Secrets of Harmony Grove

by Mindy Starns Clark

  When the ash had cooled enough

  Slid it into sooty sock

  Stashed in flea-infested bunk

  Where none went except for lice

  I will take these to the grove,

  Long-beloved place of peace

  There will pour the ashes out

  Let their death give way to life

  “Sorry about that,” Heath said, coming back into the room and sitting across from me. “That was the pathologist. Looks like our theory was correct.”

  He started to go on, but then he caught sight of my face and stopped.

  “Sienna, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  I shook my head, afraid to speak at that moment lest I cry.

  “Honey?” he asked, rising from his seat to come closer.

  Kneeling beside my chair, he brushed the hair from my face and tried to look into my eyes. I shook my head again, looking down, and then I held out the papers to him. He took them from me, flipped through several, and asked me if this was what he thought it was. I nodded.

  “I had an idea earlier,” I whispered, “that maybe Nina had the documents. So I went over there and got her mother to let me take a look around, and I found them.”

  “And?”

  “And I don’t know. It’s complicated. I wanted them so I could learn about the diamonds, but so far I can’t stop reading everything else too. There’s just so much…this woman’s story…”

  “Oh, honey, come here,” Heath said, wrapping his arms around me and pulling me toward him. I rested my head against his chest, wondering how Daphne could have survived. The poem that had hit me the hardest was also the one that validated my own experience with the darker side of man. Called “Denial,” it railed not against Hitler or the Nazis but against regular German citizens, those who lived within the shadows of the concentration camps and knew what was going on but chose to look the other way. The last two stanzas read:

  Through the slats of inbound trains

  Proof stared back with hungry eyes

  Yet your heart remained untouched,

  More empty than the returning trains.

  Every time you turned away

  Though you think you bear no guilt

  Might as well have stoked the fires

  That turned each one to ash and smoke.

  After comforting me for a while, Heath moved to the chair next to mine, sliding his plate over so we could sit and eat side by side as we studied the pages together. Skimming through, we were surprised to run across explanations for several different of the stranger markers in the German Gate section of the grove. “Singing Horses” were what the Nazis called prisoners they chained to four-wheeled carts and forced to sing as they pulled massively heavy loads of stones from a quarry. “Blood Street” was the name the prisoners had given to a long nearby road because so many thousands had died during the course of its construction. “Walking Skeletons” came from a poem of Daphne’s and was simply her description of her emaciated fellow prisoners.

  When Daphne had at last gone through the story of her experiences before and during the war, she moved into the present and began recording each day’s events as they happened. After reading about her secret marriage to Abe and her adjustment to life outside the concentration camp and the hospital, we finally got to the part where the two of them had returned to her family home in Westphalia in search of living relatives. Daphne wrote:

  Success! We have found the diamonds, Abe and I, the whole bundle still there, untouched. The treasure was right where Mother had said it would be, in the grove, buried beneath the Fishing Tree.

  I am grateful, yes, but also dismayed, for deep inside I think I had held on to the hope that someone else besides me would have returned by now, some cousin who survived the camps and came back ahead of us to retrieve these family assets. Instead, the sealed and perfect package confirms everything I had already been told, that I am the only surviving member of my entire family. My father and his brother and their wives and all of their children are dead, the entire clan reduced to me, my husband, the baby in my womb, and four dozen perfect stones worth the combined wealth of both families. Oh, how I would give every single one of these diamonds back just for one more day with my siblings, one more hour with my parents!

  Holding the sparkling stones in my hands now, their smooth sharpness numb against my burn-scarred palms, I can only thank Hashem that my father comprehended very early on, at least partially, the road that Germany was traveling down.

  And yet I am angry as well. For how could he have understood well enough to preserve our wealth but not enough to preserve our lives? Though not as tiny as diamonds, we could all have hidden somehow, I know we could have! Each new day Abe and I learn of some neighbor or friend of a friend who endured the war while tucked safely away beneath houses, behind walls, in hidden chambers.

  I would rather have been buried with the diamonds than lived through the horrors of the past seven years.

  The next day’s entry didn’t say anything important about the diamonds, but it certainly spoke volumes about Abe and Daphne and their relationship.

  We found my old flute buried at the base of the strawberry tree today, but it had not fared as well as the diamonds. Instead, its metal was rusted and its body invaded by some earthen creature that had long ago taken up residence inside. Unable to look, I told Abe that I was going into the house and for him to dispose of it while I was gone. But then, of course, I couldn’t help but watch from the window. Bless him, he did not merely toss it onto the wood pile or bury it back in the ground. Instead, he gently wrapped it in a discarded blanket, placed it atop the pile of stony rubble, and lit it afire like a funeral pyre. He took a long time to come inside, and when he did his eyes were red.

  Had he been weeping for the music I would never get to play, the music he would never have the chance to hear? Or were his eyes merely irritated from the smoke? Tonight I summoned my nerve and asked my stoic husband, but I should have known better. Abe carries his pain very deep inside and does not see the purpose in examining it as I do.

