“How long has this been going on?”
“Just a few weeks. Until that point, she was constantly over at Monica’s. Then, suddenly, she’s not returning Monica’s calls and she’s spending a lot of time in Phoenix with Whitney, either at the mall or at the movies.”
Or in the desert while her mother thought she was at places where it would be hard to track her down. David wasn’t sure of that, though, and absolutely did not want to alarm Martha—or lose any of the trust he might be gaining with the young people in his church—by making a big deal out of something that might be nothing more than…than perhaps a school biology-project trip. Martha had enough real things to worry about. And David didn’t want to establish the reputation of being a tattletale or instigating mistrust between teenagers and their parents.
He’d have a talk with Shelley. Then, if his suspicions proved to have some basis in fact, he would go straight to her mother.
“Anyway,” Martha said, shifting her weight without changing her rigid position, “when she told me about Monica’s invitation, I encouraged her to go. I know Monica and her parents very well. And those girls have always been so good for each other.”
Even from his distant vantage point, David had seen that. When he’d first come to town and met with the parish youth, he’d found Shelley and Monica almost comical in the way they’d completed each other’s sentences. And irritating in their constant whispering, as though plotting his demise. Or, more likely, the demise of some young, unsuspecting stud at Shelter Valley High School.
“So what did you think of the sermon this morning?” They still had thirty miles to go. And he was determined to avoid the forays into the past that this trip was trying to foist upon him.
“I think you’re the strangest preacher I’ve ever met.”
David grinned. “I’ll take that as a compliment.” Glancing over at her, he was struck by the feeling that enveloped him and then was gone—as though he’d just had a perfect moment.
She was pretty enough, with that short sassy hair and her dark expressive eyes, but she was wearing, as always, a pair of unremarkable slacks and a button-down blouse. Nothing to write home about. Or have a perfect moment over, either.
So it must just be that he enjoyed her company. One sharp mind pitted against another. He could settle for that.
“Can I ask you something?” She’d been staring out the window, but turned to look at him.
“Of course.” He’d been waiting for a moment like this. A time without interruptions to discuss with her the things he’d learned that would make her life if not easier, certainly more bearable.
“I understand and can respect your decision to focus your life on your job. It seems more and more people are doing that these days, sometimes at the cost of a family. But from what I’ve seen, a guy only chooses to do that if he’s been burned…”
David’s fists clenched around the steering wheel as she paused. He said nothing.
“So have you?”
“What?” He knew what she was asking.
“Been burned.”
He couldn’t lie to her. “Isn’t that all part of the human experience?” The question was a cheap shot. And the only one he had. Get her to engage in a spiritual discussion, though, and he’d be safe.
“So you’ve been in love?”
He could tell her he loved everyone. Or tried to.
“No.”
“You haven’t?” He could feel her gaze, feel her curiosity. And her surprise.
Focusing on the billboards advertising an upcoming mall, the motels and restaurants at the next exit and then on the speed limit sign, David shook his head. He wasn’t the only thirty-eight-year-old man unvisited by cupid. Truth be told, he thought those who had been were in the minority. Romantic love was a fantasy perpetuated by fairy tales and romance novels. And women.
“Never?”
“Maybe. Once.” He couldn’t believe he’d said it. Hadn’t he just reminded himself that romantic love wasn’t real?
“Who was she?” Martha’s voice was more compassionate than curious.
“No one, really,” he told her with a quick glance in her direction. “Just a girl I knew in high school. I was only fifteen.”
What was it about this woman that threatened all the carefully held beliefs he’d developed over the years? How could she, in just a few short months, with a few innocuous questions, get from him something he didn’t even admit to himself?
“What happened?”
He shrugged. “Not much. I wasn’t what she wanted.”
“I can’t believe that.”
A grin came, seemingly from nowhere, as he glanced at her. “Thank you.”
“So what about after that? Surely you dated?”
He’d hoped they were finished with this topic. He searched for a way to end the conversation, change it into something else. Anything else. Immediately.
“I was busy,” was all he came up with. Her timing couldn’t have been worse. This trip to Phoenix, her questions, were surrounding him with a dark energy he’d left behind—or so he’d thought—forever.
“You’re telling me you’ve never been with a woman?”
David grinned again. Painfully this time. Forcing himself to focus on the knowledge that he owed her nothing. Owed no one anything from his past. He’d atoned for his sins.
“Kind of a personal question, wouldn’t you say, Ms. Moore?”
“No more personal than the half-a-dozen times you’ve tried to climb into my soul, Preacher.” Her expression was completely serious. “Unless, of course, you want to tell me that it’s more intimate to connect with a person physically than spiritually.”
God, this woman could wrap him in knots. Now she wanted to get spiritual.
“Okay,” he said, deciding there was no harm in giving her an abridged version if it meant she’d leave it alone. “Yes, I’ve been with a woman. We didn’t really date. It’s more that we had a mutually satisfying relationship in the midst of pursuing the things that really mattered to us—our careers.” Whitney’s profession might not have been legal, but, still, it was a career. Her only career. And, in the years he’d known her, a very lucrative one.
