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

She pulled out a small metal box, and held it up in the air.

Chapter 35Aftermath

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 first 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