Shadows of Lancaster County

by Mindy Starns Clark

  For some reason, I had a feeling that was one prayer that wasn’t going to be answered the way I wanted it to.

  TWENTY-SIX

  STEPHANIE

  August 9, 1812

  There are rumblings in the palace, rumblings of dissatisfaction among Karl’s family. Luise is a particularly bitter pill, and she wishes nothing more than for this child of my womb to be another girl, proving yet again that I am incapable of providing a male heir to the throne.

  Everything within me yearns for this child to be a boy, as that would shut up the vindictive and unpleasant Luise for good. Were it not for the vigorous kicks inside my belly that assure me of my child’s good health, I do believe Luise’s constant snide remarks and venomous complaints would drive me out of my mind.

  As it is, the venom in her voice and eyes sometimes makes me feel not just hated but also unsafe. What could this woman’s hate make her capable of?

  I pray I never find out.

  August 15, 1812

  Today when I came upon Priscilla, her eyes were red and she clutched a handkerchief damp from tears. It took a bit of prodding for her to tell me what was wrong, as she said she never meant to share this with me for fear of casting a pall on my own delicate condition. With a fresh round of tears, my Amisch friend confided that she had had two previous children die at birth before finally having Francis, and that she has begun to feel deep in her heart that sense of foreboding that tells her the child she carries now will die as well.

  Though I have not experienced the loss of a child myself, I attempted to comfort her. Sitting by her side, I patted her hand and told her that my husband’s family has also had more than its share of infant deaths. The consensus we reached was that God was in charge and His will would cover whatever life or death or pain awaited.

  Priscilla’s grasp on God’s will, however, feels much stronger than mine. Outwardly, I professed to be accepting of whatever fate awaits the fruit of my womb. Inwardly, I know that not even heaven itself would dare to rip an infant from my earthly hold.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ANNA

  The Internet café was sandwiched between a gas station and a hotel.

  Inside, the place was empty except for a group of high school girls in blue-and-white T-shirts and a family of four that seemed to be with them. I got in line behind the whole group and studied the menu for something inexpensive. It looked like my best bet would be a gourmet coffee, so when it was my turn I asked for a venti triple shot skinny sugar-free cinnamon dolce with a shot of sugar-free vanilla.

  “Just have a seat and we’ll bring it to you when it’s ready,” the woman said as she took the bill from my hand and gave me back my change.

  “Thanks.”

  The café was named “Bites & Bytes,” though there were only four desktop computers in the whole place. That led me to assume that most people came bearing their own laptops, which was a relief. With so few hard drives, it shouldn’t take too long to find the one Bobby had used on Wednesday night.

  I got lucky on the second try. Like many public computers, these had a wiping program to clear the decks each night, but I knew how to get around that to access the browser history anyway. When I found a long list of activity on the date and time in question, I knew I had hit the bull’s-eye, especially because most of the sites matched what I already knew about Bobby’s Internet activity that night.

  My coffee appeared, so I took advantage of the interruption to pull out the chargers for my cell phone and my laptop and plug them both in. I didn’t know how long I would be here, but I’d grab some power while I could.

  Sipping my coffee, I returned to the desktop computer, went through the history, and pieced together a good list of every site Bobby had accessed. Next, I cross-referenced that list with the one I had made from my office back in California. I hadn’t missed much, though at least I was now able to answer the nagging question of why Bobby had chosen Las Vegas for his decoy destination. From what I could tell, that was the only middle-of-the-night flight that went out of Philly. I did a quick search on the airport’s website just to make sure, but as big as the Philadelphia airport was, I was surprised to see that all domestic departures took place between the hours of about six a.m. to midnight, with the exception of the flight he had booked to Las Vegas, which departed Philadelphia at two a.m. and had been some sort of this-month-only deal. Given the timing, the flight had been the one choice he had.

  Once I finished reviewing all of the sites and made sure I had covered my bases that way, it was time to break into Bobby’s email account. Lydia hadn’t known his password, but I hoped to figure it out anyway. I opened up my laptop, locked into the café’s wireless Internet, and opened my “Password Cracker” software, which was a nifty program that helped me take a person’s known data and scramble it around, mixing relevant numbers and words to find the combination that unlocked a particular door. In my experience, the Cracker was successful about eighty percent of the time, which was better than many password finders out there. Of course, this program was designed to figure out the passwords created by the average Joe, not outsmart a random password generator or a person with superior technical knowledge.

  In Bobby’s case, considering he didn’t even own a computer, my hopes were pretty high that my program would be able to figure out his password. I accessed the entry list and began typing every word I could think of in Bobby’s life: names of family and friends, favorite places, hobbies, talents, favorite films and books, old pets, new and old addresses, and more.

  At the bottom, I entered pertinent dates, such as birthdays and anniversaries.

  Once I had completed the form, I set the program to work. The Internet provider Bobby used allowed three tries before kicking out, but Cracker included as part of its protocol automatic restarting. In that way, it could cycle through a nearly infinite amount of words and word/number combinations on most ISPs, trying each one until it eventually found the password that would get me into Bobby’s email account.

