You'll Thank Me for This Page 20

  Martijn looked up at the girls, a trickle of blood falling from his forehead toward his eyebrows. He almost raised a hand to wipe it away. Margot raised the rock even higher. “Don’t you even try it,” she said. “Don’t you even think about moving.”

  Chapter 34

  Arrival

  Bands of deep pink and pale yellow spread like ribbons across the tops of the trees as Detective van Dijk’s sedan finally slowed. Grace could see that the helicopter was already descending, while the detective’s police radio started buzzing and pinging. “We’ve got eyes on some figures in the park,” she heard someone say through the static of the machine. “Landing. Over.”

  Detective van Dijk grabbed the radio off his belt and spoke into it. “I’ve got eyes on you. We’ll meet you in the clearing. Over.” They could see it all happening in front of them. There in the distance. Karin was standing on a hilltop, with her back to them, and beside her was Margot. Grace could see Margot drop a very large rock from her hand to the ground, and the two girls embraced. They held on to each other tightly as the helicopter descended, whipping the sand and their hair up around them, so they seemed like they were standing in the midst of a typhoon.

  Revving the engine so that he could drive up through the heath, the detective made eye contact with Grace, maybe to remind her that he was breaking all the park’s driving rules to get her there as fast as he could. Then, when the sedan wouldn’t drive any farther, he put it in neutral and nodded to her so she could jump out.

  Grace opened the car door and starting running toward Karin before her feet even hit the ground. As she mounted the hill, she saw that a third figure was there, below them, lying immobilized in the sand. It had to be Martijn, who was seeming defeated. These two little girls had somehow taken him down on their own, and they were standing over him, and he was either unconscious or dead. As much as she wished him dead now, she hoped, for Karin’s sake, that he was merely incapacitated. She felt a surge of pride in her chest as she ran higher, toward her daughter.

  “Karin! Karin!” Grace was shouting, and that old response came to her call:

  “Mom! Mom!” Karin cried out, turning and seeing her mother. Then she was leaping across the sand dunes, running down the hill and away from the helicopter, until she had reached her mother.

  Grace held out her arms and Karin plunged into them, pressing her head against her mother’s chest. Holding each other, they both began to weep. “I love you, I love you, I love you,” Grace said, over and over, as she held Karin as close as she could, feeling the soft curve of her small back, touching her hair, stroking her neck. She stopped and pushed Karin away to look her daughter in the eyes. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, Karin,” she was saying. “I didn’t know he was like this. I figured it out too late.” She kissed her repeatedly on the face.

  Even though Karin’s eyes were red and wet with tears, she looked all right. She looked okay. “It’s okay, Mom. It wasn’t your fault,” Karin said. “I’m okay. I’m all right. I’m not hurt. We stopped him!”

  Now they were clutching each other again and crying. “I love you so much, I love you so much,” Grace was saying. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. I just wish you didn’t have to go through this. It was so terrible. I should not have let you go alone. I have been trying to find you for hours…”

  “I love you, Mom,” said Karin. “It was Martijn. It was Martijn. It was all him.”

  There was a great deal of movement around them. The helicopter roared as it landed and sprayed sand all over the place. They covered their eyes and held each other against the wind. At the same time, they could hear the sound of an ambulance and police sirens in the distance. The cavalry was arriving. The reporters would be clambering up the hill soon.

  Grace pulled Karin closer and spoke into her ear. “Did he do anything to you? Did he touch you? Did he—”

  “No, he hurt Margot, but not me. He hit her on the head with a rock. He tied me to a tree and tried to get me to tell him something that Dad told me. But I didn’t know what he was talking about. He said he was looking for some photographs. I don’t know why.”

  As she said this, Karin realized that the metal box was still in her jacket pocket. But where was her jacket? She needed to find it—before everyone got there and took her away. “Mom,” she said, “I need you to help me. We need to find my jacket—it has the photographs in them. It’s somewhere here, I’m sure. Somewhere right around here.”

