by Karen Harper
He could tell she was tired, right on the edge of one of her narcoleptic meltdowns.
“At least,” she went on, facing the sink with her hand propping her up, “I’m allowed to theorize about age-old corpses, where little me can’t get hurt. Maybe there’s some way I can do all that online instead of actually being there, seeing so much as historic artifacts.”
“What? Claire, you’ve been through enough, and you have responsibilities,” he said, getting up too and turning her toward him.
“I sure do! And one of them is to be partners with you, not like some secondary secretary, kept in a corner, hiding behind a laptop. Brad Vance won’t let me see the real artifacts and you want me to stay in a gilded cage, a padded room!”
“Okay, okay. I’m sorry. Of course, I can use your expertise at Twisted Trees. You want to go with us to check the place out, that’s fine,” he said, holding up both hands as if she had drawn a gun on him and demanded his money or his life.
* * *
That night, thrusting aside the blackness of sleep, Claire climbed out of her grave and went to open a drawer to get more sleeping meds. But in the drawer lay a woman reaching out to her, a woman between two men.
“I feel I know you,” she whispered to the woman. “Did you love them both?”
The woman nodded. “Caught between,” she said. “Caught between and died for both. An affair of the heart, so I kept one.”
Claire walked down the hall to Leader’s office and took his dagger off the desk. She went back and clawed through the necklaces she kept inside the drawer. Where was that one with the polished stones, all broken now, broken...
She put one necklace around her neck and then another, another. One from Hunter years ago, one from Leader just last month. They weighed her down so much. Was she choking under the huge weight of the bog above her? Were they strangling her or stabbing her? She reached out and knocked the dagger away, no not the dagger, but something else...
“Claire. Claire, sweetheart, what is it? Why are you up?”
Her vision cleared. She stared into the dark mirror over the dresser. Nick was here, out of bed, holding her by the shoulders, pulling her to him. Leader was in the mirror, but Hunter was gone.
“Claire, it’s all right. You haven’t had a narcoleptic nightmare for a long time. Maybe you missed your meds.”
She collapsed into his arms, holding tight.
“But why all the necklaces?” he asked.
“Don’t know,” she said, shaking. “Some dream, like you said. Maybe a nightmare.”
“Here, let’s take them off, put them back,” he said, lifting them in one bunch from her neck and over her mussed head. “Maybe, my love, you were planning to go out on the town without me.”
“Can’t recall, but not that. Lexi—I should check on her.”
“I’ll look in on her. Here, back to bed.”
He started to lead her that way but jolted and looked down into the grave—no, down at the floor. “What’s that?” he asked, stooping to retrieve a dagger—no, of course it wasn’t that. “Oh,” he said, “the letter opener from my desk. You or Lexi must have brought it in, but I didn’t see it here earlier.”
She went back to bed, but she couldn’t recall bringing the letter opener in here. Someone had taken it away, locked it up.
Under the sheet he pulled over her, she felt around her neck. No necklaces now, none broken or twisted. But how much that letter opener looked like a glowing, greenish dagger.
* * *
Early the next morning, when the sun was barely up, though Nick had wanted her to stay home in bed, Claire made sure she took her meds and went with him and Bronco to pick up Dale at his apartment and head for Twisted Tree. They stopped at his house and waited while he went inside to get a ring of keys his mother had once told him had unlocked all the doors in the mansion. If only it would unlock its secrets.
The doors to the main house were long gone, but one key on the ring would open the door to the standing building, Dale had said. But they’d have to pry off boards securing the single entryway first since the garage doors themselves had long been broken and would not lift.
Dale with his broken arm was no help, but Bronco and Nick pulled off the old boards with the claw part of two hammers. Dale handed the key ring to Nick, who tried key after key on the rusted lock of the door, until one worked. But it still took Bronco banging his shoulder against the door to get it open.
“Dusty in there,” were Bronco’s last words to them as they filed in and he went back to his vantage point under a crooked tree to be sure they weren’t surprised or disturbed. They could hear him sneezing as they went single file inside.
