Secrets of Harmony Grove (28 page)

Feeling powerless and afraid I might once again be overwhelmed with panic, I forced my mind away from these unanswerable questions and instead decided to focus on my run, on the task that Mike had fictitiously laid out for me. I decided to actually look things over now, nodding at each cluster of people I passed, allowing my eyes to scan the grove around me for anything that might feel like a red flag. Focusing on something outside of myself seemed to help almost immediately.

Just the sight of these beautiful trees, of the flashes of red and yellow and orange among the green, of the sun-dappled shade flickering on the path ahead of me, was so calming and peaceful that I already felt a hundred times better. I wasn’t thrilled to be running in blue jeans with a heavy gun strapped to my waist, but I could deal with it. This wasn’t about physical fitness anyway but about mental fitness. At least I wasn’t jogging in slacks and heels.

I had come into the grove just past the German Gate, turning right to run forward toward the main road as I went around the wide oval, the grove on my left. I knew that the full loop of the path equaled exactly one mile, which meant that an easy jog should take about ten or twelve minutes to
get all the way around once. Hopefully, just once would do. There were so many more important things I should be accomplishing than merely running from a panic attack.

After jogging slowly for just a few minutes, I reached the first big curve, which turned me so that I was running parallel to the main road. I slowed to a walk as I neared the midpoint for this side, the entrance to the grove we always called the Peace Gate. Reaching the gate now, I paused to look up at it and enjoy its optical illusion, the curving wrought iron that at first glance always seemed to form a simple, abstract design but upon further study revealed within that design the outline of doves—some in flight, some nesting, one perched on a wrought iron limb. The inscription for this gate read:

This was the Golden Age that, without coercion, without laws,
spontaneously nurtured the good and the true…Without the use of
armies, people passed their lives in gentle peace and security
.

The markers in this section were similarly utopian and benign, much as they were at the opposite end of the grove, in the area around that we called the Corn Gate. Filled with images of peace and prosperity and good will, for the most part they were simply boring. As kids, we much preferred the more dramatic verses in the center of the grove that dealt with the ill-fated romance of the poem.

“Is there a problem, Miss Collins?” a voice called, and I looked up to see a cluster of technicians working nearby, eyeing me with concern, as if I had found something questionable in my survey of the grove.

“No. No problem at all. I was just admiring the beautiful gate.”

“This whole grove is beautiful,” one of the women in the group said as they got back to work. “Once this case gets solved, it really ought to be opened up to the public, you know?”

“That’s true,” I said, giving them a wave as I started moving again. As I ran I wondered why my grandfather had chosen to keep the grove private and within the family rather than donate it in his will to be used as a public park.

Maybe because diamonds really are hidden in here
.
Maybe he couldn’t
risk taking this place public because someone else might find them before we did
.

Trying to keep my mind clear and refusing to think about that now, I continued jogging along the path and around the curve that positioned me so that I was running away from the main road, with the B and B off to my right. In a few minutes I would reach the grove’s main entrance, the gate with the two arrows and the words “Harmony Grove.”

For some reason, that was the gate that always made me miss my grandfather the most—probably because of the many times I had seen him standing there in its opening, surveying the grove in front of him, and observing us children as we ran and laughed and wove in and among the trees.

Though we had visited here a lot when I was a child, always spending plenty of time when we came, I hadn’t loved the man who was my father’s father, mostly because I hadn’t known him well enough. Abe Collins had been an incredibly silent person, and when he spoke at all it was always about mundane matters, never of thoughts or memories or revelations or matters of the heart. Lack of communication had been a big issue during his marriage to Grandma Maureen. Though he hadn’t been much of a husband to her, he had been a good father to his two sons and had deeply loved them both to the day he died. Grandpa Abe had been so reclusive in his lifetime that we had expected his funeral to be a quiet affair, with only a few family members and neighbors in attendance. Instead, we had been deeply touched by the entire Coblentz clan, who had come out in force, filling the parking lot with their buggies and the pews with their peaceful stillness. At the front of the room had been no casket, open or closed, but instead a single, framed photo of my grandfather, who had asked that his body be cremated instead. Thanks to a very thorough eulogy given by his pastor, by the end of that service I knew more about Grandpa Abe than I had ever learned during his lifetime.

Passing the main gate now, I pictured him and thought of all the surprising facts I had learned about him the day of his funeral.

Born to Amish parents, the youngest son of seven children, Abe Coblentz had shown a flair for art at a very young age. Afraid his special talents might create pride in the young man, his parents had attempted to channel his artistic abilities in a practical and useful direction by arranging
for an apprenticeship with a blacksmith once Abe’s official schooling was complete. A quick study and a hard worker, Abe had soon proven himself invaluable on the job.

