We didn’t miss anything. We looked at every square inch of that barren, sterile room, Mrs. Janssen with her bad eyes and me with my good ones. We saw everything in the room. We just didn’t see everything the right way.
I’m worried for a second that Mrs. Janssen will have thrown away what I’m looking for. But it’s still there, the old issue of Het Parool that Mirjam was reading on the day she disappeared, already growing a little yellow around the edges.
Quickly, I unfold the paper I’ve brought with me from home. Just as I thought, it’s the same one—a back issue from last month. Even though I know both newspapers will be identical on every page, I take Mirjam’s copy back into the kitchen where it’s light, and flip to the same section I’d inadvertently circled while I was making the shoe liners.
“What are you doing?”
“Shhh, I’m trying to think.” I hold up a finger to silence her. Mrs. Janssen had always been so specific about the timeline of Mirjam’s disappearance: Shortly before Mirjam disappeared, Mrs. Janssen brought her this edition of Het Parool. Before, I’d thought of the two events—the newspaper delivery and the disappearance—as completely unrelated to each other. But what if they were a chain reaction, in which one caused the other? What if Mirjam saw something in the paper that caused her to run?
On the first day, when Mrs. Janssen told me about Mirjam’s disappearance, she told me that Mirjam loved to read every line of Het Parool, even the classified advertisements.
My eyes find the item I’d circled back home in my own newspaper copy: a simple three-line notice in the middle of the page.
Elizabeth misses her Margaret, but is glad to be vacationing in Kijkduin.
It can’t be a coincidence. This whole time, I thought I should get in touch with Amalia because she might have a guess about where her friend might have run to. I never suspected that Mirjam would try to run to her. Did Mirjam get on a train bound for Kijkduin?
“Hanneke, tell me,” Mrs. Janssen says. I’d almost forgotten that I was still sitting in her kitchen. “You’ve been staring into space. Tell me! What is going on?”
“I think I know. I think I know what happened.”
The first time I met Elsbeth:
She was seven, I was six. I was crying because it was my first day of school and I didn’t know anyone except a boy who lived in the apartment below me and liked to pull my hair.
She said, “What’s your name?”
I said, “Hanneke.”
She said, “My name is Elsbeth.”
She had a pretty ribbon in her hair, and she took it off and tied it to my braid instead. “You should keep this. It looks better with blond hair anyway,” she said. “And you don’t have to cry about that boy. Boys are silly. The first thing you need is a best friend.”
SEVENTEEN
Stupid. I am stupid. I let my memories of Bas dictate what I thought happened to Mirjam. I’m the one who assumed that if Mirjam ran from a hiding space, it would be because she wanted to be with Tobias. Why didn’t I realize that she could have been running to someone she loved just as much, in a different way?
The wind bites at my neck, down my blouse to my collarbone. I must not have buttoned my coat; it’s flapping wildly behind me as I pedal. I try to gather it around my throat with one hand, but only succeed in veering into the path of an old man. He darts to the side of the road and curses after me.
What happened? Amalia’s parents were going to send her to live with her aunt. That much, Mina had told me. But then what? At some point, once she was already with her aunt, she placed a greeting for her friend in the paper. Did Amalia know Mirjam was hiding at the furniture store? Were they in some sort of communication? Did they plan it out ahead of time, a secret message in the classified section of an underground newspaper? Was that the signal for Mirjam to run—or did she just see this greeting from her old friend, become overwhelmed by emotion, and decide to leave at the last minute?