Secrets of Harmony Grove

by Mindy Starns Clark

  “Quit your Brutzin,” Liesl called out to the baby as she went to get her up from her nap.

  I let Jenny and Nellie lead me across the wide, open room to the couch in the sitting area. They were both talking at once, and though I was flattered that they seemed to remember me, they had obviously forgotten that I didn’t speak Pennsylvania Dutch. As that was all they spoke, and they wouldn’t learn English until they got to grade school, we had to communicate through hand gestures and facial expressions instead.

  “Jenny is telling you about the new animals that her father has purchased for the farm,” Lucy said as she checked the biscuits in the oven. “Says she named the big one Peanut.”

  “Er isst aus meiner hand heraus,” Jenny added, and when I looked to Lucy she interpreted.

  “He eats right out of her hands.”

  I was about to ask Lucy if these new animals were horses or cows—or maybe even goats—when the front door opened and Jonah and his two sons came inside. Now the whole family was here.

  For the next few minutes, as Lucy manned the kitchen and Jonah worked to replace an empty propane tank in a floor lamp at her request, the children clustered around me on the couch and chatted softly with each other in Pennsylvania Dutch. Stephen, the oldest one at nine, was also the shyest of the bunch, but I noticed that even he stayed nearby, settling in a chair and listening to his siblings and finally interpreting some of their words into English for me. I asked him how school was going so far this year, and he was listing his favorite subjects when Jonah interrupted to say that as soon as he was finished with the lamp they would be heading outside to do chores.

  “You must stay close to me, remember,” Jonah added sternly, “and your little brother will need to remain inside this time.”

  Seeing the flash of disappointment on the younger boy’s face, I suddenly felt guilty, as if their imprisonment was all my fault. I could only hope that the matter would be resolved soon.

  Liesl finally emerged from the next room carrying a tiny bundle of adorableness, apologizing that it had taken so long but that the baby’s hair had come loose in the crib and had needed to be combed out and rebraided.

  Little Annie, still hung over from sleep, nestled on her mother’s hip, clutching a soft pink blanket and blinking with wide blue eyes as she took in the scene. I hadn’t seen her for almost a year, and I couldn’t believe how much she had grown. I gave her a broad smile, and much to my delight, when Leisl stepped closer, Annie suddenly held out both arms and leaned her body down toward mine, despite the fact that she was far too young to remember me. Leisl said something to her in Pennsylvania Dutch and then bent down to transfer her.

  Annie came to me easily, settling on my lap and leaning her head back against my shoulder as if she felt right at home. Despite all the confusion and torment of the past twenty-four hours, I allowed myself that moment simply to breathe in the smell of the little angel in my lap, listen to the cadence of the family chatting about their day, and watch the good-natured interplay over at the stove between Jonah and his mother as he snatched one of the biscuits she had just taken out of the oven.

  As Annie grew more awake, she sat up straighter and engaged with the other kids. Eventually, she slipped from my lap onto the floor completely and toddled away, leaving her little blanket behind as she ran, laughing, to her father. Running my fingertips over the fabric’s fuzzy softness, I wondered if I would ever have reason to own a blanket like this one, if I would ever have a little angel of my own. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed with sadness.

  Even if Heath wasn’t perfect in every way—even if he was cautious when I wanted him to be daring, deliberate when I yearned for spontaneity, and mature when I wished for his sillier side to come out and play—he was an incredibly good man, dedicated and loving and gentle and honest and everything else a woman could dream of in a husband. I had seen him with his nieces and nephews and knew he would be an excellent father, that he could give me children and companionship and devotion and security for the rest of our lives.

  If only I could learn to love him the way he loved me.

  The children moved away to sit at the kitchen table and enjoy an afternoon snack of homemade biscuits and honey. Lucy invited me to join them, but before I did I carefully folded the little blanket, unable to resist pressing it to my face and breathing in its precious baby smell. As I set it on the empty cushion beside me and then stood, I realized that Liesl had caught me. She was watching from across the room, and tears suddenly sprang into her eyes.

  Terribly embarrassed, I was about to make some excuse and beat a hasty retreat when the door burst open and one of Jonah’s workers came inside.

  He blurted out something in Pennsylvania Dutch and in response Jonah passed his daughter over to his mother, grabbed his hat, and headed outside. Liesl spoke to her mother-in-law and started for the door as well. Some of the children tried to follow, but Liesl set them straight on that notion with a single look. Quickly, I told Lucy I would talk to her later, and then I followed Liesl, asking what was going on as I caught up with her and we strode quickly across the lawn, retracing the path we had taken not too long before. Jonah and his worker were walking even faster and were far ahead of us now.

  “It is something about the new animals in the back cages,” Liesl said. “The emus.”

  Emus? That must be the animals the children had been talking about.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong,” Liesl added. “But the police are all there, and they said they needed to speak with us right away.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  “Since when did you have emus?” I asked as we continued to race across the field.

  “Just since the spring,” Liesl replied. “It is a new business venture for us.”

