Secrets of Harmony Grove (10 page)

We had the lawyer pursue the matter as well, hoping he might find diamonds listed on an official customs declaration form or something. But nothing ever came of it—no proof, no first-person sightings, and no idea
where those diamonds ever ended up. Poor Emory received everything he had coming from his father’s will except for those “certain assets.” It was anyone’s guess as to what my grandfather’s true intentions had been.

I had forgotten about the matter until Troy called me on Monday night to talk about it. As we reminisced about our search for the diamonds during the renovation, I suddenly got my hopes up, wondering if these newly discovered documents held clues as to their location. But when I asked Troy, he said they provided no new no hiding places or anything like that, just more vague references that would lead to nowhere.

“But I thought you’d like to know about them just the same,” he had added. “So those diamonds never turned up, huh?”

“Nope. We never found a thing,” I said, shaking my head sadly. “Whatever my grandfather was talking about, I guess we’ll never know.”

Sitting here now, with Troy dead outside, I opened my eyes, a new and disturbing thought beginning to permeate my brain. What if he had been lying on Monday night when he called me? What if those documents he found
had
provided new clues about the diamonds, clues he then tried to follow? That would mean he hadn’t stuck around here for a few days so Floyd could go out of town. More likely, he had gotten rid of Floyd so he could go on a treasure hunt by himself.

If that were true, it would explain what he had been doing out in the grove today. Troy was no outdoorsman, but he would endure almost anything that might lead to a hidden fortune in diamonds. In fact, on Monday night he had even said as much himself.

If this were true, then the bigger question that remained was whether or not his search had anything to do with the fact that he was now dead.

When Mike finished his conversation and returned his attention back to me, I decided to share with him what I was thinking. Had Liz been there, she might have told me to be quiet. On the other hand, if there was a treasure-hunting element to this case, that would actually be a good thing for me personally, as it would help take away any focus that might point toward my government investigation/work suspension problem.

I launched into a full explanation about the will and the diamonds and the papers Troy had found. Just as I finished, we were interrupted again, this time by the news that the medical examiner had arrived. Mike excused himself, saying he would be back and for me to stay inside and out of the way.

I agreed, though after he was gone, I moved through the house all the way to the screened porch, which was close to the pool area. From there I would be able to hear and see what was going on outside while technically remaining inside, as directed.

Stepping onto the wooden slat flooring of the porch, I realized that the night air was getting chilly. Pulling my dress jacket more tightly around me, I moved to a wicker chair near the back, turned it toward the pool area, and sat there in the darkness.

Though I could barely see over the pool fencing, I could easily hear the conversation between Mike and the ME. She confirmed right away that the
wound on Troy’s thigh had definitely not been caused by a gunshot. Instead, she said he had been stabbed by something jagged.

“I’m thinking of a woodworking tool, like a circular saw, maybe? Or a gardening trowel, a hoe. Something with a sharp edge, but jagged. Not like a knife.”

“The other victim said there was some kind of creature here,” Mike said. “Does it look like it could have been done by an animal?”

I leaned forward, listening intently for her reply.

“Yes and no. Some sort of big sharp claw could have done this. The nature of the cut mark would be consistent with that. The problem is, claw marks usually show up as several parallel lines, not just one, especially with the big cats. So I don’t think it was a mountain lion or a cougar or bobcat. I suppose it could have been a bear, if that bear happened to have one prominent claw.” She went on to say that whatever animal had done this, if indeed an animal had done this, at the lab she would be able to look more closely at the wound and check it for evidence. “A gash this deep can hold plenty of debris.”

“So was that cut the cause of death? Did he bleed out?”

“I don’t know yet. The froth in his lungs and the nasal hemorrhaging both point to drowning. The skin on his feet tells us the body wasn’t in the water too long. I’d say half an hour at most. The skin on his hands…I’m not sure what’s going on there. It’s blistered and red, see?”

They were both quiet for a moment, and then he murmured something I couldn’t quite make out. Judging from her reply, there was something under Troy’s fingernails—a residue of something white that had managed to remain despite his having floated in the pool.

“If you look here,” the woman said, “you can see he also bit his tongue, which tells me he may have had a seizure.”

Mike asked about other signs of a struggle, other cuts and bruises. She replied that she could see no visible signs of forced drowning, such as bruises around the neck, shoulders, or head. Nothing like that at all.

“There
is
massive bruising around this gash in his thigh,” she added. “We’ll check the rest of his body at the lab for other cuts and contusions, but I don’t see anything else that jumps out at me right now.”

