They (27 page)

He opened the door and turned on the light from the string that hung down from the bare sixty-watt bulb in the ceiling. The room was small, twelve by fifteen feet perhaps, with wood shelving and a concrete floor. Reverend Powell kept what few tools he had and various odds and ends down here; old books, photo albums, things he couldn’t bear to throw away. He stepped further into the room and reached into a shelf space and felt around the bare concrete wall to a spot that was a natural cubby-hole, his groping fingers brushing against what he’d stashed in there three days ago since finding it. Now he brought it out with shaking hands, wondering why he was looking at it again when he knew it was just going to make him more afraid and paranoid.

He found the box the day Vince left for California. He’d headed over to Maggie Walter’s place that evening very late, hoping to avoid the curious speculations of the few neighbors who lived in the area. He’d parked his truck behind her home, and headed to the backyard where he sat on her porch for awhile, letting his eyes get adjusted to the dark. It had been a clear night, with a half-moon riding high in the sky providing all the illumination he would need. He’d looked out at the backyard, noticing a few of the marks in the ground he’d dug then covered up, not giving a damn if it would attract the attention of the authorities if they decided to come poking around again. He decided it wouldn’t matter. If anybody decided to ask him he would suggest that it was probably animals digging around in her backyard.

The first time he’d come to the yard in that first futile attempt at locating the box he counted off the ten paces just as Lillian had told him. That first dig yielded nothing, so he tried to the immediate left and right of that first attempt. Then he’d tried a foot ahead, again to the left and right. He’d left that evening, not wanting to arouse too much suspicion.

The next trip had proven to be a charm, though. He counted ten steps again, this time taking to mind Maggie’s smaller stature. He wound up two steps behind his original ten from his first attempt and started digging. Five minutes later he hit pay dirt.

He’d brushed the dirt off the box, covered up the hole, then climbed in his Explorer and driven home. The key he’d lifted from Lillian’s home on the day she died was in his bedroom drawer. He’d gotten it, then opened the little silver lock that held the box closed.

He carried the box into the basement den, trembling as he sat down and fitted the key in the lock again. He remembered how nervous he’d been the first time he’d unlocked the box, and he was just as nervous now as he opened it again. He supposed he would get this feeling no matter how many times he opened the box and poked through its contents. But sifting through it also had its benefits. It was helping him to understand Maggie Walters and the events that had transpired in the past week. It was helping him to build his armor up for the battle against Satan.

He opened the box. He’d left the items as he found them, and as he lifted them out he looked through each again, one by one. The first things were the birth certificates. One for Margaret Harris, born in Sacramento in June of 1946. The second was for Andrew Harris, a boy, born June 5, 1966, in Los Angeles, California.

Margaret Harris…Maggie Walters…Andrew Harris…Vince Walters.

The items that followed helped to make that identification. There were old photographs of Maggie as a young woman and there were baby photos of Vince. There was a small photo album also, with handwritten captions making identification easier. The woman he knew as Maggie Walters was identified in the photographs depicting a young Maggie as Margaret Swanson, while those of the young boy were identified as Andrew Swanson. The resemblance between the boy identified as Andrew Harris and the young man named Vince who’d introduced himself as Maggie’s son were unmistakable.

Most of the photos in the album were the depictions of normalcy in the 60s: mother and son playing together, what looked like family gatherings, trips to the park, the zoo. There were a section of photos that looked like they were taken in San Francisco. And as the years went by in the collage of photos, so did the dress and hair change with the times. Maggie began to look more hippie-like, as did the other people in the photographs. And even though they all looked to be smiling and happy, there was something about them, some underlying presence that bothered Reverend Hank Powell.

When he first came across this photo album and the birth certificates, his first impression was what he’d told Lillian Withers that day ten years ago. The box contained nothing but mementos of her former life as a sinner. When he saw the birth certificates and made the connection with the photos, he’d thought it was a bit drastic to change your name and identity just to escape from a former life of sin. But as he dug deeper into the box he’d uncovered the reasons for why Maggie Walters had taken such drastic measures.

