Nothing Sacred

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  Even four years ago, when Todd had left, she’d felt loved. Secure. Safe.

  Lying on her stomach, her face buried in the pillow she held, Martha didn’t feel the least bit safe. She’d allowed her heart to be swayed by hope, her mind to be shaped by beliefs that could have seen her through this life and beyond.

  How had it all gotten so crazy?

  How could she insure that David was able to leave quietly?

  “Mom? What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

  She hadn’t heard the door open. Hadn’t heard Ellen come in. Hadn’t known she was crying.

  “Tell me! What’s happened?” The return of fear to Ellen’s voice got through Martha’s pain as nothing else could.

  “Nothing’s wrong, sweetie,” she said inanely, rolling onto her back. Oh, God. She had to tell Ellen. Her precious, fragile daughter. David had been one of her biggest supports these past months.

  “I guess I’m just on overload. With your dad. You. Shelley’s troubles. A prostitution ring in Shelter Valley.” Her voice broke on that last part.

  “Hey, you’re the one who always says we can handle anything,” Ellen said, climbing onto the bed beside her mother, fluffing the pillows behind them so they could sit, side by side, backs against the head-board that Todd had put together so many years before.

  Because she wasn’t ready to talk about David, didn’t know how to do what she knew she had to, Martha talked to Ellen about her father’s new baby. And how Todd’s betrayal reflected on him, not on them. They talked about Shelley. Ellen assured her mother that her sister would come around, but she didn’t sound any more sure of that than Martha was. They discussed Ellen’s counseling sessions. The girl wanted to continue them. At least for a while. They talked about Aaron. He wanted her to marry him when he graduated at the end of the term, and was giving her some time to think about it. Ellen didn’t need time to think. She’d known she wanted to marry him the minute she’d met him.

  She was too young—barely out of her teens. But Ellen had always been mature for her age. She was obviously very much in love with him.

  “Where does he plan to live?” Martha asked after hugging her eldest daughter a good long time and shedding a few more tears.

  “Mom,” Ellen scoffed, nudging her in the ribs. “Don’t go getting all weird on me, okay? You know me. I’m raising my babies and growing old right here in Shelter Valley.”

  As happy as Martha was to hear that, she still frowned. “Are you sure Aaron wants that? He might prefer to move back to Phoenix where his family lives. Or out of state.”

  “That’s what’s so great. He’s already got a job lined up teaching at the high school. He wants to coach Little League, sing in the church choir and run for town council.”

  Okay, so they’d talked about it.

  “Now, why don’t you tell me what else is bothering you?”

  Taking a deep breath, Martha realized she’d run out of time. Looking into her daughter’s wide, trusting eyes, she wished David’s angels hadn’t all been a lie. She could sure use some help choosing the words on this one.

  In the end, she just told her. For years, David Cole Marks had been a client of prostitutes. A client and a worker in the same organization that had inadvertently been the cause of Ellen’s attack. Because there was nothing gentle about the words, Martha took extra care to make her tone as loving as possible. She held her daughter, her hand against Ellen’s head, smoothing the short ends of Ellen’s soft blond hair.

  Her arms were braced for the shaking to start. Her heart for the cries of denial.

  She wasn’t at all ready for Ellen to pull out of her arms, to push a strand of hair from Martha’s forehead. To look at her mother with tears glistening in her eyes, but a compassionate smile on her face.

  “Ellen?” she asked, truly frightened. “Did you hear what I just said?”

  “Yeah.” Ellen’s voice was as soft as her glance. “I’m not surprised, Mom. I’d kind of already put two and two together. It was just too weird that he’d been able to figure everything out just by visiting that dealership.”

  “Well, I got that, too,” Martha said. And then she told her daughter about the inner city church that had been David’s first calling. About Jeb he’d said the incident had happened exactly as he’d described. When he was ordained as a minister, he’d asked to be assigned to that neighborhood, so he could help some of the people who’d been part of Shane’s scheme—the lower-level contributors and the “girls” themselves.

  Ellen shook her head. “I had more to go on,” she said, as though she had some secret Martha had been denied. If not for the fact that the girl had been completely rational moments before and was still calm, Martha would have panicked. As it was, she felt completely confused.

  “I have to tell everyone tomorrow morning. He can’t get up and preach another sermon with—”

  Ellen interrupted her with a shake of her head. “If I tell you something that it’s not my place to repeat, will you at least consider it before you do anything?” she asked.

  At a total loss, Martha nodded.

  Ellen settled back against the pillows, holding her mother’s hand as she began. “That night I…was…attacked…” The girl swallowed. Took a deep breath. “David told me something he’d never told anybody before.”

  Some emotion inside Martha closed down. A vulnerability she couldn’t afford to feel…

  “One Friday night, when he was fifteen years old, David was on the couch with his girlfriend. They’d been dating for months, but he’d never done more than hold her hand, or put his arm around her at the movies. He didn’t have a father, and his mother had never talked to him about the birds and the bees.”

