Stepping into those open arms, she buried her head against the familiar safety of her lover’s chest and wept until her whole body ached.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
DAVID DIDN’T PLAY a lot of golf. Had never really developed an appreciation for the game. But he’d been born with an athletic ability that allowed him to do at least moderately well at every sport he tried. He’d played with Will Parsons a few times. And that gave him an excuse to challenge Shelter Valley’s sheriff to a game at the local PGA-approved course. He’d heard that Greg, an on-again off-again player for most of his life, had recently taken a more serious interest in golf.
Greg was a family man now. Settled in Shelter Valley for the duration. And apparently he joined Will Parsons and some of the other men on the course whenever he could.
It was David’s hope that none of Greg’s other golfing buddies would be at the course Thursday afternoon.
“I thought you said you don’t golf,” Greg accused after David’s first tee off—a drive that made it all the way to the green.
“Wait until you see my putting,” he retorted. They had the front nine to themselves.
He’d see how welcome he was when he was through saying what he’d come to say. He still had hope that his life in Shelter Valley would remain intact, that he’d be allowed to do the job he’d come there to do, but he knew what was at risk.
And had to take the risk anyway. There was simply no other choice.
He played through three holes. On the fourth tee, a couple of strokes behind Greg, he stopped. There was no one around to hear them. And no reason for anyone who might come along to be suspicious about why the preacher was talking to the sheriff. They were enjoying a friendly game of golf. That was all.
With both hands resting on top of his three wood, David looked the other man straight in the eye. “I didn’t ask you out here to play golf.”
Still every inch the sheriff in spite of his navy shorts and navy-and-white striped shirt, Greg nodded. “I didn’t think so.”
David respected that. “I’d prefer if what I have to tell you stays between us. My part in it, that is.”
“I’ll do my best.”
In as concise a form as possible, David then did something he’d promised himself he’d never do. He spoke of the life he’d left behind. The man he’d been. The things he’d done.
Or as much of it as the sheriff needed to do his job. To see justice done. To see Ellen avenged. And to see the people of this town, whom David had grown to love, given back at least some of the peace and security they’d lost.
And then, without finishing his game, he picked up his clubs and walked off the course.
His future was in God’s hands now.
MARTHA WAS AT WORK on Friday afternoon when she got a call from Greg Richards. She was to bring Ellen to Phoenix as soon as she could for an identification lineup. Considering how hard Ellen had obviously been crying the day before when she’d come home from school a couple of hours late, Martha hated to put her through this right now. But the girl was prepared for the fact that she would, at some point, be called upon to give her testimony.
Identification of the perpetrator was part of that.
And if the right man had been arrested, perhaps they could begin to move on.
Martha left work early, with a promise to Keith that she’d do some overtime the following week, a promise he scoffed at, reminding her of all the extra hours she put in whenever he needed her. She decided to wait until she got home to tell Ellen where they were going. The girl hadn’t been able to speak to her last night without breaking into tears, and Martha was more worried than ever about Ellen’s capacity to cope with everything that had happened.
To her relief, her eldest child seemed to be in much better spirits when Martha arrived home. Shelley was there, although locked in her room, and only gave a rude cryptic reply when Martha told her she and Ellen were going to Phoenix and that she was not to leave the house.
Assigning Rebecca to take charge of dinner, Martha dashed out the door. She’d called David from her cellphone on the way home from work to let him know what was happening. She just hoped this wasn’t all a false alarm. She wasn’t sure how many of those they could handle.
“I’m sorry you have to go through this, sweetie,” she told Ellen as they sped toward Phoenix. She was elated that they might actually get the bastard. But she hated that this possibility was dependent upon putting a daughter who’d already suffered so much, through more pain.
“I’m not,” Ellen said. “I want that guy to pay for what he did. I just hope it’s him.”
Was all of this designed to help her daughter in some way? To help her grow and progress? Or if not designed, exactly, then leading to that result?
“It’s going to be hard to see him again,” Martha warned. Greg had given her a whole lecture on what to expect, to prepare her for Ellen’s natural reaction to what lay ahead. She’d already called Ellen’s counselor and set up an emergency appointment just in case.
“I know.” Ellen, staring straight ahead with her hands clasped stiffly in her lap, swallowed. “Just stay with me, okay, Mom?”
Reaching over to squeeze her daughter’s hands, Martha blinked back tears. “Of course, sweetie. Always.”
She’d never, ever, in a million days and nights of imagining, dreamed that motherhood could be so hard.
“You seem better today,” she told her daughter as they drew closer to Phoenix and Ellen started to look around. The last time Martha had been out with her, the girl had still been staring straight ahead. Watching where she was going, where she had to go, but letting the scenery pass her by. Was she more relaxed because she thought the man she feared was behind bars?
“I am feeling better.” There was almost a smile in her voice.
Taking her eyes off the road, Martha studied her daughter for as long as she dared. There was something different about Ellen.
An accepting, easier air that was almost reminiscent of the Ellen who’d left for work that long-ago January night.