  Detective van Dijk approached and introduced himself to Karin, who immediately hugged him. “You helped my mom find me,” she said.

  He nodded, with humility. “Your mom did the hard part,” he shouted above the din. “I’m going to need to talk to you shortly,” he added. “Ask you some questions. But first I need to deal with your stepfather. You’ll excuse me.”

  “Karin thinks there is important evidence somewhere here,” Grace said. “We need to find it before we go anywhere. It’s in her jacket, which she says is somewhere around here.”

  The detective said he would instruct some of the other officers to help them search for it. Police officers were already surrounding Martijn, lifting him to his feet and putting him into handcuffs. The helicopter had finally landed, and more vehicles were parking at the base of the hill.

  Karin took her mother’s hand and they began looking through the grass to try to find the jacket. “Why did he do it, Mom? Do you know why?”

  “I don’t know, Karin. I wish I knew. I don’t understand what he wanted,” she said. “It’s a puzzle with a lot of missing pieces. But I guess you know a little bit and I know a little bit, and perhaps together we can figure it out. Karin,” she added, stopping to look her daughter in the eyes. “I want you to understand that I didn’t know until yesterday that he was dangerous. Maybe I had a feeling, somehow, but I kept hoping it wasn’t true. I finally figured it out, but by then you were already in danger. I just want you to know that I never, ever, ever wanted that to happen.”

  Karin began to cry. “But, Mom, he’s been hurting you,” she said. “He’s been hurting you since we moved in together. Don’t you think that hurt me?”

  “Oh God,” said Grace. “I thought you didn’t know. I thought it was only me. I didn’t think…I just didn’t want it to be true. I didn’t want to admit it, even to myself. But it’s true. And it’s over now. It’s over. He won’t be able to hurt you anymore. I promise.”

  “Or you.” Karin looked her mother sternly in the eyes. “Or you, Mom. I need you to be okay too.”

  “Yes, of course. He’s going to be out of both of our lives. We’ll make sure that he is put away, far away. And we will start over.”

  An ambulance had parked at the bottom of the hill, and now there were more people in uniform climbing up the sand dunes toward them. They’d take over from here. They’d want to ask questions. They’d want to see Karin, get her to a hospital. That was what was next.

  They needed to find that jacket first.

  Grace looked up to notice Detective van Dijk standing not far off from where they were, holding on to Margot, talking to her. He had a mild look of satisfaction on his face, just barely recognizable, and Grace felt again a pang of gratitude toward this man who had helped her get her daughter back.

  Karin pulled away—not far, but it suddenly sent Grace’s heart racing again—and she pointed to a spot in the grass. “I see it,” she said. “My jacket is right over there.” She ran to it, picked it up and dusted the sand off, and then slipped her hand into the pocket. She pulled out a small metal box, and held it up in the air.

  Chapter 35

  Aftermath

  Grace and Karin sat together on a wooden bench in the wide marble-floored hallway of the International Criminal Courthouse in The Hague, their hands clasped together in a shared prayer. On either side of them were Jenny and Maaike, who had stayed in touch since the dropping.

  Ten months had passed since that frightening night, and the two of them were back in The Hague for the fi
rst time since they had stayed with Jenny in late October last year. It seemed like ages ago, and then again it seemed like it was just yesterday.

  They had survived, recovered to a certain extent, and gone back to their lives—though they were new lives, not the old ones. They had moved out of Martijn’s house and into an apartment of their own in Amsterdam, and they had gotten a dog—a big cuddly Great Dane. Jasper and Frank had gone to live with their mom, and Martijn had gone to jail.

  In spite of everything that had happened, Karin had insisted on continuing with the Scouts and was going on another dropping this summer, because she reasoned that she would have had a good time if Martijn hadn’t “ruined everything.” She finally wanted to have the dropping she had planned for. Anyway, she said, she wanted to work her way up to being one of the program leaders, later. She still believed that people could learn a lot from putting themselves out in nature.

