Stolen Secrets

by L. B. Schulman

  I crossed to the door, feeling drained. “I’ll be with Franklin D. if you need me.”

  “You’re not on duty yet. No need to report to me.”

  “Well, just saying, I’m around in case of an emergency or something.” The pretzels clamped under my arm had to be pulverized by now.

  When I returned to the living room, Franklin D. took one look at my face and said, “Good old Vickie, eh?”

  I tossed the bag to him. He caught it and tore it open. “She gets under my skin, that’s all,” I said.

  “Like how?”

  “Like she’s always Skyping with this guy on my grandma’s laptop when she’s supposed to be with Oma. As soon as I come in, she shuts it off.”

  “Whoa, Vickie’s got a boyfriend?”

  I laughed. “I know, right?”

  A few days ago, I’d asked her what she did on Oma’s laptop all day. Shockingly Vickie opened up a bit. She mentioned a long-distance relationship with someone named Ryan who lived in the Midwest.

  “So how’d you meet him?” I’d asked.

  “Do you know why they call it a personal life, Livvy? I’m sure you can respect my need to keep work and private separate.” As if I’d forced her to talk about her love life.

  Franklin D. threw a pretzel in the air and ducked under it, catching it with his tongue. “Guess that proves there’s someone for everyone,” he said, crunching away.

  I picked up The Diary of Anne Frank and flipped to the earmarked page. “So, remember the other day when Oma was acting like a duck?”

  “How could I forget?”

  “Before the Franks went into hiding, Anne got into trouble for talking too much in class, so her teacher assigned her an essay as a punishment. Anne wrote a short story called ‘“Quack, Quack, Quack,” said Mrs. Chatterback.’ Look, she writes about it here, in her diary.”

  He leaned in close, his soft curls sweeping across my cheek. I waited as he read about how she’d turned the story into a joke to get back at a teacher who accused her of being a “chatterbox”—a word I remembered Oma using. She’d described Franklin D. that way.

  “I have a thought—maybe it’s crazy—but it’s about how my grandma met Anne Frank,” I started. “You see, a few years ago, this woman who survived Bergen-Belsen wrote a book claiming that Anne used to tell stories to the kids in the camp to keep their spirits up. It seems like something she’d do, doesn’t it? If it’s true, then she probably retold the ones she wrote before the war, right?”

  Franklin D. nodded slowly. “Didn’t your grandma say something about a hospital the day I met her? She was sick, I think.”

  “Exactly. If she was one of those kids who listened to Anne’s stories, that would explain why it stuck in her head.” I pictured a group of emaciated kids huddled around a girl almost my age.

  “How old do you think Oma is?” Franklin D. asked.

  I shrugged. “I’ve asked her four times, but I think she forgot.”

  “Let’s say she was ten in 1944. That would make her about eighty now …”

  “Eighty-three,” I corrected. Annoyed by my left-brained self, I added, “Sorry.”

  “She kind of looks older,” he pointed out.

  “That makes sense, after going through all that.”

  “Yeah, probably.” His phone rang. He glanced at the screen, then answered, mouthing “Dan” to me. I waited. He listened for a bit, then said, “No, that’s not right. We agreed on … yes, I know, but they’re short—only a page each. Hold on, would you?” He pressed the phone to his arm and whispered to me, “There’s something I didn’t tell you. When I called Dan to see if he’d help us out, he asked for fifty bucks for the translation. I gave it to him, but now he’s saying it’s more work than he thought, and he wants a hundred.”

  “Are you kidding?” That wasn’t right. Dan should do the work for the agreed amount. At the same time, I really wanted to know what the entries said. It’s only money, I told myself. It wasn’t like I had a group of Dutch translators at my disposal or anything. “I guess we could—”

  Franklin D. put the phone back to his ear. “My friend says seventy-five is as high as she’ll go. That’s our final offer. If you can’t do it for that, then the deal’s off. I can stop by right now to pick up the pages if that works for you.”

