The Forgotten Girls Read Online Free PDF

girl, quickly picking her up and carrying her to the bench by the swing.
    “Hello?” Louise called out, looking around. But clearly there were no adults nearby.
    Eik had walked back and was crouched down next to the boy, who was still crying, his small body convulsing. Gently he lifted the child up in his arms and rocked him.
    “There must be someone here!” she exclaimed, her eyes searching the area.
    Eik had brought all three children to safety by the bench. He was now walking around with the crying boy in his arms while the others crawled on the ground.
    “Hello!” Louise called again. “Will you stay with them while I go look?”
    Without waiting for his answer she started running toward the boathouse, then followed the path along the lakeside. On several occasions she had to duck beneath branches that reached over the narrow trail. Anger was pounding in her temples. She could easily picture it: a couple of young people more interested in each other than in looking after the children they had brought along on their outing. She had done a bit of babysitting herself when she was in school and had also brought along a boyfriend once or twice, and it was easy to forget about the children when they were just sitting around playing.
    “Hello?” she called out once more as she stopped by a shed being used to store a boat. There was a large padlock on the door, and the place was deserted.
    She paused for a moment to look around. She could still hear the boy crying, but not as desperately. Louise continued to the forest road that most people used to get to the lake, gasping for breath as she reached the top, but once again finding no one.
    When she returned, Eik was sitting on the ground with the three children. The crying boy was almost asleep in his arms, and the two others were scratching in the dirt with small sticks.
    “I’ll try going the other way around,” she said, pointing behind them. Not a wind stirred the treetops. Louise listened for a moment then ran in the opposite direction.
    It wasn’t really a path. The trail had just been walked so many times that the dirt had been stamped down. Stumps protruded in several places, threatening to trip anyone who wasn’t careful.
    “Hello!” she called but fell silent when she spotted a child’s stroller a few yards ahead. It had been knocked over and was blocking the path. From a distance she could tell that it was one of those dark-blue, multiseated institutional strollers—the kind kept in nurseries and day care centers.
    “Shit.” Briefly she was stricken with fear that a fourth child might still be in the stroller, because it was completely quiet.
    Louise jumped over a tree trunk and ran to the stroller, the bottom of which was facing her. Relief washed over her when she found that it was empty. A diaper bag had been pushed down into the fourth seat along with a white cloth diaper. A clear plastic bag with a couple of water bottles and a pack of rice crackers had been flung from the cargo net and lay on the ground a short distance away. As if the stroller had been moving when it overturned.
    With an increasing sense of unease, Louise once again ran her eyes over the area while calling out a few more times before walking back to Eik. “Their stroller is over there,” she told him, pointing toward the path.
    The crying boy was now completely asleep in his lap while the other two had started to whimper.
    “Can you go get it so we can put them in?” he asked. She nodded and looked up through the sparse trees, fully aware that nobody would voluntarily leave three small children at the edge of a lake. She felt the adrenaline starting to flow.
    Then she went back for the stroller.
    Louise was bending down to grab the frame when she spotted her. On the ground between two dense bushes, the naked leg of a woman was visible with bloody scratches from the thorns.
    Louise let go of the stroller and ran to the thicket. “Hello,” she called, this time more