  While they tried to live their private lives, they sometimes saw what had happened to them, and how other people saw it, by watching the news. Their story had been shown pretty much everywhere, with the dramatic helicopter rescue captured by the news crews that morning as the main clip. That was funny because actually the helicopter had flown off without them, and they’d just gone in the ambulance to the hospital.

  All three girls had been quite shaken up, but they weren’t badly injured. With the cut on Margot’s head, her sleep had to be monitored for a few days, but she was okay in the end. Martijn had hit both Lotte and Margot with a rock—probably the same rock—but aside from that, they were unscathed. He had only wanted to get Karin alone, it seemed, and that’s what he had succeeded in doing.

  Grace and Karin had arrived at the court very early that morning, two hours before the hearing was supposed to start, in order to get inside the big mirrored-glass building before the news vans arrived, blocking the doors and bombarding them with questions. They were pretty used to that kind of treatment by now. They’d been through this a few times already, first after Pieter’s death abroad and then repeatedly since the dropping, so they knew a few strategies for getting away from reporters. But now, via their phones, they could watch as the news started running updates from somewhere outside this enormous building.

  There was a sound of clacking on the marble—sturdy high heels moving down the nearly empty corridor—and they both glanced up to see Lily Oppenbauers approaching. Ms. Oppenbauers, all six foot two of her, was the public prosecutor for the case against Martijn. She was a strikingly thin woman with a narrow face and high, angular cheekbones who looked like a fit model for the skirted suit she was wearing. Grace had once joked to Karin that they could precast her in the role of herself in the movie version of their story.

  They had been doing that a lot lately—casting people in the movie they imagined being made about their lives. It seemed to be a useful coping mechanism that helped them both process the whole horrible experience. They had already cast Kristen Stewart as Karin and Sophia Loren in the role of Grace—it was all a fictional exercise, so it didn’t matter if the casting made any sense—although Grace guessed a better choice as mom would probably be Pamela Adlon.

  Looking at Ms. Oppenbauers, though, Karin didn’t laugh. She just gazed up aghast, with a dropped jaw, like she was seeing a giant. Well, teenage girls needed strong women to look up to these days, thought Grace, and some of them should look really good.

  “Good morning, ladies,” Ms. Oppenbauers said in English, with a comically thick Dutch accent, arriving in front of them at their bench. “How are you both feeling today? Are you ready to kijk sam ass?” She was trying her best to sound like someone out of an American television show, but it came out rather hilarious. They all laughed.

  “I’m ready,” Karin volunteered. “I’m ready to kick some, er, arse…,” she said, glancing at her mother to be sure this curse, in this case, was allowed.

  Grace had no role in today’s proceedings, but Karin had one. This was the first of two cases Martijn was going to have to face—the “attack in the Veluwe,” as they were calling it, was a local criminal case, and the larger case in the International Criminal Court about his role in the Syrian Salafist group scandal. That one centered on the photographs Pieter had taken—the ones on the memory stick in the little box Karin had managed to retrieve in the Veluwe. How strange it was, the way life worked out.

  Karin and Grace had tried to piece together what happened to Martijn in Syria, but neither of them had understood the full story. Once the photographs were released, however, it all became very clear very quickly. What they showed was Martijn in the company of Salafi jihadist rebels in Syria, a crucial bit of evidence in a case claiming he had been collaborating with the jihadist group, a betrayal of Dutch government mandates.

  Martijn had not hired Pieter to take photographs, it turned out. Pieter had discovered what was going on and had managed to document it. He had been planning to publish the photographs and expose Martijn as the liaison for the group—a group Martijn had convinced the Dutch government to support. Martijn had found out just in time and stopped Pieter from taking the images to the news agencies by paying him off. Pieter had agreed to the deal, apparently unable to say no to the money—but he had also insisted that if he died, the payout would be made to his widow and daughter. Did Pieter worry that, after what he’d uncovered, the rebels would have him killed anyway? Grace still didn’t know the answer to that question.

