You'll Thank Me for This by Nina Siegal (top novels txt) 📗

ran. She ran as fast and as far as she could, feeling her feet slip under her with each step, the distance between herself and that shadowy line of trees becoming ever so slightly shorter. She ran and ran as the rain began to pelt her from above, at first feeling every drop that hit her, and then the wind whipped up to turn the rain into an onslaught.

When she reached the edge of the forest and found a tree wide and dense enough to harbor her, she sank down along its trunk and pulled the poncho close around her. Exhausted, terrified, alone in the woods, and not even yet thirteen years old, she thought; Karin began to cry, the tears rolling down her soaked face and mingling with the raindrops to make her face a wet mess.

As she was sniffling and wiping her nose with the soaked sleeve of her jacket, she was startled by the sound of footsteps somewhere behind her. She turned, hardly able to make out anything but the outlines of a form, looming above her, in the shadows of the forest.

“Lotte?” she said, hopefully.

“What are you doing here?”

It was a deep, raspy, scary voice coming from a clump of trees behind her. Definitely not Lotte. All she could see was the shape of a person, a big outline in black. Male or female, she couldn’t tell. He or she was definitely bigger than Karin. And it wasn’t someone she knew.

She managed to reach into the small front pocket of her knapsack and grab her key chain, which had a mini flashlight dangling on it. She pressed the button and flashed it up into the face of whoever it was.

“Sorry, I am not trying to freak you out,” she announced as she did it. “I can’t see you.”

She didn’t mean to startle whoever it was standing there in the clump of trees, but they immediately jumped back like she’d hit them with a dart. Then she waited. Oh yikes. What if it was someone horrible? She waited again until she heard the sound of feet clomping on wet leaves. It didn’t sound like just two feet. There were more.

The beam of her key-chain flashlight was too small. She waved it in front of her face, hoping to catch sight of something, but all she could see were shadows. And still the footsteps came closer. Then, somehow, she shined it in the right place and found a face. Except it wasn’t really a face. It looked more like a horrible mask: it was yellowish white with this big purple mouth that drooped at both sides. She moved the tiny flashlight beam to see better: big eyes too wide surrounded by really dark circles and all these red welts on the face. It was a ghoul out of a storybook.

Karin screamed, and the key chain dropped out of her hands because they were trembling so much. She heard the ghoul yelp at exactly the same time, again like they’d been bit. They leapt away from her once more. She screamed again, until all she could hear was her own scream.

Chapter 12Password

Grace sat back down at the desk in front of Martijn’s computer and marveled. The password alone was bizarre. Why was Martijn so focused on her deceased husband, who could no longer present any kind of threat to him at all? It didn’t make sense. If there was something to be concerned about, then why hadn’t he talked to her about it—really discussed it with her? They were in a marriage. It couldn’t just be insecurity, could it? That seemed just too odd.

Now that “Pieter” had granted her access, Grace could see everything of Martijn’s in front of her: all his documents were open, all his browser tabs, all his spreadsheets, and even his contacts. But what did she want to know now? What was she actually looking for?

Since “Pieter” had gotten her this far, she decided to plug his name into the hard drive search bar. Suddenly, a whole series of files popped up on the screen, one after another, like a fan. The first group of them were Excel spreadsheets, with Pieter’s name at the top. The titles of these documents read: “Pieter Hoogendijk Photo Series 345,” “Pieter Hoogendijk Photo Series 446,” and one had a title that included a parenthetical that Grace found particularly mysterious: “Pieter Hoogendijk Photo Series 525 (code name: Oranje).” Oranje. Orange—the color of the Dutch state, the House of Orange.

What was that supposed to mean?

Grace clicked on that file and opened the spreadsheet. She could tell instantly that it was a list of images. Grace knew Pieter well enough to understand his method of keeping track of his pictures. It was a little old-fashioned—she knew that these days photographers had more sophisticated means of searching their files—but this was his. He’d write the image number, “IMG 4012,” for example, next to the file name, the camera (Pentax or Canon or Canon Wide), the location (such as Johannesburg), the date, and then a little description of the subject: “bus ride.” Because she had been working on a book that combined her observations of post-apartheid South Africa with Pieter’s photographs, she knew this system intimately, and understood that “bus ride” meant the photos he shot of the early 1990s bus desegregation process, a series of photos he’d actually shot for Time magazine.

So for some reason Martijn had a whole lot of Pieter’s photo spreadsheets on his computer. She was starting to feel less and less surprised by the strangeness of this fact. But the more she clicked through the spreadsheets, the more she noticed that most of these files were fairly recent, from the period when he was in Syria, near the end of his life. Grace was less familiar with this work. During that time, Grace had been fairly well preoccupied with her own work at home, keeping life moving steadily ahead for Karin, who had been about eight or nine