  She didn’t elaborate, so I stayed quiet the rest of the way. As we neared the back of their property, not far from the grove, I saw that on the far side of an old outbuilding they had installed several huge wire pens, each one of them at least six feet high and twenty or thirty feet long. Sure enough, inside the pens I could see emus, tall, brown birds with beady eyes and spindly legs. Several technicians were also in there gathering soil samples.

  I stood back from Liesl and Jonah as Mike explained to them what was going on. According to him, several important tests had now come back from the lab, tests that provided information to the authorities that they hadn’t had before. Not only did the bear that had been caught and killed in Holtwood that morning have no detectible ties whatsoever with Troy or his injuries, but fecal flotation tests for debris found in the gash in Troy’s leg had come back positive for “avian coccidiosis,” which meant that his wound had been caused either by a bird or by some implement that had been contaminated by birds.

  Birds?

  In a way it was almost laughable, given Floyd’s “big black creature” and the rumors of werewolves and all our fears of a wild, raging beast hiding somewhere out there in the woods, preparing to strike again. Instead, we were left scratching our heads and feeling kind of silly, trying to figure out how a bird or something bird related could possibly have inflicted such a massive wound. As I heard Charlie telling Rip, “It’s like we were all waiting for Bigfoot to show up and in walked Tweety instead.”

  To make matters even more confounding, there were bird-related elements to all three of the properties that had direct access to the grove: Burl with his former chicken farm, Jonah with his emus, and Emory with his Dark-eyed Juncos and numerous other songbirds. Now samples were being collected at all three locations, samples that would be tested for coccidiosis. Of the three locations, the one that came out positive for the parasite found in the wound would be the one they would zero in on.

  Working from the other end of things as well, now that evidence of avian coccidiosis had been detected inside Troy’s cut, a second, far more specific test was being done, one that would identify the exact species of coccidiosis involved, whether galliform (chicken), ratite (emu), or passeriform (perching birds). My underst
anding was that these two sets of tests—the one that would determine which location had coccidiosis and the one that would determine which type of avian species the coccidiosis found in Troy had come from—could each take several days to complete. It would be a race to see which results would come in first, but either one should give enough information to narrow the scope of the investigation significantly.

  In the meantime other evidence was still being sought, and almost everyone at the scene seemed to be theorizing about how to interpret this new information. When I heard that Troy’s injury was bird related, my first thought was of a falcon or an eagle or some other fierce bird of prey. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that even the fiercest of raptors couldn’t injure a man to the extent that Troy had been injured. On the other hand, when given our current choice between chickens, emus, and songbirds, the word “fierce” didn’t exactly come to mind either. I knew emus could kick, but I doubted they could inflict the kind of injury Troy had suffered.

  Eventually, when I began to feel that I was more in the way than anything else, I told Jonah and Liesl that I was going to head back to the B and B, but for them to have someone call my cell if they needed me.

  “Not to worry, cousin. God is with us,” Liesl whispered, giving me a quick hug, her words far more confident than the expression on her face.

  Walking toward the grove and through it to the other side, I spotted clusters of officials along the way. Many of their conversations sounded fascinating, and as I passed group after group, I listened to the different theories that were being proposed. One police officer told of a type of bird in Australia that could actually kill a man, an ostrich-sized creature called a cassowary that lived in the wild and ate small animals as a matter of course. Another talked about falcons’ beaks, which he said were uniquely configured to cut through the spinal cords of their victims. I heard stories of angry seagulls killing house pets and aggressive geese putting people in the hospital. But when someone suggested that a hoard of angry woodpeckers could have descended upon Troy en masse and done that kind of damage as long as they were working together, I felt things had taken a turn for the ridiculous.

  By the time I reached the B and B, I had learned that other, even more important scientific evidence had already come back as well. The white powder in the hole in the grove matched one of the containers that had been found in Emory’s barn: a pesticide known as chlordane. Testing Troy’s blood for that specific substance had confirmed that chlordane was indeed the toxin that had been instrumental in his death.

  Sitting on a bench in the yard behind the pool area, surrounded by activity, I used my phone to go online and look up chlordane. I learned that it had been used widely in the United States from 1948 to 1983, but at that point had been banned by the EPA for all uses except termite control. That had lasted until 1988, when the EPA had banned chlordane altogether.

  Apparently, the substance was a known carcinogen, but I wasn’t interested in reading about the effects of long-term exposure. Instead, I googled “poisoned by chlordane,” my search revealing that an acute exposure could cause, among other things, “blurred vision, confusion, staggering, convulsions, central nervous system depression, and death.” Poor, poor Troy.

  While digesting that information, I began to wonder if simply possessing a toxic substance that had been outlawed for more than twenty years would constitute some sort of crime in and of itself. If so, that would mean that Emory could be in big trouble because, technically, it had been found on his property. While I was still having trouble processing the news I had learned earlier about my uncle, this was a separate matter entirely, one that could cause problems for him despite the fact that he had nothing to do with it.

  Wanting to know more, I scanned the people around me until I spotted Mike, but I could tell he was too busy to be interrupted. Instead, I noticed Georgia standing nearby and asked if we could talk. Moving away from the others, I expressed my concerns to her, saying that clearly the pesticide had been sitting in that barn for years, and that it had been put there long before that building and its contents had ever even come into Emory’s hands.

