Hidden Scars

by Mark de Castrique

  But why would Beale call me and then continue to work on the old photographs at home? Had he made an initial discovery and then done due diligence by going through the rest of the book? And yet he hadn’t finished. His notes only went up to the photograph of Buckminster Fuller’s collapsed dome and the penciled circles around Paul Weaver and a woman facing away from the camera.

  Ellie Johnson had confirmed that tension existed between the Jim Crow culture of the town and the culture of the college, but she denied that she and Paul were a romantic couple. However, she didn’t make the same assertion regarding Paul and Leah Rosen. Our trip to Chapel Hill the following day could be either pivotal to the investigation or a dead end. We had no more leads. No, I thought. I was wrong. The photograph I’d seen of Paul and Nadine belied her claim that she only knew him well enough to say hello. Perhaps Harlan Beale also knew Paul better than he’d said. And now he was dead.

  Somewhere in the midst of these thoughts I drifted off to sleep.

  A wide, wet tongue slurping across my mouth and nose jolted me awake.

  “Working hard?” Nakayla stood behind Blue. She held a large brown cushion.

  I sat up and rubbed my eyes. “Just thinking.”

  “Poor baby. That is hard for you. Blue and I went shopping and he has a new bed.”

  “What was wrong with his rug?”

  “It’s at your place.” She dropped the bed on the floor near the end of the sofa.

  Blue didn’t have to be given any instructions. He sauntered to it and lay down.

  “You and Blue can go back to thinking, if you like.”

  I patted the cushion beside me. “Sit down. I need to tell you about Nadine Oates.”

  I gave Nakayla a detailed account of my visit, including Nadine’s categorization of Black Mountain College as a nest of Germans, Yankees, Jews, and Communists, and her claim that she really didn’t know Paul, but I’d seen a framed picture she evidently treasured of the two of them together.

  “When do you think the photograph was taken?”

  “I’m not an expert on antique automobiles but I’d guess the one in the background was mid- to late-nineteen-thirties.”

  “Paul didn’t go into the war until 1943.”

  “I doubt if those farm people could afford new cars, especially during the war. I believe it was 1943 and Paul was shipping out.”

  “Why would she lie about her relationship?”

  “Why, indeed? Maybe she wrote him a ‘Dear John’ letter and didn’t want to admit it.” I thought of another possibility. “Maybe he wrote her a ‘Dear Jane’ letter because he met someone overseas. He was probably stationed in Europe after the surrender. There were a lot of G.I. romances with French and German women.”

  Nakayla nodded. “We haven’t checked his service record. We only know what Violet Baker told us.”

  “A good point,” I admitted, “but I don’t know how much that can tell us.”

  “It might shed some light on his relationship to Leah Rosen.” Nakayla got up and retrieved her iPad from the dining room table. She returned to the sofa and showed me the image on the screen. It was the dust jacket for letters from camp, the book written by Leah Rosen that Ellie Johnson kept in her bedroom.

  “It was available as an e-book,” Nakayla said. “Let me pull up the last letter.” She swiped the screen and brought up the index. She touched the final entry.

  The chapter heading was “letter from Paul.”

  “Read it,” Nakayla said. “It’s not very long. I’ll start some pasta boiling and we’ll have supper here.”

  I read it, and then read it again. I scrolled through the other chapters, each a letter from an individual who was in the death camp. The letters served as a literary motif that not only shared camp experiences but the hopes and dreams of those who would be gassed or shot and then incinerated by the Nazi war machine simply because of their ethnic heritage or religious beliefs. Some were men, some women, some even children. The letters never mentioned a specific camp like Treblinka or Auschwitz, but, rather, encompassed all of them in what the writers simply referred to as “the camp.”

  Except for Paul’s letter. His was addressed “To Those Who Will Not Believe,” and the author was an American soldier liberating Dachau. He described the horrors he witnessed and the inhumanity of humanity that portended more letters would be written from camps of the future, both physical and psychological, camps that would be created by hatred and bigotry.

