They

Chapter Three

THE NEXT MORNING after breakfast and a shower, Vince Walters drove the rental car to Lillian Withers’s home in Lititz.

He’d been tired after the long flight and meeting with Tom Hoffman yesterday. He thought he’d be able to get some much needed rest, but upon arriving back at his motel yesterday afternoon he was met by two homicide detectives from Lancaster who wanted to question him. Vince had wearily agreed, and the three of them had spent an hour talking in his room. The detectives were friendly enough, and Vince could tell that they were doing the best they could in trying to make sense of his mother’s murder, but they appeared to spend most of their time asking Vince about her religious beliefs. He’d told them everything: about his mother’s sudden conversion to evangelical Christianity shortly after they’d moved to upstate New York from California, how it changed her, in many ways not for the best. He told them about the move to Toronto, her taking up with a small close-knit group of fellow believers and their banding into a fellowship; how they’d formed under the leadership of Reverend Hank Powell; how fire-and-brimstone they’d been. He told them how he’d fallen away from the faith, how he never really believed in much of the hardcore elements of their beliefs.

And what were their beliefs? they’d asked.

Vince responded: “She was convinced she and her congregation were God’s chosen ones and that we would be protected from the wrath of Armageddon. She told me I was special. Because I’d accepted Christ in my heart, she and the group had a powerful weapon to wield against Satan and his demons. Really crazy stuff. I would go along with it just to appease her, but I never really believed it. I thought it was just a sack of bullshit. Especially when I saw my friends at school, friends who came from very loving families, some very traditional Christian families who espoused the same basic religious beliefs who were nowhere near as crazy in their beliefs as my mother and her friends were. She believed in the same basic theology, but she took it more seriously. More personal. She believed that she—that we—were chosen by God to lead the battle in Armageddon and that the time was drawing short. She believed that in order to be in God’s Army, we had to live strictly by his law. They advocated living in strict accordance of Christ’s example. To live by the ways of the world was an open rejection of God, because Satan was the ruler of earth. To live by the ways of the world, namely to go out and live a normal life, get a job, pay taxes, go to movies, read books, listen to music, go to parties, drink, smoke, engage in a sexual relationship, whatever, meant you were living in Satan’s world. It pretty much reserved a place in hell for your soul for the rest of eternity.”

The detectives had nodded at this. One of them, a dark-haired man about his own age named Harry Michaelson said, “We understand they were very quiet, kept mostly to themselves and didn’t cause much trouble. We’ve already questioned members of the congregation and people around town that knew your mother, and they’ve pretty much confirmed what you’ve told us.”

Once the detectives left, Vince found it hard to relax, much less sleep. His mind had kept drifting to the church they’d formed—the First Church of Christ—and their beliefs. He thought about their obsession with Satan, especially Armageddon and their overzealous paranoid reactions against what they saw as “the great satanic conspiracy.” According to them, some of the most respected people in government offices and business were top satanic henchmen. They were also pulling the strings behind most of the drug smuggling in this country. And, as could be expected, they routinely kidnapped people for ritual sacrifices.

They were beliefs he no longer held to, much less believed much in anyway. When you were a teenager, the last thing you wanted to be told was that your favorite rock band—in Vince’s case, Iron Maiden—were comprised of devil-worshippers.

When he woke up this morning after a fitful sleep, resolved to drive out to Lillian Withers’s place and face the music, he told himself that he was going to stay strong in his beliefs. He was an atheist now. He may have been a believer a long time ago, when he was a child, but he no longer held to those beliefs. Thanks to the group’s paranoid delusions, he saw no credence in them. He saw no reason to let their beliefs sway him now. Besides, he was hoping that Lillian Withers hadn’t changed much in the last fifteen years since he’d last seen her. Of the dozen or so church members that his mother fellowshipped with, Lillian Withers was the one he’d liked the most. She’d been the most down-to-earth.

All his worries of talking to Lillian Withers turned out to be in vain. In short, Lillian hadn’t changed at all.

She recognized him the instant she opened the door to her small home on Meadow Lane. Her light blue eyes lit up in surprise and happiness when she saw him. “Vincent! How good to see you!” She opened the screen door. “My God, just look at you! Come in! Come in!”

Vince grinned sheepishly and stepped into Lillian’s home. Lillian was wearing a red plaid dress, her auburn hair tied behind her head in a bun. Unlike many of the old order Amish and Mennonite people who lived in the area, the women in Reverend Powell’s sect did not wear prayer caps, but they did dress modestly, mostly in dresses and occasionally jeans. Lillian had aged gracefully; Vince had always pegged Lillian to be close to his mother’s age, give or take a few years. The last time he saw his mother, she’d looked at least ten years older than her forty-one years. Fourteen years later Lillian, who was probably in her early fifties now, didn’t look older than forty. She was positively radiant.