“So what happened?”
Still twenty miles to Phoenix.
“I decided to enter the seminary.” Okay, there’d been a bit more to it than that. A crisis. The threat of jail. A conversation from an unexpected place that turned his entire life around—that showed him the potential in himself he’d never known was there.
“And she didn’t want to be a preacher’s wife?”
He almost laughed at the thought. But the image was too damned sad.
“I didn’t ask her.”
Ten miles passed. Ten miles for David to put the feelings, the memories, behind him. To work on keeping them behind him as he approached what lay ahead.
“Have you ever regretted the decision?”
He wanted to pretend not to know what she was talking about. To act as though he’d moved on, forgotten the thread of their conversation. His conscience wouldn’t let him.
There was a very fine line between not telling truths that didn’t have to be told, and lying. David was balancing very carefully.
“No.”
“So serving people, being a father figure to many is rewarding enough to compensate for never being a real father to children of your own?”
“Yes, I think so,” he answered with more ease. “But that’s not the only reward. I’ve been given a peace of heart and mind I never would have known in my other life.”
“You feel peaceful right now, Preacher?” she asked him. She’d turned her head. Was looking at him.
Slowly, David turned his own head to meet her gaze head-on. “Yes.”
But that didn’t mean he didn’t also feel other emotions.
Like dread.
Or attraction?
No. He did not find the woman seated next to him attractive. Exasperating, maybe. Frustrating, i
nfuriating…intelligent, admirable…stubborn, domineering…sassy, strong, loyal…
His eyes firmly facing front again, he concentrated on the dread. Which was how he felt about the next couple of hours. He’d planned never to return to these places.
“DAVID MARKS! I’ll be damned. Never thought we’d see you around here again.”
“Life has a way of doing that, Jen,” David told the overly made-up and underdressed woman who was sitting on a stoop outside an apartment building in a part of town Martha would never, ever, have entered by herself. The woman was probably in her thirties, but her face looked as if life had taken its toll.
“Are you sure we’re safe here?” she whispered. There were very few people out and what businesses there were—an auto-repair place, a hairdresser, some kind of small grocery—apparently closed on Sunday afternoons. They’d parked the Explorer behind an abandoned gas station a couple of blocks over and were walking the rest of the way to wherever they were going.
“Relatively safe.”
His answer was not what she’d hoped to hear. Nor was she eager to hear about how that thirty-year-old tart had known the new preacher in Shelter Valley. Idealistic as he was, he’d probably tell Martha he’d volunteered at the soup kitchen down the road and these people were all deserving of love and trust.
He was going to get hurt, believing stuff like that.
To say the area was a neighborhood was a kindness. It was a series of haphazard buildings, some commercial, some not, sitting behind cracked sidewalks and broken-down streets. Apparently, the city taxpayers’ money didn’t extend to road upkeep in these parts.
“Maybe we should—”
“You asked to come,” he interrupted. “This was your idea, not mine.”
He was right, of course, Martha conceded, marching silently beside him. He was also just a bit intimidating. He’d lost that gentleness with which he always addressed her.
“Remember, I do the talking. You keep your mouth shut no matter what.”
She nodded. He didn’t have to worry there.
“David, my man, I knew you’d be back.”
Looking at the slimy grin on the face of the middle-aged man leaning on a beat-up mailbox on the next corner, Martha decided she’d rather they’d stayed with the hookers. This guy was too slick. In the way he looked at her. His hand on David’s shoulder. His flashy slacks and jacket.
“You here to do business?”
“Nope.” David, hands in the pockets of his jeans, glanced up the street over the other man’s shoulder. And then said, “Could I do it if I were?”
The guy’s stare moved slowly toward and then past Martha. “Who’s the broad?”
“A mother trying to protect her kid.”
The guy’s eyes might have softened. Martha didn’t really think so, but she’d seen something. “Girl or boy?”
“Girl.” David sounded tough, authoritative, more like somebody’s bodyguard than a minister.
Uneasy, she turned to him. How had he learned to do that? Why?
And why did she like it?
More to the point, the preacher thought this guy could help them? He smelled like he hadn’t had a bath in far too long. The man gave her the creeps.
“You think she’s here?”
Could this disgusting piece of humanity have had something to do with Ellen’s attack? Oh God, she hoped not.
“I’m just here to see if things are as I remembered them.”
“You want to know if she’s got a job here.”
If this guy had ever, ever been anywhere near her daughter, Martha would kill him. Over and over again. Until there wasn’t a trace of him left with the memory of her daughter on his skin.
“Maybe.”
“You still got God, doin’ the preachin’ stuff?”
Martha wondered at the odd note of challenge in the stranger’s voice. A black kid, about the size of Tim but looking nothing like her son in his oversize jeans and faded, ripped jersey, rode by on a bike that had apparently been built from spare parts. This whole afternoon was like a descent into some strange version of reality, a twilight zone.
She might not have noticed David’s hesitancy if she hadn’t been, for safety’s sake, standing so close to him. The muscles of his back clenched. His chin lowered. And then lifted ever so slightly.
