Both men finally quieted down, focusing again on their guardsman duties. I waited quietly nearby, shining my flashlight out into the grove, looking for more holes in the ground. I felt hopeful that we would find something, but despite my searching and the efforts of both Mike and the technician, they couldn’t find any special evidence in this area either, nothing except that which we had originally observed, the tended and raked ground.
We continued on toward the German Gate. As we walked I began picking the brains of the two gardeners, wondering if perhaps the Fishing Tree had received its name not from the quote on its nearby metal marker, but instead for some horticultural reason. The two men tossed around ideas for a while, but they couldn’t come up with anything.
“No ‘catfish rose’ or ‘trout vine’ or anything like that?” I pressed.
Charlie replied that fish heads and fish powder were sometimes used as fertilizer, but otherwise he couldn’t think of any plant or tree that had “fish” in its name. Rip said something about it was ringing a bell, and he offered to look at his gardening books at home and let us know.
“I think you’re both barking up the wrong tree,” Charlie quipped, making us smile.
Our smiles faded as we neared our destination: the German Gate.
As children we had always avoided this area, not liking the violent and dark poetry on the markers here or even the trees themselves. Unlike the rest of the grove, which featured a wide variety of tree types, the ones on the other side of the German Gate were all the same kind, beech trees I think, and they had been planted in straight, tight rows, like soldiers standing at attention.
Unlike the rest of the grove, which mimicked its German original, this section had been entirely of my grandfather’s design. If the grove was shaped as a sort of long oval, this section was a bulge on the outside of that oval. The gate was closed, blocking the entrance to the bulge, though of course all one needed to do to get into it was walk around the gate. Its lettering faced inward, into the grove, the words “Jedem das Seine” spelled out in a stark, art deco style amid the wrought iron, crisscross pattern of the massive doors.
Taking it all in, as an adult I could appreciate the symmetry of the creation, but I still didn’t like it. Standing there, playing our lights along the closed gate and the rows of trees beyond, it struck me that I should get more information about why my grandfather had decided to add this extra part to the grove. Maybe my father would know, or my grandmother. I should ask, as well, where the quotes on the markers among the beech trees had come from. Though the quotes in the rest of the grove had been pulled from The Metamorphoses, the ones in the bulge beyond the German Gate were from some other source, and now I wanted to know what that source was.
Even on this side of the gate, though, where the quotes were still from Ovid, the choices were strangely disturbing. Looking down, I read the one nearest to where we stood:
Immediately every kind of wickedness erupted
into this age of baser natures:
truth, shame, and honour vanished;
in their place were fraud, deceit, and trickery,
violence and pernicious desires.
Next to that was my least favorite of all, because it was surely one of the ones that had started rumors in the past:
He himself ran in terror, and reaching the silent fields
howled aloud, frustrated of speech.
Foaming at the mouth, and greedy as ever for killing,
he turned against the sheep, still delighting in blood.
His clothes became bristling hair, his arms became legs.
He was a wolf, but kept some vestige of his former shape.
There were the same grey hairs, the same violent face,
the same glittering eyes, the same savage image.
“These markers are freaky,” Charlie said, reading another one out loud. “‘Her sons’ dreadful bodies drenched Earth with streams of blood’? What’s up with that?”
“Yeah, how about this one?” Rip replied from the other side of the path. “‘These progeny were savage, violent, and eager for slaughter, so that you might know they were born from blood.’ Good grief.”
“Guys, come on,” Mike scolded. “Stay on task here.”
Both men snapped back to attention, but as they focused on their duties as watchmen, they asked me to read them some more.
“Here’s the one closest to the gate: ‘War came, waving clashing arms with bloodstained hands.’”
Rip shook his head.
“I gotta say, this Ovid fellow was one dark guy.”
He wasn’t the only one, I thought. Watching the technician pull out his tools and go to work checking for fingerprints on the gate latch, all I knew for sure was that my simple, Amish-raised grandfather had grown up to become one very odd, very complicated fellow. No wonder people thought this place was haunted.
“What do the words in the gate mean?” Mike asked, shining his light on them. “Jedem das Seine? Is that German?”
“Yes. I don’t speak German myself, but Jonah says it means ‘To each his own’ or something like that. Why those particular words on this particular gate, I have no idea.”
Mike kept looking at it and squinting.
“I’ve seen this before,” he said slowly. “Somewhere else, in a photograph or something. Not necessarily with trees around it, but this gate…I’ve seen a picture of a gate that looks just like this one.”
I could tell he was trying hard to remember where, so I didn’t speak. Instead, I simply waited in the darkness beside him, hoping that by figuring that out, he might shed some light on why it had been put here and if that could relate in any way to the family diamonds or to Troy’s death. All five of us were silent, the night deathly quiet around us. Even the crickets didn’t chirp here. The only sound was the wind rustling the branches above. Finally, Mike shook his head and said he couldn’t remember but it might come to him later.
