The Treasure Box

  The

  TREASURE

  Box

  The

  TREASURE

  Box

  A Novel

  Penelope J . Stokes

  The Treasure Box

  Copyright © 2001 Penelope J. Stokes

  Published by WestBow Press, a division of Thomas Nelson, Inc.,

  P.O. Box 141000, Nashville, Tennessee, 37214.

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means-electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other-except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stokes, Penelope J.

  The treasure box : a novel / Penelope J. Stokes.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-8499-1705-0 (hardcover)

  ISBN 0-8499-4464-3 (trade paper)

  I. Title

  PS3569.T6219 T74 2002

  813'54—dc21

  2001046668

  CIP

  Printed in the United States of America

  04 05 06 07 08 PHX 10 9 8 7 6

  For Helen,

  whose greatest gifts to me are

  the Treasure Box

  and

  our lifelong friendship

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks are due to certain people God has placed in my

  life, people who remind me that mystery, miracle,

  and wonder still exist in the world:

  My Covenant Group—Cindy, Kay, and Kirstin—

  who dare me to grow with their spiritual questions,

  their intellectual honesty, and their love;

  Carlene and Sandi,

  who wouldn’t let go until I found my joy

  and reconnected with my soul again;

  Ami and Lil,

  who challenge me to the best in myself and in my work;

  and B. J., who cheers me on.

  Thanks, too, to Henrik Ljungstrom,

  Webmaster of http://www.greatoceanliners.net/.

  His excellent Web site provided me with invaluable

  information (as well as many hours of fascination),

  and his personal assistance in research made my

  work on this novel much easier.

  Wonder is the basis of worship.

  —THOMAS CARLYLE

  Contents

  1. VITA’S TREASURE

  2. THE PORTAL

  3. THE TINKER

  4. THE CELEBRATION

  5. CHILD’S PLAY

  6. UNDER THE WILLOW TREE

  7. THE MORNING AFTER

  8. DOWN BY THE RIVERSIDE

  9. THE JUDAS TREE

  10. THE UNMARKED WAY

  11. SAFE HAVENS

  12. GUARDIAN ANGELS

  13. ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE

  14. A DAY OF NEW BEGINNINGS

  15. MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN

  16. ANY PORT IN A STORM

  17. WHERE THE WORLD ENDS

  18. A CRY IN THE NIGHT

  19. WHAT CHILD IS THIS?

  20. BREAKDOWN

  21. THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

  22. BEHIND THE WALLS

  23. THE LABYRINTH

  24. JACOB’S PRAYER

  25. FAMILY LEGACY

  26. AFTER THE BLACKOUT

  EPILOGUE

  1

  VITA’S TREASURE

  Vita? Vita, it’s Mary Kate. Are you there?”

  Vita Kirk grimaced and kept on typing. On the tinny answering machine speaker, her sister’s voice sounded even more whiny and insistent than it did in real life.

  “I know you’re there, Vita. You’re always there. For heaven’s sake, pick up the phone!”

  Vita whirled in her chair and scowled at the machine. She had bought the thing for the sole purpose of screening calls from her garrulous editor Nick, who kept phoning at all hours trying, in his words, to “establish rapport” with his most prolific writer. Rapport. Vita didn’t want rapport. She wanted to be left alone.

  And now the contraption’s bright red eye blinked off and on, signaling that a recording was in progress. A recording of the voice she hadn’t heard in ages but still recognized—that familiar, high-pitched mewling. Mary Kate’s voice.

  “Vita, please.” Her sister’s tone shifted—less petulant, more desperate. “I need to talk to you. It’s about Gordon.”

  Gordon. Vita’s stomach twisted, and her mind lurched into reverse—back sixteen years, to 1985.

  Sixteen years and a hundred lives ago. How old had she been—twenty-two, twenty-three? Old enough to have finished her B.A. and begun working on her master’s in English literature. Old enough to know better when Gordon Locke had swept into her life like a brash young Byron and demanded her undivided attention.

