He was glad that she hadn’t followed him from Patterson’s. He’d seen the questioning expression in her eyes and knew that she’d be pestering him for explanations he had no intention of giving. Even if she weren’t a preacher, she would be the kind of woman who’d always want to make things right. She’d never be able to accept that there were some things it was impossible for a man to forgive and forget. Even Maisey didn’t fully understand this hold the past had on him and she had lived through the grief and anger with him.
He deliberately pushed the old memories aside, along with the more recent nagging little sparks of attraction Anna Louise set off in him. Sitting across from her in that old-fashioned booth with its red vinyl cushions and black Formica-topped table, he’d forgotten for a moment that she wasn’t just any woman. Her sassy tongue had fueled the confusion. He did love a woman with a temper and Anna Louise clearly had spirit to spare. Apparently the hands-off message hadn’t penetrated his brain, even though he’d spent a restless night repeating it again and again.
When he should have been thinking about Anna Louise speaking from that pulpit, he kept seeing her stretching for that apple in Maisey’s orchard. The two images were not compatible. One was a solemn reminder of what happened to sinners. The other was sweet temptation.
Blast his sorry hide, he had always been drawn to danger, and Anna Louise surely was that. This time he’d been so sure that he’d have the good sense to resist. After this morning, though, he had his doubts, which made it all the more important that he not stick around Kiley a second longer than necessary.
He was walking up the dirt road leading to the house when a car breezed past him without even slowing. His heartbeat accelerated. Maisey! Had she gotten worse while he’d been gone? Had the doctor been called? Only at the last second as the car sent up a trail of dust did he catch the sheen of the driver’s red hair.
So, he thought grimly, Anna Louise had followed him, after all. He should have known being left behind wouldn’t deter her.
Only the thought of Maisey’s medicine tucked in his pocket kept him from taking his time going inside. He did linger by the kitchen window for a bit, though. The two of them were seated at the table, thick as thieves. If his grandmother was still feeling under the weather, it didn’t show. She was pouring a cup of tea for her guest and demanding to know what was going on in town.
“Did you run into Richard?” she asked, her tone all innocence, but obviously zeroing in on what fascinated her the most.
“At the drugstore,” Anna Louise said.
“I thought you might. You’re usually there about this time every day,” she said.
Richard bit back a chuckle. The old sneak! He’d wondered why she’d been in such a rush to shoo him out the door, insisting that she had to have her medicine right away, when it was clear to him now she was just fine.
“I wonder why he didn’t come back up here with you?” she said to Anna Louise.
“He probably had another errand,” Anna Louise replied. “I did see him walking along the lane up to the house. He should be here soon.”
A disapproving frown settled over Maisey’s face. Or maybe it was just disappointment, Richard decided. She probably hated the fact that the two of them weren’t falling in with her plans.
“You didn’t offer him a lift?” she chided. “Why, I’m surprised at you, Anna Louise.”
“I suspect he preferred having the time to himself.”
Richard stepped inside. “Or perhaps he just has more sense than to ride with a woman who drives like a maniac,” he chimed in from the doorway. He crossed the room in two strides, leaned down and kissed Maisey, then put her medicine on the table. He glanced at Anna Louise. “Are you in such a hurry to meet your Maker?”
“I’m surprised at you. For a man who dodges gunfire without blinking an eye, you seem to lack a sense of adventure,” Anna Louise accused with a good-humored smile. “Besides, I’ve never gotten so much as a scratch from an accident, whereas I hear you have a whole collection of scars from your intrepid lifestyle.”
“Touch;aae. Now if you two will excuse me, I’m going to take a survey of the barn to see what it will take to fix it up.”
At the screen door, he paused. “Maisey, if you’re feeling up to it this afternoon, I thought we could drive over to Charlottesville to pick up some paint for the barn and maybe some new wallpaper for in here.”
Maisey gave him an inscrutable look. “I think the trip would be a little too much for me,” she said, suddenly sounding weary.
Richard regarded her suspiciously. Despite her tone, she didn’t look the least bit tired. She obviously had some reason for feigning exhaustion, and he was willing to bet he knew what it was.
His suspicions were confirmed, when she added, “Why don’t you take Anna Louise? She knows my taste as well as anybody. She can pick out the wallpaper.”
Anna Louise glanced at him. She looked about as dismayed by the prospect of being confined in a car with him for hours as he was.
“Really, Maisey, this is something that should be your choice,” she said hurriedly. “I’m sure Richard can bring back samples, if you don’t want to go along with him.”
His grandmother’s chin set stubbornly. “Then that’ll mean a second trip. What’s the use of that? No, Anna Louise, I’d like you to pick something out, something cheerful. You have the time, don’t you? You always take Mondays off.”
Clearly beaten by Maisey’s clever scheming, Anna Louise sighed. “I have the time.”
“Well, then, that’s settled,” Maisey said.
If Richard had had a grain of sense, he would have worried about the triumphant note in her voice. Instead he just nodded, deciding he might as well make the best of it. “We’ll go right after lunch.”
