. That Jill was still on the island and that she was okay. That she should just keep her head down until the plane arrived tomorrow. That she shouldn’t trust Bruce. Abigail tried to build a narrative that fit everything that had happened here so far. Her best guess was that Jill and her new husband had had a fight that resulted in Jill getting badly hurt. Chip Ramsay decided he didn’t want the publicity, and they somehow subdued Jill, then lied to Abigail about her whereabouts. But why was it important to keep Abigail on this island one extra day if they were going to let her leave? She just couldn’t quite figure it out. And how did Bruce fit into it? Maybe because it was now clear that Bruce was not simply a guest here but a part-owner of this place and a close friend of Chip’s. If the Quoddy Resort had decided to cover something up, then Bruce would have been part of that decision. And what about Eric Newman being here? Maybe that was just a coincidence. And then was it just a coincidence that Jill’s ex-fiancé was here as well? If so, it was a huge coincidence. But what other possibility was there?

When she’d been younger, she and her father had played a game he called “What Movie Are We In?” They’d be sitting out in the backyard watching a flock of sparrows assemble on a tree, and he’d say, “What movie are we in?” and she’d say, “The Birds.” Once, they’d spotted two men sitting in a car across the street from their house, and he’d asked the question, and she’d said, “Home Alone,” even though he’d been thinking of The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Sitting in the woods now, she asked herself, “What movie am I in?”, hearing her father’s voice in her head. Definitely a thriller, she thought, maybe one of those cheesy 1980s infidelity thrillers. Fatal Attraction, or maybe that movie with Mark Wahlberg where he was stalking Reese Witherspoon. But did she really think she was in that kind of movie? She did earlier, but now everything had changed. Eric Newman scared her, but not as much as what she’d seen the night before, or the similarities between her situation and Jill’s. No. It felt like she was in some kind of horror movie, and that things were going to get gruesome. Nothing was really adding up, and now here she was sitting in a clearing in the woods with a creepy sign. So what movie was she in? Not a classic slasher flick like Friday the 13th, but something weirder. And then she thought of The Wicker Man, not the terrible Nicolas Cage remake, although she had a soft spot for that film, but the 1970s original with Christopher Lee. Like in that film, she was on an island, and strange things kept happening, and she didn’t trust anyone, not even her husband. She wondered if she was going to end up being burned alive.

The trees around her swayed in unison as a breeze cut through. The air smelled like pine and salt, and in the distance she could smell the fruity aroma of smoke coming from a chimney. And there was something else, the smell of tidal rot, of decay. She stared up at the sky through the trees. High above, birds drifted, and for a moment she closed her eyes and imagined that she could fly. It had been a recurring dream her whole life, the sensation of flying, of being plucked up by a breeze and riding an air current. She’d had the dream frequently when she’d been younger, leading Zoe to believe that Abigail had been a