Remembering Dresden (Jack Turner Suspense Series Book 2) (12 page)

After another fifteen minutes of searching, which included a number of locations on the porch, Jack finally gave up. The key was probably on a keychain somewhere, possibly, probably…in the possession of the Senator, who now owned the cabin and all its contents. But if that was true, it seemed pretty clear the Senator had forgotten all about it. Which also probably meant, whatever its contents, they couldn’t be worth very much.

Which meant that Jack was wasting his time. But really, did that matter? He had all kinds of time at the moment. He wasn’t taking time away from his research. He’d already quit for the day. This was free time.

Speaking of time, what time was it anyway? He glanced at the clock. Almost 1AM. But see, that wasn’t a problem. He could stay up until two if he wanted. Wake up in the morning whenever his body was done sleeping. Jack sat and leaned back in the recliner. It was likely true the key to the safe was on a keychain somewhere. But these store-bought safes came with two keys. He had one sitting in his master bedroom closet at home. These weren’t the kind of keys you kept on the keychain you used every day. Jack didn’t keep either of his safe keys on a keychain. He kept one in a dresser drawer, the other taped to a shelf in the closet. You wanted a key, at least one of them, near the safe. In case you lost the key or forgot where you put it.

It was worth a try.

Jack got back on his hands and knees near the opening and started feeling around the underside of the boards with his hand. About two boards in from the opening, Jack felt a bump. He explored the bump until he was sure he was feeling duct tape, then continued scratching until he found an end. He peeled it back carefully making sure whatever was causing the bump didn’t fall to the ground. He felt something metal, small and metal. After pulling the rest of the tape off, he pulled his arm up through the opening.

“There you are,” he said aloud.

The key was the perfect size. Had to be it. He carried the safe over to the dinette table. He stuck the key in, turned and it opened right up. Okay, what was this? Two notebooks, or journals. Both black, slightly different sizes. He lifted them out and set them aside. That’s it? There was nothing else in the safe? He didn’t know what to expect, but he was hoping for something more than this.

He walked the two notebooks back over to the recliner and sat. Opening the first, he saw it was a journal filled with handwritten pages. They all looked to be in German. Since he didn’t read German, and it would be an impossible task to look all this up in Google Translate, he set it aside. The other one appeared to be a small scrapbook filled with newspaper articles, all cut out and pasted to the pages. He scanned through the articles and didn’t notice anything remarkable other than that they appeared to be obituaries, all written in English. The pictures of some of the deceased were fairly old men. Others showed black-and-white pictures of much younger men in military uniforms.

Jack quickly picked out the ages of the men from the text. All were in their seventies when they died and all appeared to be military veterans, at least at one time. So what was this, a scrapbook filled with the obituaries of old war buddies? Not very intriguing. He yawned as he set the scrapbook down on top of the journal. This was a total waste of time. There wasn’t anything here. The only question now was, should he put this mess back together now or in the morning?

He yawned again. In the morning then.

He stood and stretched, then a thought popped into his head. Really an image, then a second image. The German handwriting in the journal. The German handwriting on the back of the old photographs. Were they written by the same hand? He stepped over to the bookshelf and pulled out the photo album then sat with both on his lap.

Glancing back and forth between the two, it didn’t take long to see. They were both written by the same person.

The little orphan boy in these photographs had written everything in this journal, which had been tucked away in a safe, hidden under the floorboards of the cabin.

Now, this had possibilities.

Jack yawned again.

As interesting as this was, it was still all written in German, which Jack didn’t speak. Rachael wasn’t here and based on her concerns that he’d become obsessed with this, he wasn’t likely to get her back here to read this in the next day or two. Using Google Translate was okay for a few sentences, maybe even a paragraph. But it was way too inaccurate to use for an entire notebook.

He got up with both books and walked back to the dinette table. After setting the notebook back in the safe, he was just about to lay the scrapbook with the obituaries on top of it when an earlier thought percolated upward. When he’d glanced through it the first time and noticed all the dead guys were military vets, he’d dismissed it completely, thinking it was just a scrapbook filled with
the obituaries of old war buddies
.

Then he realized…if the person who’d written on the back of the pictures was the same one who’d written the notebook, he was almost certainly a natural-born German, not an American. Since all the obituaries were of
American
servicemen, they couldn’t possibly have been war buddies. And there was this: the pictures showed he was a little boy during the war, not old enough to be friends with any of these Americans.

There was no way these were obituaries of war buddies. That being so, why would someone paste these obituaries into a scrapbook and consider it important enough to save for all these years, hidden away in a safe stashed under the floorboards?

Jack took the notebook out of the safe and walked back to the recliner with it and the scrapbook. He set the notebook on an end table, yawned and stretched then sat with the scrapbook. There was something here, something to discover. He was sure of it. As he flipped through the pages again, he confirmed that all the dead men were World War II veterans. He also noticed something else…some of the articles had handwritten notes in some of the margins that also looked to be in German.

Holding the scrapbook in his lap with his right hand, he reached for the notebook with his left and opened it. The handwriting in both looked identical. So, all three things were written by the same person. And who was this man? Jack’s gut told him it was Senator Wagner’s father,
the old man
according to Bass.

Bass had said the old man talked with an accent, similar to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger was Austrian. But they spoke German there, so that added up. And Bass had said the son had inherited the cabin from his father when the old man died. The words on the backs of the album pics, those in the notebook, and the notes written in the margins of the obituaries were likely, then, all written by the old man. He’d left them here in the cabin for his son. Some of them hidden in a safe under the floorboards.

And for some reason, his son didn’t know or didn’t care. Why else were they still here?

