Threat of Darkness

by Valerie Hansen

  The diner happened to be one of Becca’s favorite places, but she rarely enjoyed its eccentric ambience because of her grandmother. In order to accommodate the wheelchair, they had to move tables and create a general fuss that embarrassed both Becca and her grandmother. But her grandmother wasn’t with her today, so she was delighted that Davis had brought her here. She allowed him to help her out of the car and usher her inside, where red tabletops and the speckled, white vinyl seats of black steel chairs combined with knotty pine walls, a black concrete floor and an old-fashioned soda bar to charm and beckon.

  The proprietor, Lola Mae Hanover, nodded to them from the back corner table as she poured coffee from a steel pot into the cups of the Jefford brothers, Holt and Ryan. Ryan was the assistant principal at the high school where Becca taught. She blushed, recalling that he’d had to step in to calm her rowdy class the day before. That last class of a Friday afternoon could always be counted on to act up, and she could never seem to control them.

  Both men nodded in greeting as Davis steered her toward a table across the room, where he pulled out a chair for her.

  “Any idea what you’d like to eat?” he asked, shrugging out of his coat.

  She clasped her hands together beneath the table. “I’m not particular.”

  He took a seat across from her. “I’m fond of the chili myself, but then I have a cast-iron stomach, as my mother would say. I’ve met your mother, by the way, and your father.”

  “Oh?” Then she thought of her father’s pharmacy across the street. “You must have seen her in the pharmacy. She’s been working more the last week, with my sister on vacation.”

  Davis smiled. “Ah, yes, the sunny climes of Mexico. How glad I am that she’s there and not you.”

  Becca blushed to the roots of her hair. Thankfully, Ryan chose that moment to stop by the table.

  “Hello, Pastor. Becca, I’m surprised to see you out and about on a Saturday. I know how your grandmother hates to be left alone when you’re not working.” A big, authoritative man with an easy manner and kind smile, Ryan winked at Davis. “Takes a man with clout to get her out and away from Grandma Taylor.” He turned for the door, grinning. “Enjoy,” he called over his shoulder.

  Davis laughed and leaned his elbows on the table, bright eyes glowing. “I must have more influence in heavenly realms than I know, but I’m not sure I’ve met this formidable Grandma Taylor of yours.”

  “Grandma was paralyzed from the waist down in a car wreck that killed my grandfather,” Becca explained.

  Davis leaned closer. “I’m so sorry.”

  Her heart fluttering, Becca dropped her gaze. “It was a long time ago.”

  Lola came, then, and they ordered. Before the food arrived, they discussed a variety of topics: the town, books, her job. Davis easily carried the conversation, his manner intent but relaxed, and he seemed to understand what she didn’t say, as well as what little she did. But Becca hadn’t realized how at ease she’d felt around him until they bowed their heads over the meal. Usually she felt terribly conspicuous praying in a restaurant, but it somehow seemed completely natural today. Everything seemed natural and easy—until he asked a question that stung.

  “Forgive me for asking, but how old are you, Becca?”

  “I’m thirty-three,” she said. “And you?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  Five years. She was five years too old. Half a decade. Becca felt the crushing blow of disappointment. Then she chided herself. Had she really thought there might be a chance that the two of them would…?

  The unfinished thought hung like a pall over the remainder of the meal, clouding everything. They were back at the church before she realized that he hadn’t broached the subject of the pianist’s position. Of course, she would have to decline. She hated to perform, and her grandmother would not gladly part with her company more than she already did.

  “A-about the position,” she began.

  “Mmm, still praying about it,” he said, handing her up into her van. “Shall we meet next Saturday to discuss it in detail? Your grandmother can spare you for another hour, can’t she?”

  Becca opened her mouth to tell him no, but what came out was, “If it’s early enough.”

  “How’s eight?”

  After a long moment while she tried to make herself do otherwise, Becca nodded.

  “It’s a date, then. Goodbye, Becca.” He closed the door.