He was sixteen and still working for the blacksmith when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. One by one, each of his older brothers had been called into the service and subsequently approved for conscientious objector status, though their road during the war years had not been easy. Tormented by soldiers, demeaned by officials, and treated almost like prisoners of war throughout every stateside work assignment they had been given, Abe’s brothers had written home weekly, asking for prayer for the strength to endure. In the fall of 1942, the government lowered the age of the draft from twenty-one to eighteen, so by the following February Abe’s invitation from Uncle Sam had arrived as well.

Soon he, too, was approved for CO status, but unlike his brothers, Abe had shocked his entire family by requesting to serve in the war as a noncombatant. Once all the red tape had been cut, Abe found himself in training as an army medic, after which he was sent to Europe and into the very heart of the action.

Not much was known about Abe’s war years, except that they had changed him in many ways. Rumors back home were wild and varied—that he was a coward, that he was a hero, that the men in his battalion hated him, that they loved and respected him—though no one knew which rumors were true and which were not. About all that was known for sure was that, as a member of a unit of the American Fourth Armored Division of the Third Army, Abe had been among those liberating several Nazi concentration camps, including Ohrdruf and Buchenwald.

Abe had not been baptized into the Amish faith before going off to war, but his entire family had held out hope that once he returned he would confess and repent of his sins of supporting the war effort, join the church, and find himself an Amish bride. Instead, word was received in the summer of 1945 that Abe had married a survivor of Buchenwald, a Jewish woman named Daphne, and that he intended to stay there in Europe after his tour of duty was complete. Months later, the family learned that Abe and Daphne were expecting a baby, due to be born just a few weeks after their first anniversary.

That spring, however, Daphne had gone into early labor, her body still weak from the ravages of Buchenwald, and though the child survived the difficult birth, Daphne did not. At that point, as a young, widowed. noncombatant soldier with an infant son, the assumption was that Abe would return home, to his Amish roots and loving family. Instead, he had shocked them all yet again by hiring a nanny for the infant and remaining in Europe.

Abe and his motherless child lived there until he got word that his father had passed away back home. At the desperate, pleading request of his mother, and with the promise of a portion of the family land and homes that he had inherited, Abe had finally returned to the states with his young son. There, Abe had delivered one last, shocking blow to his family: Immediately following his honorable discharge from the U.S. Army, he had filed a court order to legally change his last name from Coblentz to Collins. When asked why, he had replied that it was an attempt to erase the shame of association with a religious sect that endorsed nonresistance. The conscientious objector had done an about-face at some point during the war, deciding that there could be no excuse, no honorable reason at all,
not
to fight, at least not when the enemy was as dark and evil as the Third Reich had been.

After that, the battle lines had been drawn, so to speak. And though they would never stop praying for him and never stop loving him, the various members of the Coblentz family had left Abe alone to live in
and
of the world as he was so determined to do.

Rounding the third curve of the grove path, the one that would bring me to the Corn Gate, I slowed again to a walk and thought about the enigmatic man and how his decision to break away from the Amish faith had resonated through the subsequent generations. Because something inside of him changed, something that no one else had ever truly understood, I was the creative director of an advertising agency in Philadelphia rather than a young Amish wife and mother in Lancaster County. Did I owe him thanks for that? At times a part of me longed for an Amish life, for its peace and simplicity and spiritual purity. Another part of me knew that theirs was a road I would never have chosen to walk down. After the funeral, I realized that thanks to my late grandfather, that was a choice I had never been forced to make.

Reaching the Corn Gate, I stopped and read its inscription, mounted on a brass plate amid the cornstalk pattern of the wrought iron:

Spring was eternal, and gentle breezes caressed with warm
air the flowers that grew without being seeded. Then the untilled
earth gave of its produce and, without needing renewal,
the fields whitened with heavy ears of corn
.

Thinking of my grandfather now, picturing his labors over every element of this entire, magnificent grove, I was suddenly consumed with a wrenching sense of guilt. In his will, he had requested that our immediate family gather in the grove in one final, memorial act to bury his ashes there. Though the funeral service had been held several days after his death, there had been no rush on the private memorial and ash-burial. The grove had been sorely neglected in my grandfather’s last few years of life, and we all wanted to see it get fixed up a bit first before we held our little ceremony there. My grandmother hired a team of arborists and landscapers to do the job, but once they were finished we never could seem to find a date that worked for everyone.

Soon after we had finally chosen a date, my mother had been diagnosed with MS. Consumed with her care, we had postponed the gathering indefinitely, but even after she started the quarterly chemo treatments, we had
never rescheduled the memorial service in the grove. Though we would mention it now and again, none of us had made of point of insisting that we follow through on my grandfather’s final wish.