“Fine,” Anna Louise agreed. “I’ll be ready.”
“Perfect,” Maisey said enthusiastically. “Why don’t you stay there for dinner and a movie? It’ll be a nice break for both of you. How often do you get a chance to eat in a nice restaurant?”
“Maisey, I just got home,” Richard protested. “I don’t need a break and I’ve spent the last ten years eating in restaurants.”
“And I really should be back to do...” Anna Louise’s voice trailed off. Finally, she added weakly, “Chores. I have a lot of chores I always leave for Monday.”
“Fiddle-faddle,” Maisey said dismissively. “Those chores will still be waiting next Monday. When opportunity comes knocking, you should take advantage of it.”
“Opportunity,” Anna Louise repeated with evident nervousness. Her gaze was pinned worriedly on Richard.
He knew exactly how she felt. He hadn’t been this uneasy going into Iraq the day before the bombs had started dropping. His boss had called that an opportunity, too.
CHAPTER FOUR
Self-preservation made Richard long to toot the horn when he got to Anna Louise’s just after twelve-thirty. He did not want to go inside the parsonage, which he remembered all too well as a grim, sterile place from Pastor Flynn’s day. He didn’t like envisioning Anna Louise in that kind of environment. She deserved color and light to go with her personality.
Unfortunately, Maisey had pounded strong Southern manners into him from an early age. He parked the car and went to the front door, then waited for Anna Louise to answer his knock.
“Come on in,” she hollered from the depths of the house. “The door’s open.”
Richard turned the knob, infuriated by her irresponsibility. “Have you lost your mind?” he shouted as he stepped into the foyer. “I could have been a mass murderer.”
“But you’re not, are you?” she said calmly, wiping her hands on a dish towel as she came toward him from the hallway that he recalled led to the kitchen.
“You had no way of knowing that,” he observed. “You couldn’t even see it was me from back there.”
She faced him unflinchingly. “Now let’s just think about this a minute,” she said reasonably. “If you were a
mass murderer, would a flimsy old lock have stopped you?”
He scowled at her. “No, but—”
“Forget it,” she told him with a grin. “You can’t win.”
“I’m not trying to win,” he snapped in frustration. “I’m trying to save your neck.”
“If I’m not worried about it, why should you be?”
She had him there. “Fine. Get yourself killed,” he said. “Are you ready?”
“Let me put this back in the kitchen and I’ll be right with you.”
While she was gone, he glanced around for the first time. Something had happened to the parsonage. And he had no doubts at all that Anna Louise was responsible for the changes. It was no wonder Maisey trusted her to pick out wallpaper. With probably no decent budget for decorating, she had turned the little house from a dark, dreary place into a sunny, cheerful environment.
The walls had been painted a pale shade of yellow that reminded him of daffodils. The woodwork was white. The stiff old furniture he remembered had been replaced with over-stuffed chairs and a sofa covered in yellow and white pinstripes. Astonishingly healthy plants in pots of every size and shape sat on every available surface. Where heavy drapes had once blocked out the light, now sheer curtains let it in. The transformation was astonishing.
“I can see from your expression this isn’t the way you remember it,” she said when she returned, her purse in hand.
“Far from it,” he said. “This suits you.”
“Thanks. It’s taken me five years to get it the way I wanted it, but the downstairs is finally done. Someday I’ll get to the bedrooms.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Richard stared down at the floor. Dear heavenly days, it was going to be a very long afternoon, he thought.
“Let’s go,” he said gruffly.
She shot a puzzled look at him, but she didn’t argue.
Thanks to that moment in the hallway, all of Richard’s journalistic skills deserted him on the drive to Charlottesville. He’d always thought there wasn’t a human being on the face of the earth, power broker or pauper, that he couldn’t interview. In a normal social setting that skill translated into easy, casual conversation. Talking to Anna Louise was proving to be the exception.
All of the normal questions a man might ask a woman in whom he was interested seemed too intimate, too likely to lead them off on a dangerous conversational path. Of course, that might have had something to do with his inability to remain the slightest bit objective in her presence. Every masculine instinct called for his usual flirtatious, live-for-the-moment approach to an attractive woman. He suspected there were special places in hell for men who flirted with pastors.
Anna Louise wasn’t helping matters any. She seemed perfectly content with the silence in the car, perfectly engrossed in the passing scenery. That only made him more determined to find some safe way to draw her attention back to him. A discussion of the weather, aside from being boring and predictable, seemed unlikely to elicit the sort of conversation he wanted. Asking how a woman had ended up a preacher struck him as a mite too touchy, given the objections some people apparently had to her choice. Finally conceding he was at a loss, he settled into his own grim silence.
“Tell me what it was like,” she said eventually.
He glanced over at her. She was still staring out the window. “What was what like?”
“Being a correspondent in all those places.”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Why?”
“Because...” She turned to face him, a frown puckering her brow. “Because I need to understand.”
“Me or life?” he asked dryly.
“Both, I suppose.”
He still wasn’t sure why this was suddenly so important to her, but he summed it up succinctly with a phrase that applied equally to every single place he’d been assigned. “It was hell.”