I couldn’t understand Mike’s next remarks, but it sounded as though he was saying that regardless of how Troy died, whether from bleeding to death or drowning or a seizure, there was no question that he had been bleeding heavily from his leg, and that by following the trail of blood they might be able to trace his steps backward to see where he was when he first got hurt. Mike barked out orders then, and several cops sprang into action, moving toward the driveway, probably to retrieve some sort of equipment that would help them find Troy’s trail of blood in the dark.

“Looks to me like someone attempted mouth-to-mouth after pulling him out of the pool,” the medical examiner said. “But I’d wager he was dead and floating at least a little while before that futile attempt at resuscitation.”

Someone else spoke then, the policeman who had apparently been the one to find Nina unconscious out on Emory’s driveway. He felt that she was the one who pulled out Troy and tried mouth-to-mouth, given that when they found her there were a few flecks of dried blood on her lips and her clothes were soaking wet. In response, the ME said that sounded likely, especially if she had no cuts of her own inside her mouth or anywhere else.

Listening and watching all that was going on out there, I saw some technicians using what looked like a portable black light, shining it toward the ground around the pool area and then moving outward, over the back corner of the stucco wall, then across the yard toward the grove. If Troy’s wound really had been caused by an animal, I hoped the men would be careful. Lancaster County was made up primarily of farmland, but there were enough wooded areas, especially right around here, that an animal could hide in and maybe even strike again.

Floyd had said the creature he saw was black, which made me think perhaps it had been a bear. Certainly, Pennsylvania had lots of bears. I myself had seen bear scat many times when hiking in the Poconos—but that locale was several hours from here. Lancaster County was too densely populated for bears to proliferate, though I supposed it wouldn’t be unheard of for a bear to pass through once in a great while.

Suddenly, Mike emerged from the pool area and spotted me there on the porch, startling me from my thoughts.

“Sienna?” he asked, moving closer to the screen that separated us.

“Yes,” I replied, pulse surging, afraid he was about to fuss at me for eavesdropping. Instead, he simply asked if I might have a property survey or something else handy that they could look at, something that would show how far the woods and grove extended, and where it sat in relation to nearby homes and farms. I said I would see what I could find, but a quick search in the office produced nothing.

Instead, I grabbed a pen and some paper, thinking that at the very least I could draw out a simple sketch for them. I carried the pen and paper into the kitchen, sat at the table, sketched out the property’s front and back, and then added the row of houses across the street. Moving in a circle clockwise, I added Uncle Emory’s house next door and then Jonah and Liesl’s farm after that, around the corner from Emory’s place, with their property line abutting his and mine. Finally, I added the homestead directly behind mine, an old defunct chicken farm. Moving the rest of the way around to the left, I scribbled in thick woods that covered several acres and ended at the road.

Once all of that was done I added in all the outbuildings I could remember, including my shed and Emory’s barn. I didn’t try to do that for Jonah and Liesl’s farm, though, because as with most Amish farms, it had too many outbuildings to count, much less draw correctly.

The only area I was fuzzy on was the road that led to the chicken farm. I knew several isolated homes were along in there, but I wasn’t sure where to place them in my drawing, so I guessed. Finally, I drew in the centerpiece of everything here: Harmony Grove itself. Scribbling a wide, flat oval of trees to represent its boundaries, I finished with a wiggly line down the middle for the creek and a little bridge over the creek at the very center.

Mike came inside just as I was finishing up, took a look at my sketch, and asked if there was a copy machine here where he could make some duplicates. I offered to do that for him, and by the time I returned from the office to the kitchen with twenty copies in hand as requested, he had been joined by two other cops, whom he introduced as Rip and Charlie.

The four of us sat at the table, and I went over the map in detail, explaining how all of the land had originally been owned by my great-grandfather, who had divided it up among his children. Because his son Abe had decided to become a welder, not a farmer, he had been given the wooded,
non-farmable portion of land, a large tract that was rocky and hilly with a creek running through the center.

“Of course, what wouldn’t have been suitable for farming was perfect for creating a grove,” I added. “In the end, my grandfather’s greatest legacy came from the one piece of land no one else in the family even wanted.”

Georgia came inside to tell Mike that they had managed to find the place where Troy’s bleeding had started, about five hundred feet back from the pool. She added that the ground there was grassy and dry with no good shoe or footprints, though it did look as if a struggle of some kind had taken place there, with some ruts and torn grass and the like.