Secrets of Harmony Grove

by Mindy Starns Clark

  To make sure that wouldn’t happen here, Troy had worked hard to come up with what he thought of as the perfect number: just enough of a monthly stipend to make the B and B worth the trouble for me to hang onto it, but not enough to cause any significant dip in the cash that was being laundered here.

  “Wait, I don’t understand,” Heath interrupted. “Why on earth go to all of this trouble? Why not just buy his own B and B and not involve Sienna at all?”

  Floyd pursed his lips disdainfully.

  “That’s how laundering works, man. The business has to look completely legitimate. It needs to be owned by someone who isn’t connected to the people funneling cash through it.”

  He went on to say that sometimes the business owners knew what was going on and helped to facilitate in exchange for a payoff. But in my case, the less I knew about it, the better.

  “The few times she asked questions,” Floyd said to Heath, “even simple stuff, like what computer software would I like to use or what kind of check-in procedures was I going to have, I just did like Troy said and made my answer as dull and drawn out as possible, and pretty soon she would get bored with it and move on to something else.”

  It was miserable enough hearing all of these things about myself and having a flashlight shined on my very soul, but making the experience a thousand times worse was the fact that Heath was sitting here as well, hearing all of this. What was he thinking? Had he ever articulated to himself my shortcomings this way? If not, was he seeing me in a whole new light? Those were questions I knew I would have to deal with later. For now I forced myself to focus on the matter at hand.

  Now that Floyd had admitted the truth about what had been going on, it was time to bring the police in on it as well. I said that to him, but much to my surprise he replied that he had already gone over all this with the police, and at great length.

  “Well, not the police, exactly, but the FBI and the AG,” Floyd admitted, suddenly rising from the table. “Now that you know that, maybe you’ll stop trying to interrogate me yourself.”

  Before I could even tell him to sit down, he held out both palms as if to stop me and said that he was sorry, but he had already said way more than he was supposed to.

  “I turned state’s evidence,” he added. “Now that I have a deal and I’m working closely with the FBI, I’m not supposed to be saying anything about all of this to anybody. And you can’t tell a soul either, or you’ll end up getting me killed.”

  Of course, I didn’t believe him right away. But after verifying what he had told us with the FBI, I knew he really had turned state’s evidence and was now working with the feds bring down the group of people behind the money laundering operation.

  That turn of events created as many questions as it did answers, chief among them being whether or not I was still under suspicion for having some part in all of this. I also wanted to know if Troy had turned as well. If so, had the mob found out and killed him because of it? Hoping to find answers to my questions—and to clear my own name in the process—I got back on the phone and set up an appointment to meet with federal investigators tomorrow afternoon at their office in Lancaster. Thank goodness Liz would be here to go with me.

  Once I hung up, Heath and I escorted Floyd to the door of his room, and I told him to pack his things and go.

  “How ’bout we make a deal,” he said, squinting his tired, red eyes. “You let me stay here tonight and leave tomorrow instead, and in exchange I’ll let you in on a little gossip.”

  “Gossip?”

  “Yeah,” Floyd said, glancing left and right as if to make sure he wasn’t being heard. “Not a big deal to me, but it might interest you quite a bit.”

  I studied his face for a moment and then accepted his offer.

  “Thanks,” he said, running a hand tiredly over his face. “Okay, well, when the cops brought me home tonight, the first thing I did was call Cap, a buddy of mine on the inside, to find out what he could tell me about Troy’s death. He didn’t know any more than I did, but he did say something very strange.”

  I waited, listening as Floyd lowered his voice.

  “Like I said before, Troy owed lots of people lots of money, including a couple g’s to Cap. For the past couple of weeks, Troy’s been avoiding all his creditors, not answering his calls, and acting like a real deadbeat, you know? But the day he died, much to Cap’s surprise, Troy actually answered the phone when he called. When Cap demanded the money Troy owed him, Troy said okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Well, not right away. What he said was that he was right on the verge of a huge windfall, and that if Cap could wait just a day or two more, he’d get back every penny and then some.”

  “Isn’t that what gamblers always say?”

  “Yeah, but Cap felt like this was different. Said Troy was on the trail of an actual thing, somethin’ super valuable, and he even asked Cap if he could recommend a good fence for selling it once he had it in his hands.”

  I nodded, not all that surprised by this news. No doubt, Troy had been talking about the diamonds.

  “Now I don’t know about any windfall, or where Troy thought it was going to come from, but Cap says he sounded so earnest he was almost inclined to believe him.”

  “So how did your friend respond?”

  Floyd shrugged.

  “He said, ‘Windfall, schmindfall, you got till Monday and then I’m breaking your kneecaps.’” Floyd grinned. “That’s where he got his nickname, you know? Anyway, Troy said no problem, that what he was looking for was right here at Harmony Grove and pretty soon it would be his. Said it was kind of like a treasure hunt and that he was getting close.”

  Troy had been talking about the diamonds all right. But those were Emory’s diamonds, not Troy’s. My anger surged.