  “Go out with me,” he had said, gazing into her eyes across a small battered table in a secluded corner of the student union. “I won’t take no for an answer.”

  Did anyone ever say no to Gordon Locke, Duke University’s golden boy and most eligible bachelor? A Ph.D. candidate in anthropology. Five years Vita’s senior. Handsome, brilliant, with those amazing, mesmerizing blue eyes. He was perfect. And certain of everything.

  “Marry me,” he said six months later, looking into her eyes the very same way across the very same table. “I won’t take no for an answer.”

  Vita hadn’t even thought of refusing. With Gordon, everything was yes. Yes to his proposal. Yes to a deadly dull administrative job in the chancellor’s office so that she could support them while he finished his degree. Yes to putting her own studies on hold. It would all work out, Gordon assured her.

  Vita believed him. After all, she had looked into his eyes and seen the certainty there. Except that when she brought him home to Asheville, he had looked into someone else’s eyes. Mary Kate’s.

  In 1985, Mary Katherine Kirk had been a not-quite-twenty-year-old beauty. The year before she had taken third runner-up in the Miss North Carolina Pageant and declared her primary interests to include modeling, fashion design, and world peace. Could she have been more unsuited, Vita wondered, for a learned anthropologist? Didn’t Gordon need someone who was his intellectual equal, a scholarly woman, educated in literature and the arts?

  Someone who could hold her own in the academic world—or at least carry on an intelligent conversation?

  But there was no wisdom in love. Gordon married Mary Kate six months later, in a simple ceremony with the bride’s sister as reluctant but dutiful maid of honor. The last twist of the knife.

  Vita had seen Mary Kate only twice since the reception—once at their father’s funeral in 1989, and a year later at their mother’s.

  Her sister still lived in Asheville, barely thirty miles from Vita’s home in the small town of Hendersonville. Thirty miles . . .

  “Vita, I’m going to keep talking until you pick up the phone.

  This is important. Gordon is in the hospital.”

  Vita snatched up the receiver, and the answering machine beeped loudly before shutting off. “All right, I’m here. What is it? But make it quick; I’m working.”

  “Gordon’s had a heart attack. He’s in the cardiac unit at Mission Hospital.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Vita kept her voice low, calm.

  “It wasn’t a bad one, fortunately. He was playing tennis, and—”

  Vita�
�s mind conjured up an image of Gordon in his tennis whites, tanned and shining, a young Robert Redford, his blond hair damp with sweat and ruffled by the wind . . .

  “Vita, are you there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “I need someone to take the twins for a few days. They’re on break from school, and—”

  The twins. Little Gordy, the flaxen-haired image of his dad. Mary Vita—so named, Vita was certain, as a vain attempt at reconciliation. They had been toddlers at Mother’s funeral; they would be eleven or twelve by now.

  “Surely you have someone else who could look after them,” Vita suggested.

  “We have friends at the university, of course, but—”

  Friends. The same ones—at least some of them—who had once orbited around Vita and Gordon. They had transferred their loyalties to Mary Kate as easily as Gordon had transferred his affections.

  But Vita hadn’t been surprised. At Duke, they were Gordon’s friends all along, faithful followers of the golden boy. Some of them had even wrangled teaching positions and moved to UNCA after Gordon had received his appointment there. For years now they had all lived together in a closed little academic enclave, an intellectual and social ghetto.

  Vita returned her attention to Mary Kate. “So call one of them.”

  “But they’re not family.” Her sister sounded uncertain. “And besides, they’re busy people. They’ve got their own—” She bit back the rest of the sentence, and Vita heard the sharp intake of air.

  “Go ahead and say it. They’ve got their own lives. Unlike me.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that. Vita, please. I need you to do this.”

  “I’m sure you can find someone else. Someone more appropriate.” She hung up the phone and turned the volume on the answering machine down to zero.

