Girl in the Blue Coat(11)

“Friends?”

“Who are going to help you? Who know about these things?”

Now I’m beginning to understand why Mrs. Janssen came to me. Because she has no idea how illicit activities work. The resistance, the black market—she thinks we’re all one network, sharing information, plotting against the Germans. But what I do for Mr. Kreuk works only because my link in the chain is so small. If I were to be caught and questioned about Mr. Kreuk’s operation, I could say that I didn’t know if he’d involved anyone else, and that would be telling the truth.

I don’t have a resistance network. My profiteering shopkeepers will be useless for this task. I don’t have anything, really, except an imaginary picture of a girl I’ve never seen, who I still haven’t fully promised Mrs. Janssen I’ll find.

“I need to see the hiding space again,” I tell Mrs. Janssen.

She lets me in by unlatching the hidden hook, and then calls after me. “I already looked in here. Before you came, I went through everything yesterday.”

I wait for my eyes to adjust. The space is maybe four feet wide. All but a few inches are taken up by the unfolded opklapbed. I pull back the quilt, examining the sheet below, doing the same for the mattress and pillow. On the narrow shelf, the magazine I’d noticed earlier, an old issue, from before the war. Mrs. Janssen probably had it among Jan’s old things and gave it to Mirjam as something to read.

None of the magazine’s pages have notes or markings on them, but tucked underneath is the latest issue of Het Parool, the paper Mrs. Janssen mentioned giving Mirjam yesterday. People read the resistance papers voraciously, then passed them along. Mrs. Janssen’s neighbor or delivery boy must have given this one to her.

I fold up the opklapbed to look at the floor underneath, peeling back the thin rug.

Nothing. Nothing anywhere.

But what did I expect to find? A letter from Mirjam explaining where she went? A trapdoor, where a Nazi could have sneaked in and carried Mirjam away? When I emerge into the kitchen, rubbing my eyes against the brightness, Mrs. Janssen starts to set out coffee again.

“Is your neighbor across the street home?” I ask her. “Mrs. Veenstra? The one whose son got waylaid?”

“I don’t think so.” She frowns. “Did you want to interview her? She doesn’t know about Mirjam.”

I shake my head. “Stay at your door. And sometime in the next five minutes, open it and come out. Anytime in the next five minutes. Just don’t give me warning when.”

Wrapping my arms around my waist against the cold, I cross the street to the house belonging to Mrs. Veenstra and stand on the steps, my back facing Mrs. Janssen’s home. After a minute it comes: an audible click, followed immediately by a yapping dog. When I turn around, Mrs. Janssen stares at me, confused.

“I don’t understand,” she says when we’re back in the house. “What were you doing?”

“I noticed it earlier when Christoffel left with the opklapbed. Your door is so old and heavy; it can’t be opened without making a sound. And as soon as that dog next door—”

“Fritzi,” Mrs. Janssen supplies. “The neighbor boy’s schnauzer.”

“As soon as that dog hears the door, it starts barking. Even if you were looking in completely the other direction, you would have heard the dog and noticed Mirjam leaving through the front door.”

“That’s what I said.” She’s cross at my conclusion. “I already told you that. She couldn’t have left through that door. And I already looked through Mirjam’s hiding place. You’re wasting time doing things I already did.”

“Did you already find her?” My voice is sharper than it needs to be; I’m covering my inexperience with false confidence. “You keep telling me I’m doing things you already tried, but unless you already found her, I need to see everything with my own eyes. Now, take me to the back door.”

She opens her mouth, probably to tell me again that Mirjam couldn’t have escaped through there because of the inside latch, but then thinks better.

The rear door is a heavy oak, and it’s immediately apparent what she meant by it not closing. Age and the settling of the house have warped the door completely, so that the top half of the door bulges away from the jamb. That’s why Mrs. Janssen has added the latch. It’s heavy, made of iron, and when engaged, it holds the door properly shut. When it’s not engaged, a thin stream of air seeps in through the top.

She’s right. I can’t think of any way that a person could leave through this door and lock the latch behind herself.

Mrs. Janssen is staring at me. I haven’t told her that I’ll help, not officially. And yet I haven’t walked away. It’s so immensely dangerous, much more than anything I’ve allowed myself to do.

But Mrs. Janssen came to me, the way Mr. Kreuk had come to me, and I’m very good at finding things.

I can feel myself getting sucked into this mystery. Maybe because Bas would. Maybe because it’s another way to flout the rules. But maybe because, in a country that has come to make no sense, in a world I cannot solve, this is a small piece that I can. I need to get to Mirjam’s school, the place that might have a picture, the place that might explain who this girl is. Because assuming that Mrs. Janssen is correct in her timeline, assuming the dog always barks when someone leaves, assuming Mirjam couldn’t have gone through the back door, assuming all that is true, it seems this girl is a ghost.