Secrets of Harmony Grove

by Mindy Starns Clark

  That seemed an appropriate point for ending our conversation. Nina and I said our goodbyes, and I went to the car, deep in thought. Obviously, Abe had wanted Emory to be well cared for after he was gone, so what had he done wrong? Why hadn’t the location of the diamonds ever been revealed? Was it possible that my grandfather’s lawyer had lied, that the diamonds’ hiding place had been specified in the will but that the man had somehow altered the document and stolen them for himself?

  That didn’t sound likely, but just in case I would ask Liz how to look into something like that. In the meantime, there were other avenues to pursue. Slipping into the car beside Heath, I gave him the high points of my conversation with Nina as we made the short drive back to the inn.

  He, in turn, told me about the journal, insisting that I read the final entry, one in which she predicted her own death. Dated February 12, 1946, it had been written near the end of her pregnancy.

  Abe won’t let me talk about my fear that I will die giving birth to our child. Deep inside he must know I am not up to this. My health, sorely compromised in the camps, needs years yet to heal. But what can we do? Babies come whether we are ready or not. And so I go on. I pray for life, but I brace myself for death. Scribbling furiously every day, I have tried to write things down, every memory, every truth, wanting to leave something of myself behind for my child, who I fear will not otherwise know me.

  Is the tiny one inside my womb a boy or a girl? It matters not.

  What matters is that Abe keep his promise. No matter what, he will keep our child safe from harm always. Whatever it takes. Whatever the cost. This child must always have a place to hide.

  Daphne had been right about not surviving childbirth. Emory had barely survived himself, and during the birth he had been deprived of oxygen long enough to cause permanent brain damage. Perhaps one of the saddest elements of this tragedy wasn’t just that Daphne had died, but that her mentally limited son would never have the capacity to understand or appreciate the treasure of the journal she had left behind.

  I had to blink away tears as I read the last line. But before I could even begin to gather my thoughts, I realized that the two witness protection guys were coming our way. They looked as if they wanted to speak with us, so we put the papers away for now and got out of the car.

  “Is something wrong?” Heath asked.

  “Yes, there’s something wrong. We thought you said Floyd was inside,” one of them told us.

  “He was.”

  “Not that we can see. We can’t find him anywhere.”

  “Did you call out his name when you went in?” Heath asked.

  “Called out his name, rang the bell, knocked, finally walked all over the entire place, inside and out, looking for him. He’s nowhere to be found.”

  “That’s odd,” I said, certain there was a logical explanation. Floyd couldn’t have left the house completely because the two men had been walking up as we were walking out, so one way or another one of us would have seen him. “Let me see if I can find him,” I said, thinking maybe he had just gone down into the wine cellar or something and hadn’t heard everyone calling him from upstairs.

  Heath stayed outside with the two men while I went inside and began calling Floyd’s name and walking from room to room. I checked the wine cellar, but it was empty. Thinking maybe he was out on the screen porch, I went there, but it was empty too, and the screen door was locked from the inside. After looking through the rest of the downstairs, I headed up to the second floor, checking the three rooms and their bathrooms in turn. There were no signs of Floyd anywhere.

  This was so weird!

  I came back downstairs, where Heath and the two men were just coming in the back door. I admitted that they were right. I couldn’t find him either.

  “We didn’t see him outside,” Heath said, “which means he could be hiding somewhere on purpose.”

  “That’d be my guess,” one of the men replied, looking at his coworker and snorting derisively. “He musta seen us coming.”

  At Heath’s suggestion, all four of us fanned out to look, this time in a more systematic fashion. My job was to check every door and window for evidence of an escape. When I had finished making my way through the whole house, I was more certain than ever that Floyd was here somewhere, because everything except the back door was locked from the inside.

  So where was he?

  “Well,” I said as I met back up with the two men in the main room, “whatever part of the alphabet you guys come from—FBI, ATF, DOT, whatever—I guess the important question is, what do you do when your star witness goes missing?”

  The two men looked at each other and then back at me.

  “What do you mean?” one asked.

  “I mean, how serious is this? I know Floyd turned state’s evidence, but does that mean you need him to testify against the mob and all of that, or has it been enough just to have him as an informant?”

  The men looked at each other in alarm and then at me.

  “Floyd turned?”

  “He’s been talking to the FBI?”

  “Yes. Of course. Isn’t that why you’re here?”

  Suddenly, both men began edging toward the door.

  “No, look, we gotta go,” the first one said. “If you see Floyd, tell him we’ll be in touch, would you? Just say some old friends came by to see him.”

  After that, the two men made a hasty retreat, practically running out the door and down the sidewalk. Once they were gone, it took me a minute to realize what had just happened. Those two hadn’t been feds at all. They were criminals.

  More than likely, they were the mob.

  Reaching into the pack at my waist, I pulled out my gun, holding the grip firmly as I moved swiftly to the back door and flipped the deadbolt so that it was securely locked. I knew that Heath wouldn’t be happy to see that I had the gun out, but that was his problem. Suddenly, I felt very, very violated.