  An hour after her conversation with Mary Kate, Vita was still steaming, still trying to settle down to work. But her concentration had been broken, her momentum interrupted. At last she gave up. She might just as well get some errands done and try to start fresh in the afternoon.

  With a collapsible shopping bag draped over her shoulder, Vita left the house and headed toward town. It was a perfect April day, with dogwoods blooming and ornamental pear trees shedding their petals on the breeze like pink confetti. Between the trees, in the distance, the mountains rose up in lush blue-green layers. To Vita’s eyes, they always looked like women napping, their rolling dark hips and rounded shoulders gently rising and falling against the blue dome of sky.

  Hendersonville, North Carolina, lay nestled in a hollow of the Blue Ridge—the kind of place where people still sat on benches along the treelined streets or chatted around open-air café tables. Main Street hosted the Apple Festival in fall, the Bluegrass Festival in spring, and the Antiques Festival somewhere in between. Visitors flocked in for the celebrations, and some of them decided they had found heaven—or Mayberry— and simply stayed. Low crime, wonderful weather, stunning mountain vistas—what could be better?

  But Mayberry had its drawbacks. For one thing the place, in the parlance of the locals, “had got overrun with foreigners.”

  Translation: wealthy retirees, attracted by the temperate climate and natural beauty of western North Carolina, had flocked in with their New York and Florida money and driven real-estate prices through the roof. Traffic had doubled. On weekend afternoons, you’d have to stand in line for half an hour just to get a table at the Park Deli. Finding a parking place on Main Street was a major life accomplishment.

  Fortunately, Vita didn’t often have to worry about parking.

  Her house was only four blocks from Main, in a sedate, shaded neighborhood just off Church Street. She had purchased the home ten years ago, before real-estate prices had skyrocketed—a small two-story Victorian with a wide front porch, an Italian marble fireplace, and all its woodwork intact and unpainted. And close enough to town that she could walk most anywhere she wanted to go.

  Vita was just about to cross Church Street when a pickup truck roared through the light, blaring its horn. She jumped back, her heart hammering, and realized that she had her mind not on traffic but on Mary Kate. And Gordon.

  For a minute or two she stood on the corner with her eyes closed, forcing herself to take deep, cleansing breaths. She had to calm down. Obsessing about her sister didn’t do her blood pressure any good, and it might kill her cold if she stepped in front of a speeding car.

  She waited for the light to turn green, then looked both ways—twice—before jogging across Church Street and up the hill toward Main. She dragged her thoughts away from Mary Kate and forced herself to make a mental “to do” list—get a few groceries, stop by the drugstore, perhaps drop in at Hap Reardon’s antique shop to look around. She could get her errands done and be home before the town clock chimed noon, then have a bit of lunch and get back to work.

  As she passed the courthouse, a young couple came out the doors and onto the sidewalk, holding hands and smiling at one another. The man held up a marriage license and beamed in Vita’s direction. “We’re getting married!”

  Vita thought about Gordon and raised one eyebrow. “My condolences.”

  She walked on without another word, and when she turned her head, she could see out of the corner of her eye the two of them standing there, staring in her direction and whispering.

  People always whispered behind their hands when Vita Kirk was around—words like “bitter” and “withdrawn” and sometimes even “crazy.” Vita knew what they said. But she had trained herself not to care. Caring just made a person vulnerable.

  It all came down to practicalities, in the end. You could put your hand to the flame and get burned, or you could keep your distance and stay safe. Vita had been burned more than once, and she had learned her lesson: Wrap yourself in enough layers, and you won’t freeze to death. But even if you’re shivering, stay away from the fire.

  True, she felt the chill sometimes, but for the most part she had trained herself to ignore it. She had her books to keep her company and a job that allowed her to explore the world without ever setting foot off her own front porch. Her systematic, orderly existence suited her quite well, thank you very much. It wasn’t everything, but it was enough.