  “Goodbye, Pastor.”

  “Davis,” he corrected through the window. “My name is Davis. Please, use it?”

  They both laughed, and that’s when she knew just how much trouble she was in.

  THREE

  He had made Becca Inman his business over the past week, confirming her painful shyness and devotion to her grandmother, whom Becca had cared for since high school and through college, driving the fifty-plus miles each way every day to the college in Lawton in order to remain at her grandmother’s side as much as possible. The Becca he had come to know would never accept the position of pianist. Yet the Becca he had come to know privately—the gentle, talented, sweetly pretty, caring woman—simply filled every one of his needs. His interest in her went beyond the professional or even the pastoral level. From the moment he’d met her, his interest had been highly personal, and so he would press the position upon her, if only to provide himself access to her. He was a selfish, selfish man.

  His twin sisters, Caylie and Carlie, each with dark glossy hair cascading to her slender shoulders, split a look between them.

  “Not at all,” Carlie assured him, slouching over his kitchen table as she dispensed perfect twenty-one-year-old logic. “You’re doing her a favor.”

  “God wouldn’t have given her such astounding musical talents if He didn’t mean for her to use them,” Caylie insisted, sitting primly, her back ramrod straight.

  Davis knew that was true, but he also knew that he had ulterior motives. Despite hours of prayer during which he had surrendered himself repeatedly to God’s will, he knew that ultimately he would use the pianist’s position to keep Becca close to him in hopes of working his way past her timidity and into her good graces.

  The sound of a car door jump-started his heart and recalled him to the skillet warming atop the stove.

  “She’s here. Make yourselves useful.”

  * * *

  After a moment of indecision, Becca drove her minivan across the church parking lot to the parsonage and parked it beside the pastor’s shiny black coupe, intending to meet him in his private residence. He had said that his office was there, and it really would take no time to refuse him and be on her way.

  After last Sunday’s fiasco in church when she had butchered the offertory hymn, she knew without a shred of doubt that she could not accept the position of pianist at Davis’s church.

  Filling in as the pianist for her sister last Sunday had been her worst nightmare realized. Her mistake had been glancing out across the congregation to check how the collection was progressing. At that point, she had realized that all eyes were upon her, and suddenly her mind had blanked and her fingers had frozen. Unable to find her place in the music again, she had been forced to start over. All the while she’d wanted to crawl under the piano and hide.

  So clearly there was no way she could be the regular pianist for the Magnolia church. And that’s exactly what she would tell Davis. Really, she should not be inside more than ten minutes.

  She had hardly set her foot upon the porch step, however, when two identical young women with the same glossy dark chocolate hair as the pastor emerged from the house. Both wore jeans, one with a purple sweater and matching socks, the other with a rumpled T-shirt and bare feet. They smiled in tandem.

  “You must be Becca!” exclaimed one.

  “Ho
w put together you are for so early on a Saturday morning!” exclaimed the other.

  Becca barely had time to glance down at her corduroy jacket and pleated, khaki slacks before they reached out eager arms and whisked her inside. Their eyes, she noted, were a light blue like Davis’s, but without the warm glow that his seemed to possess.

  “We’re Caylie and Carlie,” said the purple sweater, not bothering to differentiate who was which.

  “Davis is making breakfast,” said the other. “He says you play and sing like a professional.”

  “And he would know,” remarked the first.

  “My, yes, given the musical genes in our family DNA.”

  “All of my family has remarkable talent but me,” declared the object of their discourse. Standing with spatula in hand in the open archway between the small, sparsely furnished living room and an old-fashioned eat-in kitchen, he welcomed her with a smile. Clad in jeans and a dark blue knit pullover with long sleeves pushed up to the elbows, his face cleanly shaven, he quite literally took Becca’s breath away—which meant that she stood there like a dummy, as per usual. “My inability to carry a tune,” he went on cheerfully, “no doubt accounts for my winding up in the church. I had to do something.”

