Then Sings My Soul (11 page)

CHAPTER 18

A brother?

Jakob had never mentioned a brother. Nel couldn't remember a time he'd talked about his parents, for that matter. Catherine never mentioned anyone either, besides Jakob's parents on occasion, and mostly about how they'd built the lake house and passed it down in their will to him. Maybe it had been a generational thing that he had never wanted to talk much about them, or anything, for that matter. But maybe there was more, and that's what Catherine was trying to find out before she died.

How could Nel continue with that research? She hardly knew where to begin besides the envelope with the ship manifest. She couldn't stop thinking about the names.

Peter Maevski, 14.

Jakob Maevski, 5.

The boys in the photo had to be her father and who she now knew was his older brother. It made sense for Peter to have passed away already, but when? And how? How had they come to America? And why had they come alone?

All kinds of scenarios were running through her mind, but she'd have to look into it more later. She would ask Mattie about it all—maybe Catherine had confided in her about what she was looking for. In the meantime, she had to finish her prototypes and that bracelet.

As Nel finished setting up the supplies and equipment Matthew had sent her, she admired how Jakob had arranged his lapidary worktable to catch the daylight as the sun moved from east to west. The long table had a view of several bird feeders hanging from the sycamores and river birch, and the lake beyond that. On one end of the table sat a Facetron machine. Across the back wall, he had placed several multidrawered metal boxes. On the other end sat old coffee cans full of tweezers and dop sticks, wax and needles, and gem-finishing tools of all kinds. Various sizes of plastic containers—former ice cream, cottage cheese, and salt buckets—and stacks of cigar boxes labeled with the names of raw stones rested beneath the table.

Nel picked a chunk of quartz off the windowsill, crystals jutting in different directions. She blew the dust off it. “You and your rocks, Dad.” She smiled, thinking of the hundreds of times she sat by his side as he worked the Facetron machine, sketched designs, and examined each rock for the perfect angle of cuts with his loupe on one eye.

She picked up a squared-off, deep-green stone from a coffee tin full of them and studied the lines Jakob had drawn on it with pencil. “Only someone with a heart for the stone can see the best angle to make the first cut. Someone who loves the stone well. Who takes time to get to know it. Who's not afraid to feel the edges and get close to it. Who sees beyond the dirt and finds the precise section that will most reflect and refract light,” he'd explained over the years.

Collections of uncut stones called
roughs
peeked from beneath the lids of their overfilled cigar boxes: purple and lavender amethyst; chunks of emerald jade; nuggets of turquoise; slabs of tigereye, glass obsidian, Ceylon sapphire, blue Burma spinel, ruby, and topaz. Under the windowsill, Jakob had set olive jars filled with various types of opal swimming in pools of glycerin to keep them from drying out and cracking. Boxes full of halved geodes and beryl, corundum, and tourmaline rested under the table.

Oversize mayonnaise jugs full of grinding and buffing powders lined an antique oak dressing vanity, and within each drawer were more coffee cans of various tools he used to polish and shape and secure stones as he worked them on the Facetron or by hand. One can held a dozen old brushes from Catherine's blush compacts. Another held toothbrushes, tweezers, hemostats, and chisels. Another drawer held ring boxes and baby-food jars and square-inch boxes lined with aging, yellow-edged foam for storing finished stones. And a bookshelf against the back wall of the room was stuffed full of gem-club and magazine journals, binders straining with faceting designs and techniques, graph papers covered with angle calculations and diagrams. All the years spent measuring and developing mechanical equations at Brake-All had helped Jakob hone his hobby well. He'd even created his own faceting designs, which had won awards at gem shows and had been published in
Lapidary Journal
. The mathematical aspects of those designs alone were a feat few hobbyists were able to perfect, and the sheer volume of all he'd created, museum worthy.

Nel pulled open the tiny drawers of a desktop cabinet where Jakob kept all his metal findings, many similar to the sorts she worked with: silver and gold clasps and holders, rings and pendants—all for securing and displaying finished stones for wear. The settings depended on the type of cut: faceted, like the traditional diamond sorts of cuts, or cabochons, a smooth, usually oval-shaped cut that looked as if they were sliced off the side of an egg and polished to a near mirror-like finish. These fascinated Nel the most because it took the greatest amount of skill and talent to see precisely how to choose and center the section of stone to reveal its prettiest pattern. She'd practiced at shaping stones for nearly a decade before her craftsmanship matched Jakob's. And to think that folks walked by rocks like these along footpaths and hiking trails every day, with no idea what such rocks could become.