Suddenly, I spotted movement from the corner of my eye, beyond the rows of beech trees on the other side of the gate. Rip saw it too, and before I had even gasped, his gun was up, pointed and cocked, and he had taken cover behind a nearby tree.
Seeing what was happening, Mike and Charlie drew their guns as well, Mike moving toward me in one fluid motion and pulling me with him behind another tree. It wasn’t wide enough for both of us, so rather than leaving him exposed, I silently moved on to the next tree and crouched down, watching to see what would happen. By that point, we had all managed to take cover except for the technician, who had simply hit the dirt at the base of the gate and lay still.
Seeing the man trapped there, exposed and without cover, Mike whispered sharply for all of us to turn off our flashlights. The figure was beyond the reach of our beams anyway, so we did as he said. Once my eyes adjusted to the new darkness, I was relieved to see that the technician, dressed all in black, nearly disappeared from view.
No one fired. No one even spoke. Instead we all simply waited and watched, frozen, peering through the night at what had emerged from the shadows and seemed to hover there in the distance at the crest of the hill. Clad in a long, white flowing gown, the slim, diaphanous figure moved silently beyond the trees through the mist. Holding my breath, I tried to understand what I was seeing. I just hoped, more than anything, that it was an actual person and not what it really looked like.
A ghost.
ELEVEN
After a moment the figure in the distance moved downward into the hollow, disappearing from view. Waiting to see if it would emerge, I began to wonder if by thinking it was a ghost that I was doing the exact thing Mike said people tended to do, see what the eyes were expecting to see rather than what really was.
Human or not, there was no doubt that someone or something was out there.
“I’m going in,” Rip whispered, and he began to move quietly in that direction, around the side of the closed gate and into the beech trees, zigzagging from tree to tree for cover.
If I’
d had one of my guns with me, I would have gone too—not because I’m foolhardy or especially brave, but simply because the thought of being proactive was far less frightening to me than staying put and waiting to see what would happen next. Charlie whispered he was going in as well, but before he got very far a light suddenly appeared in the distance, in almost the same exact spot where the figure had first emerged. Moving along eerily in the silence, the light reached the crest of the hill and paused for a long moment, but rather than following along down into the hollow, it seemed to change course and come toward us instead. Hovering just a few feet off the ground, the yellowish glow dimmed and brightened as it floated closer.
The light finally came to a stop about fifteen feet beyond the gate. We waited, guns drawn and ready, my heart pounding furiously in my chest.
“Who goes there!” Rip suddenly demanded from his hiding place up ahead. The beam of his flashlight burst to life from among the beech trees, illuminating the path where the light was hovering.
We all flipped ours back on as well and pointed them toward the same spot, beams meeting in the center like spokes to an axle. What our illumination revealed wasn’t some otherworldly creature. It was simply a man, holding a lantern.
“I am Jonah Coblentz,” the man called. “Is everything all right?”
“Jonah!” I cried, relief flooding my veins. “It’s me! Sienna! Your cousin Sienna!”
Even as the men were already lowering their weapons, I called out to them that it was okay and not to shoot. Making my way toward Jonah—around the gate, through the trees, and back onto the path as quickly as possible—all I could think of was how grateful I was that these officers of the law had had the presence of mind not to shoot too soon.
“Sienna!” Jonah exclaimed as I reached him. “What are you doing out here?”
“At the moment I’m thanking the Lord you didn’t get shot!”
I threw my arms around him and held on tight. He tried to hug me in return, but with a lantern in one hand and a rifle in the other, it was a little awkward.
Releasing our embrace, I stepped back and looked at his familiar face. Though I hadn’t seen my cousin for almost a year, not since a visit last Christmas, in the lamplight he looked exactly the same, and I told him so.
“Except maybe the beard is another inch longer,” I added. Like all Amish men, he had stopped shaving everything but his upper lip the day he got married. That had been eight or nine years ago, and every time I saw him he looked more and more like his father.
In the midst of our little reunion, Mike came around the gate and joined us, asking Jonah if someone else had been with him.
“Jah, that is my wife, Liesl.”
Pointing my flashlight toward the place where the white figure had disappeared, I saw that it was back again, much closer now and peeking out from behind a tree. It really was Liesl, and though she waved at me enthusiastically, she neither spoke nor came any closer.
“What’s wrong with her? Is she okay?”
Jonah chuckled.
“Jah, she is fine, just embarrassed. We were already in bed when the police came knocking, and we were so concerned about the animals that we rushed right out to check on everything without stopping to think.”
Looking again at my cousin’s wife, I suddenly realized what he was saying. Though her nightgown was extremely modest, her hair was down. Her long, lovely, never-been-cut hair was loose on her shoulders and hanging free. To her mind, she might as well have been out here stark naked. The only time Amish women ever let their hair down was in the privacy of the bedroom with their husbands.