He took a deep breath and composed himself as he brought those items out now. Thank God there were no photos. Newspaper clippings were bad enough.

It was the newspaper accounts that had disturbed him deeply; they still disturbed him. They were arranged in chronological order, the first dated June 1968. They were brief clippings cut from newspapers in San Jose, Santa Cruz, and Los Gatos, all concerning the discovery of canines skinned and drained of blood in various parts of the city. There had been no known motives for the crimes.

There were similar clippings from August of 1968, then in November of that year there was a single news clipping from the
San Francisco Chronicle
. It concerned the disappearance of a local teenager, a sixteen-year old boy with a history of drug abuse. The boy had apparently disappeared on his way home from school, and it was assumed he’d simply run away.

Reverend Hank Powell believed otherwise.

Starting in April of 1969, newspaper clippings from the Los Angeles area—
The Herald Examiner
, the
Los Angeles Times
, the
Orange County Register
—began appearing with the Bay Area newspapers. They detailed more of the same; brief, four paragraph news items on the discovery of mutilated animals, primarily dogs, and news briefs on missing persons, most of them teenagers.

In August of 1969 the clippings got bigger. The minute Reverend Powell saw the headline his mind went back to when he first saw those headlines:
Five Slain in Los Angeles Home of Film Director Roman Polanski…Actress Sharon Tate among those dead
. When Reverend Powell saw those headlines again among the other clippings his first thought was
this couldn’t be
. Surely Maggie couldn’t have had anything to do with the Manson case. As he flipped through further clippings of the case—the discovery of the LaBiancas, the capture and arrest of Charles Manson and his ‘Family,’ the pre-trial hearings, the convictions and interspersed with those, more of those same four paragraph clippings, now coming from other states, all dealing with dogs found skinned and drained of blood.

Reverend Powell had flipped through the rest of the clippings with bated breath, coming across the other cases of atrocities and murder, already panicking. But then last night he caught something that he missed that first time, and it was this, which had made him proceed with more caution. He’d given a quick prayer to the Lord for letting him see this, because it not only gave him more insight to what he was dealing with, it made him less likely to panic the next time he came across some other shocking bit of news.

The item he’d missed was on the first headline of the Manson case, the discovery of Sharon Tate and the five other people found butchered in Topanga Canyon. The headline was circled in blue ballpoint pen with a question mark scribbled over it. The words, “Did Sam order this?” written in a script the Reverend recognized as Maggie’s was so faint that it was easy to miss. He’d found similar markings in the faint script on other newspaper clippings on the Manson case. Most of them bore that faint question mark. One article, regarding the murder of Hollywood stunt-man “Shorty” Shea, had an inscription that said, “This sounds like it could be the work of the group—not sure.” The clippings on the Manson case were not the only ones that bore such little notes and jottings.

There were other clippings equally ominous. One from 1970 regarded the capture of a man named Stanley Baker, who’d killed a businessman in Montana and confessed to eating his victim’s heart. There was vague speculation that he’d committed murders on the command of a cult, but there’d been no information forthcoming. Smaller clippings followed the Stanley Baker case until October of 1974, when a young Stanford University student named Arlis Perry was found murdered. She’d been found in the campus chapel, nude from the waist down, beaten and choked unconscious. She’d been killed with an ice pick, which had been driven into her brain behind her left ear.

The last newspaper clippings had come from the
Toronto Sun
, dated July 1977, regarding the capture of David Berkowitz in the Son of Sam killings, and from the Orange County Register from October 1988 regarding the capture of serial killer Edwin Groose. Like the Manson clippings, Maggie had stored newspaper accounts of the Berkowitz and Groose case until their conviction.

Interspersed with the newspaper accounts of the two well-known murder trials and the smaller, lesser-known crimes, were clips from various business journals. Some were from the
Wall Street Journal
, others were from magazines like the
Business Weekly
. At first Reverend Powell wasn’t sure of the significance of these clippings, but upon going through them a second time a few nights ago he began to see some sort of thread. All of the clippings had to do with the business activities of one man, Samuel F. Garrison. All of the clippings depicted Samuel Garrison’s slow but steady rise to power in the business world.

