Preacher Sam

by Cassondra Windwalker

  Preacher Sam

  Cassondra Windwalker

  This Book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, duplicated, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  ISBN (print): 978-1-7335994-1-2

  ISBN (epub): 978-1-7335994-2-9

  ISBN (mobi): 978-1-7335994-3-6

  * * *

  Cover design by Najla Qamber

  Edited by Lindy Ryan

  Interior design layout by Rebecca Poole

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  Black Spot Books

  All rights reserved.

  Release – September 17, 2019

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this novel are fictitious and are products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual events, or locales or persons, living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  About the Author

  To my mother, Cynthia Ellen Baty,

  who believed in Sam and Dani from the first time

  she met them, and who probably prefers

  their company to mine.

  Chapter One

  “Wow. That’s a lot of rage right there.”

  Mrs. Palmer sniffed, unimpressed by Sam’s response. Dani glared at him, but thankfully, she couldn’t kick him in the shins as she clearly longed to do. Not in front of Parker’s elementary school principal, who would be only too gleeful to document parental violence as a root cause of Parker’s misbehavior.

  The small reading room off the library had been well and truly wrecked. Parker was nothing if not thorough, thought Sam ruefully. The small, round table and five chairs that had been its centerpiece were all upended. Books and ripped pages littered the floor. Sam watched his sister eye those pages and knew that, as far as she was concerned, Parker’s cardinal sin here had been damaging books. Sam’s gaze, though, kept returning to the message scrawled on the wall in black crayon: “I don’t belong here.”

  In this room? At this school? In this world? The statement seemed terrifyingly existential for a seven-year-old.

  Mrs. Palmer’s voice slowly bored its way through Sam’s skull.

  “We will be taking the strongest possible disciplinary measures. This sort of thing cannot be tolerated. You understand that something very serious is clearly at play here. The boy is disturbed.”

  Uh-oh. Now that was a rookie mistake. And Mrs. Palmer was definitely no rookie. She was a wrung-out, strung-out, burned-out female specimen of the educational sort: a brightly-colored, horrifically-patterned tunic-thing wrapped around a scarecrow figure topped with too much makeup falling into unhappy lines that bracketed her eyes and tightly-bound bleached hair. Female only in the sense that she was distinctly unmale.

  Sam grimaced at the tenor of his own thoughts. Six months of therapy behind him and he still had to police his own mind with the rigor of a martinet. Somewhere along the way, he’d become too accustomed to sorting women into boxes. Not Dani, of course. She wasn’t a woman. She was his sister. Totally different.

  Dani took a step closer to Mrs. Palmer and hissed quietly, “Did you just call my son disturbed?”

  “What would you call a seven-year-old boy who wreaks this kind of destruction?”

  “Wreaks destruction? You are aware that this is a schoolroom and not Ragnarok, aren’t you?”

  This is going to be good. Sam crossed his arms and leaned his impressive length against the door. He had been reluctant to accompany Dani, but this was entertainment worth paying for.

  Dani was just getting started.

  “I call him a seven-year-old boy who is pissed off. Naughty. Misbehaving. Out of control. You know, all things all seven-year-old boys are from time to time, especially if they are being supervised by ignorant, inexperienced louts with a hysterical bent who like to assign psychological disorders to anyone who dares challenge the lines of their neat little box. You do realize that he has never done anything remotely like this at home, don’t you? I should be asking you exactly what you did to make him so angry.”

  If possible, Mrs. Palmer became even stiffer, though Sam thought he detected a hint of fear in her eyes. “Your attitude of blaming the school instead of the child is exactly why we have a no-tolerance for this sort of thing, Mrs. Geisler.”

  “It’s Ms. Geisler, not Mrs. Unlike you, I don’t need to attach myself to a man’s name in order to possess an identity. And I absolutely blame Parker for what he did here. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t blame you for what you did, too. Waxing histrionic over what amounts to a child’s temper tantrum pretty much proves how incompetent you are at managing children, which is your whole job.”

  “You have a right to your opinion, Mrs. Geisler.”

  Now that was just petty, Sam thought.

  “But when Parker returns to school next week, he will be on a behavior management program. If he is unable to comply with that, we will have to explore more serious options.”

  Dani was done. “Just give me my son and let us get out of here.”

  Sam barely had time to unfold himself and move out of the way as his sister stormed through the door. She wasn’t leaving much doubt about where Parker got his flair for the dramatic, Sam mused as he hastily followed her.

  Mrs. Palmer led them back to her office, where Parker sat hunched in a too-big chair, his legs swinging morosely as he clutched his backpack to his chest. The vice principal sat beside him, his arm draped casually over the back of Parker’s chair. Engrossed in his phone, the man barely spared a glance for Dani and Sam as he rose to exit with an absent pat on Parker’s shoulder.