She swept Vince up in a hug. “Oh, it’s so good to see you, Vincent!”

“It’s good to see you too,” Vince murmured.

“I’m so sorry about Maggie.” Lillian’s voice cracked slightly and Vince held her. She sniffled once. “I’m so sorry about what happened.”

What exactly did happen? He almost asked. Lillian looked up at him, her eyes misty with tears. “Well,” she said. “Why don’t you come in? I’ve got some tea if you want.”

“Thanks,” Vince said. Lillian disappeared into the kitchen and Vince took a quick glance around the house. A small living room leading to an even smaller kitchen, a hallway at the far end of the living room led to the two bedrooms and the one bathroom. The living room was furnished nicely and modestly with a couch, two easy chairs, and an oak coffee table. An entertainment center contained a small receiver, a tape deck, and a twenty-five inch television. There was a framed picture of Jesus Christ over the sofa, His gaze cast to the heavens. Another framed picture hung on the wall near the kitchen, this one a work of embroidery with a religious slogan from the Book of Mark.

“How long have you been in town?” Lillian asked from the kitchen.

“I got in yesterday,” Vince said. He sat down on the couch and leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. The coffee table was positioned in front of the couch. There was a TV Guide on one side of it. On the other side was a King James Bible and a prayer book. “I talked to Chief Hoffman and a couple of detectives from Lancaster.”

“Michaelson and Harvey?” Lillian came out of the kitchen bearing two tall glasses of iced tea. She handed Vince one, who took it gratefully.

“Yes,” he said, sipping the iced tea. It was delicious.

“They talked to everybody here, too,” Lillian said. “Well, everybody in the group. They were all pretty upset.”

“About talking to the detectives?” Vince asked.

“No,” Lillian said. She sat down in the easy chair closest to the couch, on Vince’s right. The curtains were open, basking the room in light. “About what happened. How somebody could… do something so horrible to Maggie.”

“I know what you mean,” Vince said. He took another sip of the iced tea. “I’ve been wondering that myself.”

“It’s just so shocking,” Lillian said, clutching her glass. “The press has been hounding us, too. What’s happened has become the talk of all of Lancaster County. More so than the Lambert case from seven years or so back. You think things like that only happen in places like this once in a lifetime, but to have another happen within the space of a decade…” She shook her head and took a sip of tea. “I saw Maggie the afternoon she died. We’d done some shopping on Main Street and had been talking about going to the Green Dragon. We went there every Friday, you know.” Vince nodded. The Green Dragon was an open-air flea market that was held every Friday in nearby Reamstown. “We were both planning on making dishes for the pot luck at the church, and there was a recipe book your mother saw there the week before. Anyway, I dropped your mother off at the house and she told me she was going to spend the rest of the day and evening making her stew. We planned on meeting at the church. John Van Zant was going to pick her up in the morning and bring her to church, so I didn’t think I’d see her until the next day.” Her features became stony as she remembered. “I got to church that day with my casserole, Mary Rossington baked one of her apple cobblers that she’s famous for. Reverend Powell baked some of that honey wheat bread that he loves. We were planning on just breaking bread together and fellowshipping, real down home talking and sharing in the Lord. We were all sitting in the den of Reverend Powell’s home when Tom Hoffman came. He…” Her voice faltered. “He didn’t look so good. John was with him and he looked pale. We went out to meet them on the porch, and the minute John saw us he just burst into tears.”

Vince listened quietly, nodding every now and then. Lillian looked at him and tried to muster a smile. “Poor Tom. I don’t think that man was ever used to delivering bad news, especially in these parts. But he was just beside himself that day. He almost cried himself when he told us.”

“Did Tom come out right then and tell you exactly what happened?” Vince asked.

“No,” Lillian said. “Not right then. He just told us that Maggie had been found dead, and that he didn’t want us to jump to any conclusions. John cut right in and said ‘Jesus, Tom, come off it! I found her! You can’t tell me some deranged pervert killed her after what we found.’ Well, that piqued my interest, and when Tom left John told us everything. He’d been the one to find her that way. He’d gone into the house when she failed to come to the door when he stopped by to pick her up and he went in and found her.”

Vincent nodded. “Tom told me yesterday.”

“He told you about… what they did to her?” Lillian asked, breathlessly.

