by Nina Siegal
“A complete stranger,” Grace said, but now she was getting antsy. She had to get off the phone.
“Try Martijn again,” said Rutger. “He was just behind them on the trail. Maybe he’s already caught up with them. It’s possible someone fell down and got a cut and they used an extra T-shirt because they didn’t have a Band-Aid. Something like that. I’m sure it’s something that simple. Martijn would be in the best position to know.”
A pang of terror traveled down her spine this time. But why? Okay, it was strange that he had those documents and files from Pieter, but what on earth would that have to do with this dropping? Martijn wasn’t a violent man, generally speaking. As far as she knew, he had only ever physically hurt one person, and that was her, Grace.
“Yes, it’s a good idea to call him,” she answered perfunctorily. “There’s probably some perfectly reasonable explanation for this.” She should start to count the number of times she’d tried to assuage her own fears using the same exact phrase just today. “I’ll call you back if I find out anything.”
She hung up and leaned over, propping her elbows on her knees, feeling like she might vomit. Taking about four deep breaths in and out, she tried to prepare herself for what would come next. Then she swiped open her phone again and speed-dialed Martijn. She heard it ring and clutched the phone close to her ear, saying, “Come on, come on, pick up, pick up, asshole.” She was absolutely sure he would pick up this time. He had to. He had to provide some explanation. But it rang and rang and rang.
Grace grabbed the two suitcases she had already packed and carried them down the stairs. Her plan was starting now. She was going to find this woman, she was going to the forest, and then she was going to find Karin in the Veluwe herself. And then they were going to The Hague, to Jenny, and they were not coming back here. Not until everything, and that meant every single thing, was somehow straight in her head.
She redialed the woman. “Hello, it’s me, Karin’s mother, Grace. I’d like to come and get the T-shirt, see it. Maybe it will help me figure out what’s going on. Where do you live?”
The woman seemed to have been waiting by the phone for her return call. She told Grace her address and said she’d be there when she arrived. “I know this is not possible,” she added. “But try not to worry. I’m sure your daughter is all right. It’s probably just a false alarm.”
Grace thanked her and hung up, throwing the suitcases into the trunk and getting into the car. She needed to be there now. She needed to fly there. Not another second could be wasted. She needed to have her daughter in her arms.
Chapter 19
Pack of Wolves
No, it was not just one wolf. It was the whole family. The big one was up in front, and its eyes were glinting at her. Was that the mom or the dad? She could see the outlines of the little ones behind, one after another stepping out from the brush, like they were a gang assembling for a street fight. They didn’t look really mean or anything, but Karin was freaked.
Karin froze. The big one stood there, just staring at her. And Karin stood there, staring at him…or her. If it was the mom, then that could be worse, because the mom would be really protective of her young and she might need to attack Karin. If it was the dad, well, maybe the same. Karin didn’t know. The wolf barked like a dog for a second and gave a really, really big howl. Loud and piercing, like it wanted to send an alarm.
Holy, holy crap. Karin probably would have run away—in spite of her mom’s advice—if only she could move a single muscle. But her body was just not doing anything. It was like she was stuck in stone. Her arms were, like, paralyzed, and because of that she had dropped her stick on the ground. No way was she bending down to pick it up. No way would she have waved it around anyway. Her arms were not moving. Her feet were stuck in concrete, and her legs started to tremble. She could not run, no way.
For a moment that seemed like an eternity, nothing at all happened. They were like two school enemies, finding themselves alone on a playground, just standing there, sussing each other out. Who would make the first move?
He wasn’t a black wolf, like she’d seen in movies. He was more grayish and golden, kind of like a big version of a red fox. In the app they used to track his movements, her mom had shown her pictures of him. She’d seen him in a lot of nighttime photos—those infrared photos hunters sometimes took at night—black and white, with his eyes looking like two demonic white dots. This was the Veluwe wolf, or maybe his mate, but she didn’t see another adult wolf. She saw only a couple of the cubs, but the others had to be near here somewhere. They always traveled in their pack. If she wasn’t so scared right now, she might feel honored. He was famous.
Time was ticking by. Moments. Something was going to happen if she just kept standing there. She had to do something. If she tried to run, she knew the wolf would attack. She had to either start slowly backing away—which would make her seem weak and maybe vulnerable—or she had to somehow muster up the courage to start yelling at him and waving her hands like her mom had told her.
But still, she was frozen.
It felt like one of those nightmares where you only have to call for help, and you open your mouth, but nothing comes out. You try to scream, but your voice has disappeared. It felt like that for about ten seconds, but then the wolf started to move toward her. Two steps and then three steps and then four…Then she saw the other sets of eyes, the rest of the cubs, creeping up behind him.
Karin forced it out. She started to yell and scream bloody murder. She started at a high pitch but then got into the deepest, meanest, manliest voice she could find: “Get out of here, get away from me, you beast! Go away! Go away, leave me alone, don’t come near me!” She was suddenly flapping her hands and making a big commotion and even kind of lunging forward and shouting down at him.