  “Come on, Parker,” Dani ordered grimly. Parker slid off the chair, eyes down. Dani addressed Mrs. Palmer again. “If he’s going to be out of school for a week, I need his assignments.”

  “His teachers have not had time to pull all that together yet. I can’t ask my teachers to work overtime for every miscreant student.” Mrs. Palmer seemed to derive a lot of pleasure from putting Dani in her place. “But I will ask them to email you the assignments as they have time this week.”

  The drive home was bleak. Sam felt no compulsion to contribute to the conversation, which consisted solely of an angry, lecturing tirade by Dani and a few monosyllabic responses from Parker. Sam still wasn’t sure how his presence had improved the situation. Dani had seemed more than capable of handling the school people on her own. But in spite of that bold feminist declaration to Mrs. Palmer, she’d told
Sam she wanted him along so that they would take her “more seriously.” For all her independence, Dani was self-conscious about Parker’s lack of a dad in his life. She wanted the school to be clear that her son was not without positive male influences.

  Probably would have sold better a year and a half ago, thought Sam bitterly, back when he was still a husband and the preacher of one of the largest community churches in the area. Now he was just his sister’s freeloading roommate and a half-assed CPA. Still, male was male, he supposed. His six-foot-four height was certainly more impressive than his diminutive sister’s, though she hadn’t seemed to need any backup from him.

  And women thought men used them to fill in the gaps, he thought. I’m just the token male in these weird female games. He thought of the vice-principal, slouched beside Parker and absorbed in his own electronic world while Mrs. Palmer waged war with Parker’s mom. Like a king on a chessboard, skulking around behind the pawns while the queens did battle.

  Sam grinned to himself at the idea of being helplessly shuttled around a playing board by ruthless female competitors. No such luck.

  “What are you grinning about?” Dani demanded grumpily as she switched her focus from her son to her brother without warning.

  There was absolutely no safe answer to that question. Sam took refuge in a bald-faced lie.

  “I’m not grinning.” Naturally, his face refused to cooperate. His lips stretched wider.

  “What are you talking about? You’re grinning like a damn hyena.”

  “You shouldn’t swear in front of Parker,” Sam told her piously.

  “Or what? He’ll pick up bad habits? Clearly it’s too late for that.”

  “I don’t think we should give up on Parker just yet.” Sam angled a cautiously mischievous glance toward the backseat. Parker was listening intently, a small smile on his lips, plainly relieved that his mother’s anger had found a new focus.

  “Oh, we’re not giving up on Parker. I have plans for him, don’t you worry about that.” Sam heard Parker swallow hard. “But this is about you and that stupid expression on your face. There’s nothing funny about this situation.”

  “I think it was Mark Twain who said laughter is man’s most effective and least-used weapon.”

  “I think it was God who said that it is sport to a fool to do mischief.”

  “Now, Dani, you don’t even believe in God. You can’t quote him one minute and mock him the next. And none of us are going to be doing any mischief this afternoon. Promise.”

  Dani pulled her car into the back alley of the bookshop deli that was also her home. “You’re right about that. You two aren’t going to have time for any mischief. Parker, you go upstairs and clean your room. I want every square inch of your carpet that isn’t covered by furniture to be immediately visible to the naked eye. And Sam, we missed half the lunch rush. I’m not going to miss the second half.”

  Parker trudged upstairs without another word, his backpack weighing him down so much that Sam thought it remarkable he didn’t give up on the first landing. Dani flew into action as soon as her feet hit the floor. Luckily she’d had no idea what the day held when she’d started work at 4 a.m. that morning, so all the baking and prep work was done. Soup bubbled and sandwich fixings awaited the grill. Sam started fresh coffee brewing while Dani flipped the CLOSED sign to OPEN.

  Chapter Two

  Located in the heart of Indy’s artsy Broad Ripple district, Dani’s bookshop-deli Meats & Reads picked up plenty of walk-by traffic, even though regulars would have been disappointed to find the place closed until a quarter to one that day. Sam felt guilty for wishing their detour to the elementary school that morning would have diminished the lunch rush. He knew his sister needed the business, but she also seriously needed to hire some help. By the time things slowed down, it was nearly two in the afternoon. His feet hurt, and he was starving.

  Dani was in the kitchen, washing dishes with a determined rage that made Sam’s own jaw ache in sympathy. He tossed a couple of beef and Swiss sandwiches onto the panini grill and eyed her cautiously. It appeared even the distraction of customers hadn’t taken the edge off her fury.