He hadn’t taken the time to read all of the clippings, but now he did. He sat in his easy chair with the lamp on, reading through each one. When he was finished with the last one—dated July 4, 1984, regarding the business transaction of a small, private college in the Los Angeles area—he sat back and arranged the papers and clippings in order. He sighed. He still didn’t know what to make of the clippings and Maggie’s relationship with them. He had some ideas, of course, but he wasn’t entirely sure if he was correct in them. He was under the impression that Maggie had some knowledge of something sinister and very dangerous, that she may have been a part of it in the late sixties and early seventies. He replaced the items in the box and closed the lid, snapping the lock shut. Then he placed the box on the oak end table and leaned back in his easy chair for a moment, hands crossed over his stomach, and thought.

The photos corresponded exactly with what he knew about Maggie and Vince. The last photo in the album was from the summer of 1974, judging by the dates printed in black along the white edges. That corresponded to the time Maggie had told Lillian and a few others of when she left California. Her original story, one she stuck with for years and hardly talked about, was that she was involved with a bad crowd in California that was into drugs and she’d left with her son to escape that life. She’d taken Jesus into her heart a year later, in Buffalo, New York where she was trying to start a new life with Vince. Looking through those photographs for the first time, Hank’s first impression was that she’d been a hippie, one of the countless love children who flocked to California in the 1960s and blew their minds on drugs. The newspaper clippings changed his view on that.

He was pretty certain of one thing, though. He was fairly confident that Maggie wasn’t involved in the Manson case. He was also pretty sure she wasn’t a member of the infamous Manson Family. He’d gone to the Lititz Public Library and spent the day on the Internet, reading through various web pages on the case until he grew disgusted with the outlandish theories and stories posted. He’d finally asked a librarian for help and went home with a paperback of Ed Saunders’s
Helter Skelter
. He’d combed through the book, trying to find any mention of other family members. He was unable to find any reference to neither a Maggie Walters nor a Margaret Harris. Likewise, the names that were scrawled in the photo album—Tom and Gladys Black, Paul and Opal Johnson, among many others, weren’t found in the book either. Nor was there any mention of a Samuel F. Garrison.

But the few group shots in the photo album with the names of the various parties identified in black ink sure gave him the impression they were part of that whole counter-culture scene. They certainly looked like they could have belonged to the Family, with their long hair and love beads, their halter-tops and bell-bottom jeans. Their smiling faces bore striking resemblances to the smiling faces of those that had butchered all those people during that hot, sweltering summer of 1969.

Okay, so maybe Maggie wasn’t involved with Manson. But she was either really interested in the case or had some kind of knowledge of it. Maybe she’d known some of the people involved. Maybe she had other suspicions. She also had some knowledge of the Son of Sam killings. Maybe they were just speculations. Who knows? Personally, I don’t know what to make of it. Maybe in her drug-addled mind she developed some crazy conspiracy theory. Maybe some of the people in these photographs—Gladys and Tom, Paul and Opal, maybe this Samuel Garrison person—knew something about the Manson and Berkowitz cases. Maybe they know something and because she knows that they know, she hid this stuff in the box. Maybe all those clippings about dead dogs and missing kids have something to do with it. Maybe this Samuel Garrison character has something to do with it—after all, she did make mention of a Sam in that scribble ‘did Sam order this?’ Maybe this Sam is the ‘Sam’ of Son of Sam. It seems even she wasn’t
entirely sure, but it seems likely that she had reason to believe that the people she was involved with could have been capable of having something to do with both cases. Look at the murder of Shorty Shea; she basically speculates that it looked like something the group could have had something to do with, as if they’d participated in similar crimes. Shea’s murder was solved—a few of the Manson henchmen confessed to that particular killing because the poor guy knew too much. Knew too much of what, though? And why would Maggie believe the people she associated with would have anything to do with the Manson family?