Secrets of Harmony Grove (44 page)

Creeping along the walls in the dark, past barrack after barrack, eyeing the fences for a possible route of escape, she eventually found herself at the crematorium. Realizing where she was, Daphne had stood there for a long moment, one thought consuming her mind, that this was where the bodies of her mother and sister had met their end.

In the light of a dim yellow bulb that hung in the brick archway between chimneys, she spotted ash that had accumulated in a corner, on the ground. Unable to stop herself, Daphne moved forward and fell to her knees, reaching out and scooping up two fistfuls of it. The very act seemed to snap her from her stupor. Holding her ash-filled fists tightly against her chest, she made a proclamation:

This is my mother, this is my sister, I said aloud, declaring forever that the ashes in my hands would represent both. If I could not join them in death, I would do what I could to give them the final resting place they deserved. I would bring these ashes home
.

Somehow, I made it back unseen, though not by my own doing. I stood up straight and simply walked from the crematorium all the way to my barracks. Perhaps Hashem laid a cloak of black around me as I went, blinding all who might have otherwise observed me
.

When the ash had cooled enough
Slid it into sooty sock
Stashed in flea-infested bunk
Where none went except for lice

I will take these to the grove,
Long-beloved place of peace
There will pour the ashes out
Let their death give way to life

“Sorry about that,” Heath said, coming back into the room and sitting
across from me. “That was the pathologist. Looks like our theory was correct.”

He started to go on, but then he caught sight of my face and stopped.

“Sienna, what is it? What’s wrong?”

I shook my head, afraid to speak at that moment lest I cry.

“Honey?” he asked, rising from his seat to come closer.

Kneeling beside my chair, he brushed the hair from my face and tried to look into my eyes. I shook my head again, looking down, and then I held out the papers to him. He took them from me, flipped through several, and asked me if this was what he thought it was. I nodded.

“I had an idea earlier,” I whispered, “that maybe Nina had the documents. So I went over there and got her mother to let me take a look around, and I found them.”

“And?”

“And I don’t know. It’s complicated. I wanted them so I could learn about the diamonds, but so far I can’t stop reading everything else too. There’s just so much…this woman’s story…”

“Oh, honey, come here,” Heath said, wrapping his arms around me and pulling me toward him. I rested my head against his chest, wondering how Daphne could have survived. The poem that had hit me the hardest was also the one that validated my own experience with the darker side of man. Called “Denial,” it railed not against Hitler or the Nazis but against regular German citizens, those who lived within the shadows of the concentration camps and knew what was going on but chose to look the other way. The last two stanzas read:

Through the slats of inbound trains
Proof stared back with hungry eyes
Yet your heart remained untouched,
More empty than the returning trains
.

Every time you turned away
Though you think you bear no guilt
Might as well have stoked the fires
That turned each one to ash and smoke
.

After comforting me for a while, Heath moved to the chair next to mine, sliding his plate over so we could sit and eat side by side as we studied the pages together. Skimming through, we were surprised to run across explanations for several different of the stranger markers in the German Gate section of the grove. “Singing Horses” were what the Nazis called prisoners they chained to four-wheeled carts and forced to sing as they pulled massively heavy loads of stones from a quarry. “Blood Street” was the name the prisoners had given to a long nearby road because so many thousands had died during the course of its construction. “Walking Skeletons” came from a poem of Daphne’s and was simply her description of her emaciated fellow prisoners.

When Daphne had at last gone through the story of her experiences before and during the war, she moved into the present and began recording each day’s events as they happened. After reading about her secret marriage to Abe and her adjustment to life outside the concentration camp and the hospital, we finally got to the part where the two of them had returned to her family home in Westphalia in search of living relatives. Daphne wrote:

Success! We have found the diamonds, Abe and I, the whole bundle still there, untouched. The treasure was right where Mother had said it would be, in the grove, buried beneath the Fishing Tree
.

I am grateful, yes, but also dismayed, for deep inside I think I had held on to the hope that someone else besides me would have returned by now, some cousin who survived the camps and came back ahead of us to retrieve these family assets. Instead, the sealed and perfect package confirms everything I had already been told, that I am the only surviving member of my entire family. My father and his brother and their wives and all of their children are dead, the entire clan reduced to me, my husband, the baby in my womb, and four dozen perfect stones worth the combined wealth of both families. Oh, how I would give every single one of these diamonds back just for one more day with my siblings, one more hour with my parents!

Holding the sparkling stones in my hands now, their smooth
sharpness numb against my burn-scarred palms, I can only thank Hashem that my father comprehended very early on, at least partially, the road that Germany was traveling down
.