  As the machine computed away, I sat back and stretched, feeling tension in my neck and back. I looked around the café, noticing that the teens I had stood behind in line earlier were now crammed into booths along the windows, smiling and laughing and eating their lunches. Trying not to be nosy, I watched them interact. They seemed to get along well, and they were obviously fond of the family who had brought them there, especially the woman they called Mrs. Hoffman. An attractive blonde, she was a real den mother type, warm and helpful and maternal.

  She and her husband and their two children were sitting in their own booth nearby, and they formed a handsome family unit. The son was about nine or ten, tall and slim, with the same dark hair as his father. Earlier, I had pegged him as the quiet one in the bunch, member of the family, but for the moment he was going on enthusiastically about the basketball game that they had been to before coming to the café. The daughter was younger, maybe six or seven, and she was a beauty, all blonde hair and blue eyes and sparkling personality. Glancing up at her brother now and then to listen to his tale, she was doodling big, colorful flowers on the paper placemat in front of her.

  A sudden beep brought my attention back to the computer screen, where the program informed me that it had succeeded in cracking the code. I watched Bobby’s password appear, one character at a time, in the box at the center of my screen. When it finished typing, I smiled to see that his email password was “Ditt02268,” a combination of his current extension number at work and the name of his all-time favorite pet, one of two cats we’d had as children. Bobby’s choice was particularly interesting to me because at one time, before I became more tech savvy and began using a random password generator, my first email account password had been named after our other cat, Willow, who had been my favorite. I guessed great minds must truly think alike.

  Once I was inside his account, I checked all of the dates of his sent emails first, not surprised to see that there had been no activity since he had gone online from h
ere Wednesday night.

  Clicking back to the roster of new mail, I scanned the full list of both opened and unopened emails, looking for anything unusual. There were a lot of confirmations of account changes from credit card companies and banks, which I had expected. Professional newsletters, some spam, and several forwards from friends were also there, but that was to be expected as well. What did surprise me were dozens of letters about geneology, ancestry, and tracing the Jensen family tree.

  I sat up straight, goose bumps rising on my arms, remembering the words of the ski-masked intruder: You are the sister of Robert “Bobby” Jensen, the daughter of Charles Jensen and a descendant of Peter and Jonas and Karl Jensen, among others. I’m in the right house, and you’re the right person. As far as I was concerned, those words showed a definite connection between what had happened to me out there and whatever had been going on with Bobby back here. Truly, I didn’t see Bobby as the type of guy who would be into researching our roots just for fun; something else had propelled him to do this, something that went way beyond the average root tracing hobbyist.

  For the next twenty minutes I skimmed various emails that had come in and gone out over the past few months. Judging by what I read, Bobby’s interest in geneology had been going on for a while, though it had taken a sudden and extreme rise three weeks ago, right around the same time he had been suspended from work. I thought about that, wondering if this ancestry stuff had simply been a hobby that turned into an obsession once he had all that spare time. Somehow, I highly doubted it. I kept reading, trying to get a feel for the email exchanges and what Bobby had been looking for.

  From what I could tell, he was interested only in our father’s side of the family, not our mother’s, and he had posted questions related to his search on listserves and message boards and all sorts of online sites, looking to trace back the name of Jensen. There was a receipt from about a month ago showing that he had bought a “Paternal Lineage DNA Test Kit” for two hundred dollars. He must have done the test and sent it in, because the results had come back about ten days later. I followed the link to get his test results myself, but I didn’t understand most of what I was reading. The language was technical and included terms like “haplogroups” and “subclades” and “genetic signatures.” The report came with explanatory information, but I didn’t feel like taking the time to educate myself unnecessarily. Instead, I downloaded the whole thing to my laptop’s hard drive so I could show it to Reed later and let him interpret it for me.

  I was still reading through Bobby’s emails and trying to put together the basics of his research when I heard the familiar “ding” of an incoming Instant Message, sent from someone who was online and wanted to talk to me—or to Bobby, actually, since I was signed on as him. A small box appeared on the upper left side of the screen, and inside was a note from the screen name “lostscholar32.”

  Hi, Bobby, where’ve you been? You haven’t answered my emails!

  Blinking, I hesitated only a moment before writing a message back.

  Sorry, been busy. What’s up?

  I felt guilty for IMing with someone under false pretenses, but I needed to see who this was and if they had any connection to my brother that might be helpful to my investigation. Quickly, I sorted Bobby’s mail by address and starting looking for exchanges between him and lostscholar32. Before I got too far, the reply came back.

  I was able to speak with your parents before they left on their trip. Alas, they had not heard of the Beauharnais Rubies either.

  My gasp was so loud that some of the teeneagers from the group across the way turned to look at me. I gave them an embarrassed wave and contemplated my reply. My mind was spinning in a hundred different directions—but mostly I was ecstatic that I now knew how to spell the word correctly, which would be invaluable for finding info on the web. Quickly, I switched to the browser on the desktop computer and did a search for “Beauharnais Rubies.” Desperate to keep this guy talking, I switched back to my laptop and typed a reply.

