She’d never been a very good liar. How Vince swallowed that one, she would never know.
She sat in the easy chair, her Bible opened to Revelations. It was ten-thirty p.m., and the night was warm. It had climbed to ninety degrees today and it was close to seventy now. A very comfortable evening. They’d spent the day making Maggie’s funeral arrangements, then had gone out to dinner at a steakhouse called Hoss’s and Vince filled her in on what he’d been up to. Graduating top of his class at the University of California in Irvine with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Business Administration with an emphasis in Economics and a double Masters Degree in Economics and Business. He was the Director of the Western Division at Corporate Financial and was doing quite well. With the exception of losing his young wife, Laura, almost a year ago to that horrible car accident, life had been pretty good to Vince Walters. The Lord had blessed him.
Or had He? Lillian skimmed through the Bible, thinking about all that Vince told her. First the loss of his wife, which he was still trying to get over, and now this. Lillian would never wish something like that on her worst enemy. Not that she had any, but she couldn’t fathom it anyway. It was all so horrible. She fully understood now why Vince had broken down earlier that day. She supposed it was perfectly all right for him to not mourn Maggie’s death. She hadn’t been much of a mother to her son in the last few years before he’d left for college. Vince had every right to feel some sort of resentment toward Maggie. Lillian only hoped he would find it within himself to be able to forgive his mother.
Lillian traced her finger down the pages of the Bible, finally stopping at Chapter 20, verse 7. She read the verse aloud to herself. “When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth—Gog and Magog—to gather them for battle.” She paused, reading through the rest of the passage to herself. Then she closed the Bible and looked out the window into the night beyond. “When the thousand years are over,” she murmured. There were many that believed the thousand years hadn’t started. There were others who believed that the thousand years was almost at an end, right now in these final years of the twentieth century. Maggie hadn’t subscribed to that belief. She’d held the opinion that the Beast was alive and well in this country and that his time was close at hand. This belief had taken root more strongly in the last ten years, and within the last few years she’d been almost paranoid about it. It got to the point that she’d almost had her phone unplugged because she thought the Beast was going to call her in the middle of the night to tell her that he was going to claim her as his own. Her fear had been so insistent that Lillian had convinced her to talk to Reverend Powell about it. But the talk with the Reverend hadn’t done much to calm Maggie of this fear. The best Lillian had been able to do was convince Maggie to buy an answering machine. “This way you can screen your calls,” she’d told Maggie, trying to sound as serious as possible. “You can pick it up if you recognize the voice coming through. That way if the Beast does call you, he won’t actually be talking to you. He won’t be able to get you.”
Surprisingly, Maggie had fallen for it and it was then that Lillian began to fear for her friend’s sanity. Maggie had always been strong-willed and God fearing, but her fear of the approaching of Armageddon and her insistence that it was coming sooner than they thought had really gotten to her the last few years. Lillian even talked to Reverend Powell about it in an effort to lay her fears to rest and the Reverend hadn’t shown the least bit of worry. “Maggie is simply preparing for what the Lord has told us is bound to come,” he’d said. “She may be a little more… impassioned about it than most of us would be, but then she’s a very passionate woman. Her walk with the Lord is the strongest I’ve ever seen in a Christian.”
Lillian had agreed. Maggie’s walk with the Lord was certainly one to try to emulate. But Maggie’s behavior still nagged her.
The tip of the iceberg had been when Vincent asked about Maggie’s past.
Lillian sighed and put the Bible on the coffee table. She felt bad about lying to Vince, but she had to. It was the only thing she could think of until she thought about what to do.
Now she had the time to think about it.
The box…
She didn’t know how long ago it was now, but it had to have been in 1987 or 1988. Well over ten years ago. She’d been over at Maggie’s house helping to arrange the knick-knacks on the new shelves she’d installed in the living room. It was spring and the two women had been talking about the latest lesson from church services the week before. Lillian was embroiled in the subject, which concerned Mark’s account of how Jesus chased the money-changers out of the temple, when she noticed Maggie was gone. Lillian stopped what she was doing, turning to try to find her, when Maggie called out. “Lillian?”
Lillian had turned toward the hallway and saw Maggie near the doorway to her bedroom. Maggie beckoned to her and Lillian had gone into the bedroom, wondering what her friend wanted. And that’s when Maggie showed her the box with the padlock.
“I want you to promise me something, Lillian,” Maggie had said. Her breath was bated, as if she was asking Lillian to contemplate something that was on a grandiose scale. Robbing a bank. Or stealing secret documents. Maggie kept looking around the room, as if to keep reassuring herself that they were the only two people in the room.
“What is it?” she’d asked.
Maggie lifted the box up and jiggled the lock. “I’m going to bury this box in my garden. It will be approximately ten feet from where the concrete of my back porch ends, dead center from my back door. It will be buried two feet down. I want you to promise me that if I should die—”
“What? Maggie what are you talking about?”
“If I die,” Maggie continued, ignoring her protests, “I want you to promise me you’ll dig this box up. I’ll give you the only key. You will keep the key in a safe place. If something happens to me, you will dig up the box. You will take it to a safe place and open it. Read the documents I have placed inside it.”
“Maggie—”
“Then take them to Reverend Powell. Do not take them to anybody else. Especially my son if he shows up.”
“Maggie, this is ridiculous! I don’t understand—”
“You will when you open the box. Now do you promise?”
They’d gone back and forth like that for a good ten minutes before Lillian had given in. She promised Maggie she would unearth the box, and that she and Reverend Powell would read what was inside. Maggie had given her the key, and without another word she put the box back in her room. When she returned to the living room she wouldn’t speak of her request. She’d never spoken of it in the years that passed. When Lillian asked, all Maggie would say was that she couldn’t say anything about it now. She was afraid to. But when the time came, Lillian could find out for herself and then God help her.
She’d talked to Reverend Powell about it in the privacy of his home office and he’d listened to her carefully, twirling the corncob pipe he always carried with him but never smoked. He’d been a smoker back when he lived a life of sin, and even though he no longer touched tobacco, the habit of putting a pipe to his lips was an old vice. Lillian saw it as a familiar reminder of his older, dirtier habit, and if the Lord chose to help Reverend Powell rid himself of that habit by making it impossible to give up fiddling with the pipe itself, so be it. When she finished, Reverend Powell put the pipe on his walnut desk and kicked his feet up, lacing his hands behind his head as he leaned back in his chair. He was staring up at the ceiling in contemplation. “Perhaps the items she has in that box are the holdovers from her past life. Her life before she was saved.”