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  He would be mad—she knew that even before she stopped her car. She made sure not to hesitate and raised her hands in the air as she saw the officer getting out of his car. She rolled down the window and screamed out, in Dutch: “Sorry, Officer. I can explain!”

  The policeman who’d stepped out of the car behind Grace was furious. She could see it in his face, which was flushed and beaded with sweat when he leaned, just a little, toward her car window to get a better sense of what kind of person he was dealing with here.

  “I can explain, Officer,” said Grace, in her clearest Dutch, trying to sound as calm and sensible as possible. “I have a perfectly reasonable explanation.”

  Chapter 21

  Little Red

  “Martijn, O-M-G,” said Karin, looking up to see the figure of her stepfather scrambling down the side of the embankment to get to where she was standing. “I can’t believe you found me!”

  Even though Martijn was definitely not her favorite person, right now she was pretty happy to see him. When he reached her on the trail, she even ran toward him. She gave him a hug. That might have been the first time she’d ever done that.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, patting her head. “I’m here. You don’t have to be afraid anymore.”

  Karin pulled back. She hadn’t been so scared. He smelled of sweat and something else—something she couldn’t place—but it was kind of gross. It was like he’d been to the gym and then hadn’t showered for days.

  “I lost the others,” she said. “Or they lost me. I don’t know what happened. Are they all at the campsite already?” She assumed so.

  “The others are fine,” he said, stepping closer to put a hand on her shoulder. “All tucked into their sleeping bags by now. I knew I had to get out here and find you, since we knew you were lost. And now I’ve found you.”

  Karin felt embarrassment creep over her. She was supposed to be the nature girl, the one who knew this park the best. But they’d had to send him out to get her, because she was the only one who’d gotten lost. “They all just kind of left me,” she told Martijn. “First Dirk kind of beat us up, and then he and Margot just took off. Then I was with Lotte, but somehow she disappeared. Then I was on my own, and I thought I knew how to find the campsite. I was up in the sand drifts and then when it started to rain I ran into the forest, but then these people, these—”

  “People?” Martijn was surprised.

  “I don’t know who they were, but they didn’t look good. They didn’t look human. Maybe it was just the darkness. Or maybe I just was really scared. They grabbed me and brought me back to their camp and told me that I needed to stay with them until morning. I thought they were going to do terrible things to me, but they didn’t, they…they stole my backpack and they gave me a place to sleep. They were frightening, but I couldn’t stay there…”

  “Are you hurt?” Martijn put a hand on her other shoulder and looked her over, like, inspecting her, trying to see what had happened. “Did they hurt you? Are you okay?”

  Karin pulled back, feeling uncomfortable. She wasn’t that close with Martijn. He wasn’t her mother.

  “No, no, they didn’t do anything, except steal my stuff. I think they were hungry. They were eating some food, some canned food, like maybe dog food or something like that. They didn’t offer me anything and I didn’t ask to eat it.”

  “That was smart of you.”

  “And then they told me that I should stay with them, sleep with them there in their camp, until morning. I didn’t want to say no; I didn’t think I could say no. But I was really scared being there with them. They…they didn’t look okay. I don’t know how to say it, but their faces were all stretched out and I kept thinking they were maybe like zombies or vampires or…I know it sounds weird.”

  Martijn seemed to be thinking this over, like he could figure out who they were. Like he would know.

  “But anyway, I got up and got away,” said Karin. “I ran away just when they were woken up. Something else came into the camp, and then I ran…”

  “Wait, what…?”

  Karin didn’t let him ask questions; she just wanted to get her story out. “And then I got out of the forest and I got here, and then there were wolves, and I had to scare them off. I got as big as I could get and I shouted, and they ran off. Just like my mom told me to do, and it worked! And then I was alone here, and I thought finally I knew how to get to the camp, and then you came, and then you’re here…”

  Karin suddenly felt herself to be dead tired, and without doing it on purpose she crumpled into Martijn’s chest, her legs kind of buckling under her. All the energy that she had managed to muster to get this far seemed to seep out of her at once. She was exhausted.

  Martijn grabbed her, trying to catch her before she fell. She slipped lower, but he pulled her back up and held her to his chest.

  “There, there,” he said, patting her head. “Mijn Kleine Roodekapje,” he added—my Little Red Riding Hood. “You got away from the Big Bad Wolf! That’s impressive.”

  She felt the warmth of his body and realized how cold she had been. His strong arms around her back felt comforting. But that smell. Something really rank. It wasn’t just sweat; it was like…like it had a copper kind of edge to it. Kind of like a dead animal. But then also something else. What was it? Something weird and something else.

  “I thought I was so strong, but really I’m weak,” she said. “I’m tired and I’m scared and I just want to go home. I want to be home. I wish I could see Mom right now. I don’t want to be here, doing this, anymore. I hate this dropping. I hate this whole trip.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Martijn. “Really, don’t worry. We’ll get you home. I’ll get you home. We’re not actually very far from the campsite, where Rutger and Riekje are waiting for us.” He looked up, as if assessing the distance from where they were to where they needed to be, and then back down at her. “You rest for a moment,” he said, gently lowering her to sit on a large rock, “and then we’ll go there together.”