  The last paragraph was short yet powerful.

  What is the difference between life and death? One breath. The final intake, the final exhale. And then not another. The air in this place is full of final breaths. How many were a prayer? How many were a release of pain? How many a quiet surrender to oblivion? I breathe them in, even as they scar my lungs. Those breaths, those last gasps. I feel them now inside me. So many that I cannot breathe. So filled with them that there is no room for my own breath. I live on that threshold between life and death, breathless from the hidden wounds that others refuse to see.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The drive from Asheville to Chapel Hill took about three and a half hours. Nakayla had arranged for us to meet Leah Rosen in her apartment at one o’clock, giving her plenty of time for lunch. We’d left Blue with Shirley at the law office. She’d bought matching food and water bowls as well as a cushion identical to the one Nakayla had purchased. Blue was acquiring real estate faster than Donald Trump.

  The Carol Woods Retirement Community was a mix of cottages, apartments, and recreational and health facilities. Leah Rosen lived in a ground-floor, one-bedroom unit in one of three buildings all interconnected by enclosed walkways that insured residents could access dining and amenities, whatever the weather.

  At three minutes after one, Nakayla knocked on a door displaying a carved wooden sign that read “Enter With Joy.”

  “Coming.” A woman’s voice sounded warbly but strong.

  The door opened and Leah Rosen greeted us with a smile. She had to be an inch or two below five feet and made me feel like an NBA star. Her gray hair was wavy and pulled off her wrinkled brow with a single gold clasp. She had thick glasses that magnified her brown eyes to the size of quarters.

  “Welcome. Welcome. Any friend of Ellie’s is a friend of mine.”

  She motioned with her cane for us to step through a small foyer into the living room. Except it really wasn’t a living room. Bookshelves lined the walls and held so many volumes I should more accurately describe the room as a library. A small burgundy love seat was positioned to allow access to the books behind it. An antique secretarial desk was opposite it. A reading lamp threw bright light onto a lined-page journal with an open fountain pen lying diagonally across it. I realized her life’s passion was as evident in her surroundings as Ellie Johnson’s passion for dance had been expressed through her figurines.

  “Take the sofa,” she instructed, and then went to the desk chair and turned it to face us. She capped the pen, started to sit, and then said, “Where are my manners? Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “I’m fine, Ms. Rosen,” I said.

  “We grabbed a bite of lunch,” Nakayla lied. “But if you’d like something yourself, please don’t hesitate.”

  Leah Rosen eased into the chair. “No, nothing for me. And you must call me Leah. I bet Ellie didn’t like Ms. Johnson.”

  “She didn’t,” Nakayla said. “She’s quite a lady. Still living in her brownstone. We met her granddaughter, Mercy. Ellie’s fortunate to have someone check up on her every day.”

  Leah nodded. “We’re both at that age when we need assistance. If I don’t show up at breakfast, five people will knock on my door within fifteen minutes.” She shifted in her chair and laid the cane across her lap. “How long have you known Ellie?”

  I looked at Nakayla. We’d agreed she’d take the lead in explai
ning why we’d come.

  “Actually, we just met her on Saturday,” Nakayla said. “She’s helping us with some background research on Black Mountain College.”

  A visible tremor ran down Leah Rosen’s body and ended with her hands tightening around the shaft of her cane. “What kind of research?” she whispered.

  “We’re working for Violet Baker. She’s Paul Weaver’s sister. We saw a picture of Ellie and Paul together at Lake Eden. There was a third student in that particular photograph and Ellie confirmed that you were that person.”

  Leah took a deep breath. The eyes behind the thick lenses moistened. “What picture?”

  Nakayla had set her handbag at her feet. She retrieved the library copy of the Black Mountain College book and opened it to the correct page. She walked over and knelt beside Leah, holding the book just above the woman’s lap.