  “Anyway,” Floyd said, slipping his hands in his pockets, “Cap said it sounds like Troy told the same thing to a couple of other creditors that day too, so if I were you, I’d be careful. Whatever ‘treasure’ Troy thought he was going to come up with here—even if he was just blowing smoke to buy himself some time—if word gets out and people think maybe he died before he found it, a couple of very curious treasure hunters just might come crawling out of the woodwork.”

  I tried to process that thought, finally asking, “Guys with names like Cap? Bone Breaker? Slice and Dice?”

  Floyd laughed.

  “Something like that.”

  “So what do I do?” I asked, glancing over at Heath in alarm.

  “You got me,” Floyd said. “Why don’t I sleep on it, and I’ll let you know if I come up with any ideas by morning. Right now, I’m calling it a night.”

  With that, he stepped backward into his room and firmly shut the door in my face.

  For almost a minute, I just stood there, frozen, reeling with astonishment. Would the surprises in this situation ever come to an end?

  Finally, Heath and I returned to the dining room where we could speak more privately, both of us stumped by this last development. Were we in danger here? Would these shady-sounding people really come here in search of buried treasure? If so, once they didn’t find it, would they come after us, thinking we could point the way? While the thought of that was certainly frightening, I doubted that anyone would show up immediately, not while the police and other officials still had such an obvious and frequent presence on the grounds. On the other hand, Heath and I both felt that as soon as the coast seemed clear, all bets just might be off. Thus, the race was on to find the diamonds for yet another reason.

  We had to get to them before someone else did.

  For the next hour, as we talked about how to proceed with all of the many issues that had been raised tonight, Heath seemed oddly distant and quiet. I didn’t blame him. After the evening we’d had, especially after hearing my character assassinated like that, I had to wonder if he would still be around by morning

  I wouldn’t blame him one bit if he wasn’t.

  Beyond the personal
attacks, the more I thought about all of Floyd’s astonishing revelations, the more consumed I grew with anger and fear. As furious as I was with Floyd, I was even angrier at Troy. How could one man have done so much damage? Truly, Troy Griffin was in a class by himself. Now that he was dead, would we ever untangle the vast webs of lies he had spun?

  Would we even survive to try?

  After rehashing things several times over to no avail, Heath and I finally gave up for the night and headed to our rooms, too exhausted to think about anything more than sleep. After a perfunctory kiss goodnight at the door of Heath’s suite, I headed down the hall to my own room.

  There, I closed and locked the door and climbed under my sheets without even changing into my nightgown first. Clutching a quilted Amish pillow to my chest, I wept as quietly as possible, sobbing into the darkness until I had no more tears left to cry.

  THIRTY-THREE

  When I woke the next morning, I sat on the side of the bed for a while, aching from head to toe and trying not to rub my puffy eyes. Though I felt all cried out, the patter of rain tap-tap-tapping on the roof told me that the skies had taken over for me, weeping on my behalf.

  The rain everyone had said was coming was finally here. My thoughts went to the poison in the grove, and I could only hope that the people from the EPA had managed to get it all cleaned up before the weather changed.

  Slowly I stood. After last night’s revelations, I needed to reframe everything I had learned in the past two days. Praying for clarity, I did a lot of thinking as I showered and dressed.

  By the time I was ready to face the day—or as ready as I was ever going to be—my most urgent thought was of my boyfriend. I needed to find out if Heath was still around.

  I hoped he was, but I wouldn’t blame him if he wasn’t.

  Opening my bedroom door, I peered down the hall toward his room. Heath’s door was closed, so I continued down the stairs, holding my breath until I heard his voice. His tones were oddly quiet and soothing, but I couldn’t make out the words until I reached the bottom of the stairs and realized that he was with Floyd, doing the relaxation technique they had discussed last night.

  Floyd was sitting on the couch in the main room. His eyes were closed as Heath spoke, telling him to relax muscle by muscle. I was a little nervous about seeing Heath, afraid that the uncomfortable strain from when we had said good night would still be between us this morning. He looked up at me with a finger to his lips.

  So he was still in this thing. God bless him.

  It sounded as though they were just getting started, so I didn’t hang around to watch or listen. Instead, I tiptoed my way through the main room, down the hall, across the dining room, and into the side porch. If I couldn’t go all the way outside, as per Mike, I decided this was the next best thing. I’d heard that the rains would bring cooler temperatures, and as I opened the door and stepped out onto the porch, I was glad I had put on a warm sweater for the day. Though it wasn’t freezing outside, a definite chill was in the air.

  I settled on the wicker couch, dialed my grandmother’s number, and was greeted with her cheery “Hello.” We chatted a bit first, and I was relieved to hear that she had already learned about some of the things going on out here—and she didn’t seem interested in learning more. That was a relief, as I could focus on the questions I needed to ask her without having to take the time to bring her up to speed.

  I decided to start by asking about Emory and the arrests from his youth. Not surprisingly, her answer was long and circuitous and started when the young Maureen Knickerbocker was hired by a friend of a friend named Abe Collins to care for his three-year-old son. Abe was a handsome and brooding young widower who lived in an old family home in the heart of Lancaster County, and he was in urgent need of childcare.

