They (12 page)

REVEREND POWELL’S LIVING room was large and spacious. It merged into an equally large den and a roomy kitchen. It was here that the wake was held, and the congregants at the church service were in attendance. The caterers Vince hired had put out their spread while the gravesite services were commencing, and when they returned the large kitchen counter was lined with various meats for sandwiches plus all the trimmings: shredded lettuce, sliced tomatoes, slices of Swiss and jack cheese, mustard and mayonnaise, wheat and white bread. There were three different plates of chips and multiple bottles of assorted sodas, plus a large bucket of ice. Two buckets of potato salad were also present, and most of the guests filled up on that and the sandwiches. Vince scurried about, making sure everything was in order before he made himself a ham and sliced turkey sandwich and helped himself to a serving of potato salad. Then, with a fresh Coke with lots of ice, he retreated to Reverend Powell’s back porch just off the den.

He sat down on the deck, feet planted on the second step that led to the Reverend’s back yard. He set his drink down and balanced the plate in his lap while he ate. He was ravenous.

The service had gone well. It had been held in the little chapel in Reverend Powell’s home and it had been packed with members of the church and a few people from town that mom had grown friendly with. Chief Tom Hoffman had been present; so were Detectives Michaelson and Harvey. Unlike most of the services Reverend Powell presided over, this one hadn’t gone into a two-hour tirade against the ways of the world, but had focused on the virtues of the two women being honored. Vince had remained seated as various people got up and said a few words in memory of Maggie and Lillian. Vince briefly debated getting up and saying a few words, but decided not to. He was still battling with his feelings of what had happened, as well as his relationship with his mother. It was probably best to remain silent for now.

The wake was going pretty well and when it was all over he was going to help Reverend Powell clean up, then go back to his hotel room to pack for his flight the next morning. He’d used Reverend Powell’s phone in the kitchen to place a quick call to Tracy.
How did the service go
? she’d asked. Good, he replied. She told him she loved him again before they hung up.

Vince was almost finished with his sandwich, enjoying the late afternoon sun, when he heard the sliding glass door open behind him. “Hello, Vince,” Reverend Powell’s voice called out. “Mind if I join you?” The sliding door closed.

Vince motioned toward the space on the wide steps that led to the backyard. “Have a seat, Reverend. I was just enjoying your backyard.”

Reverend Powell hunkered down on the top step next to Vince. He was carrying a can of Pepsi. Reverend Hank Powell hadn’t changed much since the last time Vince saw him; he was a big barrel-chested man, with a square jaw and large, calloused hands. His hair had gone gray and it also appeared he’d toned down some of the hellfire-and-brimstone rhetoric of his persona. When Vince was a kid Reverend Powell seemed scrutinizing and judgmental, and to a certain extent he was. When he met with the man to arrange the services he’d felt his scrutinizing gaze on him a few times. Vince had ignored it and pressed on.

Reverend Powell had been dressed in an immaculate black suit during the service. When he sat down beside Vince on the back deck of his home, Vince saw he’d changed into more casual slacks and a cotton shirt. “Yes, it’s a nice view, isn’t it?”

“How far does your property go?”

“Not that far, actually.” Reverend Powell motioned toward a small grove of trees fifty yards ahead of them. “My property ends where those trees begin. It extends to the right where that little gully is, and to the left by my driveway. I’m fortunate enough to have the house built on this little ridge here. Gives me a nice view.”

“It does,” Vince said, taking a sip of Coke. “I bet it looks beautiful during sunsets.”

“Oh, it does. It’s very beautiful.”

There was silence for a moment as Vince finished his sandwich and Reverend Powell sat beside him, looking out at his backyard and the land beyond it. After a moment Reverend Powell said, “You and Lillian had quite a talk, I gather.”

“We did,” Vince said, wiping his mouth with a napkin. He set his plate down on the porch and took a swig of coke.

“What did you talk about?”

“My mother.”

“Hmm.” Reverend Powell sounded like he expected this answer and was dwelling on it. This raised a red flag in Vince’s mind.

“Why do you ask?” Vince asked.

Reverend Powell looked at Vince with an apologetic look on his face. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound nosy.”

