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Sandy Discovers Her Unknown Father's Love Letters and Tries to Find Him

Prologue

The elderly man suddenly sat upright in bed and started yelling, “Quick. The Germans are coming. The Germans are coming. We gotta get out of here. Grab your stuff and let’s go. Now!”

Awakened by his outburst, his wife grabbed his shoulders and started shaking him, trying to wake him, “Wake up! Wake up, sweetheart. It’s just a dream. You’re safe. You’re in your own bed with me.”

Trying to break free of her grip, he shouted, “Let me go. We gotta get out of here. The Germans are coming. They’re almost on top of us.”

Not knowing what else to do, she reached over, turned on the lamp, grabbed the glass of water she always kept handy by the bed, and threw it in his face. Sometimes that was the only thing that worked.

Shaking his head to clear the cobwebs, “Oh, my God, you did that just in time. I was looking out the window, and we were about to be surrounded by Germans.”

His wife drew him close to her and tried to comfort him, “Sweetheart. It was just another dream. They can’t hurt you in a dream. Why don’t you lie down, put your head on my shoulder, and try to sleep?” He collapsed into her arms and started sobbing. When would these terrible dreams ever go away?

Chapter One

As Sandy Williams pulled her car into the Kenwood Senior Retirement Home’s parking lot on the way home from her mother’s funeral at Laurel Cemetery, what her mother had confessed a few days before she died still troubled her. Her mother had told her that her father’s name was Bill Bowers; he had served in the 745thTank Battalion and was in the Battle of the Bulge. That was all she was willing to tell her. When she asked her mother to tell her more about him, she started crying, changed the subject, and told her the “truth is in the box”. The revelation had so disturbed her that she had hardly slept a wink since then. Now she needed to find out for herself.

Sandy and her mother Helen were extremely close and always shared the most intimate details of their lives, unlike her younger sister Yvonne and her older sister Rosie. Although they grew up in the same house in Madisonville, a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio, the sisters were so different. Sandy was quiet and introspective; Yvonne was outgoing and popular, and Rosie was even more of an enigma. She was rebellious, loud-mouthed, rude, and difficult to be around, just like her father. Sandy wondered at times how they could have the same parents. They even looked different. She was petite with a dark complexion and auburn hair, Yvonne was tall, lithe, and blonde, and Rosie was short and heavyset. How these three sisters could have been born to the same parents, was always a topic of discussion at the Murray household.

Their father John had died several years before their mother, but none of them had even attended his funeral. Theirs weren’t happy childhoods. He had been distant, seemingly uncaring, and they could never figure out why their mother stayed with him. When they asked her about it, she said he seemed to change as he got older; he hadn’t been that way when she had first married him. However, they all three married soon after they graduated from high school just to get away from him.

Parking her car in the crowded parking lot, she remembered what her mother had told her, “the truth is in the box”, whatever that meant. Her mother’s apartment was small so there couldn’t be too many places to look.

Walking into her mother’s apartment, she felt as though she was walking into a time capsule. Every time her parents moved, they only took the things that were most important to them. Over time, they had condensed their lives into one small living room, kitchenette, and bedroom. Sandy smiled at what they had surrounded themselves with. Oddly enough, there wasn’t one thing that had been her father’s; not a photograph, not one personal belonging of his, almost as though he had never existed.