Every Vow You Break

by Peter Swanson

  Abigail reached inside the kayak, trying to get hold of her own gun with numb fingers.

  “Can I help you?” the man said. His voice, the calmness of it, was startling.

  “Stay right there.” Abigail found the gun and pulled it out, pointing it at the man. He was heavyset, wearing a fleece hoodie with a camouflage pattern.

  “Shit,” he said, and dropped his own gun, which had been pointing at the ground, then put his hands up.

  Abigail had begun to shiver, but she kept her finger on the trigger and kept the gun pointed at the man. “Step back,” she said, and he did. She let her eyes flick toward the ground in front of him and saw that it wasn’t a rifle he had dropped but a metal detector, an elaborate handle on one end, a flat disc on the other.

  “What are you doing here?” she said.

  “I was here yesterday. My wife and I were fishing, and she lost her wedding band. I’m here to look for it.” His voice trembled. Abigail believed him, but she didn’t want to take a chance and kept the rifle pointed in his direction.

  “Do you have a phone?” she said.

  “Yeah. It’s in my front pocket.”

  “Reach in slowly, okay? And pull it out.”

  He did as he was told, pulling out a flat black phone from the front of his baggy jeans.

  “Toss it to me.”

  He threw the phone in a low arc and it landed three feet in front of Abigail on the sand. “Sit on the ground, okay, and keep your arms above your head.”

  “Okay,” he said, and awkwardly lowered himself onto a hump of grass at the edge of the beach. Once he was settled, Abigail picked up the phone. The screen was asking for a four-digit passcode, but on the lower left was the word EMERGENCY, and when she pressed it, the phone dialed 911.

  “Where are we?” Abigail said quickly to the man, once she heard the ring in her ear.

  “What?” he said.

  “What location are we at? What street?”

  Before he could answer, she heard a click, then a female voice. “Nine-one-one. What’s your emergency?”

  “I’ve just kayaked from Heart Pond Island,” Abigail said into the phone. “There are men there, they were trying to kill me. I’m at …”

  She looked over at the man, who was sitting cross-legged, his arms still above him, and he said, “Hannaford Point on Cape Elizabeth.”

  She repeated the information to the woman on the other end of the line, then answered more questions, the dispatcher assuring her that a patrol car was on its way. After Abigail ended the call, the man said, “You kayaked here from Heart Pond Island?”

  “Uh-huh. You know it?”

  “I did some work out there a few years ago. I’m an electrician.”

  “For Chip Ramsay?”

  “I don’t remember. Maybe. What happened to you?”

  “Bad marriage,” she said, then laughed, realizing that she sounded a little hysterical.

  “Can I put my arms down now?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “James Pelletier.”

  “Go ahead and put your hands on your knees. I don’t really trust you yet, James.”

  He lowered his hands slowly and placed them on his knees. Abigail, without thinking, lowered herself to the damp sand, but kept the rifle pointed in the man’s general direction. “Where will the police car come from?” she said.

  “The road’s right behind that line of trees. There’s a little dirt parking lot. We’ll see it coming.”

  Sitting down had been a mistake. Abigail could feel the exhaustion flooding through her limbs, and she wondered for a moment if she’d be able to stand up again.

  “I really thought you were going to shoot me,” James said, shaking his head.

  She looked at him, still waiting for his hand to move swiftly into the pocket of his hoodie, whip out a gun, and put a bullet through her head. She didn’t think it was going to happen, but why wouldn’t it?

  “Ever heard of a green man?” she said.

  “A green man?”

  “Yeah, what does it mean to you?” She studied him, and suddenly he looked fearful again.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “What about Silvanus? That mean anything?”

  He shook his head.

  Flashing lights suddenly penetrated the hazy gray of dawn, and Abigail could make out the cruiser pulling into the parking lot. James turned his head.