The dust of decades made all three of them sneeze too and their eyes water. “Heil Hitler,” Dale muttered when they came across the first of several dust-covered, framed pictures of the long-dead dictator even on the wall of the small entry room. No wonder his parents had made sure this place stayed boarded up.
“Don’t joke,” Nick told him. “Damn, look at this!” he marveled as he dusted off the glass of the eight-by-ten color photo with his shirttail. It was of Hitler again—signed by him as simply Adolph. “Your great-uncle must have been a fanatic, but I guess many were.”
“You don’t think your great-uncle’s mistress was also in love with Hitler?” Claire asked. “Or maybe that madman just thought everyone loved him and signed pictures that way, even for his SS friends like your great-uncle.”
They stepped out of this small entry room into what was, no doubt, a garage large enough for three cars. An old Esso gas can, a few extra tires, nothing unusual. Whatever vehicles had been parked here were as long gone as any human inhabitants.
“Looks like the stairs to the apartment above are over there,” Dale said, pointing with his good arm.
Claire could tell this was a tremendous strain on him, but then, her heart was pounding, and she reached out to hold Nick’s arm. She had to be strong here, for she was the one who had insisted on coming along.
Dale led the way upstairs. The steps creaked in the best tradition of a haunted house. Another door blocked their way at the top of the flight. Dale tried the knob. Nick leaned forward to help. “Locked,” Nick said. “Try your other keys, or we’ll break it in.”
Claire watched while the men fumbled with more keys. Then she recalled she had worn the small, bright flashlight around her neck which she’d admired on Kris and now had one of her own. She leaned around between the two men to shine it on the keys and the lock.
“I think that one worked,” Dale muttered. Nick shoved, and the door opened. Claire squealed as a bat dove out and whipped past them.
“And it isn’t even Halloween,” Nick muttered, but no one laughed.
Dale went up the last step into a small slant-roofed apartment with two inset dormer windows which were not boarded up but were covered by heavy dark green velvet drapes. Seeing no lamps or lights, Claire pulled one pair of draperies open to reveal a set of sheer tattered curtains.
Wan morning sun streamed through them, half lace, half spider webs. The sagging, torn mattress on the narrow bed was full of mice, which jumped to the floor and skittered away. An armchair, a table, a sunken settee and a single shelf of books, all frosted with gray dust, completed the bedroom apartment, though the doors to an empty closet and a small bathroom with a claw-footed tub stood open.
Two things on the wall over the bed they simply gaped at. A red-and-white Nazi flag with a black swastika. And a framed photo of Hitler with a smiling, pretty blonde woman.
Dale gasped. “But that’s my great-uncle’s mistress!” he whispered. “I saw one picture of her before Mother ripped it up. She was standing with my uncle on the grounds here, not really smiling, looking sad. So she must have known Hitler, since they’re in this picture together. Ha—Mother missed that one. But who knows what’s still in the piles
of stuff in her house Nita and Bronco said they’d get rid of? After that cursed freezer, no one went through any more items, though the police gave things a once-over, looking for blood or proof that Cyndi’s murder happened on the premises—which they didn’t find, couldn’t prove. Surely she wasn’t killed there.”
Claire studied Dale’s face instead of the photograph. He was so nervous yet defiant, talking too much as guilty people often did, but then that didn’t mean he was guilty. She reached out with a tissue from her pocket to gently dust the photo. “Look,” she said, leaning closer between the two men. “Along the bottom, near the frame. They’ve signed it to each other, ‘Eva,’ and over here, ‘Adolph.’”
Dale looked stunned.
“Her name—the mistress—was Gretchen, not Eva.”
“So this can’t be your uncle’s mistress,” Nick said, his voice shaky. “Maybe your great-uncle knew Eva before he fled Germany. Are you sure the picture of him you saw once with Hitler’s Eva wasn’t taken in Germany?”
“No way—the picture I saw was taken here.”
