“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.
Chapter Seven
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.”
He told her all about it as they stood at the baggage claim area waiting for his luggage. She listened patiently. He didn’t know whether he should tell her about his conversation with Reverend Powell and he almost let it slip out, but stopped himself before it could become fatal. Better not bombard her with too much at once. “That’s so terrible, all that happening at once,” she said as he stepped up to the conveyer belt and lifted his tan suitcase up and double-checked to make sure it was his; it was. “It’s also sad. That poor woman.”
“Lillian or my mother?”
Tracy playfully socked him in the arm. “Both, silly! I can’t believe you would say a thing like that! Your mother was murdered horribly! I know you were…well, estranged from her and all, but—”
“I know,” Vince said, dragging his suitcase along, the little wheels clacking along the tarmac. Tracy and Vince exited the terminal, heading down the airport toward the parking structure. “It is awful, the way she died. You should have seen it.”
“Did you see the body?”
“Do the police have any idea why whoever killed her would, you know…do all that to her when robbery was the only apparent motive?”
“No, they don’t.” They were silent as they walked through the parking garage, holding hands, Vince dragging his suitcase along. It was a warm day, but it was a touch cooler in the shade of the parking garage. The sky was a clear blue, unusual for a summer day in Southern California, but there was a nice offshore breeze and that helped blow some of the smog away. Vince could actually see the San Gabriel Mountains fifty miles to the north. On a normal summer day it would be so smoggy, the air so still, that you couldn’t even see them.
They reached Tracy’s car, a black BMW, and Tracy disengaged the car’s alarm system and opened the trunk with the remote. Vince helped lift the trunk up and was just about to hoist the suitcase into it when he heard a clink of keys. “Oops,” Tracy said, her other hand fumbling with her purse, a small black pouch that hung by thin straps from her right shoulder. “I’m always so clumsy.”
“Poor baby,” Vince said as he bent down to scoop up the keys, hearing a sharp ping! strike the metal of the open trunk and the tinkling of glass and feeling the whoosh of air over his head.
“What the…?” Vince stood half-bent over, hands clutching Tracy’s fallen keys, wondering what had just happened. He saw Tracy turn her head slowly toward the cars across the lot, a look of puzzlement on her face, and then he stood up, not knowing at first what to make of the small hole that had been punched through the hood of the BMW and the shattered glass of the car’s rear windshield until there was another pinging sound that winged past his left ear, followed by the sound of more shattering glass, and now his stomach leaped in his throat as he looked out and saw a man crouched behind a car four rows over, and his eyes opened wide in surprise and fear as the man raised the weapon in his hands and rose to his feet and Vince dove for Tracy, yelling “Get down!”, the momentum of his body shoving her to the concrete just as the man let loose with a volley of rounds from a semi-automatic rifle, a rat-tat-tat-tat-tat of shells that were now flying with deadly accuracy toward them, blowing holes in the BMW, breaking windows, and as he pushed Tracy ahead of him down the side of her car toward the next row, the bullets seemed to follow them, sending up showers of glass in their wake and his heart was beating so fast, and the noise of the shots was so loud, that he couldn’t hear himself screaming, “Get down, get the fuck down!”
Tracy was crawling on her hands and knees, scraping them on the concrete, and Vince was yelling for her to “Move, fucking move, goddamnit!” and now there was a brief reprieve, as if the gunfire had suddenly died without warning. They darted out in front of a car cruising down the aisle, and all around them were the sounds of cars and people, some exiting the airport, some opening trunks to stow away luggage, and those in the immediate vicinity were all now standing with numb shock, looking at Vince and Tracy as they scrambled madly in a half-crouched position, weaving their way between parked cars as their assailant made one more try, this time having obviously come out of his hiding place to pursue them. They heard his footsteps running down the parking lot, then felt and heard the rat-tat-tat-tat-tat of automatic gunfire spray up concrete and glass as it showered around them, and then it suddenly stopped, only to be replaced by the sound of running feet, the slam of a car door and the squeal of tires as a vehicle raced out of the parking lot, and now there were a lot of excited voices but Vince didn’t know the danger was over. He was pushing Tracy under a parked car, telling her, “We’ve got to hide, get under there!”, and by the time the police came Vince knew that the immediate danger was over.
WHEN THE AIRPORT police officers helped Tracy out from under the Datsun they had crawled under, she started to cry. Vince’s heart was still pounding, and he still felt in fight-or-flight motion—he wanted to get the hell out of there now! But when he saw Tracy’s composure, that beautiful face crumpled in tears, his heart melted and he immediately went to her. She threw her arms around him, sobbing against his neck. “Wh-wh-why! Why was he shooting at us like that?”