  That smell…Karin got another whiff of it as he leaned over to help her sit. There was something sickly sweet about it too. Like rose water. No, like rose water and cotton candy, a scent that came in a bottle in the shape of a swan. Was Martijn wearing Margot’s perfume?

  Karin nodded, looking up at him. His face looked really pale in the moonlight, and somehow different—somehow stranger than before. Like all the blood had been drained out of it. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. “Okay,” she said. “Give me just a minute until I catch my breath.”

  A weird thought came into her head. What if Martijn had been captured by the ghouls too? What if they had bitten him and right now, before her eyes, he was turning into one of them? Like in those horror movies where outsiders come and take over the whole town by invading people’s bodies one by one? What if they’d done that to Martijn? What if he was already one of the outsiders and he was just pretending to be her stepdad?

  The thought of that gave her the serious creeps, and she actually shuddered. Martijn saw it. Even in the dark, she could see the strange expression on his face, as if he was wondering what she was thinking. He crouched down and tried to give her a warm smile, but it had the opposite effect: She suddenly felt like she had to bolt. Martijn wasn’t going to save her. She needed to get herself back to her mom. Her mom was the only one she could really trust. But what if the ghouls had gotten to her mom too?

  Chapter 22

  Culture Clash

  “I’m sorry I didn’t stop. I know I should have, but I’m dealing with an…an…It might be an emergency.”

  “You were speeding,” the policeman nearly yelled at her, his right hand on his belt. Did he used to have a gun there? Grace had read that the Dutch traffic police had been disarmed a few years ago. Had he even heard what she said? “License and registration.” She could read every line in his face, etched with anger. “Now!” he said, without waiting for even a second.

  “I’m getting it,�
�� she said, reaching for her purse to get out her license. “Please, Officer, let me explain.”

  “Remain silent, please,” he said.

  She handed over her license, motioning that she was going to reach into the glove compartment to get the registration, if that was okay with him. With a cop this angry, she didn’t want to make a single false move, gun or no gun.

  “Officer, I’m sorry,” she added, handing him the registration.

  “I need you to remain silent,” he said again. Grace reasoned that this was more for his sake than for hers, so that he would calm down.

  The anger lines in his face began to dissolve into soft, pudgy skin with old acne craters, and a scar on his chin was in the shape of a sickle.

  “Ma’am,” he started, “when you hear sirens from a police vehicle, you are required to stop your car on the side of the highway as quickly as possible.” He reminded her, “Attempting to flee will only incur additional fines.”

  “I wasn’t trying to flee, Officer,” said Grace. “I didn’t mean to ignore the sirens. I just—”

  He didn’t let her finish her sentence. “Where are you from?”

  “I don’t live that far from here,” she started. “I was driving down here to see a woman…”

  “No, I mean where do you come from? Your accent.”

  “Oh,” said Grace, hardly understanding how this could possibly be relevant.

  “Are you English?” he said. “England?”

  “No, I’m American,” she told him in Dutch. “I’ve been living here already for more than a decade. I—My husband is Dutch.”

  The officer glanced quickly at the house behind the car. “Where are you off to in such a hurry?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Officer,” she said, switching to English, since what was the point now of trying to speak in Dutch, which only slowed her down? “My daughter may be missing, and the person who lives in this house found an article of her clothing. That’s why I drove here as fast as I could. It’s no problem for me to pay the speeding ticket if you need to give me one, Officer. I understand that I was driving too fast. But you can’t imagine how frightened I am right now. My daughter is only twelve.”

  “This is how the Americans do it,” he said contemptuously. “You just think you can do anything you want and pay your way out of it?”

  “No! No, sir. That’s not what I’m saying,” she told him. “It’s just that…it’s an emergency.”

  “What kind of emergency?”

  “My daughter. Her name is Karin. She’s twelve and she went on a dropping with her Scout academy, here in Ede. I know it may sound stupid. She went into the Veluwe Park with a group of kids, and now she seems to be missing. The Scout leaders say they don’t know where any of the kids are, and my husband, who is supposed to be one of the adult supervisors, isn’t reachable on his phone. This woman called me and said her dog found Karin’s T-shirt, and now I need to get inside that house right there and find out what the hell is going on.”

  She regretted cursing, and she realized that she was probably speaking way too fast for the police officer to understand her English anymore. He did pick up on one thing: “She went on a dropping?” he asked. “But you think she’s missing? That’s what a dropping is for, miss, to let the kids get a little bit lost for a while. They always come back safely. She’ll find her way back, don’t worry.”

  “No,” said Grace, realizing that for him she was just another American woman who couldn’t grasp the local customs. “No, it’s not like that. It’s really concerning. Maybe you can come into the house with me and talk to the woman here. She can explain…” Grace thought that since the woman who called her was Dutch, that might give her more credence.

