Free Secrets of Harmony Grove by Mindy Starns Clark

was out at the B and B and had run into some old documents of my grandfather’s.
    “I was just going to put them back where I found them,” he had said, “but in several different places I noticed that they refer to diamonds. Remember looking for diamonds during the renovation?”
    “Do I? We practically tore the whole house apart!”
    The story of the diamonds was a complicated one, but essentially it involved Grandpa Abe’s first wife, Daphne, whom he had met and married over in Germany right as World War II was coming to a close. Daphne had become pregnant while still a newlywed and had ended up dying in childbirth. The baby survived, a son my grandfather had named Emory. A few years later, Abe and little Emory had returned to the states, where Abe remarried and had one more child, another son, my father Harold.
    Two years ago, when my grandfather passed away, we learned that his will included “certain assets” that he was leaving to Emory, assets that had once belonged to Daphne. The will didn’t specify what those assets were, and no one knew what he had meant, not even the lawyer.
    We were about to dismiss the matter outright when my grandmother piped up with a theory, that the assets in question were actually diamonds. She knew for a fact that Abe’s first wife had inherited a cache of diamonds from her parents. What happened to those diamonds after Daphne died my grandmother didn’t know, but she had a feeling Abe had held onto them for his son, brought them back to the states, and had hidden them away for safekeeping until his death.
    It was an exciting thought, and even though technically the diamonds belonged solely to Emory, we all wanted to find them for him. During the renovation, Troy and my father and I had looked high and low, even dismantling parts of the house in our search, but we had come up empty, and eventually we decided that either the diamonds were hidden so well they would never be found, or Abe hadn’t brought them with him to the States in the first place.
    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 ideawhere 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