Silent Scream

by Karen Harper

  They were both silent as Claire flipped through the other pages, but no other drawings seemed as important. Sketched egrets on a lawn under a twisted tree, like those which grew on the mansion grounds. A woman alone with open but empty arms.

  And, at the very end of the book, the last page, though there were others left blank, a drawing of a woman drinking something and then that woman on a bed—maybe the single bed in the garage apartment—with her arms crossed over her chest and what looked like a framed picture clutched to her chest.

  When Nick spoke, Claire was so into her racing thoughts that she jumped.

  “She could be cradling that picture that’s over the bed.” He ignored his cell phone when it sounded. “What is your interpretation of all this?”

  “Too early to tell, but, for some reason, Hitler must have sent Eva Braun away before he died.”

  “But the Russians found two burned bodies.”

  “But like I asked before, do you believe that? Staging that would be easy enough, just kill and burn some innocent bystander or pull one out of the ruins of Berlin. But Hitler and Eva must have thought she was pregnant with his child, and the so-called Fuhrer wanted his heir to live. To come back to Germany in triumph someday when all was lost at that earlier time? I know this sounds crazy, but I’ve been theorizing that Reaching Woman might have been married—belonged somehow—to one of the men she was entombed with, but became pregnant by the other. But back to Eva Braun. Perhaps the baby died—a miscarriage, something. When she lost Hitler and her heir, she killed herself in that apartment. Maybe Dale’s uncle had been ordered to hide and protect her and then he had to bury her. Nick, we’ve got to get this translated, carefully, privately.”

  “But it’s Dale’s property.”

  “And he’d no doubt like to destroy it. This Hitler’s heir possibility is more of a bombshell than simply Eva escaping and some other woman taking her place in a suicide pact so that two burned bodies would be found. Do you think Dale could have killed Cyndi? Maybe she was pressing about getting in to see what we saw today. Maybe she was even blackmailing him about his Hitler connection, however distant and long past. Maybe he knows more about all this than he’s telling. Can we get this diary locked in the safe at the firm and have someone who can read it come there?”

  He heaved a huge sigh that seemed to deflate him.

  “Nick, I can take this on myself. I took the journal while you two were talking. I didn’t tell you until later—all true. So I can claim I’m the one who had it translated before telling you what it said. You know, I’m pretty sure Kris could wade through this. She had some high school German, and I think she picked up more when she lived in Europe those early years on digs.”

  “If you can trust her.”

  “Of course. I’d better. And she obviously knows how to keep a secret, with all her work at Black Bog.”

  She kept silent a moment, watching Nick agonize over this dilemma. Brad Vance had strongly questioned her own pledge to keep the work there secret, had even said she might have to withdraw from her contract if she was targeted with more publicity. But she didn’t have to go public with this. If she and Kris could verify her theory, surely this diary could be handed over to historians, or even the government, anonymously.

  But this was so important—as key, in a way, as the discoveries at Black Bog. She held her breath.

  “All right, ask Kris if she can come to the office tonight to have a look at this when everyone’s gone. But we’ll at least have to tell Dale what she finds.”

  “Isn’t there some moral law about something being so important for history—for the knowledge of all mankind—that what someone owns really belongs to humanity?”

  “I’ll look into it. Sounds like international law to me, not my forte, though, sometimes lately, I’m not sure what is. Damned if I want to defend a man who has been sitting on this for years, and who had motive, means and opportunity to murder a woman. But we’re in deep, sweetheart, and getting deeper. I’m sorry I wanted to keep you out of this.”

  “Apology accepted. We’re better working together on things, have been since we first sat at that picnic table over there, and you offered me a job—and I found a new life.”

  They kissed, then refastened their seat belts before he drove them back out to the highway. Of course, she thought, getting in deep and deeper had caused them problems before, but together they would work through this, like resurrecting human ashes from the bombed-out ruins of Berlin years ago or bodies in a South Florida bog days ago.

  22

  After Lexi was in bed that night—and had been reassured again that Jace loved her—Claire took a shower, then hovered over her laptop. She wanted to do more research on Eva Braun, but she was looking into Cynthia Lindley again for Nick.

  “Bingo!” she cried after she’d gone down many a rabbit trail, rereading parts of the woman’s Facebook page, then finding Cyndi on LinkedIn, talking about “her dream job.” I think I will be a fabulous salesperson for luxury real estate, here in beautiful Naples! I will soon have some high-class backing from a member of a committee that preserves historic sights, maybe more than one influential sponsor!

  No doubt she was referring to Marian James, but more than one backer? So was Marian lying that she only received Cyndi’s recorded phone message and could not respond? Or was Cyndi lying here?

  And—amazing! Pictures accompanied the post that had to be of the overgrown lawn at Twisted Trees with ficus trees and more distant palms in the background, though the ruined mansion was not in the picture. The next photo showed Cyndi standing in front of a large modern mansion with palm trees. Behind her, on the lush lawn was a for sale sign. The implication was there, though it was a lie. The Twisted Tree grounds hardly had that stunning home on it.