  “I don’t need an explanation, miss,” he said. “I’m sure there’s nothing at all wrong with your daughter. She is having a good time with her friends and she’ll be back tomorrow or the next day. We’ve seen lots of these droppings in the forest. The parents are a lot more freaked out than the kids are, especially the parents who aren’t Dutch. I don’t mean to be…to discriminate. I’m not sure of the word. We Dutch people do this all the time. She’ll be having the time of her life, I promise you.”

  Grace could see that she wasn’t going to be able to convince this man that the situation with Karin was serious. Anyway, he was just wasting her time at this point. She needed to get inside that house and talk to the woman who had called her. She didn’t need to keep sharing information with this idiot.

  “I’m going to have to give you a ticket,” the cop said, drawing an electronic device out of his holster that looked like a video-game console.

  “Great. Thanks,” she said, as if she’d been waiting for this all day.

  He tapped information into the console in a process that seemed interminable. He needed to scan her registration, fill in her phone number, her email address, her home address. How hard could it be to just tap in the fee and give her a receipt? “Do you want my bank card?” she asked. “I can pay it right away.”

  “No,” he said absently, filling out his digital form. “It’ll be sent to your home address and you can pay on our website.”

  “Great,” she said. “Are we, um, done?”

  He paused now, looking at her. It was as if he wanted to prolong the interaction as much as humanly possible, thought Grace. “There’s probably some logical, simple explanation for what you’re concerned about,” he offered, speaking again in Dutch. “I know mothers can sometimes get very worried about their kids, especially if it’s the first time she’s away from home for the night. I remember when my son did a dropping for the first time. My wife was worried out of her mind. But everyone does it. We did it when we were kids. This is Holland. We do things a little differently than you do in America, but you’ll get used to it.”

  Grace was in a mood to rant, and she would have at that moment if she didn’t need to be done with this exchange as quickly as possible. Droppings may have been a nice tradition, but in today’s world, was it so American of her to wonder whether it was wise to just let kids wander off at night into the biggest national park in the country? Someone might accuse her of being overly vigilant, and maybe she was. But it didn’t matter how safe everything was supposed to be, or how good everyone was supposed to feel about tradition. Grace knew that things could go horribly wrong. And sometimes when you least expected it.

  The device started whirring, and it spit out a tiny little stub of paper. He shoved the slip of paper through her open car window. “This is the number and date for your speeding ticket. In a few weeks you’ll get a notice from the city traffic department with the official bill. You can send in the money or pay it online. You have an additional fine for trying to flee the scene of the crime.”

  “Fleeing the scene…” Grace stopped herself from arguing; that would not be at all helpful. She took the stub, and without waiting for his permission, she took off her seat belt and started to open the door of the car.

  He wasn’t budging, though. “By the way, if you don’t hear from her in twenty-four hours, call 112. But I’m sure it’ll all be resolved by then.”

  “Thanks, Officer,” she managed to say through her fake smile. Then finally, finally, at long last, he turned around, got back into his car, and drove off.

  Chapter 23

  The Thud

  In the distance, she heard the howl of the wolf again, low and long. It didn’t frighten Karin so much now, knowing how to scare him off. Martijn took it as a cue to start moving. “I think we’d better…” he said without finishing his sentence. He was still hovering over her.

  She understood what he meant, but Karin didn’t want to stand up. It was that smell on him, that icky rose water. Why did he smell like Margot?

  Karin had heard everything that happened this morning, even though Martijn probably didn’t know that. The kitchen was right underneath her bedroom. She hadn’t been able to hear everything they said downstairs, just muffled, ga
rbled words that drifted up through the floorboards. But she knew they were arguing, and then they got louder and louder. For a moment it had sounded like it might be over, but then all of a sudden they were really screaming and, like, wrestling or something. She could hear jostling in the kitchen, and her mother say, “Jesus, Martijn, get your hands off me.” And then a scuffle. And then, “Let go of me!”

  Then a crash and then the thud. Then this creepy silence.

  She must have been the only one home. Jasper had just left for football practice, and Frank, her other loathsome stepbrother, always slept over at his girlfriend’s house now. If there had been sounds after that thud, even just normal sounds of people talking or walking around, she would have thought, Okay, whatever. But it was so quiet. She thought maybe her mom was dead.

  Karin had run downstairs and, through the glass door to the kitchen, saw the two of them there. Her mom was sitting on the floor with her back against the kitchen cabinets, and Martijn was standing over her, his face red. Her mom wasn’t dead, but she was crying and clutching her shoulder. Karin had ducked away, out of view of the door. Because what could she do?

  Now, as Karin looked up at the face of her stepfather in the dark, her stomach convulsed. He looked so cold and remote, like he had been drained of all his blood. Maybe he was a vampire. Maybe he’d just come to suck the life out of them. They had been happy before he came along. Before her dad died. Before everything changed.

  She began to clutch her abdomen as if she were suffering from cramps. “Ow,” she said, not quite sure whether she was faking it for Martijn or whether her stomach really hurt. She did feel sick.

  “Sounds like the wolves might be coming back,” said Martijn, ignoring her and reaching down to help her up. Without waiting for her to agree, he hauled her to her feet. “We’d better get moving. Not that I think the wolves are coming for us or anything, but it’ll be safer if we could all be at the camp together. It’s really late.”