Girl in the Dark
Page 27
Only then did I realize I was in real danger. I had to try to escape. I jabbed both elbows back into Van Benschop’s rib cage. He didn’t budge. All it achieved was allowing the knife to dig deeper into my throat. I felt something warm trickling down my neck. My heart pulsing against the blade.
“Move. We’re going into the kitchen. So we don’t make a mess in your mother’s living room. Start walking.”
I looked at my mother. She had to intervene. I still could not believe she would let someone kill me. She would step in at the last minute. Just as she had that time in the crack house. But she looked frozen.
Antoine pushed me ahead of him. “Mother?” I pleaded, my voice sounding all choked and teary. “Say something! You can’t let this happen!”
“Shut up.” Van Benschop kicked me in the back of the knees. “You’ve got only yourself to blame.”
I looked at my mother, convinced she would save me. Her mouth opened and then closed again.
I felt myself being pushed into the kitchen. I tried to push back, but somehow Antoine knew how to force me to walk ahead of him. I thought about how easy it would be just to slide the blade across my throat, slicing open the artery. I’d be dead in less than a minute.
Who would take care of Aaron? What would happen to Ray? I felt my whole body go into a spasm of shaking.
Finally, after what seemed a lifetime, my mother spoke up. “No, Antoine,” she said. Her voice sounded weepy, barely convincing. But she did say it. “Stop.”
It was all I needed. Van Benschop’s grip on me slackened for a second. I stomped hard on his foot and managed to slip from his grasp. Then I kicked him in the groin. He crumpled forward, crying like a wounded animal.
I raced out the front door and into the street.
The police arrived within minutes. Neither my mother nor Antoine tried to run.
I stood across the street and watched them being led to a police car by two officers.
My mother looked old and helpless in the bright sunlight. For a second our eyes met. Then she turned away, a final fierce gesture. And with that, the squad car door was closed.
“Are you okay?” asked the policeman who was standing next to me. “The ambulance will be here soon to fix you up. That’s quite a nasty cut you’ve got on your neck there.”
I couldn’t answer, because I honestly didn’t know.
CHAPTER 55
RAY
It almost looked like my aquarium down there, fifteen feet below the surface. Only, everything was much bigger and you could see much farther, you could see as far as you wanted to. As I swam around, I started naming the fish in my head. “Hey, you, little zebrafish, I see you darting away, but I see you! You I’ll call Hank. Oh, and you, parrotfish, nibbling on the coral over there, your name is Rembrandt.”
I had gone scuba diving every day since I’d been there. I’d stay under until the diving instructor ticked on his watch, telling me that our time was up and we had to swim back up to the surface.
Then I saw her. A beautiful queen angelfish colored the brightest of blues and the yellowest of yellows with a lovely crown-shaped spot on her forehead. “You, I will name Rosita.” I thought about the letter Dr. Römerman had told me to write. I had never been able to, but sitting by the ocean I knew exactly what I wanted to say. It wasn’t much. But I felt it was true.
I never meant for anything bad to happen to you and Anna. I will always love you.
I didn’t mind having to go back to the shore. I knew Iris and Mo and Aaron were waiting for me at the dive shop. Then the four of us would walk to the beach, and Aaron and I would build castles together, just like I used to do with Anna, except that these were made of sand instead of Legos. Then I’d play paddleball with Mo or go for a swim with Iris Kastelein who was definitely my sister over to the raft out in the middle of the bay.
We’d sit there for a while, dangling our legs in the water, our faces turned to the setting sun. Soon the sun would disappear into the water. Iris said this time of day was called “the magic hour.”
I had to ask. “So are we a family now?”
She looked at me with those clear blue eyes edged in black, just like Mother’s, only much kinder.
“I think a family is more like—a father and a mother and their kids. So that’s not really what we are. But we are related. We’re kin.”
I stared at my feet.
Then Iris said, “Hey, why am I making it so complicated? Of course we’re a family. Maybe not your average family, but we definitely belong together. What do you think?”
I cleared my throat. “I always wanted to belong to a family.”
“Me too,” she said. “Me too.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to all the beautiful people who made Girl in the Dark happen:
Patrizia Gelvatti
Sarah Miles
Michael Carlisle and Lauren Smythe at Inkwell
Hester Velmans
Emily Krump at William Morrow
Chris Herschdorfer and Dorien van Londen at Ambos|Anthos
Masie Cochran
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MARION PAUW (b. 1973) is one of the bestselling writers of the Netherlands, whose books also have been published in Germany, Turkey, Italy, Hungary, and the United States. She made her debut with Villa Serena in 2005. Her big breakthrough to a wider readership and critics came with Girl in the Dark (2009), which won the Golden Noose Dutch Crime award. The Dutch film rights were sold to Eyeworks and successfully adapted into a movie. Next, she wrote the thrillers Sinner Child, Jet-Set, and Kicking the Bucket. The Savages is considered to be her debut as a novelist. She most recently published Something We Need to Tell You. Her books have sold half a million copies in the Netherlands. Marion lives in Amsterdam with her two children.
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CREDITS
Cover design by Kathleen Lynch/Black Kat Design
Cover photograph © Tobias Regell / Link Image / Gallery Stock
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
GIRL IN THE DARK. Copyright © 2016 by Marion Pauw. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
This text was translated from Dutch to English by Hester Velmans.
Title page photograph by Glebstock/Shutterstock, Inc.
EPub Edition January 2016 ISBN 978-0-06-242481-5
ISBN 978-0-06-242479-2
978-0-06-245869-8 (international edition)
16 17 18 19 20 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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