Remembering Dresden (Jack Turner Suspense Series Book 2) (11 page)

“We’ll be super careful,” Jack said. “We’ll just lift the top edge a little. Like this.” He demonstrated what he was saying. “See, that one doesn’t want to give, so I’ll just leave it.” He tried a few more and found one on the bottom row that popped right off and slid down the page. “There we go.” He turned it over. “Well, nothing written on this one. But see, it didn’t rip. And I bought some Elmer’s glue at the store before dinner. I’ll get my phone, take pictures of every page so we make sure we get them all back where they belong. And when we’re done, we’ll just glue them all back. It’ll be fun. Like having a safe, kind-a historical little adventure. I’ll even let you be the one to decide which pics are loose enough to come off.”

“Okay, but if I think one of these pics is gonna rip, even a little, I’m going to leave it in place.”

“That’s fine. I’m just thinking it’ll be so much more fun if we knew what was going on in some of these pictures. When I read that first one, it’s like I wasn’t just looking at a bunch of miscellaneous pictures anymore. I was stepping into someone’s story.”

“That’s why you’re such a good history teacher, Jack. This stuff comes alive to you.”

He leaned over and kissed her and looked down at the album. “Okay, start flicking the pics off the page.”

“No, first you go get your phone and take pics of these pages.”

“Right.” He got up and found his phone. When he came back, they spread the photo album out on the coffee table. She helped him take pics of each page. It only took a couple of minutes. Then they snuggled back on the center of the couch.

After giving up on the next five or six pics, Rachel found one that flicked off easily.

“Bingo,” Jack said, looking at the back. Four lines in German, the same handwriting as before. He turned the pic back over a second to see who was in it and what was happening. Two little boys, one of them the main one; the other considerably younger. Both in bare feet standing on a cobblestone road. Behind them, a cracked, broken sidewalk. Behind that, a bullet-scarred wall. They were looking at whoever was taking the photograph with sad yet hopeful eyes. “Doesn’t it almost look like someone has just promised them something?” he said. “Like maybe some food, if they stood still for the picture?”

“I don’t know,” Rachael said. I just can’t get over how sad they look, in every picture.” She flipped it over and read the words aloud, in German.

Das bin ich und ein kleiner Junge Ich befreundete . Ich weiß seinen Namen nicht mehr erinnern . Er wurde krank und starb am nächsten Winter. Der Fotograf war gerade bot uns ein kleines Stück Schokolade.

“You were right, Jack. The photographer had just offered them some candy. How did you know that?”

“I didn’t. It’s like when I see these old photographs, I put myself there. I just imagine what might be going on.”

“You’re pretty good at it. She read what it said now in English:

This is me and a little boy I befriended. I don’t remember his name now. He got sick and died the next winter. The photo-grapher had just offered us a small piece of chocolate.

“It’s so sad,” she said. “They’re standing there in bare feet. Looks like they haven’t had a bath in weeks. They’re both so skinny. And he can’t even remember his friend’s name…because he died.”

“I wonder when he wrote this note,” Jack said. “It was obviously many years after the picture was taken. Could have been decades. Whenever it was, it looks like the same time as when he wrote on the other pic. Let’s check out some more.”

Rachel turned the page. “I have to admit…this really is fun.”

They continued doing this for the next hour or so, making their way to the fifth page. Rachel was able to safely extract two or three pics on each page. Of those, about half had writing on the back. Both agreed, the writing was all done by the same hand, using the same ink, probably at the same time.

The story of this young orphan boy’s life after the war began to emerge. He definitely had no siblings still alive. He’d said as much on one of the pics. The reason why the backgrounds in the pictures seemed so different was due to how often he’d been moved. Not just to different orphanages but even different towns.

By the seventh page, there was at least some noticeable progress in his situation. He wasn’t skinny anymore, and his clothes didn’t look so shabby.

On the ninth page, the pictures began to change somewhat dramatically. It looked like the young boy—now grown into a teen—had joined some kind of military youth organization. Jack and Rachel had only looked at the back of one picture on that page, and it had no writing. The boy was standing with two friends in front of a large banner with the letters “FDJ,” which sat atop a logo that looked like a sunrise.