  Ellen squeezed her hand, and Martha knew she was remembering the time Martha had broken the news about the facts of life. She’d taken her to Phoenix for a rare outing, just the two of them. Ellen had been eleven at the time. They’d bought new outfits, eaten lunch at a fancy restaurant and then, at a park in the city, Martha had answered all of Ellen’s questions. She’d been dreading the outing for weeks, certain it was going to be a disaster, that Ellen would get embarrassed, refuse to listen. Instead, it had turned out to be one of Martha’s most precious memories.

  She’d repeated the process with Shelley. Who’d been embarrassed. Thought her mom was stupid. Didn’t ask a single question.

  “He was fifteen,” Ellen continued. “Far too old to ask his friends or a teacher what to do, or how to get started, anyway.” Martha could hear the smile in Ellen’s voice, coming through the sadness that shadowed her telling of this story. She had a feeling that David, in his retelling, had made at least this part amusing.

  “Anyway, after months of wanting to kiss her, on this one Friday night he’d finally worked up the guts to give it a try. He said the attempt was more awkward than anything else. Every time he tried to get his lips to meet hers, one of their noses would get in the way, and then after they figured out that part, every time they tried, one or the other of them would start laughing. They’d finally managed to connect…and—” Ellen sent her mother a sideways glance with a wry grin “—found out it was worth the effort. That was when his mother burst in on them.”

  “Must’ve been embarrassing.” Not understanding the mixed emotions flogging her as she heard about David’s first kiss, Martha reminded herself to remain detached.

  It took her a second to realize that Ellen had stopped talking. Turning, seeing Ellen’s face twisted with distress, Martha pulled at their clasped hands until her daughter was once again resting her head against her mom’s shoulder.

  “What?” she asked quietly.

  “The woman was crazy,” Ellen said, her voice soft but with such an undercurrent of emotion it was almost as if she was recounting a memory rather than telling a story. “She was crying hysterically and screaming, too.”

  “Screaming what?”

  “David didn’t say, only that they were horrible things. She grabbed a wooden pl
ant stand, spilling the plant on the floor, and started hitting him with it. She told him to get out of her house. Said she was calling the police.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s just it, he had no idea. Then.” Ellen’s words were muffled as she burrowed against her mother.

  “What about the girl?” This was nothing to Martha. And felt like everything.

  “His mother grabbed her away from David and told her to run. To get out of there.”

  Martha held her daughter, rubbing her shoulder. Wishing she could hold a young frightened man. A boy, really.

  “And then—” Ellen’s voice broke. She sniffled. And without even knowing what was coming, Martha felt her own eyes fill.

  “She told him something that’s affected the rest of his life, Mom. Something that’s colored every decision he’s ever made. It doesn’t have to, but I don’t think he gets that.”

  Sometime, without her being aware of it, Martha’s daughter had grown up.

  “What did she tell him?” That she hated him? That he wasn’t hers?

  Ellen pulled back to look at her mother. “She told him he’s the son of a rapist.” Tears dripped steadily down Ellen’s cheeks as her gaze held her mother’s. “She said—” Ellen stopped to catch her breath “—she said he was the spitting image of his father. That when she looked at him, she saw his father. And that he was a danger to all good girls.”

  Oh, my God. He’d been Rebecca’s age.

  “Surely he knows that’s not so….”

  Ellen shook her head. “I think it’s all mixed up in there, the things he understands as an adult, and the things the kid in him never recovered from. The things he feels about himself.”

  The blood started to pound in her veins as Martha thought of the man she’d first seen earlier that evening, sitting in that chair as though he wasn’t there at all. His mother had just died. The mother he hadn’t seen in twenty-three years.

  How could he not be affected by the things that had happened to that young man? He was still suffering the aftermath. Still being punished for a crime he didn’t commit.

  “Think of it, Mom,” Ellen said, wiping her tears as she sat cross-legged, facing Martha. “A young man with hormones. Remember what you told me about all that? How a young man dreams about…about sex? How these feelings are so strong in him that sometimes it might seem as if he’s going crazy with need?” The earnestness in her daughter’s face as she repeated what Martha had told her on that long-ago outing to Phoenix touched the parts of Martha’s heart that she’d been trying to hide. “I’m not surprised David, at some point, turned to hookers to assuage that need. God knows he couldn’t trust himself to ever try to share those feeling with a ‘nice’ girl.”

  Ellen’s perspective made everything sound so nonthreatening. So…okay.

  But solicitation of a prostitute was not only morally unacceptable conduct, but in the state of Arizona, it was also a felony. Not one with much punishment attached. But still a felony.

  “He made a mistake, Mom,” Ellen said, as though reading her mother’s mind. “It’s not as if he’s done anything like that in years,” she added. “He said he quit before he went to the seminary.”

  So what did he do now? Have affairs with his parishioners?

  Ashamed at her own thoughts, Martha stared at the colorful checkered squares on the quilt she’d bought when she no longer had to share her bedroom with a man.

  She’d certainly done nothing to dissuade David from kissing her, and while she’d known for certain from their kiss that he’d been experiencing those feelings, he’d never done anything to shame himself. Or her.

  But he’d lied. By omission, he’d lied to them all.

  No wonder he’d been so hesitant about helping her and Ellen.

