Free The Tulip Eaters by Antoinette van Heugten Page B

closely.
    “Damn!” Her hands shook so that the beam of light skittered wildly. She gripped it tighter and looked again. The card was dated July 1945 and stated that Anneke was born in 1920. It had an arresting illustration at the top, a black-and-red flag with a triangle in the center. The emblem of the Dutch lion with sword and arrows stood in front of a blue-and-white shield. Nora felt confused. She knew what the Dutch flag looked like, and this was not it. But it was the words in flamboyant print underneath that caused her to gasp. “Nationale-Socialistische Beweging.”
    “What?” she whispered. “The NSB? ” She knew enough Dutch history to know that during the war, this was the reviled organization of the Dutch Nazis. “No!” she cried out. “It can’t be!” She dropped the stack of papers as if they were coiled rattlesnakes.
    Her mother an NSB-er? A Dutch Nazi? The one thing Anneke had told Nora when she had asked about the war was that she had fought for the resistance. Nora strained to process this new information, to see where its edges might fit into the puzzle about Anneke’s murder and Rose’s kidnapping.
    She snatched up the documents and peered at the card again. It was incomprehensible! The print before her eyes shimmered and rippled, a mirage in the desert. Dizziness filled her head as she felt the flashlight slip. Her sweaty forehead fell into her filthy hands.
    She sat back and stared at the brown dust that had sprinkled over the documents, the lockbox and her hands. What did all this mean? Who was her mother? A hero fighting the Germans or a fanatic Dutch Nazi carrying out Hitler’s version of the New Order?
    Moments later, she raised her head. She had to go on. With shaky hands, she laid the first page on the floor and picked up the second. It bore an ornate wax stamp. She picked up the flashlight and examined it, some kind of legal document so translucent and brittle it could have been an ancient scroll. The bloodred seal cracked in two as she raised the paper into the watery beam of light. A small photo of her father as a young man was stapled to the right corner. Unaccustomed to the legalistic Dutch, it took her a while to make out the gist of it.

    In the Name of Her Royal Highness
    Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands,
    This action is hereby brought against the Dutch Citizen hereinafter named
    HANS ALBERTUS MARTINUS MOERVELD
    For the Murder of
    ABRAM DAVID ROSEN
    By virtue of the Complaint sworn to before
    The Royal Court on this
    Sixteenth Day of September
    In the Year
    Nineteen Hundred and Forty-Five
    * * *
    Nora gasped. Her eyes flew to the middle of the page, where the charge was stated in bold print, along with the Oordeel, the Court’s decision. Only two words.

    WAR CRIMINAL

    And the Vonnis, the sentence.
    DEATH.

8
    Nora stared at the paper, the words blurred. Finally, she calmed herself enough to focus. Her father’s real surname must have been Moerveld. And the paper stated he had been tried in absentia for murder. Tears of disbelief fell onto her cheeks. Her father—a murderer? Of a Jewish man during wartime?
    “No, Papa, no!” she whispered. It couldn’t be. Imagining him, she saw a gentle smile on his face as she sang “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” for her first-grade class at Poe Elementary; felt his strong arms pick up her bruised body from the street the first time he tried to teach her to ride a two-wheeler; the cozy comfort as she sat on his lap as he read La Fontaine to her. Whoever the man described in this document, it was not—could not—be her father.
    And Abram Rosen, who was he, and why would Papa be accused of killing him? The attic air choked her. No, no, no! She could not accept this. Wiping her eyes, she looked at the last line of the document and that one, black, irrevocable word: Death.
    She glanced through the remaining papers and then folded them into a clumsy parcel. She would take them downstairs to Marijke. She felt a new stab at their