Secrets of Harmony Grove (40 page)

We had to get to them before someone else did.

For the next hour, as we talked about how to proceed with all of the many issues that had been raised tonight, Heath seemed oddly distant and quiet. I didn’t blame him. After the evening we’d had, especially after hearing my character assassinated like that, I had to wonder if he would still be around by morning

I wouldn’t blame him one bit if he wasn’t.

Beyond the personal attacks, the more I thought about all of Floyd’s astonishing revelations, the more consumed I grew with anger and fear. As furious as I was with Floyd, I was even angrier at Troy. How could one man have done so much damage? Truly, Troy Griffin was in a class by himself. Now that he was dead, would we ever untangle the vast webs of lies he had spun?

Would we even survive to try?

After rehashing things several times over to no avail, Heath and I finally gave up for the night and headed to our rooms, too exhausted to think about anything more than sleep. After a perfunctory kiss goodnight at the door of Heath’s suite, I headed down the hall to my own room.

There, I closed and locked the door and climbed under my sheets without even changing into my nightgown first. Clutching a quilted Amish pillow to my chest, I wept as quietly as possible, sobbing into the darkness until I had no more tears left to cry.

When I woke the next morning, I sat on the side of the bed for a while, aching from head to toe and trying not to rub my puffy eyes. Though I felt all cried out, the patter of rain tap-tap-tapping on the roof told me that the skies had taken over for me, weeping on my behalf.

The rain everyone had said was coming was finally here. My thoughts went to the poison in the grove, and I could only hope that the people from the EPA had managed to get it all cleaned up before the weather changed.

Slowly I stood. After last night’s revelations, I needed to reframe everything I had learned in the past two days. Praying for clarity, I did a lot of thinking as I showered and dressed.

By the time I was ready to face the day—or as ready as I was ever going to be—my most urgent thought was of my boyfriend. I needed to find out if Heath was still around.

I hoped he was, but I wouldn’t blame him if he wasn’t.

Opening my bedroom door, I peered down the hall toward his room. Heath’s door was closed, so I continued down the stairs, holding my breath until I heard his voice. His tones were oddly quiet and soothing, but I couldn’t make out the words until I reached the bottom of the stairs and realized that he was with Floyd, doing the relaxation technique they had discussed last night.

Floyd was sitting on the couch in the main room. His eyes were closed
as Heath spoke, telling him to relax muscle by muscle. I was a little nervous about seeing Heath, afraid that the uncomfortable strain from when we had said good night would still be between us this morning. He looked up at me with a finger to his lips.

So he was still in this thing. God bless him.

It sounded as though they were just getting started, so I didn’t hang around to watch or listen. Instead, I tiptoed my way through the main room, down the hall, across the dining room, and into the side porch. If I couldn’t go all the way outside, as per Mike, I decided this was the next best thing. I’d heard that the rains would bring cooler temperatures, and as I opened the door and stepped out onto the porch, I was glad I had put on a warm sweater for the day. Though it wasn’t freezing outside, a definite chill was in the air.

I settled on the wicker couch, dialed my grandmother’s number, and was greeted with her cheery “Hello.” We chatted a bit first, and I was relieved to hear that she had already learned about some of the things going on out here—and she didn’t seem interested in learning more. That was a relief, as I could focus on the questions I needed to ask her without having to take the time to bring her up to speed.

I decided to start by asking about Emory and the arrests from his youth. Not surprisingly, her answer was long and circuitous and started when the young Maureen Knickerbocker was hired by a friend of a friend named Abe Collins to care for his three-year-old son. Abe was a handsome and brooding young widower who lived in an old family home in the heart of Lancaster County, and he was in urgent need of childcare.

“That was at the end of my junior year in teacher’s college, and I only took the job temporarily, for the summer, to help out while Abe looked for someone permanent. But the very first day I fell in love with little Emory, and within a few weeks I had fallen for his father as well. That fall, I put school on hold for a semester but eventually withdrew completely and married Abe instead. Your father was born a year later, when Emory was five.”

She went on to say that they knew there was something wrong with Emory from a very early age, but whenever they tried to pursue treatment they were encouraged to institutionalize the boy, something neither wanted
to do. They tried enrolling him in regular school, but at the end of the first week it was obvious to all sides that he didn’t belong there. Hoping he would “grow out of it,” Maureen kept him at home and tried to teach him as best she could, but not much ever seemed to get through. Meanwhile, marriage to the “handsome and brooding widower” wasn’t turning out to be quite what she had expected. They were both dedicated to the children, but the gap between the two of them began to widen. It didn’t help matters that Abe spent every spare minute working to create a grove as a living memorial to his deceased wife. Between his day job as a welder and his off-hours work in the grove, they barely saw each other. Meanwhile, Emory continued to falter.

“He and I were in the middle of a reading lesson one day when Harold interrupted us to give the answers himself. There he was, reading at five, and Emory still couldn’t catch on at ten.”