  Leah raised one hand from the cane and ran her fingers over the photograph like reading Braille. “So long ago. I remember the day—yesterday to me.” She looked at Nakayla. “I’ve never seen this before because I couldn’t bear to see any photos from that time. Ellie is my link. We share memories, not pictures.”

  Nakayla flipped to the second of the marked pages—the photograph of Buckminster Fuller’s failed dome where Harlan Beale had used a pencil to circle Paul and an unknown woman facing away from the camera. Nakayla pointed to her. “We see Paul, but who is this?”

  Leah Rosen bent over, her thick glasses coming closer to the page. “Me. I was heading back to my room. Paul followed.” She stopped and looked at me. “We didn’t have a lot of time to be alone.”

  I tried to visualize this elderly, diminutive woman as the young, smiling girl by the lake. The girl that Ellie said had a special bond with Paul Weaver. The woman who had written “a letter from Paul.”

  And I thought of Harlan Beale, the source of Roland Cassidy’s stories. What was fact? What was fiction?

  “You were in a concentration camp, weren’t you, Leah. Ravensbrück.” It was a statement, not a question.

  She only nodded.

  “And Paul told you he liberated Dachau. He’d seen the horrific conditions you experienced.”

  “No. He and his battalion liberated Gunskirchen. I changed that for the book. Paul and I didn’t talk much about our experiences. We didn’t need to. We shared a unique perspective and so we carved out life for ourselves. A life that hoped for a better world.”

  “What happened to Paul?”

  Tears sparkled beneath her magnifying lenses. “I don’t know. He said he was going to meet someone. To set her straight. An old girlfriend who had confronted us in town. There was quite a scene between them. But he didn’t come back that night. The next day some deputies came and told us Paul was dead. That he’d fallen while hiking. I tried to tell them he’d gone for a meeting.” She paused long enough to wipe her cheek. “Then the men in the suits came and told me no one had seen Paul since he left the college. That I should stop saying otherwise or there would be problems with my papers.”

  “Your papers?” I asked.

  “I was an immigrant, a refugee sponsored by my aunt after the war. My parents and two brothers didn’t survive the camps. You don’t understand what the phrase ‘problems with your papers’ meant to someone who had endured the Nazi reign of terror.”

  “Is that why you left the college?”

  “Yes. I returned to New York to live with my aunt under her protection until I could gain my American citizenship.”

  Nakayla closed the book. She stood and turned to me. She mouthed “Roland Cassidy” and I knew she referred to the similarities between what Leah was telling us and the characters in Cassidy’s novel.

  “Tell me, Leah,” I said. “Was the woman Paul was supposed to meet Nadine Oates?”

  Leah’s mouth dropped open. “Yes. How did you know?”

  I ignored her question and asked another. “Did you ever see her after Paul’s death?”

  “No. I’d been warned off. I left the college a few weeks later.”

  “And when you wrote the ‘letter from Paul’ in your book, was that presenting some of Paul’s feelings he’d shared with you?”

  “Yes. One of the few times he’d opened up about his war experience when he spoke of witnessing the Gunskirchen horror. He said his breath caught in his chest. He realized that a single breath was the difference between the living and the dead.” Leah Rosen leaned forward and pointed a finger at me. “And, Mr. Blackman, in that moment of telling me, Paul couldn’t breathe. We were walking around Lake Eden in the evening and he suddenly sat down. He was able to wheeze the word ‘inhaler’ and I ran to his room and found it in his shaving kit. It took about thirty minutes before his breathing eased enough for us to return to the college. That conversation and Paul’s physical reaction formed the ‘letter from Paul.’ It was my way of keeping him alive.” She stared for a few seconds at the bookshelf behind me. “William Faulkner said, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ Here you are today, bringing the past to me. At age ninety, even I can’t outlive it.”

  I thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s boats beating ceaselessly against the current. Leah Rosen had tried to pull against the current, and Nakayla and I had pushed her back into those waters churned by a fascist dictator so many years ago. Waters from which Leah Rosen could never row free.