  Looking around me, the house was so quiet that for a moment I was terrified that Heath had disappeared too. Standing by the front door, I called out his name and was deeply relieved to hear a reply. It sounded as if he was in Floyd’s room, so I went there now, gun in one hand, digging in my pocket for my phone with the other.

  “Did you hear what just happened?” I asked, and when he said he had not, I explained.

  “And that gun makes you feel safer now?” he asked, eyeing it warily. “Because it’s not doing too much for me.”

  “Deal with it,” I snapped, dialing with my other hand and waiting for Mike to pick up.

  “Sienna? Hey, hold on a minute,” Mike’s voice said as he answered, and then I could hear him talking to someone else, just finishing up a conversation. As I waited for him to come back on the line, the enormity of the situation finally began to hit me. My stupid blunder had just clued in the mob that one of their own had been ratting them out to the federal government! Who knew what the fallout from that might be?

  Beyond that, where was Floyd? Where on earth could he be hiding?

  Suddenly, I thought of the final line from Daphne’s journal: This child must always have a place to hide.

  “Sorry, this is taking longer than I thought,” Mike said suddenly through the phone. “Can I call you back in a few?”

  My mind racing on this new possibility, I told Mike yes, adding that he should just come right over to the B and B because we had some important new developments to share.

  “Will do,” he said.

  Hanging up, I looked at Heath, puzzle pieces clicking into place.

  I thought of Abe’s papers, of the plans for what looked like a small studio apartment.

  I thought of what Nina had said about Abe being obsessed with Emory’s Jewish heritage and the chance of some future Holocaust.

  I thought of Abe’s promise to Daphne to always keep their son safe, no matter what.

  I thought of the words on those plans he had drawn, FIRST TO GO.

  In Germany, the ones who were first
to go weren’t just random Jews. They were what Hitler considered the most “defective” Jews of all: the mentally or physically handicapped.

  “I think I know where Floyd is,” I said. “Or at least I know how to find him.”

  Soon Heath and I were at the kitchen table, the drawing from my grandfather’s papers spread out in front of us. And what a difference it made, to look at the drawing in the right context! Heath and I studied it together, considering the shape and dimensions, and it didn’t take long for us to figure out that the hidden room had been built under a flight of stairs at one corner of the house. There were three staircases in this place, one on the main floor, one that led to the basement, and one that led to the wine cellar. Judging by the placement and shape of the room, we both felt like the wine cellar was the only logical choice.

  Once we decided that, I gasped, a memory suddenly flooding into my brain. During the renovation, Troy and I had discovered something unusual about the stairs down there, but we hadn’t really known what we were seeing. I doubt that we would have spotted it at all if we hadn’t been working down there so much, faux-painting the newly walled-off corner of the basement to make it look like an old European wine cellar. When I was sanding the stairs for a coat of paint, I realized that the front of one stair, the part Troy had said was called the riser, was attached by hidden hinges, and it could be flipped open to reveal a secret cubby behind it. Checking each of the steps, we had found five in a row that had a false front and a hidden cubby. All five were empty except for the third one, which had a small latch on one side. We tried pulling the latch but it didn’t seem to do anything. Finally, we lost interest and gave up—and the whole thing had completely slipped my mind until now.

  “Follow me,” I said, leading Heath down into the wine cellar as I explained. The space there was tight, about the size of an elevator, just enough for the wine racks and three or four people. Ignoring my claustrophobia, I held my gun at the ready while Heath pulled on the risers of each step, starting at the bottom and working his way up. When he got to the third one from the bottom, it popped open, just as I remembered.

  “There’s the latch,” I whispered, pointing to the side of the cubby’s interior, where a small wooden handle just waited to be pulled down.

  Heart pounding, I held out the gun toward the stairs.

  “Should we wait for the police?” Heath whispered.

  “I’m not waiting another second,” I replied.

  Giving me a nod, he reached out and twisted the handle. Nothing happened at first, but I told him to keep trying, to push even harder. As he worked on that, I couldn’t help but quickly check the other cubbies, flipping them open just to make sure they were all still empty.

  They weren’t.

  Though the two bottom cubbies were empty, the top three were completely filled with cash—stacks and stacks of rubber-banded packets of bills.

  “Whoa,” I whispered, wanting to reach out and grab a packet, just to look at it more closely, but I didn’t dare. Instead, we both just stood there and stared at all that money for a moment, and then we closed those cubby doors and returned our attention to the one with the latch. There would be time later to think about the cash, what it meant, and what to do about it.

  Handing off the flashlight to me, Heath tried using both hands on the latch. Finally, with a big burst of strength, it gave, and with a metallic boing from somewhere deep inside, half of the staircase suddenly seemed to pop loose. Hinged at one side, it looked like the stairs were going to swing open like a door—a small, low door.

  Taking what cover we could along one side of that door, Heath took back the flashlight and gave the stairs a single push open with his foot, both of us pulling back, cringing as the rusty hinges squealed in protest. As the crack widened, we were instantly enveloped in the musty stench of earth, loamy and stale. It was too dark to see anything inside. Holding my breath, I squinted into that darkness, but all I could make out were a few simple, wooden steps that descended into a deeper darkness below. Despite my trembling hands and wobbly knees, I knew we had no choice but to keep going.