  Of course, he had helped them. With no guarantee that he wouldn’t be caught in the fray and lose the life he’d built for himself.

  She didn’t know what to think anymore.

  “Mom, you need to look at Shelter Valley very carefully.” Ellen’s voice held a maturity Martha had never heard before. “And look at me just as carefully,” she said, holding her mother’s gaze steadily with a strength and resolve that made Martha swallow. Hard. “What happens to us is not who we are, Mom.” It looked like she was trying to smile, but her lips were trembling too much. “Who we are is on the inside and that doesn’t change unless we let it.”

  Martha thought about Ellen’s words. There was no refuting them. But how did she follow them to a conclusion that would help her know what to do?

  “I was raped.” It was the first time Martha had heard her daughter say the words. Tears filled Ellen’s eyes again, but this time they didn’t fall. “But that doesn’t change who I am. Shelter Valley had a prostitution ring running right here in our midst. But that doesn’t change who we are, what kind of people we are, what kind of town we run. David was the son of a rapist—and more, of a crazy mother—and for a while, he let that change him inside. But then, after he went to the seminary, he realized that he didn’t have to live that way, and became again, that fifteen-year-old boy who honored and cared for the young girl he held. He became that boy so much, he just stopped being with women at all.”

  “He told you that?”

  Ellen nodded. “He didn’t want me to be afraid of him since he had his father’s blood.”

  Oh God. Oh God. Arms around her ankles, Martha rocked slowly forward and back.

  “You, me, Tory and Beth, Becca, David and all the people who’ve come here over the years, we’re all survivors, Mom. That’s what makes Shelter Valley the place it is.”

  She was right. Completely. Her little girl had grown up to be a very smart young woman.

  “David belongs here,” Ellen whispered, touching her mother’s cheek with a gentle finger. “He deserves us. And we deserve him, too….”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  MARTHA WAS IN CHURCH early the next morning. With all four of her kids. Sitting in the front row.

  Not sure he’d even be preaching, David had been waiting all night and most of the early morning for a phone call. He’d tried to imagine who’d make that call. Mayor Parsons? Someone from the church council? Martha Moore?

  He’d heard from Whitney. She’d been angry that he’d turned his back on her so completely. But mostly she’d just had a free afternoon and been curious about him, wanted to find out how much he’d changed. And to remind him of who he’d been. That he was no better than she was… Then the time had come. His parishioners had started to arrive. So, as he always did, he moved to the back of the sanctuary to greet them as they came in. To welcome them all. And to give anyone who needed anything an opportunity to let him know.

  He’d sung the first song with the rest of the congregation, careful to avoid catching the eyes of Martha and her children in the front row. They’d all dressed for the occasion. Tim was wearing slacks with creases and a matching shirt and tie. All four of the Moore females were in skirts and hose. Martha had on a navy suit that not only made her more beautiful than he could comfortably stand, but made her intimidating as well.

  Or maybe that was because he knew she could stand up at any minute and denounce him….

  Scripture reading, offertory. A special musical number by the choir. Through it all, David waited.

  And then it was time for his sermon. He wondered if that was the time when Martha would take her stance.

  He stood anyway. It was all he could do.

  Moving slowly to the pulpit, he slid the microphone out of its holder. Crossed to the three wide carpeted stairs that led down to the pews. There were at least three hundred people here, most of whom he knew. A lot of whom he’d grown to love.

  “Good morning.”

  That went okay. But then, he always started out with a greeting.

  Keeping his gaze focused somewhere down the middle aisle, David said “Good Morning” a second time.

  Giving Martha a chance to do what she must. Waiting to take his cue
from her.

  “Good morning.” His third greeting was met with rustles from the crowd. The few people he could see in his peripheral vision were looking at each other, and him, in question. And worry?

  “Yes, well, the sermon I meant to give this week, the sermon I prepared the day after we made the headlines…” He paused. Didn’t know where to go from there. What to do.

  “…is the one I’m still going to give you.” David had no idea where the words came from.

  But there they were. “I didn’t intend to,” he said. “I’d decided last night to prepare something else entirely, but I’ll save that for another time.”

  Relaxed, even if just for those moments when he did his Father’s work, David spent the next twenty minutes talking about forgiveness. Forgiveness for the man sitting in a jail cell in Phoenix, for the spouse who’d yelled that morning, for the business partner who’d cheated, the friend who’d hurt, the husband who’d left. He still didn’t look at Martha, but he could feel her there.

  “Because the thing is, folks, your anger and your desire for vengeance aren’t going to punish the people who’ve hurt you. Those negative emotions will turn on you, instead.” He was certain of this, at least. “If you hold a grudge, it’s not those who’ve mistreated you who suffer. It’s you. The only way to true peace and happiness, is to let go. And the only way to let go is to forgive….”

  Nods from the people around him, the honest concentration shining from hundreds of eyes, gave David the confidence to keep walking back and forth on those stairs. To keep talking when he wasn’t sure he had the energy to hold the mike.

  When he finished here, he had no idea what he was going to do. Where he was going to go.

  Despite the truths he was proclaiming, he knew two things.