The Miniaturist Read Online Free

bomb. She'd never felt so uneasy, so certain that something was terribly, dreadfully wrong .It was too weird; there were too many spooky coincidences.
    The dollhouses. The white bridesmaid dresses. The fly-fishing accident. The pictures in the photo album. Meg, whose name she presumed was Margaret. She started to think she'd been coaxed into a trap, unwittingly, like a stupid animal. It made her start to wonder: How much did they know about Helen's past? How did they even know that she was the person she claimed to be? Their father had certainly never told them about this other daughter, this former wife; they had accepted Helen's existence because the news had been delivered by a lawyer, and because the monstrous deceit it implied was so completely unlikely. Only a man whom you could never imagine doing such a thing had the potential to do such a thing. That was how she and Maureen and their few surviving relatives had rationalized it. It could never in a million years have happened. Thus, naturally, it had happened.
    But what if it hadn't? What if Helen was a fake, some kind of resurrected witch, pretending to be their father's daughter? What if she'd even been involved in their father's death? His body had never been found; he'd been swept away by a current while fishing alone on a mild stretch of the Penatoqua. The rangers had found his rucksack, his coat, his uneaten lunch. Downstream, they'd found his pole.
    Jennifer splashed some more water on tier face, and pressed her shaking hands against her cheekbones. She was drunk, and she knew she was letting her imagination get the best of her. But she couldn't get Helen's smiling face out of her head, that innocent, high-voiced and mostly daft way she had of talking that now seemed malice-tinged and eerily sinister.
    When she returned to the bedroom, Meg and Maureen were inspecting a dress spread over the bed's pompon coverlet.
    "Jennifer, look at this," Maureen said. She was fingering the fabric of the neckline; the tiny silver beads had tarnished and stained the fabric beneath them a blackish gray.
    "It's beautiful," Jennifer said. But she didn't think it was beautiful. The neck was so narrow it made it hard to swallow just looking at it. And the beads, now that they'd tarnished, looked even less like decoration and more like the blade of a straight-edged razor.
    "Sarah said that these dresses were the best way to test a person's loyalty," Meg said. "Those who failed the test would, as she put it, get their eternal deserts."
    "Superstition or witchcraft?" Maureen asked, clearly not expecting an answer.
    "Can we put that away now?" Jennifer asked, hardly able to keep the panicked testiness from her voice.
    Meg wrapped the dress back in the plastic zipper bag and returned it to the closet. She told the girls to help themselves to bread and jam if they woke early. She wished them a pleasant sleep, and withdrew. Jennifer heard her in the living room, blowing out lamps and candles. With each breath, the dark came closer and closer, a dense, impermeable substance. It made her feel like she was being buried alive.
    "You okay?" Maureen asked.
    "I'm . . . just a little freaked out," Jennifer admitted.
    "You? Why?"
    "What do you mean, why?"
    "You actually believe that stuff about the blood on the dress? It's just a stupid ghost story."
    Jennifer shrugged. "It's more than just that. It's ... everything."
    Just then she remembered the scrapbook album under the bed. She pulled it out and began flipping through it.
    Maureen grew alarmed. "You don't have Meg's permission to look at that."
    Jennifer put her finger to her lips. She turned the warped cardboard pages until she came to the picture of the bride. This time she clocked the name: Sarah Mills Herrick. She read the small squib of text accompanying the photo. It mentioned that the bride was given away by her aunt and ward, Peggy Dischinger.
    She thrust the album into Maureen's lap.
    "She looks just like Helen, don't you think?"