  The time for secrets was over.

  FORTY-THREE

  Moving in front of me protectively, Heath clicked on the flashlight and played its beam around the cavernous interior. Just as the plans had shown, it looked like a single room, with a toilet and sink in the far corner.

  There was a minimum of furniture in here, just a bed and a chair and a table. In the middle of the room was a stack of boxes, piled about six feet high and four feet wide.

  As I clutched the gun in both hands and Heath shined his light on those boxes, a head suddenly emerged from behind, two eyes staring back at us in fear.

  Floyd.

  “Are they gone?” he whispered.

  It took both of us a moment to grasp the reality of the situation. Floyd was here, hiding in this secret room that had been created by my grandfather. My mind filled with questions, starting with what was he doing in here and how had he known about this place. I spat out every question that came to mind, saying that I wasn’t going to budge until he gave me some solid answers.

  So with our prisoner standing in the darkened room and Heath and I looking on from its entrance, Floyd launched into an explanation, starting with Troy’s arrival here at the B and B on Monday evening. According to Floyd, he and Troy had found this room quite by accident that night.

  “You’re telling us that you and Troy ‘just happened’ to stumble on this room by accident? Heath and I almost couldn’t find it on purpose—even with a blueprint in our hands! What were you doing poking around in the wine cellar anyway?”

  As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized exactly what they had been doing: fooling with the cash in the cubbies, which was part of their little money-laundering operation. I asked Floyd if that was correct, and after a brief hesitation, he nodded.

  “Okay, yeah, we’ve been using these stairs for stashing the money. But we never dreamed there was another whole room behind them! When we found it by accident on Monday night, we were shocked. Came in, took a good look around. Couldn’t imagine what it was for. Then we thought maybe the boxes stacked here in the center contained some sort of hidden treasures. Why else would somebody build a secret room like this?” We didn’t answer, so he continued, saying that together he and Troy had gone through every box, but to no avail. All they held were an assortment of non-perishable foods and some camping supplies, along with a packet of cash and an envelope full of old papers.

  So this was where Troy had stumbled upon my grandfather’s documents. No wonder none of us had ever seen them before! When Troy took a look at them, he must have seen a reference to ‘die diamanten’ in the journal, just as Nina had said, and decided to go on a treasure hunt—though obviously he didn’t share his find, or his plans, with his partner in crime, Floyd.

  “So why were you in here now?” Heath demanded.

  “Because when you guys were leaving earlier, I spotted the Nightmare Twins coming up the walk, and I knew I’d better hide somewhere they would never find me.”

  “Why didn’t you want them to find you?”

  “’Cause I was afraid they were here to kill me!”

  That led to a whole host of new questions, which we both threw out. Floyd listened, his eyes lingering on the barrel of my gun, and then continued.

  “Okay, well, you already figured out that we were laundering cash here at the B and B, right? What you didn’t know was that this wine cellar was all part of the original plan. Here was our idea: Once a month, Troy was going to bring the cash, check into his regular room—this room with the wine cellar—and stash the money in the stairs. It would be my job to come down here each week, pull out some of that cash, and deposit it in the bank. As long as my records showed receipts equal to the amounts of my deposits, we didn’t think anybody would suspect a thing.”

  I glanced at Heath, once again feeling utterly humiliated by the lying and manipulative Troy.<
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  “See, before the B and B actually opened for business,” Floyd continued, “Troy and I thought we would need to have actual guests coming and staying once in a while to keep things looking legit. So that’s when Troy came up with the idea of walling off that section of the basement and turning it into a wine cellar, one that could be reached only through the Bay Laurel room. As long as I never put anyone in that room except Troy, it didn’t seem likely that our secret would ever be found out. As far as we knew, the only other person on the planet who was aware these cubbies existed was you. So all I had to do was remove the cash whenever I learned you were coming out, just in case. Lucky for me, you only came out once in a great while, and never for very long.”

  “And what happened to all of the ‘actual guests’?” I asked.

  Floyd shrugged.

  “It didn’t take long to figure out that wasn’t going to be necessary. The whole cash in/cash out system worked great—you never showed up at all, and nobody was asking any questions, so it was just a lot easier not to fool with real guests.”

  “So you really have been collecting your paycheck as the B and B’s manager for almost two years while all you’ve done is sit around in this big place all by yourself and take it easy.”

  Floyd grinned and said, “Pretty sweet deal, huh? Can you blame me?”

  Ignoring the question—for which I had one very strong answer—Heath asked why they hadn’t found the secret room before if they had been using the cubbyholes all along.

  “We knew there was a lever in the third one, but Troy said it didn’t do anything. I guess we just didn’t pull on it hard enough to make the stairs pop open. I figured it was for an old furnace or a sump pump or something. Never thought about it again.”

  “So what was different this time?” I asked, the skepticism clear in my voice. Frankly, this man had been lying to me so much for so long I wasn’t sure whether to believe anything that he was telling us now or not. That would be for the police to sort through.