  But finally, that at least provided Grace with an explanation for the money they had received through Martijn after Pieter’s death. The fact that Pieter had been willing to take a bribe and withhold important evidence of an international scandal seemed…well, unlike Pieter. But Grace knew he’d faced a difficult choice. Maybe she would find out more information about him—as Martijn had evidently tried to do—by looking into his old files, going back to the days in South Africa.

  Grace would have to reconcile this new image of her first husband with the one she had built up around him since his death, but at least it helped her think of him as a fallible human rather than a martyr. Thinking of him that way would be good for Karin too, for whom all of this was much harder and would involve many conversations, she guessed, over many years. Their lives would never be simple or easy.

  Anyway, it seemed that Martijn’s accounting firm had always been a front for his illegal operations. He’d indeed inherited it from his father, but he barely did real financial work there. Still, it had come in handy when he needed to give Grace the payout.

  Although she had refused contact with him after his arrest in the Veluwe, Martijn had written Grace a letter. In it, he had tried to explain what happened to him. He wrote, “You may think now that everything between us was a lie, but it wasn’t. From the moment I met you at Pieter’s memorial service, I was already in love with you. When you came to my office that first time, I told myself not to get involved, but I realized how much I had done to destroy your world, and I wanted to help. At first, it was that. And then I just wanted you to be my wife. I wanted to make things better for you.”

  But as their lives progressed, he had realized the walls were caving in on him. Some other reporters had been sniffing around the situation in Syria and the government’s support of the Salafists. And maybe Martijn had started to worry that Pieter somehow had gotten the photographs out, in spite of the payoff and the secrecy. He had tried to find out what he could about Pieter, but he couldn’t find all of what he needed to know. He became convinced that he had to destroy the photos to be safe and to be able to escape prosecution.

  “It was my stress,” he wrote to Grace, “that made me turn angry and aggressive. I never wanted to hurt you or Karin—that was never my intention.”

  What did it matter now? thought Grace. It didn’t matter. She just wanted to try to forget everything that had happened and move on with her life. Her recovery was a small part of it, but her focus now was on Karin. She’d lost her father to violence, and she’d been a victim of an assault by h
er stepfather. How would she ever trust men again? What could Grace do to help her daughter go out into the world without feeling terrified or suspicious? These were the things they had to work through now. They had counselors, they had friends, they had a lot of attention from all kinds of professionals, if they wanted it. But for the moment, they first had to get through this.

  Grace had done her best to keep her daughter out of the media storm so Karin could recover emotionally, get on with school, and try to find her way back to a normal life. This was the first time they would see Martijn in person, hopefully just briefly, since the dropping. Karin, although scared to death of this moment, had also been looking forward to it as a time when she could take the power back into her hands. That was important. Her mother, still holding Karin’s hand, gave it a hard squeeze.

  Ms. Oppenbauers had instructed her in what to do. All that was expected of her today was to explain how she had found in the woods the box that contained the memory stick. Well, of course, it wasn’t all that simple. But the evidence she had provided to the court was essential to the prosecution. And she had to answer a few questions about how she had obtained it. Martijn would be in the courtroom, but Grace had told her that she didn’t have to look at him, didn’t have to point him out, didn’t have to interact with him at all. Karin understood.

  Grace hadn’t always been viewed favorably by the prosecutorial team. At first, Ms. Oppenbauers had her held and questioned as a possible accomplice, because the link between her first husband and her second had been strong. It was hard for them to understand why she hadn’t known about it. But it didn’t take long for the prosecutor’s office to believe her, especially after Detective van Dijk explained how the events in the park had unfolded. She had also promised to share everything she had with them—which she soon discovered was quite a lot.