  For years now Vita had written travel guides for a small publishing company in New York City. Vita wasn’t oblivious to the irony—a travel writer who never went anywhere. Still, it was interesting work and it paid the bills, and she learned a lot in the process—information that convinced her, had she needed any persuasion, to stay right where she was. She knew, for example, how many tourists got mugged annually in airports and alleyways and city parks, how many wallets were lifted during tours of cathedrals and shrines and palaces. She had at her fingertips data that would make the most seasoned traveler quake with fear: the percentage of airline pilots and railroad engineers who came to work drunk or hung over; the number of burglaries per day in hotel rooms across America; the statistics on extramarital affairs aboard luxury cruise ships.

  If everybody knew what Vita Kirk knew, they’d stay at home, too.

  But she had plenty of other reasons to keep to herself—and not just the Gordon-Mary Kate fiasco, either. Other losses, other pains—places in her psyche she’d rather not revisit. Gone, but not forgotten, like a childhood scar that twinges when the seasons turn, like bursitis in the elbow that shoots a spark of pain to signal an approaching storm.

  It was better to let the past remain buried, where it belonged.

  Hanging around the cemetery only invited the ghosts to come home and take up residence.

  The bell over the door jingled as Vita crossed the threshold of Pastimes, the tiny, cramped secondhand store at the south edge of Main Street. Pastimes billed itself as an “Antique Shoppe and Purveyor of Attic Treasures,” but in reality it was more of a junk store, crowded to capacity with mismatched china and crystal, tarnished silver and chipped flower vases, gaudy lamps and discarded furniture.

  A year ago, Vit
a had purchased five place settings of an English china pattern called “Her Majesty’s Garden,” and every now and then she dropped in to see if any additional pieces of the pattern had come into the shop. Not that she needed more than that; she never had company to dinner, and she always washed and dried her single plate or bowl before she retired for the night. In truth, one place setting would have been enough for Vita. But she valued symmetry, and five dinner plates in a glass-front china cabinet made for a lopsided display.

  “Well, if it isn’t Miss Vita Kirk! What might I do for you today?”

  Vita turned from the haphazard arrangement of china on a rickety shelf and repressed a frustrated sigh. The last thing she wanted this morning was an extended conversation with Hap Reardon about her “adorable little Victorian cottage” and how some piece of leftover memorabilia that had just come into his shop would be an “absolutely perfect accessory” to her decor.

  As Reardon approached, all Vita’s natural defenses slammed around her and bolted into place. The man had no boundaries, no concept of personal space. He was forever backing her into a corner, encroaching upon her territory until she would either buy what he suggested out of sheer desperation, or make a panicked exit without having the leisure to look around.

  Vita didn’t know why she put up with it. The china, she supposed. No place else in town carried antique china settings, and although she might be able to track down the pattern on the Internet, she had better things to do with her time than spend hours on-line in a bidding war with some anonymous competitor who used the handle “eBay Baybee.”

  Besides, she occasionally did find genuine treasures in Pastimes, and at bargain prices. When she had first bought her house and was attempting to furnish it, Hap had come up with a fine old claw-foot table just perfect for her dining room. It had been stored in a chicken house and was covered with bird droppings, but a good washing revealed it to be solid oak. She had gotten it for a steal—sixty-five dollars, including Hap’s time in loading it into his pickup and delivering it to her front door.

  Clearly, he had hoped to be invited in. He had stood there on one foot and then the other, grinning and thrusting his hands in and out of his pockets. At last he had cleared his throat and said, “Well, I guess that’ll about do it. Unless you want me to set it up in your dining room. I could do that for you. If you want.” When Vita said nothing, he blathered on, anxious as a seventh grader on his first date. “We could have coffee—or something—if you want, that is. You know, try out the new table, like a—well, like a test drive. See how it works.” Still Vita waited. “Or whatever,” he went on. “You know, if you wanted to—”