  I watch

  Smoke rising from my flute

  Like notes on a page

  If only Abe would speak to me

  That song would be enough

  Once we were finished eating, Heath and I took a break to clear the table and organize our thoughts. Thus far we had managed to confirm that the diamonds really had existed, and they were in Abe and Daphne’s possession once they had dug them up from the base of the Fishing Tree.

  We also now had a much better understanding of the markers in the German Gate section of the grove.

  What we didn’t yet know was what had happened to those diamonds.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Heath and I began to go through the other papers in the envelope. Though I recognized my grandfather’s distinctive handwriting on most of them, it was hard to tell what, exactly, his scribblings and doodles were all about. We finally decided that many of the pages had to do with plans for the trees in the grove, with notes on everything from fertilizer mix to tree placement to marker diagrams.

  Harder to figure out was a large, folded page that opened up to reveal what looked like building plans, though for what structure we could not imagine. Kind of like a studio apartment, the place would have been quite small, judging by the measurements on the diagram. Along one side of the page, Abe had written what looked like a grocery shopping list, but the quantities were odd: five cases of water bottles, twenty-five cans of tomatoes, ten jars of peanut butter. The list also included other nonfood items, such as lanterns, matches, candles, knives, batteries, tarps, and more.

  “That sounds like camping gear. Maybe he was planning to build a hunting cabin somewhere,” I said.

  “How did he feel about the millennium?” Heath asked, reminding me how everyone had braced themselves for the shift from 1999 to 2000. “Maybe that’s what this was about. Your grandfather was creating a stockpile against catastrophe.”

&n
bsp; “Would that have anything to do with these words here?” I asked, pointing to what my grandfather had written near the bottom of the page in capital letters, circled, and underlined: “FIRST TO GO!”

  “‘First to go,’” Heath read slowly. “I have no idea what that’s about.”

  “Me either. But I can call my grandmother later and ask her if she knows.”

  In the end we were both disappointed that nothing else in the entire envelope seemed to have anything to do with Daphne’s family diamonds. Whether Troy had discovered the envelope and its contents on his own, or if it had been given to him by Nina, it seemed to me that the only clue it contained about where those diamonds could possibly be buried was the single line in Daphne’s journal indicating where they had originally been buried over in Europe for the duration of the war.

  The final piece of paper in the pile was a letter dated just five years ago from a professor named Odette Moreau at East Pennsylvania University. The letter was a simple thank-you note to Abraham Collins for his participation in her department’s Holocaust research project. I didn’t know what that was about, but I had to assume that Abe had given them copies of Daphne’s journal or at least her poems.

  I made a mental note to follow up with that later, curious as to what it was about. Heath received a call just as we finished, so while he talked I returned everything to the envelope and took it to my room for safekeeping. By the time I came back down, he was just hanging up.

  “Good news,” he said, standing beside the couch. “That was the pathologist. Both Floyd and Nina tested positive for ketamine.” He went on to explain that ketamine was an anesthetic used on both humans and animals, and it was often the drug of choice for tranquilizer darts.

  “How do you think it happened? Shouldn’t the humans have been shooting at the creatures and not the other way around?”

  Heath was silent for a moment, rubbing his chin with his thumb.

  “I don’t know,” he said finally. “Like I said earlier, I feel sure it was intentional, not accidental. People don’t usually take pains to cover up accidents.”

  “Sometimes they do. What about hit-and-runs?”

  He nodded, considering.

  “Here, brainstorm with me,” Heath said, walking over to the gift shop area and grabbing a little quilted beanbag. “This is how my roommate and I used to toss ideas around in college. Whatever you do, don’t let it hit the floor. It helps you focus.” Positioning himself there, he threw the beanbag over to me.

  Catching it easily and tossing it back, I said, “Okay, if he didn’t do it on purpose, why would the person who shot Floyd with the tranquilizer dart want to hide the fact?”

  He caught it and threw it back.

  “It could have been someone who didn’t want the police to know, for whatever reason.”

  “Why wouldn’t someone want the police to know?”

  “Maybe he got the ketamine illegally.”

  “Or maybe he had a lot of outstanding parking tickets.”

  “Or maybe he’s just scared of cops in general.”

  That caused me to falter, nearly missing the beanbag as I thought of my uncle. Emory was scared of cops, that was for sure.

  “Maybe it has to do with the animal itself,” I said, finding my footing and tossing it back. “Maybe a big dog got loose and attacked Troy.”

  “A dog? What about the avian coccidiosis?”

  “The dog ran through a chicken coop on the way and got the parasite on his fingernails.”

  “Dogs don’t have fingernails.”

  “Tell that to Liz. She paints Mrs. Prickles’ nails every week.”

  “Yes, but Mrs. Prickles isn’t a dog. She’s a human in dog form.”

  We were getting silly, but suddenly silly seemed to be the order of the day. Tossing the beanbag higher and harder, we still managed to keep it from hitting the floor—until I knocked over a lamp with my elbow. Scrambling to keep the lamp from falling, I tripped on the cord, lost my balance, and began to fall. The next thing I knew, Heath was diving toward me, trying to help but only making things worse. He and I ended up hitting the ground in a tangled pile of limbs, the lamp teetering over after us and landing on my head. Fortunately, at least, the lamp didn’t break. Neither did my head, thanks to the fact that the thing had fallen lampshade first and had barely hurt me at all.