  “I mean, Emory shouldn’t have to pay the price for the fact that his father didn’t clean out an old storage closet before he died, should he? Please tell me he’s not going to be arrested for this.”

  Taking me by the elbow, Georgia led me further away from the others and spoke just above a whisper.

  “Honey, we wouldn’t be out to hang something on your uncle that clearly wasn’t his doing. Gosh, who doesn’t have old cans of bug spray lying around? No, the bigger question isn’t why the outlawed substance was in the barn in the first place, but how it got from there to those weird holes in the grove.”

  I blinked, wondering if I had heard her correctly.

  “Holes? Plural?”

  Glancing around and lowering her voice even further, Georgia confirmed that they had now located two more holes within a fifteen-foot radius of the one I had discovered, holes that had also been filled with chlordane and topped with dirt. Stranger still was that the Hazmat guys had discovered some unusual objects hidden within the white powder in all three holes.

  “What kind of objects?” I asked, wondering if they had located the diamonds or even just a container that could have held diamonds at some point.

  Georgia said that one hole had a bunch of old nails and screws mixed in, another had a rusty old jar lid, and the third held the bottom half of a broken trowel.

  “That’s weird,” I said.

  “I know.”

  I thought about Grandpa Abe and my earlier fear that he had created those pockets of pesticide as protection for the diamonds. I shared my theory with Georgia now, but before I had even finished she was shaking her head back and forth.

  “No, babe, you don’t have to worry about that. Grandpa didn’t have anything to do with this. These holes were dug recently. The Hazmat guys said probably within the last few days, but certainly since the last time it rained. They said it was fortunate we found them when we did, because rain would have dissolved the powder and caused some serious problems. Even as old as it is, that stuff is still real toxic, and it would have made one heck of a poison mud stew.”

  Looking out toward the grove, I tried to picture what she was saying. Like a minefield, it was almost as if those pockets of powder had been put there as traps, waiting to catch someone when they least expected it. Rain would have eventually washed the powder away, but in the meantime would only have served to exacerbate the problem.

  Georgia and I were interrupted when a call came through that she was needed at Burl Newton’s place right away. Wanting to see what was happening, I offered to show her the nearest path, a shortcut that would lead from where we were standing in my backyard through the thick brush to the Newtons’ chicken farm. We walked quickly, moving single file where the brush was thick, and emerged directly behind the Newtons’ house. From there, we turned left and cut across the scruffy backyard toward the cluster of officers who seemed to have gathered around one of the old henhouses.

  Charlie was there, and when he spotted us walking toward him, he grinned, saying that it looked as though we had finally hit pay dirt.

  Apparently, one of the technicians who had been gathering fecal samples to test for coccidiosis had stumbled across an old trunk hidden underneath some raised nesting boxes. Inside of the truck was an entire collection of cockfighting paraphernalia. Whether that equipment had played a part in Troy’s injury or not, even possessing that stuff was against the law. By the time we arrived, Burl Newton was already in handcuffs and being led toward a police car, though he wasn’t going quietly.

  “If I’da known that stuff was hid inside there, why would I have given you permission to open up that trunk in the first place?” he was demanding. “I’m tellin’ you, that stuff belonged to my daddy, not me! I’ve never even seen it before!”

  The man sounded desperate, and though the thought of cockfig
hting turned my stomach, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him at the moment. If he was telling the truth, then his situation now was similar to Emory’s, with both men in the position of having to pay the price for old things left behind by their fathers, illegal things that until now had gone unnoticed by the sons or the law.

  Burl had always come across to me as a shifty and secretive man, one who tended to made me feel uncomfortable for no real reason. But after our conversation earlier today and learning about his kindnesses toward Emory both now and in the past, I was more inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt in this situation. As I watched him being forced into the back of the police car and driven away, I offered up a little prayer on his behalf, asking that above all else God would help each person involved with this investigation find the truth behind every question, every confusing element, and every lie.

  As Georgia stepped in to handle the paperwork involved with this new find, I watched and listened as a technician rattled off a quick description of some of the items inside: clippers and tools, syringes and medicine, scales, chains and leashes, knives, electrical tape, and more.

  “Wait a minute, what do we have here?” the tech said, carefully pulling from the trunk with his gloved hand a curved, jagged blade about three inches long. It was shaped like a scythe, and I couldn’t help but think that it looked like a miniature version of the tool that the grim reaper was always pictured carrying in his hands.

  One of the officials in the crowd explained that in cockfighting, blades like that were actually taped to the gamecocks’ ankles, pointing back and upwards, like spurs on a pair of cowboy boots.

  “When roosters fight, they kick, and those blades do a lot of damage,” he said.

  “Yeah, they don’t call it a blood sport for nothing,” another added, looking around at each of us in turn. When his eyes met mine, he seemed startled, his head jerking slightly back, his eyes widening for an instant and then darting suspiciously away. Immediately, he whispered something to the man next to him, and then they both looked straight at me, their expressions a mixture of what looked like incredulity and anger.