  Holding on to the rifle, Abigail planted a hand by her side to push herself upright again, and she felt something embedded in the sand under her palm. Cold metal. She picked at it with her fingers, realized it was a ring, and glanced down at it. Holding it up for him to see, she said, “Your wife’s ring.”

  “Ha,” James Pelletier said, smiling.

  For the first time in a long time, she thought she might actually live.

  She was shaking uncontrollably in the interrogation room when they wrapped her in a blanket and told her to wait for one minute. There had been a brief discussion when she’d been brought in through the reception area over whether she should go directly to the hospital, but Abigail was able to convince the desk sergeant that she was fine, and that she wanted to report a murder, that she’d go to a hospital right after she filed her report. It was clear they thought that she was on drugs, at least that the patrol officer who drove her from the shore to the police station thought so. He asked her several times what substances she’d taken in the previous twenty-four hours. He’d asked in a purposefully calm voice that had made Abigail want to scream at him.

  When at last a plainclothes policeman came into the interrogation room, he held two cups of coffee and handed one to her. He was wearing a blue suit and a maroon tie, and when he sat down his stomach pushed out against his button-up shirt so that Abigail could see the T-shirt he wore underneath. He introduced himself as Detective Mando, then indicated a camera in the corner of the room and told Abigail that she was being recorded.

  “There’s been a murder on Heart Pond Island,” Abigail said. “Jill Greenly was murdered by her husband two nights ago.”

  “Okay,” he said, flipping open his notebook. “What’s your name, ma’am? Your full name, please.”

  “It’s Abigail Elliot Baskin. I married Bruce Lamb last week and he brought me to Heart Pond Island for my honeymoon. He’s dead, too.”

  “You’re going to have to slow down. Tell me how you wound up out at Hannaford Point.”

  “I kayaked from the island.”

  He nodded, and she watched him write the words Heart Pond Island, Abigail Baskin, then Bruce Lamb.

  “Are you sending someone there?” she said. “They’re probably covering it up right now.”

  “Officers are on the way already,” he said. “Don’t worry. Whatever happened to you, we’re going to sort it, okay? In the meantime, I need you to tell me exactly what happened.”

  Unable to stop herself, Abigail brought her hand up and pressed a finger and a thumb against her eyelids. She cried solidly for about two minutes while Detective Mando waited. There was nothing she could do to stop it from coming out of her. She’d been wound so tight for so long and now everything was unspooling, her body out of her control.

  When she eventually stopped crying, he pushed a box of tissues across the table toward her and said, “Okay. Let’s start at the beginning.”

  EPILOGUE

  Abigail received the email on Friday afternoon, but didn’t open it until Sunday, after she’d brought her laptop onto her back patio. It was a beautiful late April morning, one of those rare warm spring days in Massachusetts. All the remnants of that winter’s numerous snowstorms were gone, and crocuses and daffodils had just started to appear. The email was from the wedding photographer.

  Dear Abigail, I didn’t know if I should send you these pictures, but then I figured that that was your decision, and not mine. I was very sorry to hear about what happened after the wedding. I hope you are doing as well as can be. For what it’s worth, it was great gettin
g to know you and your family and friends a little bit over that weekend in October. The attached link will allow you to look at all of the photographs (almost 500!), if you choose. If you do end up wanting higher res versions of any of these, please let me know. But other than that, no need to respond. All the best and take care, Natalie Ramirez

  She remembered the photographer, a woman so tiny that eventually you almost didn’t see her, wending her way around the various wedding events with a camera that looked enormous in her hands.

  Abigail wondered what Natalie had thought when she first heard about the events on Heart Pond Island. The initial news reports had been somewhat vague. “Police Investigating Multiple Suspicious Deaths on Honeymoon Island.” Then, later, “Inside the Alleged ‘Cult’ That Punished Wives for Infidelities.” At that point it was a federal case, and the story had broken nationally, leading to a deluge of reporters descending on Boxgrove, where Abigail was now living. She hadn’t returned to New York City after what had happened on the island. She’d returned home, sleeping in her mother’s bed for a while, then in her childhood bedroom. A month earlier she’d moved half a block away to a small rental house, already furnished. Her parents thought it was silly for her to get her own place, but her own place made her feel she was moving in the right direction.