  Five minutes later, Sam slid a plate of hot, gooey deliciousness in his sister’s direction with the same care with which he would have approached a growling German Shepherd.

  She tossed him an annoyed glance but devoured the entire sandwich in four bites.

  “Hangry much?” he asked, abandoning tact now that she had some food in her system.

  She wiped her mouth, a vain attempt to hide the twitch of her lips.

  “You know this is serious!”

  Sam made quick work of his own sandwich. “But not that serious. You were right when you told that woman this is just a seven-year-old acting out. Parker is a good kid. Most of the time. You’re a good mom. It’s just a bad day. Not the end of the world.”

  Dani sighed. “I guess. But suspended for an entire week? The worst I ever got was lunch detention!”

  Sam laughed. “But you were an annoying little goody-two-shoes. Plus, back then, our teachers just pulled out the paddle.”

  “I never got paddled!”

  Sam grinned. “See? Goody-Two-Shoes. You know I can’t say the same. Go talk to your kid. Find out what set him off. I’ll watch the shop.”

  Dani rolled her shoulders and conceded the point. “You’re right. I’ll be back.”

  Sam shook his head. “Take your time. You know it’ll be slow now.”

  Sam grabbed a cloth and walked back into the lunchroom to wipe down tables as the door chime signaled a customer. He looked up with an automatic smile as an older man stepped through the door. Sam’s first thought was that he’d never seen someone look so much like black Socrates. Or, at least, what he imagined Socrates looked like. Short and bald except for a halo of gray grizzle, with a suit-bound stomach announcing his arrival and an expression of wry amusement on his face, the newcomer met Sam’s gaze with a wave.

  “Howdy there,” he called in a rumbling voice that carried easily across the small shop. “I hope I missed the rush?”

  “That you did,” Sam told him, scooping up napkins and clearing tables as quickly as he could. “Welcome to Meats & Reads. Can I get you something to eat or help you find a book?”

  “I think I’ll just poke around for a bit, thanks.”

  “You bet. Make yourself at home and let me know if you change your mind.”

  Sam finished restocking the pastry case as the customer walked up to the counter with a leather journal in his hand. “Will that be all?” Sam asked.

  “Oh, no,” rejoined the other man. “I’ll take three of those peanut butter cookies and a cup of coffee. I’d like to buy you a cup too, if you don’t mind.”

  Sam felt his eyebrows climb. “Me?”

  The man’s face creased in a smile. “Well, I guess that’s silly, huh? I imagine you get your coffee for free. What I’d really like to buy is a few minutes of your time to bend your ear.”

  Sam loaded the cookies onto a plate and pushed them across the counter. “Twenty-four-fifty,” he said. “Need a bag for the journal? You’ve piqued my curiosity. I’ll give you my valuable time for free.”

  “Rufus Ffaukes,” said the man by way of introduction, extending a chubby-fingered hand. “I’m the new preacher at the Broad Ripple Community Church. And no bag is necessary.”

  Sam had accepted the man’s hand automatically, his own tightening reflexively at Rufus’ words.

  “Ouch!”

  Sam released him.

  “Lord help me,” he muttered.

  “Actually, I’m hoping you can help the Lord in this case,” said Rufus, shaking out his hand with a pained expression.

  Sam placed a warmed mug on the counter and gestured to the coffee carafe before crossing his arms. “Help yourself. Maybe you haven’t heard, but the Lord isn’t looking for my help with much of anything these days.”

  Rufus shook his head as he filled his cup. “I can’t say
I’ve received any extraterrestrial information to that effect. Maybe some tired old church gossip that I can’t attest to the truth of. However, what I do know is that you shepherded this church for several years before I came along. And I think you might have some insight that I lack.”

  Sam found he was intrigued in spite of himself, and not above poking the bear just a little, to see if he had much of a bite. He lowered himself into one of the comfy chairs by the window. Rufus grunted as he did the same.

  “I have to say, it looks like they tried to correct every possible mistake they made in hiring me.” Poke.

  Rufus laughed heartily, apparently unpokeable. “Right? White, black, young, old, local boy, Southern boy.”

  Sam had thought he’d caught a softer edge to Rufus’ speech, although it could hardly be described as a drawl. He suspected Rufus had been in the north for quite some time and used his Southern accent to encourage folks to underestimate him via familiar stereotypes.

  “I can hardly blame them,” Sam went on.

  “No, I imagine you pushed them to the edges of their spiritual comfort zone. They must have been dismayed to realize how small a space that was. But I’m more than happy to make the most of their distress. The Lord works in mysterious ways, you know. What they intended only as a Band-Aid may turn out to be actual aid and comfort after all.”