Vince could only hold her, comfortable now that the danger seemed to be over. There were two or three cops with them, and he could hear police sirens growing louder as more raced to the scene. “I don’t know,” he said, holding her in his arms. “I don’t know, Tracy. I don’t know.” He closed his eyes, trying to retrace their steps, to recall the face of the man that had suddenly popped out of nowhere and tried to kill him. His mind flashed backed on that first single shot that had gone through the trunk of the BMW and smashed the rear windshield. If he hadn’t bent down to retrieve Tracy’s keys he might be dead now.
There was no question about it. Vince had been the target of this assault.
The next few hours passed quickly. They were questioned briefly by the airport police and then the Irvine Police Department. Detectives came and scurried about, retrieving shell casings and examining the damage. In addition to the tremendous damage to Tracy’s BMW, thirteen other vehicles had been hit, three of them severely. Some of the owners of those vehicles began showing up during the preliminary investigation, and they were made to wait behind the yellow crime scene tape that had been strung up until it was complete. In the meantime, after an initial questioning by Irvine Homicide detectives, they were whisked away to the police station.
They rode to the station in the same squad car and Tracy clutched his hand during the entire trip. He could tell she was deeply disturbed by what had happened. She stopped crying, but her eyes were dark, her brow furrowed with lines of worry. She kept telling him over and over that she just couldn’t believe what’d happened. He stroked her hand and told her he couldn’t believe it either. He tried to comfort her as best as he could, but the more he tried, the more scared and confused he became.
Once at the station, they were led to separate rooms. The room Vince was led in was small and barren, with a single table and two chairs. Unlike crime dramas on television, there were no two-way mirrors. He mentioned this to the detective that accompanied him in the room. The detective, a burly man in his forties with dark hair smirked. “Well, you aren’t a suspect, Vince. Just a witness. We save those rooms for guys like the ones that shot at you and your girlfriend.”
Vince guessed Tracy was in a similar room being questioned too, so the best thing to do was cooperate and try to remember as many of the details as he could. The detective began by asking him what happened, telling him to take his time, to try to remember as much of the incident as possible. Vince thought hard and went slowly, starting with how he and Tracy were walking through the parking garage to their car, how she’d dropped her keys and he’d bent down to retrieve them and that first shot came zinging at him. The detective nodded. “Count yourself lucky, Mr. Walters. Count yourself very lucky.”
Vince nodded and continued. He told the detective that the gunman had fired at least two single shots at them, but once they started running he’d let loose with automatic fire. The detective nodded, jotting notes down in a small spiral notebook. He told the detective how scared he was, how strong the instinct of flight had been, and that he was fairly positive the gunman popped out of his hiding place to pursue them briefly. Then the gunfire stopped and he thought he heard running feet just as he and Tracy slipped under a car, but he didn’t know where the gunman was running. He thought he was running toward them, and that’s what propelled him to keep him and Tracy moving. The next thing he remembered was the first police officers arriving on the scene.
The detective asked him to repeat the story one more time. Then he asked Vince if he’d gotten a look at the gunman. Vince shook his head.
“Do you know why you might have been the target, Mr. Walters?”
Vince sighed. “No. Until lately, nothing like this has ever happened to me.”
“What do you mean, ‘until lately’?”
Figuring they were g
oing to find out sooner or later, Vince told the detective about the trip he’d just returned from and the details of the murder of his mother. The detective looked real interested in this and jotted down notes. He asked Vince the name of the Police Chief in Lititz. “And they don’t have any suspects yet in your mother’s murder?”
Vince shook his head. “No.”
“And you say that the detectives in Pennsylvania think it’s a robbery gone bad?”
“That’s what they think.”
“What do you think?”
Vince shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Will you excuse me for a moment?” Vince nodded, and the detective left the room for a few minutes. Vince sat silently, his mind twisting and turning, going over the events of the last few days. It was obvious somebody had targeted his mother; it hadn’t been a robbery gone bad. Somebody had wanted her dead and now they wanted him dead as well.
The detective returned ten minutes later. “Just got off the phone with the Lititz P.D., and told them what just happened to you. They tell me that all indications in their investigation points to a robbery. I asked a detective there, a guy I believe you spoke with named Jacobs, if he had any reasons to believe that what happened with you today might be related to your mother’s murder and he told me probably not. Just the same, I think we’re going to check things out on our end just to be sure. Why don’t you tell me a little about your mother?”
For the next two hours, Vince told the detective—Rob Staley—everything he knew about his mother’s murder, how she’d lived as a religious recluse. After awhile, another detective joined them. Detective Staley asked Vince if his mother had any enemies. “As far as I know she didn’t,” he said, telling him what he’d told the detectives in Lititz. When he was finished they started over again, taking him through the last few days. Vince didn’t alter his story in any way, nor did recurring narratives bring to light anything he might have forgotten.
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