At first, he took a few steps back and cocked his head to one side as if trying to figure out if she was some kind of crazy girl. But then she repeated the whole thing over again: “Go away, beast!” shouting even louder and even harder. “Get out! Get out, you nasty beast, get out!” And then he turned toward his own tail and fled. All the little cubs followed him, jumping over rocks and running off through the heath.
And then Karin saw her—it must have been her—the mom, taking up the final position in the pack. To Karin’s surprise, she came toward Karin, as if to get a look at this weird figure scaring off her mate, and looked at her. She was curious. She wasn’t attacking. She just looked. And then Karin stomped forward, as if she were going to try to grab the mama wolf, and off she fled, following her family, into the dark.
It was a miracle. They were gone. She had scared off a pack of wolves. Holy crap!
Karin remained standing where she was until the wolves were clearly out of sight. Then she started to feel her legs tremble violently. The last few minutes—how long could it have been really?—had seemed like they were set to slo-mo, and now it was like a switch had been flipped and she was back in normal time. She started to realize what had just happened. She’d chased off a pack of wolves in the forest in the night. It really had been a pack of wolves. She’d done that! And she was only twelve. Whoa.
When it hit her like that, Karin’s legs just kind of gave way, and she plopped down onto the ground like a rag doll. That was crazy; that had been crazy. And probably no one would ever believe her if she told them what had happened. She didn’t have her phone with her, so she couldn’t have taken any pictures for evidence. She’d just have to tell people, and then they’d think she was making it up or bragging or something. But it was true.
Her legs were still shaking and she was tired, and she was cold and she was alone and she was far from the camp, but she smiled to herself just a little. She was proud of herself for that.
She used her hands to kind of massage her thighs to get them to stop trembling and start working again. When rubbing didn’t work, she kind of slammed on them with her fists. They started to tingle and relax, and soon enough she thought she m
ight be able to stand again. It was really weird what fear could do to your body, she thought. How it could make you seize up or freeze or run or leap.
After all she’d been through today already, in less than even twenty-four hours, Karin wondered if she would ever actually be afraid of anything again. She felt like she’d seen it all now. She was kind of a pro at getting out of hairy situations. She was kind of a rock star.
Feeling this new sense of pride, Karin stood up and brushed off her pants. She had a renewed sense that she would make it out of this. There was just one final hurdle, one last leg of her journey. She just had to make it a little bit farther; she just had to walk to the campsite.
Her feet were okay now; her legs worked fine. She didn’t even really feel cold anymore because her clothes seemed to be dry—maybe she’d fired up some kind of engine in her body when she was scared and that had warmed everything up. Who knows? There was a hill up ahead, and she climbed it, and when she came down the other side she saw there was another marking on the trail. It felt like the right direction. It must be.
Somewhere along the way, where the path sloped downward into what was sort of a hollow between banks of dirt, she heard what sounded like a human voice, shouting.
It was late and she was tired, and she took it, at first, to be her mind turning the sound of the wind into something else. But then it came again, like a hoot-hoot. And when she stopped and listened more carefully, she could make out the words: “Wait!” someone was shouting. “Wait!”
She stopped and turned around, squinting to try to see something on the trail behind her. Nothing there. Convinced again that it was her mind playing tricks on her, she continued hiking, this time walking a little faster than before.
“Up here,” she heard, and this time the voice was as clear as a bell. She hadn’t been imagining it. “Karin!” came the shout. She looked up, toward the top of the sandy embankment to her left. There, looming over her, was the figure of a man.
“Don’t be afraid, Karin,” said the voice, which she now realized belonged to her stepfather. “It’s just me, Martijn. Wait right there. I’m coming down to get you.”
Chapter 20
Perfectly Reasonable Explanations
Grace had driven this route so many times, with extreme leisure, while listening to a podcast or one of her favorite Stevie Wonder albums, cracking open the window for a bit of fresh air and just coasting.
But this time she sat upright on the edge of her seat, with nothing on but the GPS man, entirely focused on the road, and no distractions, to get there as quickly as possible. The highway stretched out in front of her like an Alfred Hitchcock circle that twisted into infinity. It was so close, and yet it seemed like she would never get there. No matter how hard she stepped on the gas pedal or how much her mind willed her to get there faster, it would still take as much time as it would take.
She was way past the speed limit and aware that if she got too out of control she’d risk getting stopped for a ticket—time she definitely couldn’t spare at all. Every second was space, the space between herself and Karin. How would Grace be able to find her now, in the dark, in the sprawling Veluwe, without a phone?
Grace had done her best to convince herself that nothing was the matter, that there must be some “perfectly reasonable explanation” for the fact that Karin’s T-shirt had blood on it, that it was found in the woods, and that the Scout leaders on her trip had not seen her. And a perfectly reasonable explanation for Martijn’s refusal to pick up the phone, even though she had tried calling him now at least a dozen times. And a perfectly reasonable explanation for why he had those photos and why he had that file and why he had been behaving aggressively toward her and why their marriage seemed to be built on a foundation of confusion and lies.