  Catching our breath, we remained there together on the floor for a moment, our laughter fading to soft chuckles. Disentangling myself and rolling onto my side, I propped a head on my arm and looked at Heath, who was still sprawled facedown on the floor next to me.

  “How’s it going, Grace?” I quipped. “Did you have a nice fall?”

  Turning his face toward me, smiling, Heath allowed his eyes to linger on mine. Then, reaching up with one hand, he slid his fingers under my hair and lightly smoothed it back from my face. Lingering there, he traced the line of my chin with one fingertip, ending at my lips.

  Time seemed to stop. The world went away. Despite all the heartache of this day, in the moment all we had was this place and each other. Leaning forward, I touched my mouth to his.

  The next thing I knew, we were locked in a fervent embrace, kissing passionately, holding on to each other tightly, as if to keep from falling from a cliff. At such an odd angle, pinned between him and the back of the couch, I would have expected to feel frightened and claustrophobic, panicked by a rush of memories. Instead, I wanted him to hold me even more closely, to lose himself in the moment and maybe even forget that we had boundaries and that we lived out what we believed.

  But he didn’t forget. Heath never forgot. He pulled away, sat up completely, and ran a hand through his hair as he let out a groan of frustration.

  “You know,” he told me in a low, gravelly voice, “if we were married…”

  “I know,” I whispered, wanting to continue even as I tried to catch my breath.

  “With this big, beautiful place all to ourselves, we could spend hours…We could be together here, there, anywhere, anytime, Sienna, in every room of this inn if we wanted. You and me. Husband and wife. Think of the freedom in that.”

  “I know,” I whispered again, wondering if this was his idea of a proposal or just some wishful thinking.

  We were still sitting there, trying to get our passions under control, lost in our thoughts of what-if, when there was a knock at the back door and it swung open.

  “Hello?” Mike called out, stepping inside and brushing the rain water from the vinyl case he was carrying.

  He spotted the two of us on the floor before we had a chance to respond or get up. I wasn’t sure how he would react, whether embarrassed or jealous or maybe just nonchalant. Instead, it was as if a steel door slammed shut behind his eyes. Looking away, he apologized for coming in like that, saying that he should have waited until someone came to the door.

  “I wouldn’t do this at a regular home,” he added, “but since this is a B and B, I guess I wasn’t thinking. It felt more like walking into a hotel.”

  “Please don’t apologize,” I told him, getting to my feet. “This isn’t what it looks like. We had a little lamp mishap.”

  Heath stood as well, replacing the lamp on the table before stepping toward the door and holding out his hand to Mike for a shake. Though there seemed to be less macho posturing this time, I did notice the look that passed between them, a slight tilting of chins as if in challenge.

  “So what’s up?” I said, trying to make my tone light as I wondered why I kept letting myself get sidetracked by man issues when far more important things were going on.

  “There are a couple of things I would like to discuss with you. Do you mind if we sit down and talk for a minute?”

  I offered him coffee, which he accepted, so the three of us went into the kitchen together. While I worked behind the center island, putting a filter in the coffeemaker, scooping up ground beans, and pouring in the water, the two men seated themselves at the table. I wasn’t sure if Mike had intende
d to include Heath in this conversation, but I could see that Heath wasn’t going anywhere any time soon.

  For a moment I looked from one man to the other, thinking how handsome each one was in his own way—Mike, with his strong features and muscular arms and crackling air of intensity, and Heath, with his chiseled cheekbones and intelligent blue eyes and sweet, gentle spirit. Given that the two men were so different, how was it I found myself attracted to both?

  Trying to banish such thoughts from my mind, I was glad Mike didn’t seem angry with me anymore, not like he was last night. Instead, as he began to explain why he was here, his demeanor was friendly but professional.

  “First, I came by to give you an update on things. I thought you’d like to know that Burl Newton has been released. He’ll still face charges for the cockfighting paraphernalia, but he’s been cleared in the matter of Troy and his wound. We got more test results back. Turns out the avian coccidiosis wasn’t the kind you find in chickens. The gash definitely didn’t come from any of that cockfighting equipment.”

  Pulling three mugs from the cabinet, I braced myself for what I was afraid was coming next, that the evidence was pointing toward Emory’s songbirds and, consequently, Emory himself.

  “Instead, it’s…hold on,” Mike said, pulling his little notebook from his pocket. Flipping through the pages, he found what he was looking for and read it to us. “Okay, this coccidiosis can only be found in ratites, specifically those who are of the order Casuariiformes. Caz-u-air-ee-forms? Am I saying that right, Doc?”

  “You got me,” Heath replied.

  “Well, anyway, that means the evidence in Troy’s wound points to one of only two types of birds, genus Casuarius or genus Dromaius.”

  “In English, please?” I said, wishing he would get to the point.

  “The first one, genus Casuarius, is what’s more commonly known as a ‘cassowary.’ Cassowaries are the most dangerous bird alive. In fact, a cassowary can and will attack a human, and there have even been some fatalities.”