  I winced, afraid of Dan’s reaction, but seconds later, Franklin D. said, “Good. I’ll come by to get the first two then. When will you finish the rest? … Okay, fine.” He hung up, then growled under his breath like a dog that hears someone fiddling with the doorknob. “I’m going over right now, even if he isn’t done with them all.”

  “I’ll pay you back.” My first paycheck from Mr. Laramie had come on Friday. For a few seconds, I’d been happy to get the money, but the feeling hadn’t lasted. I was Oma’s granddaughter—I should be taking care of her for free. In the end, I deposited the check in the bank, telling myself that I needed every cent to pay off Mom’s DUI fines.

  “My treat. I have some bar mitzvah money that I’ve been saving to spend on the perfect girl with a compelling mystery,” Franklin D. said.

  I laughed to hide the unexpected impact of the words. Perfect girl.

  “I’ll be back with the entries, as fast as a blur,” he said.

  He darted out of the house before the thank you could form on my lips.

  Two hours later, he handed me a flyer advertising an eighty-dollar rebate on a set of Goodyear tires. On the back were Dan’s notes, slanting down the unlined paper.

  “I had a bad feeling about that dude the first time I called him on the phone,” Franklin D. said. “I wouldn’t have given him the job if I knew someone else who spoke Dutch. Before I even met him, I was obsessing that he might try to sell the pages if they had anything to do with Anne Frank.”

  I hadn’t considered that. Would an unscrupulous private collector be willing to pay Dan for a few pages that mentioned her?

  “So I made copies and kept the originals safe and sound right here.” He patted a green folder beside him.

  “Oh, I get it. The age of the entries can’t be proven with a copy. It could be a forgery that someone made last week,” I said.

  Franklin D. grinned.

  “You’re really smart, you know that?” I inched closer, eager to decipher Dan’s lousy handwriting.

  The door swung open. Oma stood there, wagging a wooden spoon at us. “Who ate my goddamn cookies?”

  The last thing I needed was a meltdown. “Not us, Oma, but I’ll make you some more later, okay?”

  “It was the Jews! They’ll eat anything, even bread made from sawdust.”

  I cringed. Vickie ran into the room, drying her hands on her pants. “Oh, there you are!” she said to Oma. “I can’t even go to the bathroom without you causing trouble.”

  “She wasn’t causing trouble,” I said.

  Vickie’s gaze landed on the translation. Franklin D. shifted to block her view.

  “Did you steal my cookies?” Oma accused her.

  Vickie plunked a hand down on her shoulder. “Don’t be a silly goose.” She led Oma out of the room. We heard her say, “You can forget about the cookies. Next time, stay in bed, or else …”

  Free from prying eyes, we returned our attention to Dan’s translation. The auto mechanic’s handwriting looked like a seismograph reading of a 7.2 earthquake. I drew in a tight breath and began to read.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHTEEN

  WHILE DECIPHERING THE PUZZLING INTERPRETATION, I tasted blood. I hadn’t realized I’d been gnawing at the chapped skin on my bottom lip. I wiped my hand across my mouth and stared at Dan’s notes.

  “That train trip from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen …” I stopped, dizzy from an assault of emotions. Reading this, I couldn’t help but imagine myself on the transport in a crammed freight car, where everyone—men and women together—shared latrine buckets. The words “retching” and “smells” were enough to make something unmentionable climb up my throat. That wasn’t
the worst part, though. Dan had scrawled a series of disjointed words on the page: Train halt. Dead bodies. Dragged/dumped/thrown away. When Franklin D. left to get a glass of water, I pulled out my phone to research. Yes, the trains had stopped multiple times, always for the same purpose. Friends, relatives, lovers—dead from suffocation or exposure to the elements—tossed out like trash.

  “I wish these notes made more sense,” Franklin D. said.

  In a way, I was glad that Dan could only pluck individual words from the entry. Whole sentences might do me in. I saw it all through Oma’s eyes, making each word more intense, more real.

  The first entry ended with the train’s arrival at the camp. The barracks were full, so the Nazis moved the women to a tent. They slept on hay and mud, huddled against the cold German November. Bergen-Belsen seemed no better than a chicken factory, overcrowded and unsanitary.

