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

woman with a lame foot would hold her up. “It seems you must be doing pretty well with it if you went for a walk in the woods with the dogs already,” she said hopefully.

“The dogs need to be walked a few times a day, and with my husband in the hospital, who else can do it? Plus, they say it’s good for my recovery.”

“And your husband? How did the surgery go?” Grace was doing her best to be at least minimally polite, in spite of her drive to get moving.

“He’s all right. He got sick from the anesthesia, but they say the operation was a success.”

Grace followed Maaike into a living room with a white tile floor and baroque-looking furniture spaced around a coffee table covered with ceramic figurines. A figurine of a woman in a nineteenth-century dress holding a parasol. A figurine of a woman in eighteenth-century costume reaching down to pat a tiny dog. A ceramic cat climbing up onto a ceramic birdbath, where a tiny ceramic bird was about to take flight.

They moved at Maaike’s pace into the kitchen, followed by all the dogs, where Grace could see a red bucket on the counter. “I put it up here so the dogs couldn’t get to it again,” said Maaike, reaching to show the bucket to Grace.

She could immediately recognize Karin’s T-shirt inside, with white and pink stripes and with a pink sequined star right in the middle. It was one of those “interactive” T-shirts they sold at H&M. Grace had an image in her mind of Karin swiping her hand over it, up and down, to make it change colors. Silver up, pink down. Anyone could have bought it; lots of kids walked around in identical H&M wear at school.

Grace reached into the bucket and took out the shirt, bending back the collar to find the tag, which read “Karin 0641420787,” Grace’s own phone number. That was inarguable. She raised the shirt to examine it. Right in the center of it was a huge dark stain of brownish red, and lots of holes punctured around the star.

She felt suddenly faint and grabbed on to the counter to wait for her head to stop spinning. Maaike’s hand came to rest on her back, steadying her. “The gashes are from Jezebel’s teeth,” said Maaike. “I think.”

Grace let her head clear and took a deep breath. That stain could be blood, but it could also be something else—red paint or ketchup or tomato sauce.

She brought the shirt to her nose to smell it, and got a whiff of something truly awful. It didn’t smell like blood per se; it didn’t have that slightly coppery scent. It smelled like something rotting, chemical, like the kind of toxic solution you’d use to clean out a really mildewed bathroom. It reminded her a bit of rotten eggs, sulfur. It may not have been blood, but it certainly wasn’t only something child friendly, like ketchup or tomato sauce.

“I need you to show me where you found this,” said Grace.

“Of course,” Maaike said. “But do you think we should call someone? The police?”

Grace thought of the conversation she’d just had with the highway patrolman and anticipated how contacting the cops would only slow her down. Karin wasn’t technically missing yet, because she was scheduled to be on the dropping until tomorrow afternoon. And Grace knew this was not the shirt Karin had been wearing when she went out this afternoon. So at least that was something—something slightly less worrying. It was an extra shirt that she and Karin had packed in her zebra backpack this morning while sitting on the living room floor—Grace was sure of that. It also seemed that whatever this fluid was on the shirt might not be blood, so maybe the cops would not help anyway.

“No, not now,” she said. “I’ve got my cell phone; if we find something we’ll call them.” But as she said it, she swiped her phone to check the battery. She was already down to 23 percent.

Grace would have asked to charge the phone then, but there was no time.

“We can take my car,” Maaike said. “The dogs are used to it, and I know the way to the place where we had our walk earlier. Is that all right with you?”

“Yes, of course. Can you drive with…” Grace looked down at Maaike’s booted foot.

“Oh, it’s no problem. Thank God it was my left foot, not my right.”

The foot didn’t turn out to be the limiting factor. It soon became clear that Maaike didn’t go anywhere without all of her dogs. She was less their owner than their pack leader, thought Grace, watching her try to get them all clipped into their leashes while balancing on one foot and the heel of her huge blue boot. Grace was becoming increasingly anxious. She asked Maaike if she had flashlights and a first-aid kit, and if she did, if it would be okay if Grace got them. Maaike instructed her where to find everything while she wrestled the Labrador into a reflective vest.

“They love to be out there once they’re out there,” Maaike told her apologetically. “It’s just a matter of getting all their noses pointed in the same direction.” The two sausage dogs had run around her, so her ankles were now tied up in leashes, threatening to topple her.

Grace didn’t have much of a plan at this point, except to get out there with flashlights, somewhere near where the dog had found the shirt, and to start calling Karin’s name. She figured that if Karin was hurt and lying somewhere out there by herself, at least she could hear her mother’s voice. But what if she was unconscious? Grace could only hope to come across her body with the flashlight in the darkness. Just the thought of that made her shiver. “Which one is the hunting dog?” she asked Maaike. “The brown one?”

“Jezebel,” said Maaike, putting her hand out to pat the snout of a