Until the Dawn (11 page)

Collins, the scariest of the bodyguards because he had a set of frightening metal teeth instead of real ones, went into town daily to fetch groceries. When he laid a slab of pork shoulder on the wooden counter, she dared to ask the question she had been fearing.

“Mr. Collins, are you able to eat something like pork with those teeth? If you need me to prepare something softer . . .”

The smile that spread across his face was a little chilling, as it exposed plenty of the shining metal. “No baby food for me, ma’am. But thank you for asking.”

She wasn’t quite so terrified of him after that. As the aromas of simmering chowders, meat, and baking bread permeated the house, it was secretly satisfying to watch each member of the household drift past the kitchen, surreptitiously peeking at the dishes as they emerged from the oven. Collins even politely asked for a cookie.

But Mr. Vandermark had not softened in the least. She couldn’t understand why, but he seemed to actively dislike her. Whenever she entered a room, he made an excuse to leave it. On the few occasions they spoke, he consistently had something rude to say.

But no matter how frustrating his father, working with Pieter was a joy. He smiled more when she was near. He laughed and asked questions, losing the timid streak that clung to him at other times. Each morning they went up to the roof to gather climate data while Sophie explained the principles of temperature and humidity, how heat affected rainfall, and what caused the winds to shift. After the first few days, Sophie let Pieter take
the measurements while she carefully looked over his shoulder to ensure he was reading the thermometers and gauges correctly.

“Excellent,” Sophie murmured in approval the day Pieter completed an entire set of readings with no help from her at all. “Your father will be so impressed at how quickly you’re catching on.”

Pieter closed the front cover on the case protecting the thermometer, taking an unusually long time as he fastened the latch. “I’m always afraid I’m going to make a mistake. I never do anything right.”

It hurt to see a young child already riddled with such crippling anxiety. It didn’t help that Quentin constantly berated him, but all Sophie could do was try to give the boy a few tools to cope with it.

“Being young and afraid is a normal part of life,” she said gently. “It doesn’t feel good, but I don’t suppose a tulip bulb feels good once it’s buried in the cold, dark soil . . . but it works out in the end, doesn’t it? When the time is right, the tulip will grow to its full potential. It obeys the rules of science, just like your father always talks about. Maybe right now you are going through a difficult time, just like the tulip bulbs, but you’ll be okay. Just have a little faith.”

Pieter fiddled with a button on his shirt and chewed on his lip. She could tell by the way his face was screwed up that he was wrestling with a question, and she waited patiently while he searched for the words.

“Aren’t you afraid of my father?” he finally asked.

She was, but it would be cruel to admit it. And the anxiety in the boy’s voice was heartbreaking.

“Why? Are you afraid of him?”

Pieter nodded. “He’s mad all the time. I can’t ever do anything to make him happy.”

It was impossible for one person to
make
someone else happy,
especially someone as grim as Quentin Vandermark. Pieter was a sensitive boy, and it was crushing that he blamed himself for his father’s surliness.

“You aren’t to blame for your father’s unhappiness, Pieter, and there is nothing wrong with being a little worried or afraid every now and then. It’s a normal part of life.”

She had been warned not to proselytize to Pieter, and she would honor that agreement, but it didn’t preclude her from talking about her
own
faith. “I was raised to believe that Jesus is with me always, even though I can’t see or touch him. I can feel him in my heart, and he’s never led me wrong.” She hunkered down so she could see him better, took his hand, and smiled into his eyes. “I believe he’s looking out for you too, Pieter,” she whispered.

To her surprise, Pieter launched himself at her, hugging her with all the strength in his spindly arms. “It’s going to be okay,” she whispered, rocking him gently.

“Did you know a bunch of bad men kidnapped me last year?” he asked in a muffled voice.

“I heard about it.”

“I was so scared, and I prayed the whole time. I don’t even know how to pray, but I just kept thinking,
please, please,
please . . . someone help me and I promise to be good
forever
. I don’t know who I was talking to, but maybe it was Jesus.”

“Maybe,” Sophie said with a gentle smile. It wasn’t right this boy was being deprived of a religious faith, but if she directly countermanded Quentin’s orders, she’d be shown the door as abruptly as the unfortunate governess, and then she’d never see Pieter again. Her heart urged patience, and to keep teaching Pieter by example.

She had time. Quentin had said it would take a month to create a detailed floorplan of the house, complete with measurements for the depth and density of the walls, the strength of the
structural supports, and the dimensions of each room. He filled pages with mathematical equations to determine the extent of dynamite needed to bring down the walls. Most ominously, he had begun drawing large
X
’s on support columns, and circles where he wanted Collins to begin drilling holes in the walls. As soon as his plan was complete, sticks of dynamite would be inserted into those holes, and then Dierenpark would be demolished.

It had been ten days since the Vandermarks had returned, and the sight of those
X
’s and circles drawn on the walls chilled her. The only real hope she had was figuring out why Nickolaas Vandermark wanted the house destroyed, and she still didn’t even know if the man was on the American continent. Unless she could somehow persuade the eccentric old millionaire to spare Dierenpark, Quentin intended to demolish a rare treasure.