A trickle of sweat rolled down the small of Nel's back as she pushed and lifted as best she could the boxes full of unused laps and long-forgotten supplies from under the table and moved them to one side of the room.

She wasn't trying to be nosy when she made the next discovery in a box in the farthest corner under the table. As she had with the other boxes, she lifted the flaps to see what was inside so she could arrange the boxes by their contents, if similar. At first she only noticed more dowel rods, wrapped chunks of dop wax, and a large collection of old tweezers. She was about to set the box aside when a tarnished silver cup, with something wrapped in cheesecloth stuffed inside it, caught her eye. She studied the intricate design of a village etched on the outside of the cup, thatched-roof homes, fences, livestock, and rolling hills scrolling across the cup's surface. The work reminded her of the etchings she used in her silver and rose-gold jewelry.

As she pulled the cheesecloth out of the cup, the doorbell rang, startling her. Something fell to the floor and slid across the wood beneath a pair of old horsehair, swivel chairs.

“Coming!” she called as whoever was at the door followed the ring with knocking.

“You're out of breath.”

“David—hi! What are you doing here?” She ran her fingers through her hair, suddenly self-conscious.

“I never did apologize for the prom.”

She feigned annoyance and crossed her arms. “As a matter of fact, you never did.”

He held up a bag with the Sherman's logo on it. “Thought maybe ice cream would be a start?”

“I was kind of in the middle of something …”

“It's okay. I know I'm unannounced. I can just leave it and come back another time. But you've been having to handle some rough stuff. And if I remember correctly, mint chocolate chip is your favorite.”

When she hesitated, the look on his face reminded Nel of a middle school boy who'd overspent on a Valentine's gift for a crush. “Oh, come in. Maybe you can help me—I lost something. Besides, I've been wanting to talk to you about fixing some things on the house.”

He followed her into the kitchen.

“Just set that on the counter and come with me,” Nel said over her shoulder as she headed back to Jakob's lapidary room. “Remember how Dad's a rock hound?”

“Yeah, sorta.”

“I've been moving stuff around to set up a workspace in here. My agent—Sandra—she's breathing down my neck about finishing a couple of projects that can't wait.” She got on her knees and pressed her cheek to the floor to scan and feel around under the chairs. “Anyway, I dropped something just when you rang the doorbell.”

Sam crouched down and held something out to her that flashed in the sunlight angling through the window. “Is this it?”

She sat back and gasped. “Yeah … I think it must be.” She took the stone from his hand. Nel had never seen a gem faceted so beautifully, round in shape and at least as large as a golf ball. “Aquamarine, maybe. Maybe sapphire. Topaz. But probably aquamarine.”

“You've never seen this before?”

“No … it fell out of this cup I found stashed at the bottom of this last box of Dad's things I was moving to make room for my stuff.” She nodded toward the cup on the edge of the table. She turned the stone every which way, up against the light of the window, the light of the ceiling lamp, studying every facet. “I think the top facets create a Star of David.”

“Yeah?” David, sounding distracted, picked up the silver cup and turned it in his hand. He pulled a couple of folded pieces of paper out of the bottom of it, as well as a tattered object resembling a tassel. “Did you see these, Nel? This one looks like it's written in Slavic or something.”

He handed her the two papers. On one, a friable piece of parchment, someone had drawn a faceting diagram with words that did look Slavic, although if Nel's growing hunch was right, they would prove to be Ukrainian. Angles were jotted down the right-hand side and words on the left, with lines and notes pointing to various parts of the shape, which seemed the same as the stone she held in her hand. She'd have to look closer with a loupe to know for sure, but the design did indicate the top of the stone was faceted in the shape of a Star of David.

The second paper wasn't quite as old. It was a death certificate from a place called the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. The full name on the certificate was Peter Maevski Stewart, the date of death May 14, 1915. Cause of death: consumption. His birth information was listed as June 12, 1890, Russia. His parents were listed on there too: Josef Maevski, place of birth, Russia; Eliana Maevski, place of birth, Russia.