While they were relieved to know that Harold didn’t share his older brother’s limitations, they didn’t know what to do about poor Emory.

“But then the decision was sort of made for us,” she continued. “When Emory was eleven, he came home one day covered in blood, and he led us back to a place in the woods where a rabbit had been killed. He was hysterical, and he kept saying that he did it but he wouldn’t or couldn’t explain why. He just cried and cried. Of course, we had to follow up on it. Abe buried the rabbit, and then we took our son to the doctor. At that point he was taken away from us and put into a mental home. It just broke our hearts—especially when we would visit, and he would be sitting there drugged out of his mind, like a zombie. Doctors were so ignorant about mental illness back then! Oh, Sienna, you have no idea.”

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered, grieved to hear of such pain and sadness with my loved ones but glad at least to know that Emory had been remorseful about the rabbit.

“Like I said, things were already not so good between Abe and me,” my grandmother continued, “and the stress of losing Emory was the icing on the cake. I left a month later, taking your father with me. I hated to do that to Abe, but at the time I felt I didn’t have a choice. I just couldn’t live that way anymore.”

My grandmother then launched into the full story of her marriage and its issues, and I knew there would be no stopping her now.

“What was the basic problem?” I asked finally, trying to cut to the chase.

“Abe was fixated on his first wife,” my grandmother replied. “I knew that going in, but I had convinced myself that over time he would learn to love me as much, and hopefully even more than he had ever loved Daphne. Of course, looking back now, I realize that more than anything the poor man probably had post-traumatic stress disorder from the war. He had been so traumatized—they all had—but even once the war was over and everyone was trying to pick up the pieces and start anew, he faced a second blow, the death of his young wife in childbirth. That had compounded his already damaged psyche greatly, I have no doubt.”

I murmured in sympathy, shifting to a more comfortable position as she went on.

“My friend Bessie always said that if I had never become pregnant, Abe and I might have been able to make things work. But, you see, the day Abe learned we were expecting, it was almost as if someone flipped off a switch inside his heart. The man had never been one to easily share his feelings, but once I told him I was with child, he withdrew from me completely. Bessie said Abe’s PTSD probably kicked into overdrive once he realized he might lose me just as he had lost Daphne. Whether he was conscious of it or not, the man cut me out purely from self-preservation.”

“How sad.”

“Yes, it was. Of course, we didn’t know about things like PTSD back then. All I knew was that there were three people in our marriage, not two, and that the other woman, though long dead, was far more real and more important to my husband than I was.”

She went on to explain that as Abe withdrew from her he began to obsess on the grove. Originally, it was supposed to have been similar to the one near Daphne’s childhood home in Germany. But the closer they got to Harold’s birth, the stranger and more obsessed Abe grew, expanding the original plan to encompass an entirely new section.

“It drove me nuts, Sienna, but how could I compete with a dead woman? I couldn’t even try! The grove was her living memorial, and the more the
trees grew, it was like Daphne was coming back to life as well. With every tree Abe planted, what he was really doing was burying his grief.”

Hearing her tale, I looked through the screen at the grove in the distance. She was right. The entire place, though lovely, was really all about pain and grief.

“I shouldn’t have left him, but I did. And life went on.”

“I’m sorry, Grandma,” I said, wishing she were here in person so that I could give her a hug. “I knew the basic story, but I never really understood it before. Thanks for sharing it with me.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I’m just sorry that you went through so much pain and suffering yourself.”

“Don’t feel bad, honey. Once we left Lancaster County, Harold and I did okay. I finished my degree, as you know, and worked as a teacher. I’ve had a happy life, despite some painful bumps along the way.”

That seemed like a good point to end our conversation, but there were still a few questions I needed to ask her.

“Grandma, what happened the second time, when Emory was again caught with a dead animal?”

“I wasn’t directly involved that time, but I’ll tell you what I know.”

“Okay.”

“Abe was never happy with the care Emory got at the home, but in the late sixties he found out something that just infuriated him. The doctors there were using ‘behavioral treatment techniques’ that were abusive to the patients. To make matters worse, they were also experimenting on them with various drugs, including LSD of all things. When Emory was in his early twenties, Abe had finally seen enough and took him out of there and brought him home.”

“I don’t blame him.”

“At first, from what I understand, Emory seemed to do well, responding to his father’s kindnesses much better than he had the cruelties at the home. They kept pretty much to themselves, but the two men got along. I think Emory had been back with Abe about a year when the police knocked on the door one night and told them that one of the Newtons’ dogs had been
found in the grove, killed in the same manner as the rabbit all those years before. Emory was arrested, but this time Abe got on top of things right away. Instead of taking his son to an ‘expert’ who would only institutionalize him again, Abe did everything he could to keep Emory at home and care for him himself. He paid off the Newtons, agreed to medicate and better supervise Emory, and even arranged for in-home care through a county program. It took all of that, but finally the charges were dropped. Abe had managed to keep his son out of jail or the mental home.”