The perfectly reasonable explanation completely eluded her—that’s what it was. These things might not all be connected, but then again they might. And the perfectly reasonable explanation might encompass all of them at once. Or it might not. Truth be told, the perfectly reasonable explanation might just be that she was going mad. That all of these factors tying her stomach up in knots and making her head feel like it was about to burst a blood vessel were figments of her imagination and signs of her highly troubled mind.
If that was the case, she was okay with it. In fact, that would be good news. Because that would just mean that she would be diagnosed with something and she would get the help she needed, and that everything else in the world was all right. That Karin, most of all, was all right.
As she drove, she kept dialing him again and again, glancing over at the phone briefly and trying not to crash the car in the process. It just rang and rang and rang and rang. Why?? How idiotic it had been, how utterly stupid of her, to let Martijn go as a supervisor today, of all days, instead of just going herself. She’d wanted to trust him—she’d tried to trust him, beyond how much she actually trusted him—and that was why. But she needed to trust herself. She needed to trust only what she could trust.
As she pressed the gas pedal to the floor, trying to rev the engine of her stupid, ancient urban secondhand sedan, she wondered if the answer to all of her questions was just that: that she’d gone mad. What kind of madness was it? Was it schizophrenia, manic depression? Could it be post-traumatic stress disorder? She had experienced trauma. Or was it generalized anxiety—that was a thing, wasn’t it?
The car’s GPS man was informing her in his polite British accent that she was supposed to get off the expressway here.
“In two hundred meters, merge into the right lane and take the next exit,” he said. Grace was doing her best to be compliant and follow orders, but she knew this wasn’t the right exit. She steamed on straight ahead. The voice interjected a few moments later, “In eighty meters, turn right. In fifty meters, turn right.” The Brit became increasingly insistent—“Turn right here. Turn right here”—but Grace ignored the turn, speeding off, and then veered into the left lane to pass a slow-moving truck ahead of her.
The caller lived in Wolfheze, a small town off a long roadway called the Parallelweg. Grace remembered that it was somewhere near that private golf course, not far from Ede.
Grace had been there exactly once, when she and Pieter had had a weird Sunday outing to the town, with lots of cameras in tow, because he thought the town might be a good subject for a photo documentary project. The place housed a nineteenth-century insane asylum, and later the town had added a home for the blind. It had some important World War II history, but she couldn’t remember that part of the story.
How ironic that she was driving herself to an insane asylum. These days they would call it a “residential care setting for the mentally disabled,” or maybe there was an even more “woke” expression for it now. Pieter had wanted to shoot there, but they had felt so strange walking through it, like they had arrived at the setting of The Shining or something. Pieter had looked up and pointed out the surveillance cameras on lampposts everywhere. Someone, surely, had been watching, but no one ever came to bawl them out and make them leave.
There was a little local history museum, a one-room brick building that had reminded her of an old village church, presided over by “the oldest man in the world,” as Grace had called him when they got back into their car and drove back home. After they shook off the strangeness of the whole experience, Grace had confessed to Pieter that she’d found it quite illuminating—so many stories in a tiny little place. She’d encouraged Pieter at the time to pursue the photo documentary project, but he’d gotten the job in Syria instead, and they never went back to Wolfheze.
To the right, where she was supposed to have gotten off the highway, she saw tall trees beside the highway and the creek that ran below, just along the line of the road. This was the Otterlo side of the Hoge Veluwe, she thought. Maybe she should skip visiting this lady and just head out into the park to look for Karin right away?
“Rerouting,” the GPS man announced, ever so politely defeated. “One moment
, please. Rerouting. Rerouting.”
Grace decided to go see the lady first. Otherwise, she would have no idea where to start looking in the park. It was a pretty massive forest, and it was late and she couldn’t drive in till morning. Maybe this woman could lead her to the place where she’d found the shirt.
“In one hundred meters, turn left,” said the GPS man finally. “Turn left in one hundred meters.”
Just at the moment when she was about to lift her foot off the gas pedal and put her foot on the clutch to slow down, she heard a siren, high-pitched and shrill. The police. Oh shit. How fast had she been driving? She looked at the speedometer to see the needle pointing to 110 kph—way over the 80 kph limit. Fuck. I can’t stop now, she thought. It will take too much time. It’s already taken too much time. I need to go find Karin. She looked up and at that moment saw the exit sign reading, WOLFHEZE, 10 KM. So close. Right there already.
She depressed the clutch and moved into third gear, then into second, pressing on the brakes ever so slightly. But instead of stopping for the wailing police car behind her, she moved onto the exit ramp. Fuck it, she thought. He’s just going to have to follow me. The off-ramp took her in a circle toward her destination. She looked in the rearview mirror to see what the police car was doing, and now its lights went on, full blare.
“Just give me a minute,” she said to the cop car, even though he obviously couldn’t hear her. “I’ll tell you everything in a minute.” The cop would have to understand.
Turning onto the road she needed, the cop car still trailing and blaring its siren and flashing its lights, Grace recognized the location. “In fifty meters, turn right.” She was obedient now. You see? We are in the same territory. “Your destination is on the left.” And there it was, so close to where she and Pieter had parked that time they’d visited this storied town.
