You'll Thank Me for This Page 16

  “No, stay where you are, in case anyone shows up there.”

  “Okay, but we need to coordinate. Can you try your husband again?”

  “I will try again. I have been trying and trying,” said Grace. “Dirk says he was with Margot when he saw him last?”

  Rutger sounded like he had pulled his mouth away from the receiver; she could hear him speaking to Dirk in the background. “Yes, he said Margot sprained her ankle and Martijn was going to help her walk to camp. He says he told Dirk to go ahead.”

  Grace felt herself recoil inwardly. Oh God. She felt as if invisible hands were creeping up her throat, trying to strangle her. Could Martijn have something to do with this? Or was it something else that had somehow gotten to all of them? Whoever was here at this weird campsite? They had obviously had contact with Karin. But could they have somehow had contact with everyone else too?

  “I don’t understand,” said Rutger.

  “Neither do I,” said Grace, and she thought at that moment that she might just start to cry. “It’s clear only that something has gone terribly wrong. I’m hanging up to call the police and then I’ll call you back.”

  “Yes,” said Rutger. “I agree. I’ll call the Scout program to see if we can get some extra hands out here. I’ll also contact the other parents. You call the police.”

  Chapter 27

  Confessions

  Karin’s wrists hurt a lot. They were tied behind her back and to a tree. It was the tree where she and her dad had pitched their tent. Martijn had used some kind of really prickly rope to fasten her hands together, and her arms were pushed up against the hard bark of the tree. She squirmed and wriggled to try to free herself, but it only tore at her skin.

  Martijn seemed to have gone actually nuts. He had this headlamp he’d put on, and he was bent over, on his knees, wildly digging in the ground around where she had said her dad had pitched their tent. He kept asking her questions, like she was supposed to know something about something. She told him what she could—where they had put this and that—but she really didn’t know what he wanted. He kept saying that she had to know more, but she didn’t know anything.

  “I promise, I swear, I don’t know what you’re looking for,” she said. “Please, Martijn. Can’t you untie me? I won’t go anywhere, I won’t. I will stay with you here until you find what you’re looking for. I promise.”

  “There’s no point in going to the campsite anyway,” he said. “No one is there.”

  “What do you mean, no one is there? They’re all waiting for us.”

  He stopped digging, stood up, and came toward her. She turned her face away, thinking he might smack her. He didn’t. He just stood there looking at her, staring at her, with his headlamp shining into her eyes. That hurt her eyes. It blinded her too.

  “I swear,” she said again, this time starting to cry. “I swear I don’t know what this is about.”

  “I believe you,” he said. “I believe that you don’t know. Or maybe you think you don’t know. Maybe he told you but you don’t remember. That might be it.”

  It was like he thought if he just stared at her, shining that light in her eyes, she would suddenly remember something she had forgotten. But all she could think was that she wished her dad were here right now to save her. “My dad was my dad,” she said. “He just was a dad. He didn’t tell me his secrets, ever. He protected me.”

  That seemed simple enough. And anyway it was so long ago that they were here last. Martijn was completely losing his mind.

  “Maybe if you tell me what this is all about…” Karin started. She had to think about ways to get him to let her go. If he would talk to her, maybe he would calm down. “He did tell me some things, but maybe not what you think he told me…”

  Martijn tore the headlamp off his head. His eyes looked wild. “I really don’t want to harm you, Karin,” he said. “But if I don’t find these photos, I’m in trouble. I’m in a lot of trouble. I need these photographs he took because they help prove my innocence.”

  Karin shook her head. She didn’t understand any of this. He didn’t make sense. “Maybe he meant it, like, metaphorically…” Karin started. “Like not really buried but, like, put away somewhere. Why would someone bury something in a forest?”

  Martijn flashed his eyes back at her. “You’re pretty clever for a twelve-year-old, huh? Metaphorically…You think that hasn’t occurred to me? I have looked everywhere else where they might have been stashed. I have found all his old files, all his old computer files, all his digital photo archives…I have searched for two years. More…”

  Karin felt her mind clicking little pieces into place. Is this why he always seemed so interested in everything that had to do with her dad? Is this why he was always asking her weird questions? Is this why he always asked her about her father when her mother wasn’t there? It wasn’t jealousy, she thought. It was like something out of a murder mystery…Maybe she had to start thinking faster, to start thinking like a murder-mystery writer. Or like a detective. Like Miss Marple in those Agatha Christie books. Like Nancy Drew in the series her mom gave her. Like Harriet the Spy.

  “If you tell me,” she started, “maybe if you tell me exactly what happened and what he took from you and why he had these photographs, I could help you. It was a long time ago that we were here, but maybe if you tell me what it’s about, I could start to remember. It could jog my memory. I could help you find them and protect yourself.”

  He looked at her in an odd way, obviously not sure if she was trying to trick him. He glanced down and then back at her, as if deciding that it was better to try this approach than not to.

  “I wasn’t always working as an accountant,” he started to explain. “Before I did that, I had another job. I was in foreign affairs. Do you know what that means?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “We do current events in school. I read the newspapers.”