“What do you think it all means?” David asked.

“I'm not exactly sure,” Nel said. “But I'm going to find out.”

CHAPTER 19

Jakob did decide to eat his dinner in the dining room eventually, and more often as the days passed. No use sitting in his room letting his joints stiffen further. He'd lived too long, that was the bottom line. People aren't supposed to live into their nineties. If he were dead and in the ground next to Catherine where he should be, the choice about where to eat his meals wouldn't matter.

“Here with the guys, or by the window with the ladies?” Nyesha asked as she wheeled his chair into the dining room, a large, open room with a severely pitched ceiling and exposed rafters. A stone-encased, double-sided fireplace separated this room from the recreation room, which featured plenty of couches and therapeutic, industrial recliners for broken-down residents who wanted to read or knit or sit and watch all their final minutes and hours drift by, each one, if the truth be told, wishing death would hurry and go on and take them.

Jakob considered the two tables. At one sat old Judge Golladay. In his prime he was the county prosecutor most feared by drunks and wife beaters and other good-for-nothin's. Now he sat hunched in his wheelchair, thinning, peppered hair combed back with Vitalis, coffee dribbling down his chin, and a chunk of scrambled egg stuck next to the Izod logo on his green, button-down cardigan. Lloyd Loeffler, whom Jakob had hired to work on the line at Brake-All decades earlier, sat next to him. Back then he'd been a recent high school graduate with barely a whisker on his face and a very pregnant, newly wedded wife to care for. Jakob had hired him against the advice of his supervisor, but he was never sorry about it since Lloyd was such a hard worker. Sidelined by early-onset Parkinson's, Lloyd watched the dining-room aide cutting his pancakes for him and Lloyd struggling to keep each bite from falling out of his mouth as she fed him. His bride from back then visited him nearly every day, and all the lucid residents were a little jealous of that.

Next Jakob considered the table of ladies. Guaranteed their prattle would distract him from feeling sorry for himself, as the four of them barely paused to breathe before they were on to their next woe or fracture or dental crisis. Either that or they argued like a brood of barnyard hens pecking at one another. Rose Habiger, cloud-white hair meticulously coiffed each morning, had been the matriarch of a blueberry farm before a massive heart attack and resultant congestive heart failure created a need for oxygen and care so great her wealthy progeny couldn't deal with it, so they stuffed her away at Lakeside and rarely visited.

Vicky Wilson wasn't much better off, a lifetime of cigarettes and secondhand smoke from spending decades of office hours in the high school teacher's lounge crippling her lungs and oxygen-starved heart. She wore her hair in the same snug bun she had when Nel had been her prize English student. And lipstick. The same red lipstick he remembered her wearing at Nel's “meet-the-teacher” nights. She never left her room without it on.

Helen Tuttle, a former housewife, was in better physical health than the others, but her mind had lost the battle to Alzheimer's a long time ago. Still, she had enough spunk and wherewithal in her to have managed to avoid the locked memory unit. So there she sat each morning wearing an overstretched, overwashed “I left my heart in Daytona” sweatshirt (complete with emblazoned checkered flags and stock cars) and talking to Rose and Vicky as if they were her daughters and—if he chose to sit there—as if Jakob were her son. Everyone played along. Everyone except Mabel, that is. Parkinson's had stolen her voice years ago. She could hardly lift her head, but they wheeled her out to the dining room every morning anyway.

“It'll be good for her,” the staff often said.

Somehow Jakob doubted that. He watched as Mabel lifted her head with heroic effort, looked around, and scowled. She didn't want to be around anyone anymore. She'd died inside a long time ago, as others had done. Didn't matter how many times they wheeled her out, she would have none of it.

“The ladies.”

“You got it, Mr. Jake.” Nyesha wheeled him up to the table and across from Mabel. She wore a cameo brooch he hadn't noticed before. Most folks wore the same thing every day, with an occasional change of top or pants. Residents usually came in with plenty but ended up with only a remnant of their original wardrobes. Staff and visitors stole all the best while the residents slept, then told them they were imagining things when they asked about their stuff gone missing. As if all their brains had quit working. Especially those residents pushing one hundred.

So of course Jakob noticed Mabel's cameo.