“It’s all right,” Vince said, trying to feign normalcy. “We just talked about…old times, mostly. And about what we’ve been doing with ourselves the last fifteen years.”

“Catching up, in other words.”

“Something like that.”

Reverend Powell paused for a moment and to Vince it seemed like the man was struggling to say something. As if he was wrestling to bring up a subject he didn’t want to touch but had to out of some obligation. Vince was just about to steer the conversation into something more mundane when Reverend Powell asked. “Did Lillian give you anything?”

“Give me anything?”

“Yes. A box. Something she would have kept for your mother?”

“No. Why?”

Reverend Powell appeared troubled by this answer. This made Vince concerned. He tensed up, thinking something happened he didn’t know about, that something was being hidden from him. “I was afraid of that,” Reverend Powell said.

“What is it?” Vince asked. He glanced back toward the den and the Reverend turned to look himself. The wake was still going on, but it wouldn’t be long before somebody traipsed out to join them.

Reverend Powell rose to his feet. “We need to talk, Vince.” He set off down the deck steps and into the backyard.

Vince watched him, dumbfounded for a moment. Then he rose and followed the minister into the backyard and to the grove of trees that bordered the property. “What is this all about?” Vince whispered.

Reverend Powell looked back at the house to make sure nobody else had come out, and when he looked back at Vince his expression had changed. Gone was the look of confidence, of sympathy. It had been replaced by fear. Reverend Powell looked like he had the knowledge of the world’s most evil secret and that keeping it to himself would be worse than telling it. “I have to tell you something Vince, and you have to promise me you won’t reveal to anybody that we had this conversation. Okay?”

“Hank, what’s wrong?” Vince exclaimed, troubled now by the reverend’s demeanor. “You act as if you’ve seen a ghost or—”

Reverend Powell’s hand shot out and gripped Vince’s shoulder, his strong fingers pinching him like a vice. “
Promise me
!”

“Okay, okay—”

The fingers tightened again. “And keep your voice down.” He whispered fiercely.

“Fine,” Vince hissed. The reverend released his grip and Vince massaged the area the bigger man had gripped. His stomach became a hollow pit of fear as he stood at the end of Reverend Powell’s backyard.

“Lillian relayed to me eight years ago that your mother made a rather unique request should she pass away,” Reverend Powell began, speaking slowly. “Your mother requested that Lillian was to dig up a box in her backyard and to turn it over to me.”

Vince was flabbergasted. Was the box supposed to contain information on his mother’s family—a hint of his past? “What’s in it?” he whispered.

“I don’t know,” Reverend Powell said, his features turned down in defeat. “Lillian died before she could dig it up.”

Vince turned this over in his mind. He could picture Lillian Withers sitting in her little house on the evening she died, thinking about the promise she’d made to his mother. Did she get up to go outside and dig up the box just as she was felled by the heart attack? If that was so, was it possible that thinking about what was in the box was the catalyst that caused her heart to fail? “The police don’t know about this?”

“No,” Reverend Powell said. “Chief Hoffman did mention that Lillian had removed a shovel from the storage bin off the kitchen, but he didn’t inquire about it. After all, she was found in her chair in the living room and the medical examiner has already ruled that she died sitting in it. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, though, and I think she was getting ready to dig up the box your mother buried in her backyard.”

“The police didn’t stop to wonder why she’d taken the shovel out?” He was excited now. “I mean, my mother gets murdered a few days before and then her best friend turns up dead. Surely they would’ve put two and two together and—”

“Use your head, boy,” Reverend Powell said. “The coroner attributed the cause of Lillian’s death as a heart attack. Perfectly natural. Having an honest to goodness real murder case for them to deal with is more than enough for them to handle. This is Lititz, Vince, not Los Angeles.”

Vince’s mind was whirling. “Okay, but what about now? If that box contains something about my family…if she’s buried it because of…oh, I don’t know, trying to bury a shameful past or something, as a part of her rebirth, her conversion to Christianity…and it’s still
there
, I think I need to—”

“I’ve already tried looking for it,” Reverend Powell said through clenched teeth. “I tried last night. I went out there and dug in the spots Lillian told me your mother would have buried it. I couldn’t find anything. At least not yet.”

