system was active, and any window, or outside door, on the first floor was opened, that set off one warning buzzer and a light on the control panel Marion had set up in what had been Mom and Dad’s bedroom, but was now his.
The second system did the same thing for windows on the second floor and the two dormer windows in the attic. The third system protected the powder magazine only. The powder magazine was in the basement. It had originally been a larder where Mom had stored tomatoes mostly, but beans too, and chow-chow and things like that. Marion liked cooking, but he wasn’t about to start canning things the way Mom had. It wasn’t worth it.
The first time he had put something in the powder magazine, it was still a larder. That was when he had come from Vietnam on emergency leave when Mom had gotten so sick. At the time, he had wondered why it was so important that he knew he had to bring twenty-seven pounds of Czechoslovakian plastique and two dozen detonators home with him. Now, of course, he knew. It was all part of God’s plan.
If God hadn’t wanted him to bring the plastique home, then when the MPs at Tan Son Nhut had randomly inspected outbound transient luggage, they would have selected his to inspect, and taken it away from him.
Marion hadn’t then yet learned that when something odd or out of the ordinary happens, that he didn’t have to worry about it, because it was invariably God’s plan, and sooner or later, he would come to understand what the Lord had had in mind.
When he’d come home, Mom was already in University Hospital, but there was a colored lady taking care of the house, and he didn’t want her hurting herself in any way, so he had put the plastique and the detonators in the larder and put a padlock on the door.
God had put off taking Mom into Heaven until they had had a chance to say good-bye, but not much more than that. He had been home seventy-two hours when the Lord called her home. And then he’d had those embarrassing weeping sessions whenever he thought of Mom or Dad or all the kids (he thought of them as kids, although they weren’t much younger than he was) who’d fouled up, or been unlucky and been disintegrated, and they hadn’t sent him back to Vietnam, but instead to Fort Eustis, Virginia, as an instructor in demolitions to young officers in the Engineer Basic Officer School.
They used mostly Composition C-4 at Eustis, which wasn’t as good as the Czechoslovakian plastique the Viet Cong used, and sometimes just ordinary dynamite, and when he was setting up the demonstrations, he often slipped a little Composition C-4, or a stick of dynamite, or a length of primer cord, in his field jacket pocket and then brought it to Philadelphia and put it in the larder when he came home on weekends.
God, of course, had been making him do that, even though at the time he hadn’t understood it.
One of the first things he did when he was released from active duty was to turn the larder into a proper powder magazine. This meant not only reinforcing the door with steel bars and installing some really good locks, but also installing a small exhaust fan for ventilation that turned on automatically for five minutes every hour, and, after a good deal of experimentation and consulting a humidity gauge, one 100-watt and one 40-watt bulb that burned all the time and kept the humidity down below twenty percent.
After Marion had his supper, he put the leftover green beans in the refrigerator, and the leftover mashed potatoes and the pork chop bones in the garbage, and then washed his dishes.
He then went to watch the CBS Evening News, to see if there would be anything on it about the Vice President coming to Philadelphia. There was not, but it had been in the newspapers, and therefore it was true.
He turned the television off, and then went down the stairs to the cellar. He took the keys to the powder magazine from their hiding place, on top of the second from the left rafter, and unlocked the door.
Everything seemed to be in good shape. The humidity gauge said there was twelve percent humidity and that it was fifty-nine degrees Fahrenheit in the magazines. That was well within the recommended parameters for humidity and temperature. He carefully locked