  And the picture looked like a very good selfie, maybe one made with a selfie stick or one of those new little drones that took photographs, obviously a drone much smaller than the one that had crashed into the country club window.

  In the photo, Cyndi stood in front of the sign. She had positioned herself perfectly to block out the name of the Realtor and the phone number, so there was no way to follow up to see if she had managed to get a job somewhere, which Claire doubted. No one had evidently come forward when she was murdered to say she’d worked for a particular firm—unless Ken Jensen was not telling them everything.

  Or perhaps Marian had lied and had actually talked to Cyndi instead of just receiving her recorded message. Had Cyndi bargained with Marian to get an in with a posh real estate office here in town for the promise of help with her access to Twisted Trees? Or was this all just an egotistical lie from Cyndi, pie in the sky to build herself up? The woman was starting to sound more and more unbalanced and aggressive.

  She ran to get Nick.

  * * *

  Claire did not go to Black Bog the next day, but stayed home with Trey and tried to bolster Nita’s self-confidence. She had agreed to move back into her and Bronco’s house for the coming weekend to clean the place out. That way, Bronco wouldn’t be working and could be there to help, and Nick and Claire could pitch in some too. Until then, Claire had Black Bog work she could do at home, namely going through her voluminous handwritten notes, trying to puzzle out a theory about the trio. Also, she, Nick and Kris were going to meet at the law offices tonight after the staff left to take a look at what they were calling Eva’s Diary.

  Trey was asleep in his bassinet in the shade on the back patio table next to her while she searched for even more about Cyndi online. Nick had been astounded at what she’d found last night, though they’d decided not to blindly call any of the dozens of local real estate firms. He planned to call Ken Jensen to see if his team had turned up these clues, but she knew Nick was dragging his feet. No way he wanted her work to be more admired by the police department so they’d try to hire her as a forensic psychologist.

  T
oday, Claire was looking under both the dead woman’s names, her real one, Cynthia Linschwartz, and her chosen but evidently not legal name, Cynthia Lindley.

  So what else had the woman been willing to lie about? Nick had been amazed and ecstatic last night that Claire had found what must be a mention of Marian James. He had agreed with her questions: was Marian lying about whether the two women had made contact? Had something gone awry in the meeting and Cyndi ended up dead?

  But now, it seemed both lines of research had come to a dead end. Maybe Heck could take this further as he was better at online detecting than she’d ever be. If Heck’s dream job to work for a facial recognition tech team—the rec tech team, as he called it—was too dangerous, maybe he could be the one to consult with the Naples police. As for her, it was time to turn her thoughts to theories, based on facts, of course, about the trio in the Black Bog grave.

  But Trey picked that very moment to wake up and fuss. She fed him a bottle and walked around the pool, holding him against her shoulder. Could there have been a child involved in the trio’s lives? If there had been a love triangle between Reaching Woman and the two men, whose baby had she carried? Who belonged to whom, if their culture had recognized some form of marriage? The woman’s deerskin clothing matched Hunter’s, so had she fallen for Leader when her man was out hunting? But the broken necklace was more like Leader’s bracelet. Or had she been Leader’s mate, then had fallen for Hunter and so it was decreed she would be dressed like him and die with him as punishment?

  But how and why had Leader died and been interred with them? Could it have been natural causes and so, with his eyes wide open, his people had honored him to lie with the woman he loved? But why did Hunter’s executed body lie there too and why was his heart with the woman’s body?

  She jolted when Nita’s voice came close. “Want me to take him for a while, so you can work?”

  “I’m thinking while I walk.”

  “Okay. I will go back to making lists. I thought at first to keep some of the furniture in the house at least, but now I don’t know.”

  “Did you sleep some, Nita?” she asked as her friend turned away to go back inside.

  She shook her head and shrugged. “Some, I guess. Claire, I’ll go back there, help everyone by cleaning that place out, looking for things—clues—like you said. But her face frozen in that silent scream still scares me. At least the freezer will be gone soon.”

  “I understand. It still scares me too,” Claire said, wishing she could share with Nita how the trio of bog faces, especially the woman’s, haunted her. And Leader’s open eyes, as if he wanted a last glimpse of the woman he was buried next to, while she reached out toward him and the executed Hunter, who had paid with his life for some terrible deed or act.

  “We both need to be brave and find answers,” Claire told her friend. Nita, of course, thought she meant about their house a hoarder had left littered with a lifetime of things. But she meant so much more.

  * * *

  “I can’t believe you brought Lexi even if it’s not a school night,” Nick whispered to Claire as they got set up in his office to have Kris look at the German diary.

  “She needs to be with us now that she’s upset about not seeing Jace. Besides, she’ll be content looking up butterfly pictures and information for a two-minute talk she has to give in school about her favorite animal.”

  “Yeah, but that has to be her horse, Scout. As soon as I can, I’ll take her over to the stable stall we rented. Ever since she fell in love with that little dude when we were hiding out in Michigan, it’s been like therapy for her to be near him and ride him.”