  “What’s this part about the stars?” Franklin D. asked.

  Dan had written, M. says imagine stars above us.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “But I don’t think pretending helped.”

  Franklin D. rifled through the folder and pulled out an original entry. “Do you think we should try to find a sample of your grandma’s handwriting?”

  “Okay,” I said, though it seemed obvious to me that Oma was the author of the diary. I’d found it in her house. But I led the way to the library and went to her desk.

  “Is everything all right, Livvy?” Vickie called from the kitchen.

  “Just doing homework.” It was Saturday night. I never did homework then, but she didn’t know that.

  In the middle drawer, I found an old shopping list.

  bread

  eggs

  cheese the orange kind

  lima beans

  canned chili

  mashed beans in a can

  The letters on the list were more upright than slanted, written with a shaky hand. I tried to focus on the handwriting, but all I could think about was Oma’s dementia. When she’d written this, she’d already forgotten the words for cheddar and refried beans. The writing on the entry was more compressed. I pictured a younger version of my grandmother trying to cram her thoughts on the scrap of paper.

  “I’m no handwriting expert, but they look a little different,” Franklin D. said, watching me carefully.

  “Of course they would. That was over seventy years ago. Time changes everyone’s writing, especially with Alzheimer’s.”

  “Yeah,” he said after a moment.

  “It affects fine motor skills,” I added.

  We returned the list to the drawer and stepped out into the hallway. Vickie stood by the kitchen door, phone to her ear. She watched us walk into the living room.

  Back on the couch, Franklin D. took out Dan’s translation of the second entry, also from November 1944. I ignored the lump in my throat and began to read about a storm that had barreled through Bergen-Belsen one night. Oma had been too scared to go inside the tent, but her sister made her. It “groaned” in the wind, Dan wrote. And then the unthinkable happened. The whole thing collapsed. Women screamed. People tripped over one another, blindly pushing toward the exit.

  Here, Dan interpreted a full sentence: “Someone called, ‘Frank girls, over here!’” The sisters had followed the voice to the exit, clinging to each other.

  After that, there was a string of question marks. I swallowed my annoyance at our interpreter’s laziness and moved to the next part. A guard named Irma had a dog, a half-starved animal that Dan wrote “liked the taste of human flesh.” I wondered if it had been Irma who’d led the drenched women to a barrack that night, where they slept for a single hour before being woken for roll call.

  My eyes reversed a few lines, reading the two words Franklin D. had found before: Frank girls. The meaning hit me like a dodge ball to the head. “You want to compare the writing to Oma’s because … because you don’t think my grandma wrote this at all. You think Anne Frank did?”

  It was hard to wrap my mind around it. This was my grandmother’s journal. In Oma’s house. On her bookshelf. You have to find my journal! That’s what she’d said.

  Franklin D. confirmed my thought with a nod.

  “Maybe someone called out to the Frank girls, but it was Oma and her sister who followed the voice,” I reasoned.

  He took a folded piece of paper out of his pocket. “I printed a sample of Anne Frank’s handwriting that I found online. We didn’t have the translation back yet—but … well, just look.”

  I stared at the bold, determined strokes. The way the G’s and the Y’s dipped down, pulling to the right as if the words were in a race to make it off the page. I turned back to the original entry. I had to admit, they looked similar.

  Franklin D. covered my hand with his. “I know you were hoping to learn about your grandmother.”

  The unexpected sympathy brought tears to my eyes. “No, I’m okay,” I said, shaking off disappointment. “I mean, this is unbelievable.” I took a moment to let it sink in. If this really was Anne Frank’s concentration camp diary, it would be an incredible find. Not just for us, but the world. That definitely outweighed learning more about my grandmother’s past.

  “When I first tried to translate them myself,” Franklin D. said. “I checked if there were names on the four pages. I found mostly initials, but there was one that was interesting …”

  “What?”

  “Pim.”

