Dead Men (Marie and Lotte Book 1) by Mette Glargaard Page B

look at the state of my bank account was accolade enough.
    In that year of thinking about the death of my husband, I grew to understand the meaning in my life. Mikael had beaten me and treated me badly, just like my father, my uncle, a guy in a tunnel and my very first boyfriends. No one would be allowed to do that anymore, anyone who did would simply be punished.
    So I slowly grew out of my false mourning to a fuller, brighter future where my life would have meaning, not just for me, but for many beaten and abused women. Little did I realise it at the time, the hunter was born one fateful day when I was seventeen and now I was free to act at will. My true character and the path of my life could not have been clearer.
    I knew I would never experience love since that was reserved for each new pair of shoes I buy. Getting a new man was not about love, but each relationship would have a similarity with the shoes, the feeling of having acquired something that I would eventually tire of and discard.
    There have been men in my life since Mikael, mostly men while traveling; travels they never returned from. Men who spoke French or Afrikaans, men from the UK, Australia and Italy. Men who had something in common … they were dead.

9
    Marie looked out through the tunnel onto the railroad tracks, rivers of fallen leaves spread beside them, in autumn golden, orange and red. She had taken a walk along the lake as she listened to the crows; their shrill, hoarse cries sounded like frightened shrieks. So it was with Marie - there were always so many things that made her think of death.
    She had continued at a brisk pace through the small and familiar forest that was close to the orphanage in one of the suburbs of Copenhagen. It was beautiful in the forest at this time of year, a hint of frost on your nose and the clear azure sky finding its way through the almost naked trees as they waited for their final, multi-colored leaves to fall. But for Marie, this setting was yet another reminder of death and decay, when the wet leaves lying on the rails were ground into pulp by the trains, as if falling from the trees were not enough and they had to be totally destroyed.
    This was how her life could feel; one day everything was light and good and she felt at peace with the world; the next she would wake up and there was only darkness and it seemed as if only her death could rescue her from the pain she felt inside. She had the distinct feeling that this was not the case for other seventeen year old girls. Their only problem was choosing whether they wanted to go to this party or the other, whether to buy the skirt or the jeans, whether or not to dye their hair. But Marie was not like ordinary girls and this was a fact she’d known for a long time.
    It was right back in Kindergarten the first time she felt that she was different. Not wanting to play with the other children, she had sat down under the big pear tree in the garden. But rather than sitting with her back to it and looking out, she had faced the tree and simply stared at the bark. Then she slowly reached out and she began to pick at it, inserting her small fingers and nails between the cracks in the tree’s rough surface and bits of bark started to come away. So she picked at it some more, her actions speeded up as if there might be some prize hidden beneath, but the pieces she managed to remove were only small and they fluttered to the ground like lifeless brown bugs.
    But to Marie it felt as if the world was a little less heavy when she pulled the bark off and she sat there creating a small bald patch on the old tree until an adult appeared and discovered what she was doing. They took her inside and told her that when you peel the bark of the trees, they die. Marie felt a flicker of delight at the thought that, as small as she was, she could have power over a living creature vastly bigger than you were and it could do nothing other than stand still.
    The next day she sat down next to