It was as if a bucket of ice-cold water had been thrown over a fire. Vince blinked, his breath held. “Nothing…”

“Nothing I could find,” Reverend Powell breathed. “I dug up the backyard last night for two hours. I looked everywhere, dug in all the right spots. I looked
exactly
where Maggie told Lillian she was going to bury it.” He sighed. “It wasn’t there.”

Vince was silent for a moment. “Do you have any idea what was supposed to be in this box?”

Reverend Powell shrugged. “Probably a scrap book. At least that’s what I think.” Then he looked over his shoulder at the house again, as if checking to see if they were being watched. When he turned back he looked fearful. Afraid. He reached into the pockets of his slacks and withdrew what at first appeared to be a scrap of paper. When he held it up, Vince saw it was a faded envelope, folded in half. “A few years ago I was moving some of my belongings into the den.” He indicated the den with a sweep of his hand. “I’d added the den on to the rest of the house and had a bunch of junk in my attic I wanted moved out. Your mother loaned me some boxes to store some of the stuff in while I unpacked and moved things around. I wound up keeping the boxes because they turned out to be pretty useful. Lillian asked me if I had any spare boxes a few days ago, when Maggie died. Said she wanted them to help you in sorting through her stuff. I went to the attic and found one, pulled it down. And I found this.”

He handed the envelope to Vince.

Vince took the envelope, unfolded it, and opened it.

There was a photograph inside. It was old, black and white, marred at the edges and slightly curling. A young woman was in the picture, dressed in hippie garb: bell bottom jeans, tank top, long blond hair parted in the middle, headband, love beads, the whole nine yards. She was cradling an infant in her arms. She was seated on the front porch of what appeared to be an apartment building. In the background, beyond the sliding glass door that led to the porch, he could make out people inside the apartment. They appeared to be young, hip, the youth of the crazed sixties.

There was no mistaking the woman in the photograph. It was Maggie Walters.

The infant in her arms was Vince.

Vince looked at the photograph in stunned amazement, then back up at Reverend Powell. “That’s mom,” he breathed. “And me.”

“That’s what I think, too,” Reverend Powell said softly. “Apparently your mother missed this particular photo when she was cleaning out her belongings. If she’d gotten to it, I think it would have been buried in the box along with whatever else is in there.”

“How do we know there really
is
a box?” Vince said, still holding the photograph. “Suppose it’s just something she made up?”

“If you heard Lillian that day when she told me about it, you’d believe it, too,” Reverend Powell said. “It exists.”

“Then where is it?”

Reverend Powell shrugged. “I don’t know.”

The two men looked at each other. Vince felt that Reverend Powell was telling him the truth. And he also felt there was more to this than simply a missing box containing family heirlooms, something more ominous.

There was movement from the back porch and then a voice called out. “Hey! I thought you two were back here. How’s everything going?”

Vince and Reverend Powell turned toward the voice. Standing on the porch was John Caruthers, one of the members of the congregation. He was holding a can of A&W root beer, his belly held back by a red and blue plaid shirt. He smiled, his wide face beaming giddy happiness. “My, it’s such a beautiful afternoon!” he decried.

Reverend Powell nodded at Vince, signifying that their conversation was over for now but would resume when all the guests had gone home for the evening. Vince sighed. He felt a sense of impatience now as they walked toward the porch to resume the wake. The undying need to pepper Reverend Powell with questions ate at him for the rest of the afternoon.

TRACY HARRIS WAS a sight for sore eyes when he saw her smiling face at John Wayne Airport when he exited the plane at the US Airways’ arrival gate. She was wearing a red and white summer dress, the skirt hugging her shapely hips and her auburn hair bounced freely on her shoulders. She swept him up in a hug and kiss that made Vince’s skin tingle. Her lips tasted like strawberries. Vince had never expected to be so smitten with Tracy, but smitten he was. Tracy was a godsend.

“So how was the trip?” she asked, taking his hand in hers as they headed toward the baggage claim area.

“Exhausting,” he said. “You don’t know how glad I am to be home.”