“Yes.” Vince took another sip of iced tea. “But how do you know it’s ‘they’? Suppose it’s just one killer?”

Lillian looked toward the closed front door of the house, then her eyes darted toward the windows, as if checking to see if unwanted ears were eavesdropping on their conversation. She looked back at Vince almost fearfully. “Did I say ‘they’? I guess that was just a slip of the tongue. It could be ‘they,’ or ‘he,’ or ‘she.’ Anybody, I guess.”

Vince opened his mouth to pursue the matter, but decided better. Lillian drained the rest of her iced tea and rose, heading toward the kitchen. “I need a refill,” she said. “Can I get you anything?”

“No,” Vince said, puzzled now. “I’m fine.” He waited while Lillian refilled her iced tea. What the hell was that all about? She got really spooked when I asked her about they. Almost as if she knows something more than she’s letting on.

When Lillian returned to the living room her features were more composed. She looked as if nothing had ever happened. She sat back down in the easy chair next to Vince and took a quick sip of her iced tea as Vince tried to steer the conversation back to his mother. “You know,” Vince began, choosing his words carefully. “I really dreaded coming back here when I heard the news. Especially after all that I went through with mom. We… didn’t really see eye-to-eye on a lot of things in the end.”

Lillian reached her hand out and touched his knee lightly. Her blue eyes locked with his. “I know things were hard for you. Especially the last few years you were here.”

“It was worse when I left,” he murmured.

Lillian’s hand rubbed his knee lovingly, bringing the warm touch his mother never would have bestowed. “Your mother was… very upset with you in the end.”

“But why?” He turned to her, his drink forgotten on the table. “I never thought leaving for college or getting married would make my mother hate me.”

Lillian sighed heavily, as if contemplating the delivering of bad news. “At first I didn’t understand it, Vincent. Your mother’s always been… set in her ways, I guess you could say. And I know that you had it harder than most teenagers when you were growing up. I know your mother wasn’t the most understanding person. But there was one thing she was strong in, and that was her faith in the Lord. Your mother walked the closest walk with the Lord than anybody I’ve known in my life. That’s something to be admired about the woman.”

Fuck my mother’s walk with the Lord, Vince thought, his jaw set in a hard grimace. If abandoning your child’s emotional needs when they’re growing up is part of walking with God, then I want no part of Him. He tried to keep the anger out of his voice. “So she never spoke about me after I left, right?”

“Far from it,” Lillian said. She picked up her glass of iced tea. “She spoke of you often. Prayed for you all the time.”

“Prayed for me?”

“Yes.” Lillian took a sip of iced tea.

“Why?”

Lillian hesitated. “Are you sure you—”

“Yes,” he almost snapped. “Just tell me!”

Lillian blinked in surprise, as if taken aback by Vince’s sudden outburst. Vince closed his eyes briefly and took a deep breath. He exhaled and opened his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I… I didn’t mean to snap at you like that.”

“It’s okay,” Lillian said. “You’ve been through a lot lately.”

More than you’d care to imagine, Vince thought. He ran a hand through his hair, took a sip of his iced tea, and leaned forward on the couch, ready to go head-to-head with whatever revelation Lillian had. “Why did she pray for me all the time?”

Lillian sighed. “She believed you were walking with Satan.”

The tension that had been building up in Vince’s limbs evaporated. He let out a breath. Was that all? According to the way his mother interpreted the Bible, he pretty much expected her to believe he was one of Satan’s minions. Lillian’s confession wasn’t a big surprise. “Why did she think that?” he asked.

“Because according to her, you’d abandoned the Christian faith she raised you in.” Lillian’s eyes were open, gentle. “You didn’t believe. You chose to cloak yourself in worldly things, which the Bible says is aligning yourself with Satan. Are you familiar with the Gospels, Vincent?”

“Yes,” Vince said. He took another sip of his iced tea.

“Then you know what Jesus said about choosing to live in the world, by the ways of the world. That Satan rules this world and its ways are his.”

“That’s all I heard when I was growing up,” Vince said. He set the glass of iced tea down on the table. “I suppose that despite the fact that I didn’t share my mother’s religious beliefs, she assumed I was a sinner and was doomed to Hell. And that because I was, she couldn’t associate with me because I would taint her somehow. Right?”

Lillian reached out again and caressed Vince’s arm. It felt comforting, soothing. “Vincent… I know you’re troubled by all that’s happened. Your mother’s death… your estrangement from her and all. But… she had a good heart. Really, she did. You may think she was crazy, but she really cared about you.”