So many questions were gently knocking on the door but would have to wait. His body would no longer follow where his mind wanted to go. He had to get some sleep. The only question that remained: should he leave everything out for tomorrow or put it all back where it belonged?

Jack awoke the next morning and as he went through his morning routine, did his best to ignore the budding mystery that beckoned in the living room. That was the compromise he’d made with himself last night. He didn’t put everything away, just moved it all into the living room, then he’d spread out all his Dresden research back on the dinette table.

As he sat now at that table drinking his second cup of coffee, he had to keep reminding himself…
this
is why I’m here. Not
that
. That stuff in the living room was for breaks and free time only. Still, it held a ridiculous amount of interest for him. By now, Jack knew how he was wired. Part of his success as an author and as a history teacher was his ability to make history come alive for his audience. That wasn’t his self-assessment; it’s what magazine and blog reviewers had said about his books over and over again. What his students had said about his lectures in countless emails.

Jack knew what made that possible. He had always followed after things that stirred him, things that lit him up inside. If something stoked his curiosity, he’d keep pulling on those threads and running down those rabbit trails wherever they led. It was an offbeat approach to the learning process. Some might even call it undisciplined.

But it was hard to argue with the results.

Following those same instincts had led Jack to pursue this Dresden project for his doctoral dissertation. He still believed it was the right direction to go. But right now, in the face of this unfolding mystery in the living room, its luster had faded. All he wanted to do was get up from the table, head over to the living room and give himself to this new pursuit.

He turned in his chair, as if to free his legs from their hold beneath the table, when Rachel’s parting words to him last night came to mind. “
I know how you get. This photo thing might be a nice diversion right now…like, when you need a little break. Don’t let it become an obsession
.”

Then a reminder of his own reply: “
That’s not gonna happen
.”

Here it was happening, the very thing.

Jack knew what he had to do. He stood, walked to a closet, pulled out a blanket, walked into the living room and tossed it over the whole mess. Covered the notebooks, the open floorboard…even the recliner.

He walked back to the dinette table and his Dresden research, confident he had freed himself from the pull of this distraction. If not for good, at least until his morning break.

Jack spent the next three hours listening to online interviews from Dresden survivors, taking notes and cross-checking things they’d said with known facts. The stories were sufficiently gripping to easily hold his interest. Before long, the project in the living room had faded and was no longer distracting him. The Dresden story really was an amazing chapter in World War II history and Jack was again glad he’d picked this topic for his research.

At the moment, he was watching a video of an elderly woman with a thick accent speaking to a library group somewhere in the US. She had been born in Dresden and was a teenager during the firebombing. It took her a while to get to the relevant part of her story but, once she did, Jack was riveted by what she said. So much so, he almost didn’t see his cell phone ringing. He had shut the ringer off but left the phone in plain view.

When he saw Rachel’s beautiful face on the screen, he grabbed it. “Rachel?”

“Hi, Jack. It rang so much, I thought it was going to be your voicemail.”

“I’m sorry. About an hour ago, I got several phone calls from the school, so I shut the ringer off.”

“I didn’t mean to interrupt your work,” she said. “Got a few extra minutes before my next class, thought I’d give you a try.”

“I’m glad you did. You’re my favorite distraction.”

“So, the research is going well?”

“Definitely. And as always, where would I be without the internet? I know it was around when I studied for my bachelor’s, but it wasn’t anything like this. Between Google and YouTube…it’s crazy to be able to listen and watch videos on almost any topic you can think of in a matter of seconds. It almost seems unfair how much easier it is to study for a doctorate now than it was twenty or thirty years ago.”

“That’s true,” she said, “but you’re still the one doing all the work and the one who’s going to have to write that big paper. Oh, before I forget, I had a brief chat with my dad on my drive to school this morning. He said to say hi, by the way.”

Jack still wasn’t used to being on such familiar terms with Rachel’s dad, a retired Air Force general. Especially a man he had served under many years ago.

“He called just to touch base,” she said, “nothing special. I was telling him about our little adventure last night. You know, that photo album you found with all the little German children. Of course, he wasn’t in the military during World War II. Vietnam was his era. But he told me something I didn’t know about his story. He was stationed in Berlin for a few years, was there when the wall went up.”

“Really? That’s pretty cool.”

“Isn’t it? I thought I knew his whole story. Anyway, I asked him about those last few pictures we saw when the little boy was a little older. Remember that one when he was standing under a big banner with those big letters?”

“FDJ?” Jack said.

“That’s the one. My dad knew what that was. I thought you’d find this interesting.”

“What’s it stand for?”

“The exact German translation is
Freie Deutsche Jugend
. In English it means,
Free German Youth.
My dad said he always found that to be an ironic title for a group of young people who were anything but free.”

“What do you mean?”

“They were in East Germany, Jack. It’s a communist youth group. Apparently, that little boy in the photo album grew up on the other side of the Iron Curtain.”

“Really?”

“That’s what he said. FDJ was a huge communist youth organization. He said it reminded him of the Hitler Youth the Nazis had set up. It was all about indoctrinating young people in the communist ideology from the ground up. He said it was especially big among the thousands of orphans raised in East Germany after the war ended. It became like their family. I bet you if you kept looking at the rest of that album, you’d see a lot more pictures of life in East Germany before the Wall came down.”

As he listened, Jack stood and walked over toward the living room. He pulled the blanket back exposing the end table and recliner. He was looking right at the photo album, but also at the scrapbook with all the obituaries of the American pilots. He wanted to tell her all about it but wasn’t sure that was a good idea.

“Jack?”

“What?”

“You didn’t answer. Usually that means you’re distracted. What are you thinking about?”

Women’s intuition was a scary thing. “I’m wondering if you want me to hold off looking at the rest of the album until you get over here and we can do it together.”