“Like a secret uncle?” Ezra’s eyes sharpen. “Do you think the Cohens had another son?”

Penina, from the other end of the table, says, “There’s no way. A grown adult who was connected enough to be buried with the family but was never mentioned over the years? Those kinds of secrets don’t last after death.” She sounds just as interested as Ezra, and Gabe wonders what her theories are, but doesn’t dare to ask.

“Unless Avigdor never knew, either,” Hillel muses. Then he laughs, loud and boisterous. “I love this. We should get a professional journalist in on the saga. Gabe, you should write some kind of National Geographic article about it.”

“It’s hardly story material,” Rivi says sharply, glaring at each of them. “Mr. Pretter, do you know anything about the new extension that the yeshivah is planning? Ezra has only heard snippets.”

Hillel is distracted, talking about building plans and architects, but Ezra exchanges a glance with Gabe, and Gabe knows that he isn’t ready to drop it.

“If he really is your secret uncle, there must be some evidence,” Ezra says after the meal, once Penina has left and Gabe can finally breathe again. “A letter, a document… have you found anything in the house?”

Rivi wipes off the table, her jaw tight.

“Not really,” Gabe says.

He remembers something, though, an old paper he’d found once in the basement. Abba hadn’t liked him touching it, had taken it away when Gabe had shown it to him, and put it elsewhere. His expression, Gabe thinks suddenly, had looked a lot like Rivi’s right now: the same dark eyes, the clenched jaw over a strong chin, the way they both stare without seeing anything at all.

“There was a family tree, I think. It was this old, rolled-up paper that must have been in the house since my grandparents lived there. I have no idea what Abba did with it.”

“It must be somewhere,” Ezra says, rubbing his beard thoughtfully.

Hillel perks up. “We could go take a look after Maariv. Where is your father’s house? Somewhere close by?”

It’s a ten-minute walk from shul, which Hillel decides is worth it for an adventure. Rivi doesn’t protest, just stares at them in sullen silence, and Gabe shrugs helplessly at her and clears his plate.

When Shabbos ends, Gabe takes the men to Abba’s old house.

Inside, the house is dusty and cramped with nearly every object Abba has ever owned. Gabe finds Rivi’s old roller blades still in the front hall closet. Pinned to the kitchen bulletin board is an old note from yeshivah informing Abba that Gavriel Cohen has made the Menahel’s List.

A photograph sits on the bookshelf near the dining room table, a framed wedding picture of Rivi and Ezra. Beside it is a smaller photo of Abba with an infant Meir, staring down at him with an expression of wonder on his face.

The house is a monument to Rivi and Gabe, even after years of distance and estrangement. Abba had spent his final years with mementos of their childhood, a living shrine to when they’d been a family, and it makes Gabe’s eyes sting when he thinks too much about it.

Ezra puts a hand on Gabe’s back, light and supportive, but Hillel sees none of this. “Let’s get searching!” he says, rubbing his hands together. “Where would your father keep a family tree?”

“The study, maybe. There was a file cabinet there.” It’s dusty with disuse and the top shelf is jammed until Hillel yanks it hard. He and Ezra leaf through it.

“Some of these documents are older than I am,” Ezra marvels. “Doesn’t look like anything was organized by year or person. But we know that this paper won’t look like the others.”

“It’s even older,” Gabe agrees. He wanders over to the desk. The study is a cozy room that Gabe had used when he did  schoolwork, the desk situated right in front of the window. Abba had never had much use for the room — it had been a relic of his parents’, and he’d always been reluctant to move too many of their things. Still, Gabe is surprised when one of the desk drawers won’t open.

He peers at the lock on it, then pulls another drawer open and finds a key for it. Not well hidden, not something that Abba had tried hard to hide, but it’s still strange that he’d even bothered to lock this drawer.

Gabe can’t imagine why. As he moves through this house, it’s becoming clear that he didn’t know his father nearly as well as he’d thought.