“I’m still the same old guy.” His words weren’t at all what she’d expected. “You know, tigers and their stripes, leopards and their spots…”
“Okay.” Ignoring Martha completely, the guy elbowed David with an intimacy that made her feel sick. “I don’t have the answers you want,” he said quietly. “I got out awhile back when it looked like there’d be layoffs. Permanent ones. I don’t think the old folks are going to appreciate you asking around.”
David nodded slowly, stared off over the guy’s shoulder again, then headed on down the street. “Thanks, man,” he said after he’d taken about three steps.
Martha, confused and completely out of her element, was right behind him.
“WHAT WAS THAT ALL ABOUT?” The second the Explorer turned onto a familiar Phoenix road, Martha’s question tumbled out.
“No questions, that was the deal.” Back in his car, David wasn’t shedding the old skin as quickly as he would’ve liked.
He’d overestimated himself when he’d agreed to bring her with him. Thinking he was so far removed, so forgotten or at least forgiven that he’d be able to slide in for a visit—for a good cause—and right back out again without becoming part of it.
“That was before I knew what I was getting into.” Martha’s hands flew up with the force of her words. She was now turned toward him, pinning him with a relentless gaze.
But it didn’t matter. Because he’d answered all the questions he was going to answer.
“And you knew that, too, when you gave me your word.”
“You can’t expect me to go to a place like that, put my life in danger and then not tell me what we were doing there!”
“I can and I do.”
“I can’t accept that.”
“Then I suggest you stay home.”
She turned, crossing her arms in front of her. David’s chest eased just a bit. The sooner she left him alone, the sooner he could do what he needed to do to get himself back where he belonged.
He was risking everything with this foray to places he’d left behind—to a life he’d left behind. He’d known that going in. Just as he’d known that far more than his own life was at risk here. Lives far more valuable than his.
“So the whole gentle preacher thing is all an act, huh?”
“What?”
“You and the whole loving, serving, peaceful crap.”
David’s gaze shot from the road to Martha’s disgruntled expression and back again. “Of course not!”
“I just saw you in action, Marks,” she said, her voice filled with as much disdain as he’d ever heard from her. “I had the sense that if that man had made one false move, you would’ve had him out flat in seconds.”
“Having good reflexes isn’t a sin.”
“You’d have flattened him without one thought for his immortal soul.”
“I’m human.”
Yes.
Oh.
She was staring at him. For a second there, David wondered if she’d been able to hear the voice in his head. “What?”
“Just trying to figure you out.”
He chuckled, feeling better. “You might as well give up on that one.” Signaling, he moved onto the freeway back to Shelter Valley. “I’ve been working on it for thirty-eight years and still haven’t managed.”
“I’m serious.” A new note had entered her voice.
One that kept him quiet. And tightened his chest again.
“Until today, all I’ve seen in you is this very gentle man who—while arrogant in his belief that he knows best—is still kind and loving, giving everyone he meets the benefit of the doubt. Finding value in everyone.”
> “Thank you.” He could have done without the arrogant part, but generally he liked her assessment.
“And then today I see a man who…who’s capable of anything, even violence. Who looked at another man with calculation.”
“No mystery there,” he said, maybe a little too quickly. With one hand on the wheel, he reached over to adjust the car’s temperature control. He needed cold air. Lots of it. “You know, ‘when in Rome…”’
It was trite. Clichéd. But clichés were clichés because they were true.
“No.” Martha shook her head. “You acted like a completely different person.”
The conviction in her statement lay heavily upon him. As he’d said, a tiger couldn’t change his stripes. A leopard couldn’t change his spots. And those who’d seen those stripes and spots always had something on you—which meant they also had your loyalty.
“So what I want to know is who’s the imposter? Which one was real?”
Help!
David waited. Nothing. Where was the voice when he needed it?
“You don’t have to answer that.”
David was so busy focusing, searching for guidance, that he didn’t hear at first. She’d continued to speak before he could form a reply. “It’s possible to act like you care when you don’t,” she said. “But you can’t hurt a man if your heart is filled with love.”
Even though her words condemned him, David was proud of her for the insight about love. Martha Moore didn’t know it yet, but she was someone who could change the world. He hoped he was around when that day came.
ELLEN HAD THE DREAM AGAIN.
She is trapped on a winding cement staircase. The cold and dirty cinder blocks scrape her shoulders as she climbs, step after step, around and around, holding on only because she knows that with each step she’ll be closer to the top. And a way out. Even if she has to jump from a window to get down. At least there’d be space. And air. The muscles in her legs are burning, shooting sharp pains down her shins. Still, she keeps climbing. She can’t let go. Can’t give up.
Finally, she can see the end. The top stair is in front of her. Just another four or five steps. Relief is so palpable, it gives her impetus. And robs her of precious strength. She isn’t sure she’ll be able to get up those last couple of steps. Her foot weighs so much she can barely lift it. Crying, dizzy from suffocation and exhaustion, she raises her right foot. But not far enough. Her toe hits cement—the middle of the step. And drops back down.
Nothing Sacred Page 9