“What do you make of that?” Rachel said. “What is FDJ?”

“I have no idea,” Jack said. “My East German history after the war is pretty malnourished.” But he was definitely intrigued. “I can look it up.”

Rachel glanced at her watch. “No, I better go. It’s not that late, but I’ve got some homework I have to do before bed.”

“You really have to go?”

“I really do.” She set the photo album back on the coffee table. They both stood, and he walked her toward the front door.

Once outside, they kissed several times, as they always did saying goodbye.

“So glad you came,” he said. “Hope it wasn’t too weird. Doing that photo album thing at the end.”

“It wasn’t too weird. After reading the first few, I got sucked in, like finding the missing pieces of a puzzle. I wanted to keep finding more of them with writing on the back. But hey, don’t you get too sucked in.”

“What do you mean?”

“I know how you get. This photo thing might be a nice diversion…like, when you need a little break. Don’t let it become an obsession.”

“That’s not gonna happen.”

She gave him that look. They’d only been together a year, but he knew that look. He decided not to argue the point. She waved and smiled again, walked toward her car. “Hey Rach, wait up. I’ll follow you in my car down the dirt driveway, till you get to the main road. It’s pretty dark and then there’s that….”

“Creepy shack?” she said.

“Yeah, that.”

After Rachel left, Jack spent the next half hour cleaning up after dinner. While they were eating, Rachel had offered to help, but Jack refused. He knew she had the homework to do and couldn’t stay long. He didn’t want their time together eaten up with chores.

Now that the dinette table was clear, he spread all his Dresden research material out the way it was before. He lifted the lid to his laptop and opened the file he had already created. It took some doing, but he was finally able to break free from the old photo album’s gravitational pull. He had to get back on this research project. The outline wouldn’t write itself.

Within fifteen minutes, he was fully into it again, then spent the next three hours totally immersed in the project, adding five new pages to his outline notes. There were so many more angles to the Dresden bombing than he had ever imagined. A lot more websites, survivor interviews and controversies to explore. The worst part of the controversies were the eyewitness accounts telling of American fighter planes flying down to ground-level to deliberately strafe and kill civilians, who were literally running for their lives. Even Kurt Vonnegut had said this happened.

But there were just as many other accounts—the more official accounts—that denied such a thing ever took place. Was this a case of history being determined by the victors? What was the truth? Jack wasn’t sure how he would handle this part of the story. But he was sure he needed to take a break.

Getting up from the table, he poured himself a glass of iced tea. He walked outside for a breath of fresh air. Stepping off the porch, he glanced up at the half-lit moon and starry sky. They provided just enough light to allow him to trace with his eyes the silhouette of the trees as they wrapped around the lake. It was so peaceful and quiet, so soothing. Hard to imagine anyone experiencing the kinds of things he had just been reading about.

Not only during the World War II years, but even now in various parts of the Middle East. Planes were still bombing targets. People were still dying. Only now, the idea of carpet-bombing civilians was unthinkable. This was the age of smart bombs and drone strikes. Military strategists did everything they could to avoid “collateral damage.”

Jack wondered how the military leaders during World War II would have fought the war if they’d had these hi-tech weapons at their disposal. How would it have changed things? Would it have changed things? The world was such a different place then. He had read recently that since 2003 almost 6,000 American soldiers had died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even with this figure, people today were outraged by such losses.

But during World War II, more Americans died than that in the Battle of Iwo Jima alone. More than double had died in the Battle of Okinawa. More than triple had died in the Battle of the Bulge.

Yes, it was a much different time then.

Jack sighed.

Here he was in this peaceful place with this beautiful scenery, almost overwhelming his senses, and he was thinking about the horrors of war. About battles and statistics. He needed to get his mind on something else, something smaller, more personal. Maybe he should call it a night, pick up the research project in the morning. For light reading, he’d only brought Vonnegut’s book,
Slaughterhouse Five
. That didn’t seem like the change of pace he needed.