“Okay,” Martha said, holding back a premature grin. “You going to tell me what happened?”
“I saw Aaron.”
Heart skipping a beat, Martha tried her best to play it cool. “You’ve seen him several times.”
“I talked to him.”
Their exit was coming up in five short miles. “Said hello, you mean?”
“No.” Ellen shook her head and glanced over at her mom, her lips tilted slightly upward. “I mean really talked to him.”
“And?”
“And…he knows.”
Thank God. “You told him what happened.” As far as she knew, after the initial outpouring that first night, Ellen had never spoken directly about what had been done to her.
“Yeah.”
“Everything?”
Ellen nodded. Her hands were still clasped between her knees, but she was smiling. “Things I haven’t been able to tell anyone. It was weird, Mom. It just all came spilling out. When I heard the stuff I was saying, I felt so humiliated I thought I was going to die…but then I didn’t.”
“Because of Aaron?” Martha was going to love that boy forever. And beyond. She owed him more than she’d ever be able to repay.
But then, if he ended up with Ellen, she figured there’d be nothing more he’d want.
“I guess,” Ellen said softly. “He didn’t care, Mom,” she said, tears gathering at the corners of her eyes. “I mean, he cared, of course—it seemed like he cared as much as I did, as though it happened to him, too, not just me.” She paused, wiped the corner of her eye. “But what happened—he said it didn’t change me. I was just the same to him yesterday as I’d been…before.”
The tears were different now. Martha could tell that almost immediately. They weren’t tears of despair but of tenderness. And love, with sadness mixed in. But she knew they were healing tears just the same.
DAVID ALMOST WISHED he could refuse when he got the
call late Friday evening to meet Greg Richards at the Moore home. Ellen had identified her attacker, and the wealthy business-owner, charged with kidnapping and rape, was behind bars in Phoenix. With his heart full of gratitude, it was hard to believe there was still room for fear.
But David felt fear nonetheless. He went anyway. Because he cared too much not to be there when Greg told Martha and her kids the whole story.
Or at least the part of it that involved Ellen.
He hoped.
So far, that was all that had come out.
“Please let that be it,” he said as he turned the Explorer onto Martha’s street. “Don’t let anything else come out.”
Things will happen as they must.
“You said that if I need something, all I have to do is ask.”
That is so.
“Well, I’m asking.”
You will have what you need.
So why were his nerve endings buzzing with alarm?
THE FAMILY, along with Greg Richards, was gathered in the living room when David arrived. He approached the couch where Martha and Ellen were seated. Martha greeted him with a smile, Ellen with a quick hug. Shelley excused herself rudely and left the room. Tim and Rebecca both said a solemn hello. Rubbing Tim’s head on his way past, David gave Rebecca a reassuring grin. Having the sheriff in full uniform in the middle of their living room on a Friday night was understandably unsettling.
With an idea of what was coming—an idea Martha didn’t yet have—he suggested that perhaps the younger two kids could be excused and Martha could fill them in later.
Greg, saying he should’ve thought of that himself, agreed, and David was the recipient of two grateful smiles as the kids left.
Taking the same spot on the love seat he’d had that first uncomfortable day he’d been in this home, David looked around. He took in, again, the built-in bookshelf by the fireplace, the pictures all around. He recognized the people in them now.
“Let’s get this over with,” Greg said, sitting on the edge of the armchair Ellen had occupied during David’s first visit. Ellen and her mother were huddled together on the couch, Martha’s arm firmly around her daughter, Ellen’s blond head, with flat and lifeless hair, on her mother’s shoulder.
All eyes in the room were trained on the sheriff.
“First off, Ellen, thank you for your cooperation this afternoon. I know it was hard.”
With a jerk of her head, indicating that she hadn’t yet fully recovered from the experience, Ellen nodded.
“What’s going to happen to the bastard?” Martha’s voice was trembling. David could only imagine how hard it must have been on her that afternoon, too, coming face-to-face with the man who’d raped her daughter. “He’ll go to jail for life, I hope.”
Elbows on his knees, Greg rubbed his hands together. “That’s for the courts to decide,” he said. “Prosecution is going for kidnapping and rape, which could mean up to twenty-eight years.”
“I hear a but in your voice,” Martha said, her face white and pinched. Sitting back was one of the hardest things he’d done in a while, but David did so, running his hand along the leg of the black Dockers he’d worn all day. His white shirtsleeves were rolled up, the air cool on that early April evening, and still he was hot.
“Hear me out and you’ll understand,” Greg told her, his smile tired but kind. The man’s curly black hair was disheveled in places.
Knowing what the sheriff had likely uncovered that day, David could sympathize.
But only from a distance.
Life as he’d chosen it to be could very well hang in the balance during the next few minutes.
“For the past year, there’s been a prostitution ring running just outside of Shelter Valley.”