“But this can’t be your uncle’s mistress,” Nick repeated. “I had Heck check out Eva Braun. He showed me a couple of pictures of her. The ones here are of her for sure, but Hitler finally married his mistress just a couple of days before they both committed suicide in a bunker in Berlin. Their burned bodies were found later by the Russians, who insisted the teeth in the charred remains matched.”
“Yeah,” Dale muttered, leaning his shoulder against the wall as if he just couldn’t stand on his own anymore. “And we’ve seen—I think—how powdery bodies are when they get burned up to ashes.”
“Unless she had a twin,” Nick went on, “that picture, like the others in this place, are absolutely of Eva Braun herself, so they surely can’t be your great-uncle’s mistress. Or—or can they?”
21
Dale sounded more panicked than ever to Claire. “We’ve got to hide or destroy this stuff and get out of here!”
“Calm down,” Nick told him, putting a hand on his uninjured arm. “This is priceless and important. I don’t mean to sound like I’m on Marian James’s side, but you can’t just destroy amazing history like this.”
“But you’re my lawyer, my friend! I own all this now, and, like you said, we don’t need all this hitting the media or the police so they think I was out to stop Cyndi to cover this up. I wasn’t. I just wanted to get rid of—I mean, get her out of my life.”
While the men continued to argue, Claire moved away and peeked in the bathroom. The tub had brown stains. The small mirror over the basin was dust-shrouded and cracked. The toilet lid had a crocheted cover, yellow with age, which seemed to fit with the cobwebs all over this place.
While Nick tried to calm Dale, she sidled around to peer in the closet. Lots of old wire hangers, nothing else.
She moved on and bent to read the titles of the ten or so books on the single shelf. Every title was in German, but one book looked like a ledger. She slid it out and blew it off. Inside was page after page of large, loopy handwriting, all in German.
She flipped through it, fanning dust so she sneezed again. She noted little drawings here and there. She closed the book and stuck it in the waist of her jeans in back, then settled her shirt over it.
“I have every right just to burn this place down,” Dale was saying. “If that was Eva Braun in the picture here with Uncle Will, that could mean she visited here! People would be crawling all over this place. Nick, no way I can allow that, especially with the police looking for motives I could be hiding. And I don’t need to be labeled some neo-Nazi in this mess of my life!”
“Let’s lock up here, you go back to your apartment and think this through, unless you’d rather come into the firm with me today. We’ll make a plan. Maybe you can donate these photographs anonymously, if we can just hold Marian James and her committee off for a while. You’ve obviously mixed up what you remember the mistress looked like with photos of Eva.”
“All right. It was a couple of years ago when I saw that picture, so that must be it. But if Eva died with Hitler, she can’t have visited here. I—my memory—I’m just confused. Then, maybe my great-uncle or his mistress just brought photos of Hitler and Eva here when he fled. I am taking your advice, leaning on you, Nick.”
He turned to look at Claire. “And you, too, Claire. I’m grateful.”
“We’ll get to the truth,” she told him.
He nodded, but she could sense he did not like the way she’d worded that.
* * *
Shortly after, they watched Bronco drive Dale away to his apartment as they still sat parked in their car on the street between Dale’s house and Bronco and Nita’s new one.
Nick said, “We’re going to have to talk Bronco and Nita into coming back to their house to clear out whatever’s inside. Maybe we can help. We need proof that the mistress was not Eva Braun, and Dale’s mother has lots of things stashed inside to look through.”
“But I have a theory,” she told him, sitting forward to pull out the notebook from the waistband of her jeans. “Nick, don’t get upset, but I thought I’d better rescue this. It was wedged between what looked like some novels in German. I don’t trust Dale not to go back inside and clear everything out, maybe destroy things. What if his great-uncle or his mistress wrote this?”
“Can you tell who that belonged to?” he asked, leaning closer.
“I can’t read German, but surely we can find someone who can. Also,” she said, pointing, “every so often, there are little sketches, and even they might tell a story. Like knowledge about the Black Bog people, this can rewrite history. Oh, look! A few of these entries are signed.”
“By whom? Let me see.”