  Chills spread up my arms. “Anne’s nickname for her father.” A thought wormed its way into my head. Franklin D.’s photocopy would stop Dan from selling the journal if it belonged to Oma, but not if Anne Frank had written the entries. “Dan could still sell them!” I blurted out. “He won’t get as much as he would with an original, but he could still use the handwriting to prove that Anne wrote it …”

  Franklin D. cupped his fingers behind his head. He smiled, slow and knowing. “Too bad he doesn’t have her handwriting.”

  I looked at him, lost.

  “Like I said before, I was on my way to see him when it dawned on me that it was a stupid idea to give him the originals. Unfortunately I’d left my portable copy machine in my backpack, so I had to write them out by hand.” He took out the version he’d shared with Dan. Franklin D.’s handwriting looked different from either Oma’s or Anne’s.

  I was impressed. “Wow, it must’ve taken you forever to write those pages out.”

  He looked at me in the strangest way as if I was a new breed of animal at the zoo. Feeling self-conscious, I tightened my ponytail.

  “The entries were short, but it was pretty hard to write a foreign language,” he admitted. “I guess it’s not Dan’s fault that he couldn’t translate some of it. My handwriting doesn’t just suck in English, apparently.”

  “Well, I think you’re brilliant,” I said. Before I knew it, my lips were against his cheek. His hair smelled like the beach. I pulled back, laughing to hide my embarrassment.

  He lowered his hands to his lap and studied them. “I like how you say thank you.”

  I picked up the throw pillow and clasped it to my chest. “Here’s something I don’t get: Why would Oma have Anne Frank’s concentration camp diary in the first place? It doesn’t make sense that she’d hide it from the world for seventy-three years. If it belonged to Anne, Oma would’ve given it to Otto Frank as soon as she found out he was alive.”

  It dawned on me that if this went public, people might be angry that Oma had kept it for so long, no matter what her reasons. Alzheimer’s couldn’t explain the decades that had passed.

  Franklin D. shook his head. He didn’t have answers, either. If only I could ask Oma. I studied the rug in front of the armchair: an intricate display of swirls and flowers trapped inside a dark green border. Once again, I felt defeated by my grandmother’s disease.

  “I better put the originals back in the library for safekeeping,” I said. But not in the books. Oma might dump them on the floor again.

  We heard a noise ou
t in the hallway. I looked at Franklin D., then crept to the door. When I opened it, Vickie stood there, crystal pitcher in one hand. She almost dropped the two glasses with handles that were hooked on her pinkie. “I was about to knock,” she said. “I wanted to apologize for being short with you before. It’s been a lousy day of fending off bill collectors. I thought I could make it up to you with some lemonade. Any takers?”

  “Thanks, but …,” I started, my voice unsteady.

  Franklin D. moved beside me, his hand molding into the curve of my back. “We’d love some. Thank you.” He took the pitcher and cups and smiled. But I knew him by now. When his smile petered out before reaching his eyes, something was wrong.

  Vickie excused herself and left. Franklin D. waited, listening for the kitchen door to shut. He stood there until he heard her turn on the faucet.

  “Do you think she was spying on us?” I whispered.

  “I don’t think so,” he said, heading back to the couch. “Or if she was, I don’t think she could have figured out what we were talking about.” I noticed that he left the door open so we would know if she came back.

  I considered what had been said, what Vickie might have heard. The translation notes? Our conversation about who wrote them? Maybe she was bringing us lemonade, like she said, and hadn’t heard anything at all.

  We returned to Dan’s notes. Franklin D. inched closer to me, reading them again. I tried not to focus on the hairs of his arm, which tickled mine.

  “Irma,” I said after a moment.

  “What?”

  “First, Oma mentions that name, and then it’s here, in this entry.” I pointed to the laptop on the mantel. “Let’s see what we can find out.”

  Franklin D. went to get the laptop and plopped down beside me, closer than before. A tap on the space bar raised the password prompt.

  “You have to go to my login, not hers,” I said, showing him where to find it. “My password’s twenty-three Dogwood. That’s my old address in Vermont.”

  “Why do you and Vickie have separate login screens?”

  “Because her ‘work and private life must be kept separate,’” I said, exaggerating Vickie’s twang.