  It had been more than six months of talking. To her parents, to Zoe, to a succession of therapists. And, of course, constant interrogations, some under oath, with both federal agents and a slew of attorneys. In the midst of all this she’d somehow managed to work on her novel, about the twins in New York. She knew it was less than stellar but didn’t mind. Involving herself in that fictional world, no matter how dark that world was, was preferable to thinking about what had happened in her actual life.

  Two months earlier, Charles “Chip” Ramsay III had been arrested in Mexico, where he’d fled after his indictment. Eric Newman, last Abigail had heard, was cooperating with the federal investigation into what was now being called the Silvanus Cult, a small group of men with ties to other men’s rights groups, and with a history of testing their girlfriends and wives for fidelity. Some of the wealthier members, such as Bruce, were also partners in a limited liability corporation set up by Chip Ramsay called Silvanus Incorporated, named after the Roman god of the woods and of wild nature. That corporation had purchased Heart Pond Island and the defunct summer camps on it, as well as a similar island in the Puget Sound, the place where Bruce had gone for his bachelor weekend. Once the floodgates had been opened, a surprising number of current and ex-employees of both these places had stepped forward to give testimony, along with multiple women, all with stories about being elaborately punished for their transgressions. Chip Ramsay’s own wife had disappeared two years earlier, and that disappearance was now being treated as a potential homicide.

  Mellie, whose full name was Melanie Nadeau, had turned herself in as a cooperating witness, claiming that she had been coerced against her will by Chip Ramsay to work on Heart Pond Island. Porter Conyers, the man from Bermuda who had once been involved with Jill Greenly, had somehow managed to entirely disappear. Jill’s husband, Alec Greenly, the producer, had committed suicide in his jail cell in February by hanging himself with a bathroom towel.

  Abigail was a star witness in the wide-ranging investigation. She was hoping it would never go to court, but she was also willing to do whatever it took to make sure the various members of Silvanus paid for what they’d done.

  Eric Newman had tried to get in touch with her, sending an email to the same address he’d used way back when, before the wedding. He said that he didn’t expect her to ever forgive him, but that he’d like to explain his role in what had happened. She imagined that he wanted to talk about how Chip Ramsay was a charismatic figure, that he’d been seduced like other damaged men during one of Chip’s seminars in San Diego, a weekend event called “Men Finding Their Voice” or something like that—that was most likely where both Eric and Bruce had been recruited years earlier. She never replied to Eric Newman’s email.

  She was about to open the photographer’s link when movement in her small backyard caught her eye. It was the black feral cat that sometimes lived in the attached garage. The owners, before renting to Abigail, had informed her about the cat they’d named Bonnie, wanting to ensure that Abigail would keep an eye out for her and occasionally put food and water out, especially if there was bad weather. Abigail had agreed, but she’d rarely spotted Bonnie since she’d moved in.

  Abigail watched the cat move stealthily across the lawn, keeping low, stalking a lone sparrow on a fence post that marked the boundary of the property. Bonnie got about three feet from the bird before it sprang into the air and landed on a low branch of a tall maple tree. The cat stretched her spine and nonchalantly circled back, as though she hadn’t been that interested in the bird in the first place. Abigail watched the sparrow, now arcing its way toward a small shrubby tree. Did it know how close it had come to being eaten?

  She finished her coffee, went back inside to get a second cup, and made toast for herself. Her father had called and left her a message wanting to know if she’d like to go see an afternoon movie, and Zoe had sent a text to see if she wanted to get lunch. She decided she wasn’t quite ready to make decisions regarding her day and took her second cup of coffee back outside to the patio, putting it down on the coffee table next to the small white stone with the red ring that she’d kept from Heart Pond Island. She touched a finger to the stone before leaning back, gathering her laptop, and clicking on the link that brought her to the wedding photographs.