  “I know,” said Martijn. “I know you do.”

  “So, what…Does that mean you were also working in Syria, like my dad?”

  “Not there, no. I didn’t go there, but I worked for the government department that deals with things in that part of the world,” he said. “I was involved with the government’s…operations.”

  Karin remained silent. She knew that if she didn’t talk, he would probably talk more. Maybe he would somehow tell her something that would allow her to figure out what to do. In the meantime, whenever he looked away from her, she tried to work on the knots behind her back.

  “The Dutch are part of an international coalition that wants the Syrian government out of power,” he said. “The government of President Assad.”

  “I know a lot about Syria,” Karin said. “I’ve read a lot about it since my dad died.”

  “Well, then you know that it is a bad regime, killing its own citizens,” he said. “The Dutch originally had the idea that by supporting rebel groups, antigovernment organizations fighting the regime, we could help take them down.”

  “Yes, I know that part.”

  “One of the groups our government was supporting got away from us, you could say. They weren’t clean. They turned on us. This group turned out to be Salafist, which means they were anti-imperialists, which means…which means they were jihadists—do you know what that means?”

  “I know what ‘jihadist’ means,” Karin said. “All the papers said the jihadists killed my father. I know what it means.” Karin thought, basically, that jihadists wanted all Europeans to be dead, and that’s why when they saw her father they shot him. Just like that. They never asked what he was doing there or if he was helping anyone or doing anything positive for their country; they just didn’t like who he was, what he represented.

  “Yes, well, that was them,” said Martijn. “That’s the simplest way to put it.”

  Karin thought about this, what she knew from the papers and what she’d heard from her mother, and what she’d learned in school.

  “What do you mean? The Dutch gov
ernment doesn’t fund jihadists,” she said.

  “It did,” he said. “It did back then, without knowing it. The idea was to support anti-Assad rebel groups to try to diminish his power, and we didn’t know that they were jihadists at the time.”

  “Is that who shot my dad? Is that what you’re saying? Someone paid by the Dutch government?”

  He started pacing around in a circle. He was trying to explain himself. “It wasn’t clear from the beginning that they were jihadists, but we heard that might be a possibility. My job at the time was to do an investigation, to find out what was going on there. That was why I hired your father. We wanted someone who already knew the country, who had ways of getting around, who understood the politics. Your dad had spent a lot of time there, and because he was a photojournalist, he had access, he could do things other people couldn’t do.”

  Karin wriggled against the tree, trying to maneuver so she could at least move a little. Her hands hurt so much. She tried to feel the tree to see if it had any sharper pieces of bark that she could use to latch on to the rope and loosen it.

  “What does that mean, you hired my dad? My dad worked for newspapers and magazines. He didn’t work for the government.”

  “Mostly he worked for newspapers and magazines,” said Martijn. “But he also worked for me. He worked for the government, doing some work for us.”

  Karin felt the weirdest thing behind her. It was sharp, but not the way pieces of bark are sharp. More like the way something metal is sharp. Like the corner of a box made out of metal. She couldn’t see it, of course, because her back was to the tree, but when she felt around, it did seem like it was not something you find in nature. And it seemed to be tucked into a hole in the trunk of the tree.

  She had to keep Martijn talking. “What are you saying, then? Are you telling me my dad was a spy? That he was a spy? You’re a liar. He was not like that.”

  Karin had heard too much dumb stuff from too many people about her dad and Syria and the stupid war over there and what he was doing there and accusations that he worked for ISIS or for the CIA or whatever…It was enough. Her mom had told her to ignore it all. It was all a big lie. “You’re either a liar or you’re just an asshole.”

  Even though Martijn was like some weird, crazy stranger now, he suddenly looked like he totally understood her. He looked like he was trying to tell her something. “I know it’s really hard to understand, Karin,” he said. “It will take a long time for you to really understand it. Maybe you never will.”

  “I don’t want to hear any more,” she said, thinking now that she had to get his eyes off of her. She had to figure out what this sharp thing was behind her back. A metal box hidden in the tree. Could it actually be what he was searching for? “You’re just going to lie to me, like everyone else.”

  “I need you to help me or else I’m going to get in a lot of trouble. The photographs your father took could exonerate me. They’ll show that we knew before the government knew, and that we tried to inform them. I need the photos or the negatives. If I don’t find them, I’ll be arrested. I might go to prison. I don’t know what will happen. They’ll definitely put my name in the paper and expose me as the one who paid off the jihadists. That’s why I want to tell you now, so you’ll hear it from me. Karin, I have been trying to find a way to tell you for a long time…”

  “Tell me that my dad was a spy? I don’t even believe that. That pictures he took could save you? But they didn’t save him?”

  “He wasn’t a spy, Karin,” said Martijn. “He was helping the government to get information. That was good. We needed to know. Your father was doing the kind of work he wanted to do—to help reveal the truth.”

  “But the jihadists found out and that’s why they killed him?” she said.

  “Not exactly,” said Martijn. “No.”

  “Then what?”