“I wish she would have showed it,” Vince said. He drained the rest of his iced tea and stood up. “I’ve got to get going.”

Lillian stood up and walked with him to the front door. He had to get out of this house now; he felt his throat locking up. He felt like he was going to cry again. He felt that a little part of him was dying; the part that had never known the joy and love of his mother. The love that a mother can bestow on her son.

He was almost at the front door when he felt Lillian’s hand lightly gripping his arm. “Vincent.”

He stopped and turned. “Yes?”

She looked at him, her eyes brimming again with tears, and then moved forward, taking him in her embrace. He held her, her voice low and crackling. “I’m so sorry, Vincent. I’m so sorry.”

They stood there for a moment, silhouetted in the doorway of Lillian Withers’ comfortable little cottage set off a narrow farm road in rural Pennsylvania as the mid-morning sun peaked high overhead. Vince could feel the day warming up outside. The scent of lilacs wafting through the doorway was fresh in the air. The crisp, clean country air felt good. Vince closed his eyes and held Lillian, feeling a familiar sense of home, of a childhood he’d never had.

When Lillian finally stepped back she looked up at him, her eyes misty. “You’re a good man, Vincent. I think if your mother were here now she’d be proud of you.”

“Lillian—” Vince protested.

Lillian stopped him by tapping her finger on his chest. “Only the Lord knows your heart, Vincent. In the end your mother was too wrapped up in her own—Lord, dare I say—righteousness, to be concerned with the goodness of other’s hearts. It blinded her. She either didn’t see, or refused to see you for the good person you are.”

“Despite the fact I’m a non-believer?” Vince said. He mustered a smile. He’d said it. He was a non-believing atheist.

“Despite the fact that you’re a non-believer,” Lillian said, without missing a beat. Her features were serious. She looked more composed, more in control of herself. “You’re a good man, no matter what you believe. Don’t let the memory of what your mother used to say to you, or how she treated you, change the way I know you feel about her. Deep down she really loved you, Vincent. She loved you from the bottom of her heart.”

Vince looked out at the road and the thick grove of trees that spanned the property across from Lillian’s. “You know, I’d really like to believe you, Lillian. But so much of the last few memories of my mother is her screaming at me over the phone, telling me I’m the spawn of the Devil, or that I’m going to burn in hell for leaving her and choosing what she called the Left Hand path.” He turned back to her. “Maybe you’ve forgotten about all that happened. When I won that scholarship to UCI. I thought she would be happy for me. She wasn’t. She told me that if I went off to college I would burn in hell.”

Lillian’s features collapsed, as if in shame.

“I went to college and, as you know, the relationship quickly went downhill. She sent me tracts in the mail, she called me on the phone telling me she was organizing a prayer session in the hopes I’d be saved.”

Lillian nodded, closing her eyes. “I remember…”

“It got so that every year at Christmas I dreaded coming home because all she would do was insist I pray with her every day at Reverend Powell’s, for hours straight. You remember?”

Lillian nodded.

“When I started dating Laura, it got worse. By then I was working at Corporate Financial. She saw that as really… being something bad and evil. I’m sorry, but I still don’t see what is so evil about having a career in a financial planning firm. It got so bad that I stopped calling her altogether. I even stopped with the Christmas and birthday cards. All the cards I ever got from her were religious ones. But the final straw was when I broke down and called her after Laura and I got engaged. Know what she told me?”

Lillian shook her head. She looked saddened. “No. Vincent you don’t have to tell me—”

“I think I do,” Vince said. He struggled to keep his voice even, to keep from breaking into tears himself. He could feel his chest grow heavy, his throat constricting. “She all but damned me to Hell. She did not want to hear about what I thought was something every mother would want to hear from her son, that I was engaged. Instead she told me I was doomed, and that she did not want to hear from me ever again. And then she hung up on me.” His breathing was growing heavy. He struggled to hold back the flood of tears that threatened to pour forth. “I expected this, but… I thought she would have been happy for me. You know?” And then he did start to cry, just a little bit, because it wasn’t just the memory of his mother’s rejection of him that he was crying over. It was the memory of Laura taking him into his arms that day after his mother hung up on him and he’d turned to her, teary eyed just as he was now and said, “Sh-sh-sh-she..h-h-hates me!” He’d broken down then, and Laura had been there to comfort him.