He unlocks the drawer and opens it. There is a mess of documents inside, old scraps and school notices and newspaper articles all shoved in without any concern for organization. Maybe this is where the family tree is?

But when he moves aside some of the papers, there’s no rolled-up, yellowed document, just more papers. A newspaper headline catches his eye — MISSING ONYX TO BE RETURNED TO THE ISRAEL FAIR MUSEUM. That must have been Gabe’s newspaper clipping once. Abba might have saved it for him, like he has so much of their childhoods. The onyx’s reappearance had been a turning point in Gabe’s childhood.

He still remembers the excitement when it was found. The onyx had been discovered 50 years ago, near the ruins of the Temple Mount. Carbon dating timed it to the era of the Second Beis Hamikdash, and strange etchings on the back had seemed to corroborate that it might be a unique, sacred onyx: the stone that had represented Shevet Yosef on the Kohein Gadol’s Choshen.

Skeptics had waved off the discovery but many archaeologists had been positive that it was the real deal. Then it was stolen along with some other items from the famed Israel Fair, vanished for almost a decade, without any culprit found.

Gabe remembers when it had resurfaced. He’d read about it the summer he was nine, still disappointed in their Eretz Yisrael vacation cut short and with a new, Israel-induced interest in history.

There was no explanation about where it had gone; no daring capture of its thief. But it had been recognized on the black market by a sharp-eyed collector and returned to its place. For the rest of the summer, Gabe was fascinated. He had read everything he could about the onyx, then about archaeological treasures, then about history. By the end of the summer, Gabe had been determined to become an archaeologist.

That had shifted over the years to anthropology. People had been the greatest mystery to him, even more than the past hidden beneath the soil. Maybe, if he studied enough, he might one day figure out how they worked.

No success yet, he thinks wryly, remembering Penina’s defiant face and Rivi’s tense one. Or maybe that’s just the women who have been in his life. He understands Hillel just fine; he’s an open book — straightforward and uncomplicated.

“Family tree!” Hillel announces, brimming with enthusiasm. “I think I’ve found it!”

Gabe tucks the article into his pocket and heads over to see what Ezra and Hillel have found. The paper is yellowed and delicate, made flat after years in the file cabinet, but it’s unmistakably the family tree he’d found as a child. It traces down through Abba’s mother, not his father, and the lines are carefully drawn and very old.

“It doesn’t even have Rivi and me on it,” Gabe says, frowning. “For all we know, my father was the older brother.”

He peers at it. There are cousins on it — family lines that go lower than Avigdor Cohen (b. 1951) on the chart. Though the tree doesn’t go far enough to show many people born after Abba, Abba’s mother had a few siblings, and they have children on there. There must have been some people in Gabe’s generation, but he’s never met them.

Maybe Abba had stopped speaking to his relatives after Ima had passed away. It makes a sad sort of sense. But it is still strange to imagine a family spread wider than just Gabe and Rivi and Abba. A family that might, if their theories are correct, contain a secret brother and a mysterious fate.

Maybe he should write an article.

Hillel and Ezra continue to examine the family tree, but Gabe drifts back to the desk, rifling through the remaining papers in it. There are a few old bills, some from several decades ago. A note from Rivi’s high school about her making the honor roll. An old shopping list stuck to another paper, and he’s about to unstick it when something beneath it catches his attention.

It’s a pad of stationary marked Malon Chedvah in Hebrew. It’s where they’d stayed in Israel, a quiet hole-in-the-wall that had featured eight bedrooms, two to a floor, along a winding staircase. Rivi and Gabe shared a room near the top opposite Abba’s, and Gabe liked to look out the window in the morning and pretend that he was a permanent resident of Yerushalayim.

But his fond memories fade when he pushes aside the shopping list to get a closer look at the notepad.

There are words scrawled on the top page of the pad in a handwriting Gabe doesn’t know, succinct and potent.

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID.

To be continued…

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 906)