You'll Thank Me for This by Nina Siegal (top novels txt) 📗

what she said? “License and registration.” She could read every line in his face, etched with anger. “Now!” he said, without waiting for even a second.

“I’m getting it,” she said, reaching for her purse to get out her license. “Please, Officer, let me explain.”

“Remain silent, please,” he said.

She handed over her license, motioning that she was going to reach into the glove compartment to get the registration, if that was okay with him. With a cop this angry, she didn’t want to make a single false move, gun or no gun.

“Officer, I’m sorry,” she added, handing him the registration.

“I need you to remain silent,” he said again. Grace reasoned that this was more for his sake than for hers, so that he would calm down.

The anger lines in his face began to dissolve into soft, pudgy skin with old acne craters, and a scar on his chin was in the shape of a sickle.

“Ma’am,” he started, “when you hear sirens from a police vehicle, you are required to stop your car on the side of the highway as quickly as possible.” He reminded her, “Attempting to flee will only incur additional fines.”

“I wasn’t trying to flee, Officer,” said Grace. “I didn’t mean to ignore the sirens. I just—”

He didn’t let her finish her sentence. “Where are you from?”

“I don’t live that far from here,” she started. “I was driving down here to see a woman…”

“No, I mean where do you come from? Your accent.”

“Oh,” said Grace, hardly understanding how this could possibly be relevant.

“Are you English?” he said. “England?”

“No, I’m American,” she told him in Dutch. “I’ve been living here already for more than a decade. I—My husband is Dutch.”

The officer glanced quickly at the house behind the car. “Where are you off to in such a hurry?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Officer,” she said, switching to English, since what was the point now of trying to speak in Dutch, which only slowed her down? “My daughter may be missing, and the person who lives in this house found an article of her clothing. That’s why I drove here as fast as I could. It’s no problem for me to pay the speeding ticket if you need to give me one, Officer. I understand that I was driving too fast. But you can’t imagine how frightened I am right now. My daughter is only twelve.”

“This is how the Americans do it,” he said contemptuously. “You just think you can do anything you want and pay your way out of it?”

“No! No, sir. That’s not what I’m saying,” she told him. “It’s just that…it’s an emergency.”

“What kind of emergency?”

“My daughter. Her name is Karin. She’s twelve and she went on a dropping with her Scout academy, here in Ede. I know it may sound stupid. She went into the Veluwe Park with a group of kids, and now she seems to be missing. The Scout leaders say they don’t know where any of the kids are, and my husband, who is supposed to be one of the adult supervisors, isn’t reachable on his phone. This woman called me and said her dog found Karin’s T-shirt, and now I need to get inside that house right there and find out what the hell is going on.”

She regretted cursing, and she realized that she was probably speaking way too fast for the police officer to understand her English anymore. He did pick up on one thing: “She went on a dropping?” he asked. “But you think she’s missing? That’s what a dropping is for, miss, to let the kids get a little bit lost for a while. They always come back safely. She’ll find her way back, don’t worry.”

“No,” said Grace, realizing that for him she was just another American woman who couldn’t grasp the local customs. “No, it’s not like that. It’s really concerning. Maybe you can come into the house with me and talk to the woman here. She can explain…” Grace thought that since the woman who called her was Dutch, that might give her more credence.

“I don’t need an explanation, miss,” he said. “I’m sure there’s nothing at all wrong with your daughter. She is having a good time with her friends and she’ll be back tomorrow or the next day. We’ve seen lots of these droppings in the forest. The parents are a lot more freaked out than the kids are, especially the parents who aren’t Dutch. I don’t mean to be…to discriminate. I’m not sure of the word. We Dutch people do this all the time. She’ll be having the time of her life, I promise you.”

Grace could see that she wasn’t going to be able to convince this man that the situation with Karin was serious. Anyway, he was just wasting her time at this point. She needed to get inside that house and talk to the woman who had called her. She didn’t need to keep sharing information with this idiot.

“I’m going to have to give you a ticket,” the cop said, drawing an electronic device out of his holster that looked like a video-game console.

“Great. Thanks,” she said, as if she’d been waiting for this all day.

He tapped information into the console in a process that seemed interminable. He needed to scan her registration, fill in her phone number, her email address, her home address. How hard could it be to just tap in the fee and give her a receipt? “Do you want my bank card?” she asked. “I can pay it right away.”

“No,” he said absently, filling out his digital form. “It’ll be sent to your home address and you can pay on our website.”

“Great,” she said. “Are we, um, done?”

He paused now, looking at her. It was as if he wanted to prolong the interaction as much as humanly possible, thought Grace. “There’s probably some logical, simple explanation for what you’re concerned about,” he offered, speaking again in Dutch. “I know mothers can sometimes get very worried about