Girl in the Blue Coat(70)

Does any of this even matter anyway? There’s a girl who is dead.

“Hello?” Through several walls, I hear the front door creak open and someone call out. “Hello, Mrs. Janssen?”

I rush out of the pantry, hurling the door closed behind me. A young blond woman I’ve never seen before stands in the parlor, dressed in the clothes of a shopgirl or store clerk.

“Can I help you?”

“Oh!” She theatrically puts her hand to her chest. “Where’s Mrs. Janssen?”

“Who are you? What are you doing here?” I say, deciding the best way to avoid answering her question is to ask a ruder one of my own.

“I’m Tessa Koster. I work—I worked—for Mr. Janssen in the furniture shop. The door was ajar. Are you… Mrs. Janssen’s companion?” she guesses.

“Yes. Mrs. Janssen’s not here. Can I help you with something?”

“Oh, no. I came by to drop some things off for Mrs. Janssen, but I’ll come back later when she’s home.”

Tessa Koster smiles, flustered, and as she heads for the door again, I piece it together. The furniture shop employee. The one who was leaving on her honeymoon the day after the raid. “Photographs,” I say. “You brought photographs for Mrs. Janssen, from Mr. Janssen’s back room.”

She looks unnerved that I know this; for all she knows, I’m a spy sent to trap her. “Is Mrs. Janssen coming back soon? I really should talk to her.”

But I’m already shaking my head, looking as sympathetic as I can, because I want her to leave those photographs with me. “I don’t know when she’ll be back. I suppose you could come back tomorrow? You’re brave, walking around with those photographs, though. It sounded like they were sort of”—I bring my voice down to a whisper and continue—“illicit.”

“I’ll—I’ll be fine.”

“Did you ever meet the family who was in hiding?” I ask, letting her see I know more than she guessed I did. “The daughter? Mirjam.”

“No, I didn’t. You knew about that?” She looks back toward the door.

“Are you sure you never saw them? They were there for several months. You must have suspected something.” Mrs. Koster averts her eyes, staring down at the new wedding band on her finger, and I have a new, ugly suspicion.

“Mrs. Koster. Were you the one who told the police that Mr. Janssen was hiding people in his back room? Did you report him to the Nazis?”

“Listen.” Her eyes dart to the side. “I don’t approve of what Mr. Janssen was doing, but I didn’t tell on him. I didn’t even know about it. I came into work, and the raid had already happened. These were in the back room; they had blood on them, so I took them home to clean them up, and then Mrs. Janssen wrote me a letter saying she wanted them. That’s really all the involvement I want to have. Can I leave them with you? And then I don’t have to come back again.”

She digs in her handbag, blond curls falling in her face, and eventually produces a paper envelope. “Here. Take them.”

I pretend to consider it. “Are you sure? You’re not going to wait?”

She thrusts the paper in my hand. “Take them.”

Once I see her out the door, I take the packet of photographs back into the kitchen. I’m not rushing this time. I’m infinitely precise. I’m infinitely patient as I sit down at the table, lay the envelope squarely in front of me, moving with an emotion it takes me a while to identify. Dread.

Most of the blood has been wiped from the photographs; only a few traces remain, making the corners of the pictures stick together when I peel them apart. I lay them one by one in front of me, a row stretching across the table, this gluey narrative of a family and life and death.

Here are Mr. and Mrs. Roodveldt, I presume, cradling a baby in a white dress, behind a table with a cake on it. A birthday. Here’s one from a few years earlier: Mrs. Roodveldt’s bridal portrait, her eyes lowered, a lace veil covering her hair and a small bouquet of lilacs in her hands.

The photographs skip back and forth in years, and the family marches across the kitchen table unstuck from time, beaming at me from their happiest moments. Parties. Holidays. A new apartment, a new baby, a different one from the first time.

And here is one with two teenage girls with their arms around each other. The girl on the left has dark curly hair, a faint birthmark on her chin, and long, lush eyelashes. Her eyes—which I’ve only really seen closed, on Mr. Kreuk’s table—are large and expressive.

The girl on the right is slightly taller, also with dark hair, her mouth open in laughter. She’s wearing a paper birthday crown. I’ve never seen her before.

With shaking hands, I turn the picture over: Amalia and Mirjam at Mirjam’s 14th birthday.





There are so many things I wish I could forget. The hard parts. The nasty injuries, beneath the scarred skin, the things I’d like to disappear by ignoring.




The last time I saw Elsbeth, before I sneaked into her house:

It was a few months after the day in my bedroom when I told her I wished Rolf were dead instead of Bas.

She came to my house again. She had two wedding invitations, one for me and one for my parents. She awkwardly accepted tea from my mother and answered questions about her dress and the flowers at the church. When my mother left us alone “so we could catch up,” Elsbeth turned to me.