Sophie returned to the hotel every evening as soon as dinner was on the table at Dierenpark. It made for a long day, but her father had been scandalized at the prospect of his innocent daughter sleeping in a household of nine men with only an old woman as chaperone, so she still made the journey home each night.

This evening, she sat at the hotel’s kitchen work table, decorating Dutch
gevulde koeken
, an Old World recipe for almond cookies passed down through generations of Sophie’s family. Marten Graaf, her childhood sweetheart and former fiancé, kept her company. Marten still had a crippling weakness for her
gevulde koeken
, and whenever he was in town she sent him back to the city with a large tin of freshly baked cookies.

Their ongoing friendship seemed strange to many people in the village, but not to Sophie. Marten had been her fondest friend since childhood, and despite a difficult few years following his
abandonment, they were friends again. Sometimes she sensed he regretted jilting her, but Sophie would never take him back. She had grown into a woman, while Marten still seemed trapped in his impetuous, carefree youth. He seemed such a pale man compared to Quentin Vandermark.

Where had
that
thought come from? Quentin was a bad-tempered man with no faith, no manners, and a cynical streak wider than the Hudson River. Aside from intelligence and a sense of humor, he had no redeeming qualities whatsoever. She couldn’t even credit him with being a good father. She didn’t doubt that Quentin loved his son, but he was depriving Pieter of the comfort the boy needed so desperately.

“Do you want a raspberry or blueberry topping?” she asked Marten. She had a jar of each from canning preserves last weekend, and it would take only a few moments to put a dollop on each cookie.

“Can I have both?” Marten asked with his typical audacity.

The back door to the kitchen banged open and her father clomped inside, a tower of boxes balanced in his arms.

“Marten, I need you to look the other way,” Jasper said, dumping the boxes on the wooden countertop with a thump. The way her father’s hand covered the label on the box closest to Marten immediately put Sophie on alert.

“Literally or figuratively?” Marten asked as he leaned in for a closer look. Her father scooted the boxes to the far side of the table.

“I need you to literally leave this kitchen before I figuratively annihilate Quentin Vandermark.”

Sophie held her breath. The way her father covered the labels on the boxes indicated he was up to no good, but if he had a plan to save Dierenpark, she wished Marten would leave quickly. She scooped the still-cooling cookies into a tin and pressed them into his hand.

“I’ll have blueberry
gevulde
koeken
next time you visit.”

The moment Marten was out the door, she whirled to face her father. “What are you doing?”

“I’ve already searched through all the court records and documents relating to the title of that house,” her father said. “I’ve spent the past week looking for anything that would call their ownership of the house into question. I even consulted with descendants of the local Lanape Indian tribe to see if I could prove the original Vandermarks cheated them out of the land.”

“And?” Sophie asked.

“Adrien Vandermark paid a princely sum for it back in 1635. Which was a shame. Most of the early Dutch settlers bargained with glass beads for huge chunks of land, while Adrien paid in gold, along with bolts of cloth and some iron cooking equipment. One of the Lanape elders still had a kettle that was said to be from Adrien Vandermark.”

This gave Sophie pause. Adrien Vandermark was known to be a friend to the Indians, and yet only five years after he arrived he was killed by an Algonquin raiding party that swept down from the north. It was his brother Caleb who ultimately created the Vandermark legacy and fortune in New Holland.

“Nothing in the courthouse archives will help us,” her father continued, “but the Vandermarks had a personal vault stored in the basement of the bank on Main Street.”

“Like a safe deposit box?”

“Precisely. They didn’t call them such back when Karl Vandermark established it, but that’s what it is, and these boxes are what I found inside the vault.”

“Father! You can’t poke through their safe deposit box.”

“Why not? It’s been abandoned for sixty years. I don’t intend to steal anything; I just need to see if there is something of interest here. Why else would Karl Vandermark have locked up these boxes?”

She could think of plenty of things he’d want secured in a safe place. Bars of gold? Antiques from the Old World? People as rich as the Vandermarks surely didn’t store all their wealth in one place, and there could be any number of curiosities stored in those boxes. She didn’t know how her father had gotten the key to that bank vault, but the fact that he made Marten leave the room was a sure sign it wasn’t aboveboard. She shouldn’t have anything to do with this, but as he lifted the lid off the first box, it was impossible not to peek.

Old papers.

The same with the next box and the next. On some level, Sophie was disappointed not to see golden Spanish doubloons or a stash of pirate treasure, but her father seemed delighted.

“Never underestimate the power of a paper trail,” he said with relish as he lifted the first set of documents from a box. They were loose pages written in the spindly handwriting of the eighteenth century.

Paper trails might fascinate a lawyer, but Sophie just wanted to save Dierenpark, and it was going to take more than old pieces of paper to do it. It was going to require figuring out the strange, hidden, and deeply complex attitudes of Quentin and Nickolaas Vandermark, and given Quentin’s determination to avoid her, she still didn’t know how to accomplish it.

Sophie wished that dealing with Quentin Vandermark were as easy as dealing with the twenty thousand honeybees that lived in the eight-frame beehives on a patch of land at Dierenpark. She had no idea who first built the hives, but they seemed to have been here forever, tended by generations of Broeders, who had served as groundskeepers at Dierenpark for as far back as anyone could remember.