Then he remembered…the old photo album. That might be just the thing.

He was about to head inside when he noticed the oval throw rug still hanging over the wood railing. He’d better bring that in first before it started getting damp. Setting his iced tea down, he shook the rug out a few times, then walked it inside. He needed to move a few things around in the living room to lay it back down properly. One of them was the recliner. As he pulled it back, his eyes zeroed in on that board. The loose floorboard. He could see the whole length of it now. It really was a different shade than the rest. The grain pattern was even different.

It made him wonder…what must have happened to the original floorboard? Did it crack or get destroyed somehow? And why replace it with a new floorboard but not nail the board down? Jack looked at it closely. There weren’t even any nail holes. It had only ever been set in place, as if….

As if someone had wanted it to be an easy thing to pull up and put back. Now he really was curious. He got down on his hands and knees and pulled the board up. All the floorboards were pretty wide, maybe ten inches. Once again, he stared down at a dark hole, probably the crawl space under the cabin. A flashlight. Jack had packed one; it was in his backpack.

He hurried to the bedroom, grabbed the flashlight out of his backpack and headed back to the living room. This was probably all for nothing, but what the heck? It was pretty fun and had definitely gotten his mind off of battles and war statistics. He turned the flashlight on and dropped to his hands and knees.

He could see right off the bat, this wasn’t nothing.

He was looking at a black box, clearly visible through the floorboard opening. He lay on the floor and reached down to feel it. Hard plastic. With his right hand, he felt around the perimeter, trying to get a sense of its size. Maybe eight inches high, a little over a foot wide and a foot deep. He sat up and shone the flashlight on it some more.

Now he knew what it was. A portable safe.

Still on his knees, Jack looked at his right hand. It was filthy, just from handling the safe. Clearly, it hadn’t been touched in a while. Possibly for years. He shined the flashlight all around the safe again, trying to get an idea of what he was looking at. How did the owner get the safe down there? It didn’t look like it could fit through the opening. It was too wide. Did he bring it in through the crawl space? But that didn’t make any sense.

Then he figured it out, and felt pretty stupid. The safe was too wide to bring up horizontally, but it was only eight inches high. The opening was at least ten. You could pull it up if you turned it sideways.

So he did.

It came right up through the opening with a little room to spare. He laid it flat on the wood floor. It really was so dusty and dirty. If someone told Jack it had been down there for twenty years, he would’ve believed it. He shined the flashlight back down through the opening, because something had caught his eye as he lifted the safe through. Now he could see some concrete blocks lying on the dirt. That’s what the safe had been sitting on. Which made sense; the blocks would have kept it off the ground in case any moisture or standing water ever gathered there.

Jack was just about to get up and wet some paper towels to clean it off, when he stopped to think about it some more. Was that a good idea? If it was all cleaned up, someone would know somebody else had messed with the safe besides the one who’d put it there. Then Jack realized, he’d already messed up that idea when he felt along the safe’s edges with his hand and lifted it through the opening. It not only looked messed with already, his fingerprints were all over it.

Cleaning it up was actually a necessary step now.

It only took a few minutes and the safe looked good as new. Now, the bigger problem became evident. The safe was locked. It wasn’t any kind of fancy security system, just a simple opening for a key, which of course Jack didn’t have. The crazy thing was, having gotten this far, seeing what was inside the safe had quickly grown from a mild curiosity to something just shy of a quest.

He bent back down and shined the flashlight all around the concrete blocks and the dirt underneath where the safe had been. No key. Nothing even shiny or metallic. He got up and sat on the edge of the recliner. This thought involuntarily ran through his head
:
If I were the owner, and I wanted to hide a key in this cabin, where would I hide it
?

He stood and spent the next thirty minutes going room to room, and spot to spot, trying to answer that question. But no luck. He located one hopeful drawer in a dresser in the loft upstairs. It was filled with odds and ends: spare buttons, old combs, tie tacks, nail clippers, some old coins, and even some keys. All of them, however, too big to fit in the safe opening.