  “Your father’s work revealed something that the Dutch government didn’t really want to know. Something sensitive, that they didn’t want him to share with the public.”

  Karin understood all of a sudden why her father had been so anxious for months before he was killed. How he couldn’t sleep, and she would hear him wandering around in the living room in the middle of the night. Maybe why he’d been drinking all the time. He’d told her that he was going back to Syria and that he had to “make something right.” Then he’d insisted on coming out here, to the forest, to photograph the mouflons one more time. It had seemed a little weird then—he hadn’t even been trying to sell his nature photographs to National Geographic anymore. But it was time they could be together, and alone, and that was what made it special.

  Maybe even then, she thought, he’d known that if he went back someone would try to kill him. Maybe even then he’d thought it was the last time he would be able to share with Karin. Maybe he had wanted to get out here to bury something—could that be? Could it be that this sharp-edged box she could feel with just the tips of her fingers, in the hollow at the base of this tree, was what he had hidden? What Martijn was looking for?

  “He told you the photos were here?” Karin said.

  “He said he buried them in a place he loved.”

  Karin thought this over. That was her father. She knew he was like that. He might say something like that, a kind of riddle.

  She remembered what her father had told her that last day when they were here, in this park, on their last camping trip before he died. “Life gets too complicated sometimes,” he’d said. “You think you’re doing the right thing, but it turns out you’re on the wrong side. And then you have to find your way back.”

  Karin looked at Martijn’s face and saw that he was paler than pale. He was a ghost. She figured it out. He had followed her here because he believed that her father had already told her where he buried the photographs. He thought she would lead him to this place. He had planned this all along. He had come on this dropping with her to…to…get it back. And now they were here, and without trying to—she was pretty sure now—she had actually found what he was searching for.

  It was all so creepy and terrifying. Who had he been all this time? Did he ever love her mother? Did he ever want to be her stepdad? Or had all of this been an act for the last few years? Was everything about him just completely phony?

  “You didn’t work for the government,” she said. “You had him killed, didn’t you? It was you.”

  His pale face glowed in the dark, and he shook his head slowly. Something about him no longer looked like he felt bad about anything, or like he was trying to convince her of something.

  “Why? Why isn’t anyone there at the campsite?” she asked. “I thought you said they were already tucked into their sleeping bags. Why isn’t anyone there yet?”

  Chapter 28

  Search Party

  Police vehicles had assembled in the south parking lot of the Hoge Veluwe National Park, encircling the meth camp. The parents had been called; the Scout program had been informed; an Amber Alert had been sent out across the Netherlands, just in case. But the investigation was centered around the grimy, soiled, chemical-smelling, drug-cooking lab in the forest.

  It was no longer the middle of the night—it was now nearing dawn. Calls to Martijn were all unanswered; Rutger still hadn’t heard from Riekje, Lotte, or Margot. Every minute that passed, Grace knew, was another minute that threatened the life of her daughter. Whoever had been at this meth lab camp could have attacked all of them, could have put her, and the others, in the back of a van and sped off with them, maybe even to another country by now. Where had they gone, and who had taken them?

  The police detective in charge, a tall man with a dour expression affixed to his chiseled, serious face, approached Grace and introduced himself. “I’m Detective Ricardo van Dijk, and we’re going to get this situation under control as quickly as possible,” he assured her. “To make it simple for you, I’m your point of contact. You can call me Dick. Anything you need, come to me. Anything you need to share, tell
me. I’ll keep you apprised of our progress every step of the way. I promise that we will do our utmost to resolve this and get your daughter back to you. I understand how scary it can be when children go missing. We need to act fast.”

  This Dick van Dijk didn’t look anything like the Dick Van Dyke of Grace’s youth, he of Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. This Ricardo had caramel-colored skin and striking, pale blue eyes, which she guessed suggested Dutch and Surinamese heritage. There was something Dick Van Dyke avuncular about him, though. He had a calm, comforting energy and seemed to be someone she could trust to handle things, in spite of the militaristic staccato of his speech.

  He informed her that the other parents were on their way here. His men would sweep the area of the meth camp in search of useful clues as to the whereabouts of Karin and anyone else who had been staying in the vicinity. He said that other agents were being sent out to patrol the rest of the park.

  While waiting for the cops to arrive, Grace and Maaike had already scoured every bit of ground around the tarp. They’d found Karin’s black jeans and a blue sweatshirt, and a pair of her socks with giraffes on the side, covered in mud. That alone had been unnerving. At first, she’d been afraid that she would discover Karin’s body somewhere in the mud, and her heart had raced and raced, but it seemed they had covered the entire area and there were no human bodies. Only lots of chemicals and plastic garbage.

  “My suspicion is that your daughter was not here long,” Detective van Dijk said, confirming what she already suspected was true.

  “Why do you think that?” asked Grace.

  “All that’s here is her backpack and its contents. My gut tells me she was robbed, not kidnapped, and that her backpack may have been stolen from her elsewhere, somewhere on the trail over there. I’ve sent some men to scour that area for clues.”

  He was trying to calm her, but the word “kidnapped” traveled up her spine like an electrical current and reverberated.