  The twins pooh-poohed that as they trundled her into the kitchen, parked her at the square oak table, served her coffee and inquired how she preferred her eggs.

  “Oh, I’m not particular.”

  “Over easy it is,” Davis decided, standing at the stove, his back to her.

  The twins groaned. Becca quickly recanted. “Scrambled, perhaps?”

  With the twins clamoring approval, he turned a look over his shoulder, his electric ice-blue eyes dancing.

  “I like your hair down.”

  She tried not to gasp, one hand touching the recalcitrant curls. In deference to the early hour, she’d originally caught the lot of it at her nape, but the clip had burst open on the drive over and now lay hidden under one of the seats. Cheeks blazing, she ducked her head in embarrassment as Davis and the twins went about preparing the remainder of their breakfast.

  Soon the table had been laid with napkins and flatware, as well as platters of crisp bacon and toast and tubs of butter and jelly. Davis turned to the table, four plates in hand.

  “Scrambled, for the ladies,” he said, handing off the appropriate plates before placing his own before the empty chair to Becca’s left. “And over easy for the man of the house.” He wiggled his dark eyebrows at Becca. “It takes a real man to eat half-cooked eggs.”

  She recognized with a shock her own laughter among the “eww” and “yuck” of the twins. Then they linked hands around the table and bowed their heads.

  “Father God, I praise You,” Davis prayed. “Thank You for Your many blessings, among them this town, the church, my sisters and Becca. Bless this food from Your bounty to the nourishment of our bodies, and forgive me for pressuring this dear lady to take the position of pianist to satisfy my own selfish ends.” He squeezed her hand and leaned so close that their heads nearly touched. “You will, won’t you?”

  The refusal that she’d painstakingly practiced fled her tongue. What could she say? Taking a deep breath, she looked up into those luminescent blue eyes. “I’ll try my best.”

  “We’ll pray you through it,” he promised, holding her hand so tightly it seemed welded to his. “Amen!”

  The twins began to eat amid much chatter. “We’re so glad! Honestly, he’s helpless on his own. Mother says Joshua is even worse, which is why he’s married already.”

  “Our brother,” Davis clarified, using a fork to smash his eggs into a runny pulp. “He’s twenty-five.”

  “The same as my Barry,” Caylie announced happily. “I think twenty-five is a good age for a man to marry, don’t you?”

  “So is twenty-eight,” Davis said with a shrug, “or thirty-three or fifty. The only bad age to marry is too young.”

  “But I’m not too young!” Caylie argued. “Even Mother says so, and she was nearly forty.”

  “She was thirty-five,” Carlie said.

  “Thirty-four,” Davis corrected, then he left them to their bickering, turning those azure eyes fully on Becca, who had somehow managed to actually eat. “Would a trial period be more to your liking?” he asked softly. “A month, perhaps, to decide if it will work out for you?”

  A rush of warm affection flooded her. “Thank you, yes.” Somehow it helped to think that she had obligated herself only temporarily.

  And somehow it did not.

  “Good. I feel better now. When might you start?”

  Becca thought rapidly. “Well, my sister’s back, but I still have the winter concert this Friday evening to get through, so the first Sunday in March?”

  “Lovely. It’s settled then, a week from tomorrow.”

  Becca took a deep breath before confirming, “A week from tomorrow, yes.”

  “And don’t worry,” he told her. “Our congregation is still small in number, but they will be large in gratitude, I promise.”

  They discussed the pay, which she found surprisingly adequate, and then he casually asked, “Friday, that would be, what, Leap Year day?”

  “Yes, I thought it appropriate.”

  “How so?”

  She ran a fingertip around the rim of her coffee cup. “Let’s just say I’ll be taking a huge leap of faith that night.”

  “I imagine it’s a daunting prospect,” he said, “a choral concert with reluctant high-schoolers.”

  “You’ve no idea.”

  “Will it help to know that I’ll be praying for you?”

  “Yes.” Surprisingly she really thought it would.

  He smiled and polished up his breakfast plate.