She carefully turned pages and pointed to a signature: Eva.
“But that’s impossible if Eva Braun’s burned body was found. Unless this diary was written earlier and just brought here by Dale’s great-uncle—if this signature is by Eva Braun.”
“Remember, their bodies were found and burned by Hitler’s enemy, the Russians. And are we even believing them these days? Maybe the Russians didn’t want to admit they couldn’t find her body. Here’s my theory—Oh, who is that?” she cried, startling as a thin old lady with a dog on a leash knocked on their passenger-side window and waved.
“Close and hide that and stay put,” he said, opening his driver’s-side car door. He got out and shut it behind him.
Since the windows were up, Claire strained to catch the conversation.
“I saw Mr. Bronco Gates, the man who bought the house, was with you,” the woman was saying. “Will they be moving back in after cleaning out poor Lucy’s clutter?”
Ah, Claire thought, that must be Betty Richards, the woman who had identified Cyndi’s frozen face and then talked to Nick later about Dale’s mother. She hadn’t met her, but there seemed to be something familiar about her.
She went on, “I take it the police haven’t proved a thing against poor Dale, so I am happy for that, but then who hurt that poor woman? Well, I just want to tell you, Mr. Markwood, if Dale ever does go to trial, you can call on me to testify that Cyndi was not a nice person, you know, very rude to Dale’s mother, not that she cared for that tart.”
“I’m sorry to hear they didn’t get along. Was there a specific instance you can recall that really showed that?”
“Why, more than one. I overheard Cyndi tell her she shouldn’t live like a heathen—that was the very word she used. All her clutter should go out in the trash, Cyndi claimed, and then Lucy told her she was trash and she should be thrown out of Dale’s life. Oh, is that your wife? Hello,” she said louder with a smile and a wave through the glass. Claire was tempted to get out but she stayed put. Since Nick had evidently not wanted her in on this conversation she just waved and smiled, though it was getting warm in there with the windows up.
Claire waved back a second time to be certain the woman had seen her through the reflections on the glass. A busybody and perhaps a loose cannon, but she made a mental note to suggest to Nick that she talk to the woman sometime, maybe if she came with Nita to start weeding through decades of possessions again.
The woman finally walked away with her dog—actually, back to her house the way she had come, so was she really going for a walk, or had she spotted them and just wanted an excuse to talk to Nick? With her own mother and then in several of Nick’s cases recently, eccentric, elderly women had inadvertently helped to solve problems. Was there something in the water in South Florida that produced Florida characters, only some of whom could be trusted?
Nick got back in, started the motor and air conditioner and drove away while they assessed “nosy Betty.” But he pulled into Sugden Park off US 41 and parked where they could see the lake.
“This was where we had a picnic before we left for St. Augustine the first time we worked together,” Claire said. “We are definitely not here for you to try to hire me this time, though, I believe, I have a piece of rare evidence here—evidence for something. Want to sit at a picnic table and let the view calm us down?”
“No, psych major. I’ll leave the A/C on and we’ll sit in here guarding that prime piece of evidence until you explain to me your theory about that diary or whatever it is. I’m going to leave the doors locked. Tell me—show me again—what you’ve found.”
“Found and stolen. Well, let’s say borrowed. I hope you’ll be willing to defend me if Dale eventually brings charges,” she said with a little laugh. They both unhooked their safety belts and leaned closer over the console, shoulder to shoulder. “Look, this Eva drew little doodle-like pictures, and they translate well.”
She turned to the page that had caught her eye. It was laid out like a cartoon in three blocks. To the left in the first drawing, two figures clung together—one with a black, brushy mustache—crying tears yet smiling. They were sharing a bed. In the middle drawing the man waved to the woman as she boarded a crudely drawn airplane. The woman looked pregnant. In the picture on the right, the woman was alone reading a newspaper and crying so hard that—well, evidently, real tears had blurred that drawing and the words beneath. And a tiny baby was floating in a cloud drawn overhead, as if it were in the sky. Or in heaven.