  There were hundreds of them, as the photographer had promised, laid out in a grid that loaded surprisingly fast. Most were in black-and-white, but a few were in color, and the images unspooled on the page like cards being turned over. Abigail had been prepared for a tidal wave of emotions but, oddly, maybe because she was expecting that, she felt relatively unmoved by all the pictures. She remembered the day well—getting dressed with the bridesmaids while sharing champagne, the official photographs on the hill with the Hudson River in the background, the walk down the aisle, the vows they’d written themselves, the cocktail party, dinner and dancing. She actually found herself enjoying some of the pictures, getting to see her friends and family dressed up again, having fun. The pictures that showed Bruce were harder to look at. Not because she grieved for him or missed him in any way, but because she found herself studying his face in the pictures, trying to see if there was any moment when he gave himself away, when he showed his true nature. She couldn’t see it. In the posed pictures he looked stiff at times, his smile a little too wide, but that could mean anything. In the candid shots, he mostly looked relaxed and at ease with himself. There were even shots where he was looking at Abigail, and it looked as if there was love in his eyes. How had she been so fooled?

  It was one of the questions she found herself asking a lot these days. How had she not recognized Bruce’s true nature? Had she been blinded by his romantic gestures? Or by his money and his success? Or had he just seemed so different from Ben Perez that she’d fallen for him regardless? She wasn’t sure she’d ever know.

  But she did think there was maybe a clue in the wedding pictures. Maybe he looked as though he was in love with her because he really was, in some perverted and strange way? Even though he knew what lay ahead, that he would get his revenge for her infidelity, he still felt love for her, or an approximation of love? And maybe she was reading too much into it? The most logical explanation was that Bruce was a psychopath, a psychopath who had gone to a seminar that told him what he always believed down deep, ever since his mother had abandoned his family: women weren’t to be trusted.

  And the reason he’d looked genuinely in love in the photographs was because he was good at faking it.

  Abigail was almost done looking at the album when something caught her eye in one of the last pictures. It was a photo of the last dance, she and Bruce looking tired and happy at the center of the dance flo
or. She remembered it well. Her stinging feet, the jazzy version of “Every Breath You Take,” making jokes with Bruce. In the photograph they are out of focus while the onlookers, the wedding stragglers on the edge of the dance floor, were shown in sharp detail. There were her parents, standing next to each other, her mother looking sleepy, her father beaming, probably a little drunk. Behind the onlookers was the wide-open door of the barn, its white-painted trim strung with garlands of flowers. A man stood just inside the door, edged by light, probably from the headlights from a departing car. Abigail zoomed in on the man. He was heavily pixelated, but she knew without a doubt that it was Eric Newman.

  She remembered thinking she’d spotted him on her walk back down the carriageway that night. Not spotting him so much as smelling the French cigarette that he was smoking. It was strange to think he really had been there. She wondered if Bruce had snuck off at some point to talk with him, maybe even chat about the game they were about to play on Heart Pond Island.

  She closed her laptop. She’d seen enough of the photographs and didn’t think she’d ever need to look at them again.

  A cloud had gone over the sun, and the day had dimmed. The line of woods along the property was dark, and she looked for the sparrow but didn’t see her. She didn’t see the cat, either. A phrase entered her head: The woods are lovely, dark and deep. She’d said those words to Bruce on the island. Remembering that moment, she didn’t feel awful; she didn’t feel anything, actually. Most importantly, her mind didn’t automatically go flipping through that catalogue of terrible images she’d carried with her for six months. Men in masks. Alec Greenly battering his wife to death by the fire. The feel of sliding a knife into Bruce’s throat, and watching an arc of blood leave his body. Instead, she thought about the day ahead, and what she might want to do with it.

  Beasts had come for her. And she was still alive.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS