Within seconds he was upon her. Martijn, seemingly out of nowhere, dove at her legs and knocked her down flat on the ground. All the air rushed out of her lungs when she hit the sand. It felt like she had been punched in the back. She couldn’t inhale and she couldn’t exhale for a few terrifying moments.
He climbed on top of her and tried to hold her down. His feet dug into her ankles and his hands pressed into her hands. He was heavy, and strong. Much stronger than she was. Karin struggled to breathe, wheezing through her chest.
Karin looked up and saw the helicopter, which seemed to be flying away, past the clearing. It hadn’t seen her. They hadn’t seen her. They were not coming back. And Martijn had her again.
Karin closed her eyes and tried as hard as she could to breathe. She had so little energy left. Finally, she managed to get some words out. “The box,” she said. “You can have the box. It’s in my jacket pocket. You can have it…” He was pressing her down into the sand and she could feel the ground starting to engulf her.
“What?” he said. “Where?”
“In my jacket pocket,” she said. “You tore it off me. It’s there, I swear. Go look.”
Miraculously, he got off of her and went to look for her jacket. Maybe he knew where he’d left it, maybe he didn’t. It gave her at least a few seconds to get her breath back. She could maybe use that moment to run off again. But she just wanted the helicopter to see her, and save her. “Please!” she cried, turning over and managing to get up onto her knees. “Please! Come back! Don’t leave!”
Just then she heard a scream, loud and piercing, and a thump. She turned and looked where the scream had come from. She watched as Martijn fell to the ground—and behind him, there was Margot. She held a very large rock in her hand. She had somehow managed to hit him on the head with it.
Karin and Margot stared at him as he fell. Then Karin finally got a good look at Margot, because the sun had started to rise. One side of her face was covered in the dried black blood, and she guessed there was a big gash at the temple; a dark purple bruise had started to form near that eye.
Still holding a very large rock in her hand, Margot moved forward, so that she could stand over Martijn, where he had fallen. She held the rock up over his head and stood there menacingly, in case he tried to move again. Karin walked toward them, determined to keep him down if he tried to get up again.
The two girls stood over him as he put a hand to his temple and rolled over and his eyes blinked open. They could hear the chud, chud, chud of the helicopter again, which seemed now to be turning around, over the forest, and heading back in their direction, at last. Karin looked up to see the copter moving slower, and she waved her arms frantically. Margot also started jumping up and down, waving her arms and holding the rock in the air. “Here!” they cried, “Here!” until long after it was clear they didn’t need to do it anymore. Karin started to breathe normally again as her hair began to whip in the wind. She felt relief, seeing the copter descend.
Martijn looked up at the girls, a trickle of blood falling from his forehead toward his eyebrows. He almost raised a hand to wipe it away. Margot raised the rock even higher. “Don’t you even try it,” she said. “Don’t you even think about moving.”
Chapter 34Arrival
Bands of deep pink and pale yellow spread like ribbons across the tops of the trees as Detective van Dijk’s sedan finally slowed. Grace could see that the helicopter was already descending, while the detective’s police radio started buzzing and pinging. “We’ve got eyes on some figures in the park,” she heard someone say through the static of the machine. “Landing. Over.”
Detective van Dijk grabbed the radio off his belt and spoke into it. “I’ve got eyes on you. We’ll meet you in the clearing. Over.” They could see it all happening in front of them. There in the distance. Karin was standing on a hilltop, with her back to them, and beside her was Margot. Grace could see Margot drop a very large rock from her hand to the ground, and the two girls embraced. They held on to each other tightly as the helicopter descended, whipping the sand and their hair up around them, so they seemed like they were standing in the midst of a typhoon.
Revving the engine so that he could drive up through the heath, the detective made eye contact with Grace, maybe to remind her that he was breaking all the park’s driving rules to get her there as fast as he could. Then, when the sedan wouldn’t drive any farther, he put it in neutral and nodded to her so she could jump out.
Grace opened the car door and starting running toward Karin before her feet even hit the ground. As she mounted the hill, she saw that a third figure was there, below them, lying immobilized in the sand. It had to be Martijn, who was seeming defeated. These two little girls had somehow taken him down on their own, and they were standing over him, and he was either unconscious or dead. As much as she wished him dead now, she hoped, for Karin’s sake, that he was merely incapacitated. She felt a surge of pride in her chest as she ran higher, toward her daughter.
“Karin! Karin!” Grace was shouting, and that old response came to her call:
“Mom! Mom!” Karin cried out, turning