“If it was so terrible, why did you do it? Are you one of those people who thrive on danger?”
“I suppose that’s part of it. Being challenged just to stay alive, struggling to get the story and get it right, all of it makes every moment vivid and memorable. You cling to those moments because you never know when the next one might be your last. You know with every fiber that you’re living life, not letting it pass you by.”
“Did you need that kind of intensity after leaving Kiley?”
He grinned. “Let’s face it, staying alive in Kiley is not a problem. The only thing that’ll kill you here is the boredom.”
“I wonder if that’s all there was to it,” she said, regarding him with a doubtful expression.
“Meaning?”
“Sometimes people force themselves into dangerous situations out of some sort of death wish. It’s the kind of thing someone with low self-esteem might do to get attention, either by succeeding dramatically or getting themselves killed.”
Richard might have taken offense, if the suggestion hadn’t been so laughable. “Trust me, my self-esteem is intact. All foreign correspondents have egos the size of Texas. We’re a rare breed, maybe a little like firefighters.”
Anna Louise still didn’t look convinced by his glib answers. “There’s something more, though, something you’re not telling me. Are you sure your motivations were entirely selfish?”
Richard regarded her sharply, startled by her apparent intuitiveness. “What are you suggesting?”
“That maybe you went because you felt someone had to, because you knew the world had to see what was going on if there was going to be any chance at all to make things different.” She leveled a look at him. “Maisey showed me some of your articles.”
“Really?” Given her own reaction to the vivid contents, he was surprised that Maisey had shared them, especially with someone like Anna Louise, who was probably blind to the extremes of human depravity or whose sensibilities might be offended by the grim reality.
“They were very good,” she said quietly. “I felt as if I were right there with you. You made the most complex stories human. I could feel the pain and the anger, the despair, the hunger. You brought all of that alive.”
Not knowing how else to respond, he simply said, “Thank you.”
“There was something else you did, as well.”
“Oh?”
“I wonder if you were even aware of it,” she said, her gaze fixed thoughtfully on him. “Somehow I don’t think so.”
“What do you mean?”
“You also captured that fragile sense of hope that flickered to life in even the most horrific tragedies.”
Richard had to admit he was taken aback by the assessment. “Hope?” he said derisively. “There were instances of blind folly, not hope.”
She nodded, her expression suddenly sad. “Somehow I thought you’d see it that way. It says a lot about the way you and I view the world, doesn’t it? You see the cup half empty. I see it half full. You see the evidence of evil. I see the potential for good. I suppose, though, that it’s no wonder you’ve suffered a crisis of faith, given what you’ve been through.”
She said it as if she felt sorry for him, which only served to infuriate him. “One of us is wearing rose-tinted glasses, Pastor Perkins,” he chided.
“And one of us is deserving of pity. I wonder if you even recognize which one that is.”
“How do you explain the atrocities?” he demanded. “Surely you have some easy answer, one that’s compatible with your beliefs?”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t, but just because I don’t understand doesn’t mean that I have to give up my faith that God has a plan.”
“I guess that’s where you and I part company,” he said grimly.
“Yes, I suppose it is.”
She settled back into her seat then, her unhappy gaze returning to the passing landscape. The silence this time was all the more oppressive, because Anna Louise’s gentle criticism stung. He tried telling himself that her opinion of his outlook on life didn�
�t matter. She was the one whose vision was skewed. Unfortunately, the easy dismissal didn’t work as well as it might have only days ago.
Instead he found himself wondering what life would be like if he could view it through her eyes. He found himself hoping against hope that tragedy never caused her to see it as he had. Something told him, though, that in her own quiet way, Anna Louise had the toughness and strength it would take to survive no matter what hand she was dealt.
* * *
Anna Louise couldn’t imagine what had possessed her to taunt Richard as she had on the drive into Charlottesville. He certainly hadn’t given any indication he was looking for an outsider’s impression of the choices he’d made in his life. Nor did he seem to care two hoots about his own motivations.
He was clearly a man who’d made certain decisions—for better or worse—and intended to stick by them. The why of it didn’t seem to matter much to him. From Anna Louise’s perspective, that was incredibly sad. And if there was one thing she despised, it was the tragic waste of a life for no reason at all.
Going against the grain to become a preacher had taught her two things: patience and the will to fight the odds. If she put her mind to it, surely she could show Richard Walton that living didn’t have to necessitate dodging bullets. Maybe she could even prove to him that not everyone in the world was dedicated to doing harm. And from what she’d been able to discern, that lesson would have to start in Kiley, not in some far-off place where the politics were Byzantine and strife was the only certainty.
First, though, she had to win him over. Right now he trusted her about as much as a path through a minefield. Well, if there was one thing she had going for her, it was her people skills. She hadn’t gotten to be a pastor without knowing how to get along with just about everybody, even those who mocked her or flat-out detested her. She’d even managed to have a civil conversation with Orville Patterson on one occasion. Only one, but she had viewed it as a start, which only lent credence to Richard’s assessment of her as nothing more than a cockeyed optimist.
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