Unfinished Business

 

Welcome to the Spot Writers. This month’s prompt is to write about a picture frame from a thrift store with a message scrawled on the back. This week’s story comes from the pen of Phil Yeats.

In April 2024, Phil published The Body on Karli’s Beach, the third book in his Barrettsport Mysteries, a series of soft-boiled mysteries set in a fictional South Shore, Nova Scotia town. For information about these books, The Road to Environmental Armageddon, his trilogy about the hazards of ignoring human-induced climate change, and his latest, a novella titled Starting Over Again: A Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy visit his website: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com/.

 

Unfinished Business

by Phil Yeats

 

Talia arrived at the Jewish Student Centre at our small-town college with another wooden picture frame—her second or third, all small, dirty, and weatherbeaten. She handed it to me.

“Got it for fifty cents at the thrift shop,” she said. “Should clean up well, but I see one problem. How do I get a photo into it?”

I turned it over and checked out the back. Like most photo frames, it had a third leg for standing it on a desk or shelf, but as she said, no obvious way to get the frame apart. The thing that caught my attention was a faint seven-digit number, 9111938, pencilled onto the back’s dark material.

Talia and I were employees of the college—Talia was an administrator in the Arts Faculty, and me a professor of chemistry. We were volunteers at the centre. We were both Jewish, Talia of German or Polish descent, she never said which, a Holocaust survivor and a devout Zionist. I was Canadian whose faith was not a major factor in my life. I left university twenty-five years earlier for military duty during World War Two. Those days were long past, but I still had terrible memories of my time on the European battlefields. I’m sure Talia’s wartime memories were much worse.

I continued turning the frame, studying at it from all angles. “A puzzle, for sure. I could take it to my office and make a more careful inspection...”

“Yes, please, but try not to alter the weather-beaten look.”

I tapped the back. “The appearance of the front and sides shouldn’t be an issue. This frame’s secrets must be hidden here.”

 

Under a powerful light in my office, I probed the back of the frame with a sharp blade. I found, after considerable effort, a seam on the bottom edge that wasn’t glued. More probing and prying produced a slight movement. The back panel slid down a quarter of an inch. I could now grip it with my fingertips and wiggle it down. A black-and-white photo and a rectangle of cardstock fluttered to the floor.

I remembered enough from my WW2 experiences to recognize the man in the photo as a member of the Third Reich’s Schutzstaffel (SS). On the back, someone had written a name (not a very German-sounding one) and an address in a nearby town.

I reassembled the frame with cardstock and photo inside and left them for Talia. I should have pushed Talia’s picture frame from my mind at this point. They were really none of my business, but I could never resist a puzzle. This was definitely a puzzle with few clues. I had the number written on the back of the frame and a name and address on the back of the photo of a Nazi SS officer.

I started with the number on the frame. My first thought was that the number on the frame was a Nazi concentration camp ID number. I cast that idea aside quickly. The information I dug up suggested the numbers were five or six digits, never seven.

I then considered dates. Could the number indicate September 11, 1938, or November 9, 1938, depending on whether the writer used the Canadian or American convention? Even a lapsed Jew like me recognized November 9, 1938, as Kristallnacht.

I turned next to the name and address on the back of the photo. Eric Smith was pretty generic, but Eric was a commonly used Germanic forename, and Smith could have been a Canadianization of the German Schmidt. The address was in a nearby town.

On the next day, a Saturday, I bought a book by a local author and drove to the address written on the photo. It was in an enclave of small bungalows that could’ve been post-war construction. I knocked on the door of #22. A young woman with two small children, one in her arms and the other hiding behind her, answered the door.

“What can I do for you?” she said.

I handed her the book. “I was an organizer of a book fair two weekends ago. Mr. Eric Smith won one of our door prizes. He gave this address and a phone number that doesn’t work.”

She sighed. “He lived here until three years ago, when he moved into a palliative care facility. We never met him, but a neighbour said he’d died more than a year ago. Looks like someone’s leading you astray.”

I retrieved my book, thanked her, and moved on to the library, where I consulted old copies of the town’s weekly newspaper. With little effort, I found a brief mention of Mr. Smith’s passing. The few details confirmed what the woman at #22 told me, gave me Mr. Smith’s age when he died, 45, and the time he lived in their community, ten years. It also said he lived alone and died with no known relatives.

If I wanted to pursue the matter, I needed a better cover story. I reluctantly jotted down the details from the obituary, closed my notebook, and returned home.

I crossed paths with Talia on the following Thursday. She glared at me and growled, “Kummere dich um dienen Kram,” before stomping off.

My German wasn’t very good, mostly restricted to technical usage, but I got the gist—stay out of my business. I tore the pages with notes about this little mystery from my notebook and deposited them in a trash can. An unsatisfactory end to my investigation—a few questions answered and several more raised. But Talia was right. I shouldn’t have charged into something that was none of my business.

 

***

 

The Spot Writers:

Val Muller: http://www.valmuller.com/blog/

Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com

Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com/

Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.com/