“Maybe,” Jan replied.

“I think I’ll go do that now. It’ll cheer me up.”

“Okay,” Anna said. She followed Ellen into the house.

Ellen went into the house, her head down. She sat at the table with a paper and pencil. “Province of Utrecht.” How could she let her parents know?

When they had finished dinner that night, Ellen got out her letter and showed it to Jan. She had addressed an envelope as well. “Here’s my letter. You can read it. I followed all the rules.”

Jan looked at the letter.

“Will you send it? I’ll give you the money for a stamp.”

“We’ll see,” Jan replied.

“Here’s eighty cents.” Ellen took a small coin purse out of her backpack and counted out the coins. “We need to talk about an allowance. If I’m still here by Saturday, I think you should pay me an allowance.”

“You’re not serious,” Hans said.

“I get eleven Euros a week at home. I do a lot more chores here than I do at home.”

“Don’t you have homework to do now?” Hans asked.

“You sound like my Dad. He doesn’t even let me digest my food.” She turned to Anna. “Men,” she said, shaking her head as she got up from the table.

That night Jan re-read Ellen’s letter, just to be certain. It looked harmless enough.

Without telling anyone, he mailed it the next day.

The letter arrived on Saturday afternoon.

When Kevin pulled up in front of the house from a bicycle ride, Diane called to him from the door. “We got a letter from Ellen!”

Kevin dropped his bike and ran inside.

There was an envelope on the table, in Ellen’s handwriting, but with no return address. The postmark was again from Amsterdam. This time there was no demand from the kidnappers, just a short letter from Ellen:

Dear Mom and Dad,

I miss you very much. Don’t worry about me. I am being taken care of and am fine. I’m keeping up with my schoolwork, even my Dutch. I’m learning new words such as Ut, which means out, and recht, which means right. I hope that I will see you again soon, but don’t worry.

Love,

Ellen

“Where’s the clue?” Kevin immediately asked Diane.

“I was looking for that myself. Do you think there is something about out and right, like outright, or right out?”

Kevin read and re-read the letter. “I don’t know, but she’s trying to tell us something.” He couldn’t figure out what it was.

“Did you call Detective Weber?”

“Yes.”

“At least Ellen is still okay. It’s her handwriting all right.”

“She seems to be okay, if you can believe the letter. But maybe they are making her write it.”

An hour later Detective Weber arrived. She examined the letter. “This is strange. Why would the kidnappers just let her write home, with no demand or other communication?”

“I was wondering about that myself,” Kevin said. “It seems like they’re taking an unnecessary risk.”

Detective Weber rubbed her chin as she studied the letter. “Up to now they’ve been very professional about everything. I don’t see the purpose in sending this letter.”

“I bet she’s put a clue in this letter,” Kevin said. “I just can’t figure out what it is.”

“I thought it might have something to do with the words ‘out’ and ‘right,’” Diane said. “That’s just kind of out-of-context. She picked those words for a reason.”

“She spelled the word ‘out’ wrong,” Detective Weber observed. “We spell it ‘uit’ in Dutch, not ‘ut’. And she capitalized it. Wait a minute. When you put Ut and recht together, you get Utrecht. We have a province named Utrecht.”

Kevin looked at the letter. “That’s it! How big is the province of Utrecht?”

“Well, the good news is that it’s the smallest province in Holland,” the detective replied. “The bad news is that there are a lot of farms in the province.”

“This narrows it down quite a bit, though, doesn’t it?” Diane asked hopefully.

“It does,” the detective said. “I’m going to get all our manpower over to Utrecht. And I’ll get this letter fingerprinted. Your daughter is quite clever about feeding us information without her captors realizing it.”

Diane and Kevin looked at each other proudly. Could this be the break they needed? They were afraid to get their hopes up too much, but both were ecstatic with the newest developments.

“I still think that Vacinovic is involved in this in some way,” Diane said.

“Would you mind if I contacted him now?” Kevin asked Detective Weber. “If he’s not involved, maybe the secret police have heard something in Serbia that might help your investigation.”

“Go ahead. Our surveillance of him hasn’t paid off. Just let me know in advance when you’re going to meet with him.”

Detective Weber packaged up Ellen’s letter and took it with her to be processed.

“What do we do now?” Diane asked after the detective had left.

“What do you say we take a ride?” Kevin said mischievously.

“You mean to see for ourselves what the province of Utrecht looks like?”

Diane and Kevin got out their map of Holland. The city of Utrecht was located in the center of Holland, about a forty-five minute drive from Wassenaar. Upon arriving in Utrecht, Kevin and Diane visited the VVV, Holland’s tourist agency, and got more detailed maps of the province.

Detective Weber was right, there was a lot of agricultural land in the province. They spent the afternoon driving around the small, country roads peeking down driveways leading to farm after farm.

“This is so frustrating,” Diane said. “I can feel that Ellen is around here somewhere. But how do we figure out where?”

They became more discouraged as they drove on through the province. “We need more clues,” Kevin said. “I hope we hear from Ellen again. She’s gotten us this close.”

When they returned that evening, there was a message from Detective Weber. The police laboratory had found some fingerprints on the letter and envelope.

Most were Ellen’s, but they also developed some adult fingerprints as well. They were checking those prints in their databases.

“What a roller coaster,” Diane said as she slumped on the couch.

Kevin sat down and took her hand. “We know she’s alive. It’s her handwriting on the letter, and it was postmarked yesterday. Thanks to Ellen, we’ve narrowed it down to the province, and we know she’s on a farm. Now we have fingerprints, too.”

“Oh Kevin, it’s been eight days. Can you imagine what she’s going through? She’s never been away from home this long. Who knows the conditions she’s being kept in.”

Kevin tried to picture Ellen on a farm somewhere in the country they’d seen that day. He hoped she wasn’t locked in some cold, drafty barn. The winter temperatures in Holland were hovering below freezing. He hoped she was not sitting somewhere, shivering in the cold.

The next day, Sunday, Diane and Kevin stayed home. Diane finished her brief. It was first-rate. She argued that although evidence of the atrocities against the Serb people were not a justification for war crimes, the evidence was relevant to explain the state of mind of the people who committed the acts.

“While the court may justifiably view the ‘honor of Serbia’ as irrelevant to the question of whether war crimes were committed,” Diane had written, “it is legitimately relevant to the question of whether the crimes were carried out by the highly-trained group of dispassionate warriors commanded by the accused, or passionate and misguided men with whom the accused had no connection and over whom he exercised no control.”

She ended her brief by attaching the note from the kidnappers as an exhibit, and making a personal plea. “The small amount of the court’s time spent on this matter may make a lifetime of difference to our family. Please give us the latitude to present this evidence.”

On Monday morning, the two of them went to court for another week of Draga’s trial. They filed Diane’s brief first thing in the morning, then spent the next five days listening to the testimony of Muslim witnesses who had been subjected to beatings, torture, and rape in the Serb-run camps in Bosnia. Kevin and Diane listened to tale after tale of horrible mistreatment and inhumane abuse.