That also explained why I hadn’t recognized what I was seeing earlier. Had she been wearing the apron and cape she wore in the daytime, no doubt I would have spotted that telltale Amish silhouette, remembered that beyond the beech trees lay their farm, and figured out that it was her. Instead, a figure in a white gown had no context, and my mind had gone to “ghost.”
As Mike and Jonah briefly conversed, I thought about running over and giving Liesl a hug, but I wasn’t sure if that would only embarrass her further. To be safe, I simply waved in return and stayed where I was. After Mike crossed back to the other side of the gate to help the technician, Jonah and I chatted, me explaining what I was doing with the police, him telling me how sorry he was to hear about Troy, not to mention Floyd and Nina.
“I am relieved to say that the animals are all fine,” he told me. “There were no signs of any wild beasts at all. Now we are on our way to Emory’s. Liesl wants to check on him and make sure he is okay.”
“I should have thought to check on him myself,” I admitted, “or at the very least called my father about all of this by now.”
When Grandpa Abe died, the responsibility of his mentally disabled son had fallen to my father. Unsure about what to do, my dad had had his older brother Emory tested for competency, and we all had been relieved to hear that he could live alone as long as he had daily part-time help. Nina, a home health worker who lived across the street and had been a longtime family friend, had easily filled the bill. Just to make sure things were working out with the new arrangement, my father had begun coming out to see Emory more often. Things had floated along smoothly ever since—or at least until my mother had become so sick. Now my father had almost no time or energy to spare for his brother. I didn’t even want to think about what might happen if poor Nina ended up not pulling through.
“You haven’t told your family yet?” Jonah asked, his eyebrows disappearing under the rim of his hat.
“My mother isn’t doing very well,” I explained. “She had one of her treatments again this morning.”
“Ah. Then your father has enough on his hands already,” Jonah replied. “Do not worry, Sienna. Liesl and I and will take care of Emory. Even if Nina didn’t come today at all, I am sure that is not a problem for him. He makes out okay. My bigger concern is how he reacted when the police came knocking on his door tonight. He is terrified of men in uniform, you know.”
I put a hand to my mouth, now feeling even worse.
“Oh, dear. I didn’t know.”
“It is okay. Liesl and I have a key to his medication box. There are pills we are allowed to give him if he gets too upset. Do not give it another thought; we will take care of it.”
“Thank you, Jonah. We’ll talk tomorrow, okay?”
I could tell that Mike and his men had finished with the gate and were waiting for me, so I gave Jonah a hug and thanked him again for being such a huge help. He insisted that no thanks were necessary. Emory was family, and this was just what families do.
“You two be careful out here,” I said as we parted. In reply, Jonah held up his rifle and said he had things covered.
As I made my way back through the trees, I thought about that. An Amish man with a gun? Perhaps later I would ask him about it. It was my understanding that the Amish were never willing to bear arms, not for any reason. I realized there was so much about my own family heritage I didn’t know or understand. Once my grandfather left the faith, he also left all that part of himself behind.
Mike explained that it didn’t look as if Troy had been at the German Gate after all, so we pressed onward, checking first the Corn Gate and then the Peace Gate. In the end we had to conclude that whatever latch he had opened during our phone conversation, it wasn’t any of the four in the grove.
Feeling overwhelmingly disappointed as we crossed back to the B and B, I realized that our entire jaunt had served only one good purpose evidence-wise—that of finding the holes that had recently been dug. I was feeling hopeless and every bit as confused as before when Mike’s radio crackled to life and we heard at least one interesting bit of news: One of the cops who was an avid hunter had found some very unusual animal scat among some trees not far from the pool area. The scat had been overlooked by everyone before because of its appearance. I wasn’t interested in hearing the details, but it sounded as though it included a piece of fruit so large and nearly und
igested that an untrained eye might not realize it had passed through an animal at all.
“Do you recognize what kind of creature it came from?” Mike said into the radio.
“Negative. It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before. I can tell you what it didn’t come from.” He then went on to list every animal, large and small, that we had been considering thus far. When he was finished, Mike asked the man what he thought their next animal-tracking move should be.
“Once it’s daylight, we can check for prints in the mud alongside the stream in the grove,” the man’s voice said. “The ground should be softer and wetter there, so if there really has been a wild animal around, that’ll be our best chance for finding any tracks.” He added that it was also probably time to call in the game commission.
Radio chatter continued all the way back to the B and B, with the officers who had made the rounds knocking on doors finally reporting in. I was only half listening, but I smiled when I heard one of them say that the Amish couple around the corner seemed more interested in the safety of their livestock than themselves. I knew they were talking about Jonah and Liesl, who took excellent care of all of their animals.
From another report, we learned that Burl Newton, the former chicken farmer who lived directly behind me, hadn’t been home when they knocked on his door. But police had continued moving down Burl’s road, notifying other neighbors, and when they came across a backyard party in progress several houses down, they ran into Burl there and were able to talk to him.
“Said he walked over from his place around six o’clock, and that he didn’t hear or see anything unusual along the way.”
Secrets of Harmony Grove Page 9