  “That was at the end of my junior year in teacher’s college, and I only took the job temporarily, for the summer, to help out while Abe looked for someone permanent. But the very first day I fell in love with little Emory, and within a few weeks I had fallen for his father as well. That fall, I put school on hold for a semester but eventually withdrew completely and married Abe instead. Your father was born a year later, when Emory was five.”

  She went on to say that they knew there was something wrong with Emory from a very early age, but whenever they tried to pursue treatment they were encouraged to institutionalize the boy, something neither wanted to do. They tried enrolling him in regular school, but at the end of the first week it was obvious to all sides that he didn’t belong there. Hoping he would “grow out of it,” Maureen kept him at home and tried to teach him as best she could, but not much ever seemed to get through. Meanwhile, marriage to the “handsome and brooding widower” wasn’t turning out to be quite what she had expected. They were both dedicated to the children, but the gap between the two of them began to widen. It didn’t help matters that Abe spent every spare minute working to create a grove as a living memorial to his deceased wife. Between his day job as a welder and his off-hours work in the grove, they barely saw each other. Meanwhile, Emory continued to falter.

  “He and I were in the middle of a reading lesson one day when Harold interrupted us to give the answers himself. There he was, reading at five, and Emory still couldn’t catch on at ten.”

  While they were relieved to know that Harold didn’t share his older brother’s limitations, they didn’t know what to do about poor Emory.

  “But then the decision was sort of made for us,” she continued. “When Emory was eleven, he came home one day covered in blood, and he led us back to a place in the woods where a rabbit had been killed. He was hysterical, and he kept saying that he did it but he wouldn’t or couldn’t explain why. He just cried and cried. Of course, we had to follow up on it. Abe buried the rabbit, and then we took our son to the doctor. At that point he was taken away from us and put into a mental home. It just broke our hearts—especially when we would visit, and he would be sitting there drugged out of his mind, like a zombie. Doctors were so ignorant about mental illness back then! Oh, Sienna, you have no idea.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered, grieved to hear of such pain and sadness with my loved ones but glad at least to know that Emory had been remorseful about the rabbit.

  “Like I said, things were already not so good between Abe and me,” my grandmother continued, “and the stress of losing Emory was the icing on the cake. I left a month later, taking your father with me. I hated to do that to Abe, but at the time I felt I didn’t have a choice. I just couldn’t live that way anymore.”

  My grandmother then launched into the full story of her marriage and its issues, and I knew there would be no stopping her now.

  “What was the basic problem?” I asked finally, trying to cut to the chase.

  “Abe was fixated on his first wife,” my grandmother replied. “I knew that going in, but I had convinced myself that over time he would learn to love me as much, and hopefully even more than he had ever loved Daphne. Of course, looking back now, I realize that more than anything the poor man probably had post-traumatic stress disorder from the war. He had been so traumatized—they all had—but even once the war was over and everyone was trying to pick up the pieces and start anew, he faced a second blow, the death of his young wife in childbirth. That had compounded his already damaged psyche greatly, I have no doubt.”

  I murmured in sympathy, shifting to a more comfortable position as she went on.

  “My friend Bessie always said that if I had never become pregnant, Abe and I might have been able to make things work. But, you see, the day Abe learned we were expecting, it was almost as if someone flipped off a switch inside his heart. The man had never been one to easily share his feelings, but once I told him I was with child, he withdrew from me completely. Bessie said Abe’s PTSD probably kicked into overdrive once he realized he might lose me just as he had lost Daphne. Whether he was conscious of it or not, the man cut me out purely from self-preservation.”

  “Ho
w sad.”

  “Yes, it was. Of course, we didn’t know about things like PTSD back then. All I knew was that there were three people in our marriage, not two, and that the other woman, though long dead, was far more real and more important to my husband than I was.”

  She went on to explain that as Abe withdrew from her he began to obsess on the grove. Originally, it was supposed to have been similar to the one near Daphne’s childhood home in Germany. But the closer they got to Harold’s birth, the stranger and more obsessed Abe grew, expanding the original plan to encompass an entirely new section.

  “It drove me nuts, Sienna, but how could I compete with a dead woman? I couldn’t even try! The grove was her living memorial, and the more the trees grew, it was like Daphne was coming back to life as well. With every tree Abe planted, what he was really doing was burying his grief.”

  Hearing her tale, I looked through the screen at the grove in the distance. She was right. The entire place, though lovely, was really all about pain and grief.

  “I shouldn’t have left him, but I did. And life went on.”

  “I’m sorry, Grandma,” I said, wishing she were here in person so that I could give her a hug. “I knew the basic story, but I never really understood it before. Thanks for sharing it with me.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I’m just sorry that you went through so much pain and suffering yourself.”

  “Don’t feel bad, honey. Once we left Lancaster County, Harold and I did okay. I finished my degree, as you know, and worked as a teacher. I’ve had a happy life, despite some painful bumps along the way.”

  That seemed like a good point to end our conversation, but there were still a few questions I needed to ask her.

  “Grandma, what happened the second time, when Emory was again caught with a dead animal?”

  “I wasn’t directly involved that time, but I’ll tell you what I know.”