  “Right, but she talked her teacher into letting her mention two animals, so butterflies are in also. Ms. Gerald is ecstatic someone else cares about butterflies. I think she’s a real fanatic.”

  “Nice they have that connection,” Nick told her. “So, Kris, how much German did you have?”

  “Three years in high school until I came to my senses. A very hard language with huge, long nouns. But I was glad I could speak it later and came to like it. Speaking of Hitler as she does here, it was amazing how he screamed his speeches, and an entire nation followed a man like that.”

  “Can you tell what the writer’s attitude toward him is—was?” Nick asked, sitting on her other side.

  “She adored him. She says she wanted to bear his prince—and then—right here, see,” she said, pointing to the page with the telltale crude pictures. “She says she’s pregnant, but he says she has to leave him to save their child if the fatherland falls.”

  Nick and Claire stared wide-eyed and speechless and at each other.

  “Something here,” Kris said, frowning at the loopy, cursive penmanship, “about how they could not stay together, despite their death vow, because if they were taken or killed, the baby, Hitler’s heir, could be too.”

  “Worrying about the baby but not her—except as the child’s mother?” Claire asked.

  “Not sure. There’s so much here, frenzied thoughts, on and on. Strange, isn’t it?” she said, finally looking off into the distance and blinking back tears. “Here I’ve found a man who wants to date me—and I him. Mitch sounded so great on the phone, so steady, even when he explained that he had some things to settle before he could ask me out and it wasn’t another woman.” The corners of her mouth lifted in a wistful smile.

  “Then I saw him in the newspaper,” she went on, “good-looking, macho—and read that article about him taking yet another dangerous job, and I understood. One has to follow one’s passions no matter what the strictures or sacrifices. That’s what’s going on in this sad, trapped, pitiful woman’s life, Eva Braun,” she whispered, looking down at the diary again.

  Nick shifted position, and Claire said, “I’m wondering if that conflict is ageless. That maybe the ancient people we’ve been studying had exactly that sort of conflict.”

  “If so,” Kris said, refocusing and frowning, “it didn’t go well for them, did it? Well, let me skim through the rest of this and see what else I can figure out.”

  Though Claire continued to sit beside Kris, Nick, bless him, instead of hovering, went over to talk to Lexi and look at her butterfly pictures on the laptop screen. He had set it up so that she could use his printer to get pictures of “the prettiest ten of them.”

  “What else?” Claire prompted as Kris seemed to puzzle overlong at the last pages of increasingly shaky scribbles in the diary.

  “You don’t need to speak German to see it,” Kris told her, pointing at a page Claire leaned over. “You had to take a handwriting analysis course in your forensic tech studies, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, and I still have my notes from the class.”

  “Well, see how Eva’s handwriting is degrading here? See this squiggle like she might have dropped off to sleep more than once? And she says she’s depressed. Life is not worth living since there is no baby, Hitler’s dead and the dream of the Reich is gone.”

  “Does she say the child died?”

  “I don’t know,” she said as Nick came quickly back when he saw them whispering. “It’s like—like it just vanished inside her, she says.”

  “Like a false pregnancy or phantom pregnancy?”

  “Maybe. I think it’s technically called a hysterical pregnancy—Weird term, huh?”

  Nick said, “Maybe she felt guilty she’d misled Hitler about the baby. Maybe she actually wished she’d stayed to die with him.”

  Squinting at the page, Kris nodded. “She keeps repeating this defiant phrase over and over—see here: ‘Wir Schaffen das!’ That means ‘We can do it!’”

  “But do what?” Nick asked.

  “She evidently asked—begged,” Kris said, “her guardian here in Florida from Hitler’s Schutzstaffel staff—his SS elite troops—to get her some poison. The Fuhrer had shot himself, but she wanted to take poison. Her c
ontact here said no at first, but now—I mean back then—she thinks he will do it. She must mean so she can commit suicide.”

  Claire saw Nick startle at that last word. He’d spent years trying to prove his own father had not shot himself. He’d finally done that, made the murderer pay, but the horror of finding his dad dead still haunted him.

  “That last drawing,” Claire said, “must be how she envisioned her death, maybe how she staged it. See, she’s cradling that monster’s picture to her breasts, lying on the bed we saw, Nick.”

  “As Claire told you, Kris,” he said, “this all has to be top secret, but I know you understand that.”

  “I sure do. Secret for secret then.”

  “Unless this backfires and I get hit with attorney misconduct charges over mishandling this,” Nick muttered, almost to himself. “But I hope my client won’t see our taking and reading this book as a betrayal. I’m going to level with him.”

  “Kris, we can’t thank you enough,” Claire said, giving her a one-armed hug. “It’s great to have someone we can trust in this delicate matter.”

  “No one would believe me anyway,” she said with a little shake of her head. “Wish our bog people would have left diaries or drawings, but we’ll have to go on body language—one of your strengths, Claire.”

  “Don’t I wish.”

  “Mommy, do you and Kris want to see my favorite ten butterflies? But I think it’s so sad people catch them in nets, and then they die or get cold in a refrigerator till their babies hatch, and they get stuck dead under a picture frame, and then people just study them.”