“What?” Martha frowned, gently stroking Ellen’s upper arm. “Prostitutes? In Shelter Valley?” She glanced over at David, as though he had something to do with it, or could’ve done something about it—after all, hadn’t he suggested as much?—and then back at Greg Richards. “How does this concern Ellen?”
“The ‘business,’ which is the most successful and long-running of its kind in the history of Arizona, has its home base in Phoenix.”
The statistics were news to David. Leave it to him to get involved with the biggest and best.
“Catering to wealthy businessmen and politicians, the owners of the ‘business’ guaranteed, above all else, anonymity to the clients they serviced.”
Martha’s hand on Ellen’s shoulder grew more brisk. The girl watched the sheriff unblinkingly, but David wasn’t sure she was following what was going on. Martha had told him about Ellen’s talk with Aaron. The girl had been through a lot.
David sent up a silent prayer for Ellen—and for himself—still sitting there with, he hoped, an attitude of total calm as Greg continued.
“The business is owned by a well-known state politician.” Greg named the man.
“What?” Martha sat forward, dragging Ellen with her, and then, looking down at her daughter, sat back. “You’ve got to be kidding! I met Michael Shane at Becca’s last year. He was here for her swearing in.”
Greg nodded.
“And apparently that’s when he noticed the old motel with rooms for rent just outside of town. He’d recently run into some trouble in Yucca and was scouting out new locations.” The apartment complex they’d been using in the town near Phoenix had had a drug bust, and Shane, not wanting investigators so close, had decided to relocate.
“As far as we know right now, there are at least six other establishments he’s been using, all over the state of Arizona. Shelter Valley was one of them.”
“So what does all of this have to do with me?” Ellen’s voice was tiny, childlike. She was on overload and David wished he could take her burdens upon himself and free her of cares. In all his years as a minister, he’d never mastered the detachment that was considered to be a vital part of surviving the work.
“I’m getting to that,” Greg said. “This whole thing involved an intricate network of people who didn’t know each other. No one, other than Shane and his partner, knew who worked for them. Each player only knew the one person to whom he reported. But they were all well compensated for their cooperation. There were front-line men—those who saw opportunity in prospective clients, generally by witnessing them at parties or using an escort service. If the client was agreeable, the front-line guy would send the name to someone who then sent it out for an extensive background check to make sure that there was no trap involved. This guy had no idea what the background check was for. He also never saw the results of it. Apparently those checks were done on the street, illegally of course, with high-tech equipment the local FBI was glad to confiscate.”
“So arrests have already been made.” David, speaking for the first time since Greg had begun, was surprised to hear his voice sound so normal.
“Many of them, yes,” Greg told him, then went on. “The man who did the checks had no idea what the information was used for. He simply passed on the facts to someone higher up and if the client was approved, that guy left a card with a particular insignia on it at the reception desk in the lobby of Shane’s export business. David recognized the name. It was one of Shane’s acquisitions just before David had left the company. When that “higher up” guy had been him, he’d left the card in the lobby of the medical supply company offices, where he’d held a legitimate position. Their clients, or at least the men availing themselves of this particular service—including, on occasion, him—had all been named Sam Hunter then. They were James Sharp this go-round.
“The client was then notified to pick up the card and take it to a certain high-end car dealership owned by one of Shane’s key contributors. This guy started with a couple of used-car lots and is now enormously wealthy—largely due to the prime government-owned real estate he’s been acquiring with Shane’s help over the years.”
Martha was rocking Ellen. Staring at Greg. Still white, eyes wide, Martha didn’
t look well. David wondered if she’d put it all together yet.
He also wondered how he was ever going to go home tonight, to that house by the church.
That house was trustingly provided by people who expected a man of God, a man of sound moral values and genuine virtue, to inhabit it.
Not a man who’d been stained by his actions long ago, branded by what he’d done just as surely as a tiger’s stripes identified him as a tiger and a leopard’s spots identified him, too.
It was what he’d been telling Jeb that day on the street. And the man had known it. They’d had that talk one other night, long ago.
When David had lived on those streets. Pretending not to be one of them.
Now and in the past, David Cole Marks was nothing but a fraud.
HYSTERICAL LAUGHTER WAS slowly building inside Martha as she rocked her little girl on a couch she and Todd had chosen together ten years before. Because they’d wanted a piece of quality furniture and had spent so much money on it, they’d joked about growing old on that couch. Bouncing their grandchildren and maybe even great-grandchildren on their knees while they sat there.
Never once had they considered a divorced Martha rocking her twenty-year-old raped daughter there.
Or hearing a story so fantastic she wasn’t sure she was even taking it all in.
The only thing keeping her calm enough to finish out the evening was the minister sitting across the coffee table. As always, he conveyed the sense that everything was going to be okay.
She might not believe in what he had to teach, might not put any stock in things believed but not seen, but she was beginning to believe in him. The man had some kind of special power.
Even if it was only the power of positive thinking and mind over matter. Whatever it was, she’d seen firsthand, through all these months of turmoil, that it worked.
Nothing Sacred Page 18