  She was on her way home a half hour later before she finally allowed herself to consider the significance of one important fact: Davis Latimer’s mother had married at the age of thirty-four.

  Perhaps it was not too late, after all. Thirty-three did not seem so terribly old when she considered that Mrs. Latimer had borne at least four children after the age of thirty-four. At the same time, judging by those children—the three whom she knew, anyway—the woman must be a courageous, forthright, Amazon of a figure. No doubt she had delayed marriage because she’d been off seeing the world and accomplishing great things. Music was bred in their genes, according to the twins. Perhaps their mother had been a great musical prodigy and thrown it all away for love.

  There she went letting her fanciful dreams carry her away. The last thing she should be doing is building castles in the air just because some nice man had said he liked her hair.

  “Oh, dear Jesus, help me,” she prayed.

  Not only had she agreed to do the thing for which she was least suited in this world, she had done so for all the wrong reasons. Besides, she could never leave her grandmother alone or expect anyone else to put up with her, certainly not a man like Davis Latimer, minister or not.

  * * *

  “I am selfish,” Davis reiterated, enjoying the last of the bacon while his sisters shared a sink full of dirty dishes.

  “If she’s as talented as you say,” Caylie qualified, “it would be selfish of her not to share her gifts.”

  “And you gave her an out,” Carlie insisted.

  “Which I won’t let her take,” Davis confessed, “if there’s any way I can prevent it.”

  “You know you’re just asking God to stop you,” Carlie said.

  “No, I’m asking God not to stop me,” Davis admitted.

  “Well, then,” the twins said in unison.

  “He will or He won’t,” Carlie finished for them. “Either way, it’s up to God.”

  Davis nodded and silently prayed that God’s will wo
uld coincide with his own.

  FOUR

  “Becca, you have company.”

  Company? Becca looked up from the folder of sheet music that she was going over in her head. Now? Here? She glanced around at the collapsible risers arrayed in a semicircle before the conductor’s music stand and felt the heavy crimson curtain at her back sway. Turning, she saw Davis Latimer push past Ryan Jefford, the assistant principal. She stared stupidly while Davis, elegant in a coal-black suit and white shirt with a pale blue tie, thanked Ryan and moved toward her.

  “How are you?” he asked. “Nervous? Nauseous?”

  She hadn’t even thought of being sick until that moment, but now she gulped down a doughy lump in her throat and nodded.

  “You look marvelous,” he told her, touching a wispy ringlet that had escaped her chignon to spring from her temple. “The green of your dress brings out the green tint in your eyes.”

  “School color,” she muttered. Technically the velvet Empire-style gown with its long, fitted sleeves was many shades too dark to qualify as the official school color, but she liked the simplicity of it, and her sister thought it would look good against the black her students would be wearing without standing out too much. At the moment, however, Becca had other thoughts in her head. “Wh-what are you doing here?”

  His pale blue eyes glowed with sympathy. “I thought it might help if we prayed together. Would you mind?”

  Mind? She’d been praying since she’d awakened that morning. Oh, Lord, don’t let me cry. Oh, Lord, don’t let me faint. Oh, Lord, don’t let me mess up. Oh, Lord, make the kids behave and pay attention. Oh, Lord, get me out of this!

  The young pastor bowed his head, and Becca followed suit, one hand unconsciously splayed atop her sheet music, the other gripping the white baton that her parents had given her as a graduation gift. To her shock, Davis slid an arm about her shoulders.

  “Father God,” he whispered, “how I praise You for the magnificent gifts You have given this beautiful woman. Let no one leave this place tonight without understanding what a blessing the ability to make music is. Inspire Becca as never before, Father, to Your glory, and as she loses herself in the beauty of the music, let the rest of us follow so that we may know some iota of Your magnificence. You have made her for this, Lord God, and so we trust Your Holy Spirit to guide and strengthen her as she fulfills this moment in her destiny. In the name of Your Holy Son we pray. Amen.”