Free The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton Page A

that looks like a mini log cabin. "
    "How cute," Jennifer said. She started to say something about Scott's parents' terrible taste-their home in suburban Seattle featured metallic wallpaper in the bathrooms-but stopped herself. Scott-bashing was also off-limits these days. Did it matter that he and Maureen had scarcely split before he fell in love with Helen? Hardly. Did it matter that he approached both Jennifer and Maureen with a glassine smile so bogus and vacant that it made them speculate he'd been turned into a pod person? Apparently not.
    Maureen, in Jennifer's opinion, was far too forgiving. It verged on unethical. It meant she was capable of betrayal, in a purely passive sense, simply because she was too understanding to get appropriately angry with people who deserved it.
    If the main road was treacherous, this road was doubly so. From the dull, crunching sounds the chains made, they weren't on a paved road. They were on dirt.
    "Do Helen's directions say anything about a dirt road?" Jennifer asked.
    Maureen shook her head.
    There was a new sound, too. A high-pitched grinding that wasn't coming from the tires.
    "I think we should turn around," Jennifer said. "This is a logging road or something."
    She looked at Maureen, peering tensely through the windshield at the snow. It was starting to get dark; the snow was a gray color, not even pretty and new-seeming as it fell.
    The road was growing more and more narrow and soon turning around would he impossible, unless they found a driveway, which seemed unlikely. Where the fuck were they? They should return to the general store and ask directions. Never mind that the parking lot was full of trucks with gun racks and whale-sized plow attachments (the interior metal scoops strangely gilled, they looked like beached Pleistocene fossils to Jennifer, abandoned at this high altitude by the receding ocean some trillion-odd years ago), and that she and Maureen had as good a chance of getting gang-raped in the restroom as receiving directional assistance of any sort. It was all Helen's fault, and she would make sure that Helen knew it. It almost made her want to get raped, so that she had more reason to be mad at Helen.
    It was this attitude---cavalier, pissed off, vaguely selfdestructive-that made her a bit uncareful. Normally, she was skepticism personified-her skepticism intensified by a wild imagination that could seek out the dark possibilities in even the most banal situation. Normally, she knew better than to drive onto the presumed shoulder of a road that was obscured beneath a layer of snow and could have been anything-could have been air.
    Jennifer swung the car perpendicular to the road. The chains restricted her turning radius, and she had to back up, then forward, then back, then forward. Each time she put the car into gear she heard the whining sound, the hysterical pitch of the wind that a person might mistake for human screams, if a person were so inclined. Jennifer was not so inclined at this moment. She jolted the transmission into drive a final time, nudging the right wheels onto the shoulder that wasn't a shoulder, which was in fact, she was soon to learn, a deep, if narrow, ditch. She felt the wheels start to slide, and she corrected, swinging the wheel hard to the left. The chains clawed at the slope and the car hung there for two or three seconds as the wheels spun, long enough for her to catch Maureen's expression, which struck her as strangely, passively sad, given the circumstances. Or disappointed, but really it was a look of sadness, as if Jennifer had, one final foolish time, fallen prey to her own infrequent impetuosity, and screwed them both for good.
    The sound of the chains breaking off the right front tire was unmistakable, a muffled, metal-bone twang. The tire slipped, and the car dropped thuggishly onto its own chassis; Jennifer felt her spine compress.
    She and Maureen sat without speaking and stared through the windshield at the darkening woods,