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

large brown dog, with dangling brown-and-white spotted ears. “This one. She’s a naughty girl. But she’s very good at finding things.”

“If we give her the piece of clothing to smell and then send her out looking for my daughter, will she do it?” she asked, now thinking, she felt, with a bit of a clear head.

“We can certainly give it a try.”

She asked Maaike, “Do you have some kind of bullhorn or something that could amplify my voice?”

“No, I'm afraid that I don't,” Maaike replied, and Grace could see that she was now unraveling the leashes from around her ankles and starting to break free. At last she was jangling her car keys, walking toward the front door of her house.

Chapter 25Off Course

“We’d better go back,” he said.

“What do you mean?” she said. “You said you knew the way. You said it was this way, even when I told you it was the other direction.”

“Well, I am sure you know this park better than me,” he said. “You’ve been here so many times before. I’m new. I am just getting to know the forest.”

This change in attitude was really odd. First he knew where he was going and then suddenly he didn’t? Suddenly it was her job to show him the way?

She was going to argue, but then he just started to walk back to where they’d come from, now picking up speed. She had to run to catch up with him.

“Uuuuuuugh!” she cried. “Stop. I don’t even want to go to the campsite now. Can’t we just go home? Can’t we just go back to the parking lot and skip the rest of this? I’m tired of all this, and I want to give up. Can’t we just call Mom and have her pick us up? I give up. It’s not worth it.”

He stopped and turned back to look at her. He seemed to be inspecting her like a robot that had just malfunctioned. “Karin, giving up?” he said.

“Yeah, well, it’s okay to give up sometimes.”

“What would be the fun of that?” he said. “Come on. No whining, Karin. You show me the way back.”

“Ugh, fine.”

They retraced their steps for at least ten minutes until they got back to the mouflon spot. She saw the two boulders and the tree, and the place where they’d camped that last time, and other times before that. It felt nice to be someplace she recognized again, but she expected they would just keep walking past it in the right direction this time.

“Here,” she said. “This was our camping spot. So if you think about it, the campsite has to be northwest of here, which means it’s that way, right?” She started off in that direction.

“Very good, Karin,” said Martijn. But he didn’t look in the direction she figured the camp must be. He just stood there, looking at the spot where she and her dad had camped, like he was seeing it for the first time, even though they’d been here just before.

“Could you show me exactly where you would set up camp? Around here somewhere?” He made a circle motion with his hand. For some reason Martijn had this creepy way of being particularly interested in everything her dad had done. If his name came up, he always wanted to know more, to ask more questions. She’d thought it would be the opposite—why would a second husband be so interested in his wife’s first husband? Karin could only reason that he was probably jealous that her dad had been more important to her mom, and he was trying to figure out how to be more like him.

Karin was so tired. “I mean, I don’t know why you care so much.”

“I just want to know where you camped. No reason.”

“Are you jealous or something?”

Martijn seemed really impatient now, glaring at her in the darkness. “Show me where you set up camp, Karin.”

He was really irritating when he got this way. “I’ll tell you if it’s so important to you,” she said. “There, we’d pitch our tent about there.” She pointed to the place under the tree.

“Tell me more,” he said. “How you got here, where you put your stuff.”

“What? Why?”

“Just tell me.”

Karin had no clue why he wanted to know this, but she was too tired to argue. “We always parked our car at the Otterlo gate, and then we’d bike down here with our gear. We always set up our tent over there, under that tree,” she said, whirling around to show him. “We made our fire there. We’d go to sleep, like, right after the sun set. Even him. So in the morning we could wake up really, really early and watch the mouflons. We must have seen hundreds of mouflons here. He liked to photograph them when they were in a herd, and they only came here when it was really silent, so we—”

“The tent went here?” he said, walking to the spot, like a land surveyor or something. Like he was going to build a house right there. Or put up a statue or something.

“Yeah, about there,” she said. “What’s this all about?”

Martijn started to do the weirdest thing then. He took a small shovel out of his backpack, shined a flashlight on the ground at the base of the tree, then dropped to his knees and started digging.

“I thought we were going to the campsite,” Karin said. “Why are you doing that?”

“I’m looking for something,” said Martijn. “Something that belongs to me.”

“You left something here? Or you lost something? I don’t understand.”

“Don’t ask questions if you know what’s good for you, Karin. Just keep quiet.” The coldness of his voice and the way his eyes glared at her—without a hint of pity or patience—suddenly terrified her. It occurred to her that he had in fact been bitten by one of those ghouls.

She stood stock-still and dared not say another word. She kept her eyes on him, though, hoping he might soften, crack a smile. It would