And yet I am angry as well. For how could he have understood well enough to preserve our wealth but not enough to preserve our lives? Though not as tiny as diamonds, we could all have hidden somehow, I know we could have! Each new day Abe and I learn of some neighbor or friend of a friend who endured the war while tucked safely away beneath houses, behind walls, in hidden chambers
.

I would rather have been buried with the diamonds than lived through the horrors of the past seven years
.

The next day’s entry didn’t say anything important about the diamonds, but it certainly spoke volumes about Abe and Daphne and their relationship.

We found my old flute buried at the base of the strawberry tree today, but it had not fared as well as the diamonds. Instead, its metal was rusted and its body invaded by some earthen creature that had long ago taken up residence inside. Unable to look, I told Abe that I was going into the house and for him to dispose of it while I was gone. But then, of course, I couldn’t help but watch from the window. Bless him, he did not merely toss it onto the wood pile or bury it back in the ground. Instead, he gently wrapped it in a discarded blanket, placed it atop the pile of stony rubble, and lit it afire like a funeral pyre. He took a long time to come inside, and when he did his eyes were red
.

Had he been weeping for the music I would never get to play, the music he would never have the chance to hear? Or were his eyes merely irritated from the smoke? Tonight I summoned my nerve and asked my stoic husband, but I should have known better. Abe carries his pain very deep inside and does not see the purpose in examining it as I do
.

I watch
Smoke rising from my flute
Like notes on a page
If only Abe would speak to me
That song would be enough

Once we were finished eating, Heath and I took a break to clear the table and organize our thoughts. Thus far we had managed to confirm that the diamonds really had existed, and they were in Abe and Daphne’s possession once they had dug them up from the base of the Fishing Tree.

We also now had a much better understanding of the markers in the German Gate section of the grove.

What we didn’t yet know was what had happened to those diamonds.

Heath and I began to go through the other papers in the envelope. Though I recognized my grandfather’s distinctive handwriting on most of them, it was hard to tell what, exactly, his scribblings and doodles were all about. We finally decided that many of the pages had to do with plans for the trees in the grove, with notes on everything from fertilizer mix to tree placement to marker diagrams.

Harder to figure out was a large, folded page that opened up to reveal what looked like building plans, though for what structure we could not imagine. Kind of like a studio apartment, the place would have been quite small, judging by the measurements on the diagram. Along one side of the page, Abe had written what looked like a grocery shopping list, but the quantities were odd: five cases of water bottles, twenty-five cans of tomatoes, ten jars of peanut butter. The list also included other nonfood items, such as lanterns, matches, candles, knives, batteries, tarps, and more.

“That sounds like camping gear. Maybe he was planning to build a hunting cabin somewhere,” I said.

“How did he feel about the millennium?” Heath asked, reminding me how everyone had braced themselves for the shift from 1999 to 2000. “Maybe that’s what this was about. Your grandfather was creating a stockpile against catastrophe.”

“Would that have anything to do with these words here?” I asked,
pointing to what my grandfather had written near the bottom of the page in capital letters, circled, and underlined: “FIRST TO GO!”

“‘First to go,’” Heath read slowly. “I have no idea what that’s about.”

“Me either. But I can call my grandmother later and ask her if she knows.”

In the end we were both disappointed that nothing else in the entire envelope seemed to have anything to do with Daphne’s family diamonds. Whether Troy had discovered the envelope and its contents on his own, or if it had been given to him by Nina, it seemed to me that the only clue it contained about where those diamonds could possibly be buried was the single line in Daphne’s journal indicating where they had originally been buried over in Europe for the duration of the war.

The final piece of paper in the pile was a letter dated just five years ago from a professor named Odette Moreau at East Pennsylvania University. The letter was a simple thank-you note to Abraham Collins for his participation in her department’s Holocaust research project. I didn’t know what that was about, but I had to assume that Abe had given them copies of Daphne’s journal or at least her poems.

I made a mental note to follow up with that later, curious as to what it was about. Heath received a call just as we finished, so while he talked I returned everything to the envelope and took it to my room for safekeeping. By the time I came back down, he was just hanging up.

“Good news,” he said, standing beside the couch. “That was the pathologist. Both Floyd and Nina tested positive for ketamine.” He went on to explain that ketamine was an anesthetic used on both humans and animals, and it was often the drug of choice for tranquilizer darts.

“How do you think it happened? Shouldn’t the humans have been shooting at the creatures and not the other way around?”

Heath was silent for a moment, rubbing his chin with his thumb.