  What have you managed to learn about the rubies so far?

  I glanced at my web search results, disappointed to see that there were no direct hits. There were, however, a few listings for “Beauharnais Emeralds,” so I clicked on those links and was astounded by what I saw. Apparently, back in the 1800s, a woman named Stephanie de Beauharnais was given a beautiful set of emerald jewelry by her adoptive father, Napoleon Bonaparte. This set of jewelry had become known as the “Beauharnais Emeralds” and was currently on display in a museum in London. My attention from the article was diverted by a “ding” on my laptop, indicating a reply.

  Your father sent along a photo that has proven quite encouraging. He also mentioned that you have a sister, though he couldn’t give me any contact info. Any chance you could put me in touch with her? Maybe she’ll be able to help.

  Needing to stall for time, I typed my reply.

  Sure, hold on a second. Don’t go away.

  He responded quickly.

  Don’t worry, I won’t!

  As fast as I could, I went through Bobby’s emails back to the very first communication I could find from this guy, which had been sent about two weeks ago with the subject line Your post on the ancestry message board. In the email, the man identified himself as Remy Villefranche, a historian and scholar and the author of the “Nowhere to Be Found” series of books, which thus far included the titles Nowhere to Be Found: Lost Paintings of the Masters and Nowhere to Be Found: Missing Manuscripts.

  According to the email, he was currently working on his next book, Nowhere to Be Found: Lost Jewels and Antiquities, and he was researching a certain “parure of jewelry,” whatever that meant, that he believed had been passed down through the generations of the Jensen family line. He said he had various forms of proof tying certain pieces of the set to Bobby’s Jensen ancestors, specifically his great-great-grandfather William and his great-great-great grandfather Peter.

  He concluded the email with the words Would love to discuss this matter with you further at your earliest convenience. That was followed by a long list of contact information, including several phone numbers, an address on Park Avenue in New York City, and a website.

  I sent the guy another message.

  You still there? Keep holding, I’ll be just another minute.

  Yep, still here. Take your time.

  Turning to the desktop computer, I went to an online bookstore and did a search for this man’s books. Sure enough, he seemed to be a legitimate author with a major publisher. Scanning further down, I could see that he had earned some good reviews, most of them praising the books’ “thorough research,”

  “gorgeous photos,” and “attention to detail.” Sounded legit enough for me.

  On the laptop, I held my breath as I typed my next message:

  You live in Manhattan, right?

  Right. Why?

  Because my sister’s in town. She’d like to meet with you in person.

  As I waited for his reply, I tried to calculate how long it would take me to get to New York City. If I took the train from Malvern with a switch at 30th Street Station, I could probably be at Penn Station in about three or four hours. Then again, if I drove, I could probably do it in two and a half. Though I couldn’t spare the time or the money for either method, this was too important a conversation to have via the Internet or even on the phone. I needed to not just pick this man’s brain but also observe his body language and facial expressions. I was also going to tell him about my intruder and see if he could help to shed some light on who the man might be who had broken into my home. By the end of the evening, if he was any help at all, then perhaps this part of the mystery would have been solved.

  The computer beeped as his response popped up.

  Super! Just name the place and the time and I’m there!

  Even better, he was willing to come to me. I thought for a moment and then suggested we meet tonight at a restaurant near the train station in Paoli, which should make
things convenient for him.

  His reply was swift as he asked me to hold on a minute and don’t go away. Assuming he was checking the train tables, I replied for him to take his time. The messaging box sitting dormant, I clicked over to Bobby’s Sent mail and read the reply he had given to this guy’s original email.

  Dear Mr. Villefranche,

  I don’t know anything about rubies passed down through the family, but I’d love to talk with you if you can shed some light on my paternal lineage search. I’ll call you in just a bit. Which number should I use? Right now, it’s a little after 2:00 p.m. here in Hershey, and I’ll probably call when my computer session ends at 3:00.

  Thanks,

  Bobby Jensen

  Hershey? Computer session? Bobby’s emails were providing as many questions as they were answers! I recalled seeing another message that had the word “Hershey” in the subject line, but I had thought it was spam and hadn’t bothered to read it. I found that email now, but before I could open it, another message popped up from Mr. Villefranche.

  Okay, I just called some friends who live in Lititz, and they’re going to pick me up at the Amtrak station in Harrisburg and drive me to our rendezvous. Should we say dinner at 8:30? How about The Olde Greenfield Inn in Lancaster? My treat, of course.

  That sounds fine. She’ll meet you there.

  How will I recognize her?

  I thought for a moment, grinned, and wrote:

  Just watch for a mysterious blonde lady in a navy peacoat.

  Very well. Tell her to watch for a not-so-mysterious gray-haired old man in a burgundy cravat. Must run now so I can pack and make that train.

  Okay, bye.

  The sound effect of a closing door indicated that Remy Villefranche was no longer online. I sat there for a minute, grateful for this monumental break in the case. Maybe the tide was finally turning, all of my questions would be answered soon, and somewhere Bobby would turn up safe and sound.