  ***

  “Do you think Nadine Oates could have killed Paul Weaver?” Nakayla asked the question as we merged onto I-40 headed west to Asheville.

  “She could have. And she has the family tie to Harlan Beale. Maybe he knew her secret.”

  “Or even helped her,” Nakayla offered. “Paul Weaver could have died elsewhere, been transported to the site along the Blue Ridge Parkway, and then his body thrown from the trail.”

  “Newly suspects Beale’s body could have been moved as well. But it’s hard to believe that a ninety-year-old woman could orchestrate that maneuver. As for 1948, we have no proof that Paul Weaver actually saw Nadine on the day of his death. I’m sure she’ll deny it and there’s no one to state otherwise.”

  “And what about the missing death certificate and sheriff’s report? How did Nadine manage that?”

  “She didn’t,” I said. “This is more than a jilted lover. I don’t know what we’re stirring up, but we’ve got only one option.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Keep stirring.” I kept my eyes on the road and handed her my cell phone. “Speed-dial Newly. Tell him we should be back before six and we’ll come straight to headquarters. Tell him we’ve got some traffic for our two-way street of communication.”

  Newly agreed to meet but not at police headquarters. I suspected he didn’t want to appear too cozy with private detectives at this early stage of his investigation. We were to call him when we reached our office and he would walk over.

  Nakayla returned my phone and I clipped it to my belt.

  “Tell me about the plot of Love Among the Ridges,” I said. “How much does it mirror what we’ve learned from Ellie and Leah?”

  “The main female character, Sacha Molter, is a concentration camp survivor like Leah. But she wants to be a dancer like Ellie. That makes dramatic sense as the action of dance is more interesting than scribbling in a notebook. The male lead, Robbie Oakley, is an artist who paints what are described as angry abstracts. In the book, the horror of the war fuels his drive. He was part of the U.S. troops that liberated Buchenwald. That’s a change from Gunskirchen, but maybe it’s only Cassidy’s thin attempt to fictionalize what he’d heard, like Leah Rosen did.”

  “Heard from whom?” I asked. “Harlan?”

  “I guess. Unless he also talked to Nadine, but didn’t want to credit her as a source.”

  I thought about how Roland Cassidy had advised me to stay clear of Nadine Oates. Did he think she was a nut or was she someone who woul
d undercut his claim to have invented his characters and story?

  “And there’s no violent death in the book?”

  “No. The plot’s a slow revelation of the two characters’ backstories. It’s like Dirty Dancing meets Love Story. Sacha turns out to be dying of tuberculosis contracted in the camp.”

  Those old movies were before my time, but Nakayla liked nothing better than a classic cinema tear-jerker.

  “That’s interesting,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Tuberculosis. Both the fictional Sacha and real Paul had breathing difficulties.”

  “Anything else? Any small detail or subplot could be relevant.”

  “I hadn’t made the connection before, but you said Nadine spoke disparagingly about the people at the college.”

  “She called them Germans, Yankees, Jews, and Communists.”

  “Then we need to have another conversation with Roland Cassidy,” Nakayla said.

  “Why?”

  “In the book Sacha is a member of the Communist party. Where did Roland get that idea? Maybe we should have asked Leah Rosen about her politics.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Newly, Nakayla, and I sat in the conversation area of our office with cups of freshly brewed coffee. Newly had arrived with an unmarked manila envelope, but did nothing more than drop it on the table in front of his chair. It was like the ante in a poker game. Nakayla and I would have to give him something in order to play.

  I decided to go ahead and lay out my cards. “Since Friday, we’ve seen three people who might have a bearing on Harlan Beale’s death. Ellie Johnson in Brooklyn, New York; Nadine Oates, whom you know; and Leah Rosen in Chapel Hill. Johnson and Rosen were students at the college with Paul Weaver. Nadine Oates was Weaver’s old girlfriend who got dumped for Rosen. Nadine might be the last person to have seen Weaver alive.”