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

“Oh, just”—he paused, grunting again—“setting up a tent.”

He made a series of loud groans on the other end of the line, which gave her the impression that he was digging something, but actually they might even have been sexual noises. “Am I interrupting you?” she asked, trying to keep the sarcasm out of her tone, not sure if she had succeeded.

“Not at all,” he said. “But this may not be the best time to talk. We’re trying to set up camp. Is there something else?”

Grace couldn’t hear any background noise, no sounds of anyone else talking. Who was the “we” he was referring to? If he was with the other Scout leaders, they were probably all separately doing their own thing, apart from one another, in the great outdoors. She pressed the phone closer to her ear.

“And your computer was on and open,” she lied. “I was trying to Google something and I ended up opening some photo files. I guess I was just curious what kinds of things you’re looking at when you’re up there, and…”

“Nothing to be curious about,” he said, and she could hear a scold in his voice. Yes, this had been crossing a line. She knew that, even if she was downplaying it. “Any man needs his space, you know. I just need a place where I can sit and smoke a cigar and not be bothered.”

Ah, the cigars. Maybe that was all it was, actually. A place where he could go and secretly smoke.

“I didn’t even know you were smoking cigars,” she said, trying not to sound priggish.

“Well,” he said. “A man does need to have a few secrets.” He laughed. Then he blurted out, “Ugh, whoo,” as if he was moving furniture around.

“What is going on over there? Is it really hard to set up the tents?”

“No, I’m done with that,” he said. “Firewood.”

Then there was the sound of something heavy falling, and if Grace could trust her ears, she heard another voice, vaguely in the background. Not someone talking but more like a woman sighing. “Oh,” she said. “With the other supervisors, I guess.”

Could he be having an affair? Could it be that simple after all? Could it all come down to that?

“Whew,” he said, now sounding like he was trying to catch his breath. “Big logs. Grace, listen,” he added, speaking rather sternly. “I’ll need to call you back. This is a much larger conversation. I’ll call you back once we’re settled in.”

Chapter 15Midnight Raid

If there was one skill Karin had learned from her father, it was how to, as he put it, “move like a ghost.” He said the key to it was to try to stay loose. When your body gets stiff, you’re likely to make weird movements that send you off-balance and make you trip. So then you might be able to be quiet for a while and then you suddenly tumble to the ground. He had done this moving like a ghost to blend into the background as a war photographer. Now she needed to do it to make sure she could get away from this ghoul camp.

As the rain was gently pattering on the green tarp that covered them in their makeshift den, and they seemed to be slumbering in their ponchos, right there in the dirt, she decided to make her move. A few hours had probably already passed since they found her by the tree, and the Scouts and her leaders must be wondering where on earth she had gone to. She hoped they might be looking for her already, but she somehow doubted they’d be near here.

It was hard for her to orient herself, but she didn’t bother to look for her compass again. If it had still been in her backpack, it was now somewhere in the mud, where they had dumped out her backpack hours ago. They’d taken her tinder kit, mess kit, and of course her knife, and complained that she had only a euro and twenty-five cents of money, and no pills. They’d eaten the candy bars and emergency food supplies she’d brought with her, and left her extra set of dry clothes, including her favorite T-shirt, in a heap in the mud. Ghouls or vampires or whatever, they were definitely creeps.

If it seemed at first like they might help her, it soon became clear that they were wholly uninterested in anything but themselves.

The one who spoke to her the most, the leader with the acrid breath and the translucent skin, after dumping the contents of her backpack on the ground, had announced that she could stay the night but she’d better not expect them to feed her. She had watched as they pried open tin cans filled with something that looked alarmingly like dog food—Karin really hoped it wasn’t, but she couldn’t read labels in the dark—and hadn’t felt the least bit hungry anyway. Eventually, she had thought, she would be back with the Scouts and they would give her hot dogs and fries with mayonnaise. Nothing in the world had seemed more delicious, at that moment, than the thought of that. But first, she’d had to wait a long time for them all to fall asleep.

Karin decided she would just leave her backpack where it was and make a break for it. All her extra clothes had gotten dirty anyway, and they’d eaten all her food. The only thing she thought she wanted was the backpack itself, which her mom had bought for her at the start of secondary school that year. Since it had a zebra print, she thought maybe she could spot it in the dark.

She was half crouching, half standing when there was a sudden noise behind her and Karin turned. Nothing. Someone had shifted in their sleep maybe? Then she tried to stand up a little more, and she heard the noise again. Was it coming from under the tarp, or outside? Was someone awake in here, or