Lillian tried to offer comfort as best she could. Her warmth brought a sense of security to him, one that he’d never felt with his mother. But then he’d always felt pretty secure with Lillian. Growing up, Lillian had been the only member of the church group to tell him jokes, or to trade gossip in the latest chapters of the soap operas they both watched (Vince had been a fanatical follower of General Hospital in the Luke and Laura days). In short, she’d been more of a mother to him than his birth mother. And she was filling the role now as well.

He wiped the beginning of tears away. He turned away from her, slightly embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that…”

“You don’t have to explain,” Lillian said. Surprisingly, she remained strong for him when he was at his most vulnerable. Her features were composed, strong and confident. “It’s all right to cry every now and then.”

Vince managed a smile. “I wasn’t expecting to cry like a baby in your home.”

Lillian playfully slapped his arm. “I’ve seen you cry more than once, young man! My Lord, I’ve seen you at almost every point in your life except for when you were really little. I’ve seen you cry over everything from scraped knees to broken hearts.”

This broke the ice and they laughed. For Vince, the laughter helped ease the tension. He’d always liked Lillian, but deep down never really knew whether Lillian thought of him as a sinner the way his mother had. Part of that tension was his fear that Lillian, who he saw as his only hope in regaining some sort of foothold in Lititz, would have succumbed to his mother’s view of him.

He felt better now. He looked outside at the warm blue sky, his rental car parked in Lillian’s driveway. He turned back to her, gratitude welling forth. “Thank you, Lillian,” he said.

“Don’t mention it,” she said, rubbing his arm and smiling at him. “That’s what families are for, right?”

“Are you my family, Lillian?”

“I’ve always felt I was.”

“Good. I always felt you were too.” And he did. And now he suddenly felt a void that he never thought he would; a sense of loss in that he never fully knew how much Lillian Withers meant to him as a friend, as family, until twenty years later.

“Lillian,” he began, not knowing how to approach this question. He decided to take the plunge and ask, even if she became shifty about it the way she had when she inadvertently referred to his mother’s killers as ‘they.’ “There’s something that’s been bothering me for awhile now. It’s recently started bugging me since… well, since yesterday when I was on the plane flying out here.”

“Yes, Vincent?”

“Did… did my mother ever mention her family to you? Do you know what ever happened to them?”

Lillian sighed, and much to Vince’s relief she didn’t appear shifty. “Your mother never spoke much about her family and I never asked. All I know is what she told me when I met her, when you moved to Carlisle Street in Toronto. That the two of you had lived outside of Buffalo, New York for a year and that you were originally from California. Your mother was divorced and she had custody of you. That was it.”

“Divorced,” Vince muttered. He’d tried dredging up memories of his life before New York, but it all came in images. He remembered living somewhere other than New York, he remembered a man that he presumed to be his father. The man had been nice, had seemed like a father to him, although he was gone a lot. Vince just assumed he’d been out working. He remembered other people that had been in their lives, but he had no recollection of who they were, or what their relation to him and his mother had been. One of them, a distinguished looking older man, could have been an uncle. A younger couple close to his mother’s age could have been aunts and uncles, friends of the family. Others floated to the surface of his memory only to dissipate. He shook his head. “I don’t remember him hardly at all. I don’t remember his name, where we lived—”

“You were no more than eight or nine when you moved to Carlisle Street,” Lillian said. When he and his mother moved to Carlisle Street in Toronto, they’d settled into a two bedroom apartment in a lower-middle class neighborhood. Lillian had lived in the apartment downstairs and was the building manager. Once Maggie found out Lillian was an evangelical Christian, the two women had become fast friends. “If you were eight when you and your mother left California, you probably wouldn’t have remembered that much.”

“I thought she would have mentioned more to you about our past life,” he said. He looked at Lillian wearily, realizing it was only noon and he had the rest of the day to make funeral arrangements. He felt worn out. “But she didn’t say anything, not even in passing?”

“No.” Lillian shook her head. She tried to muster a smile, perhaps in an attempt to put him at ease. “I tried asking a few times, but she never revealed more than what I just told you. And that her parents were dead.”

“Her parents were dead,” Vince echoed.

“Yes.” Lillian looked at Vince with concern. “Are you okay, Vincent?”

Vince turned to her. He was gazing out the screen door again. “What? Oh, I’m fine.”

“Will you need any help making funeral arrangements?”

“I suppose I will.” He hadn’t really given it much thought until now, but then who knew his mother better than Lillian Withers? “I’m supposed to claim her body this afternoon at the Lancaster County Morgue.”

“Why don’t I call Reverend Powell and see if we can arrange something? Do you have any particular plans in mind?”

“No.”

They spent the rest of the afternoon making funeral arrangements for Maggie Walters.