“What is it, Sister Margie?”
“It’s Sister Lynn, and that man she went to Louisiana to meet. They’re in serious danger—right now. Oh, my sweet Jesus . . .”
Nothing more needed to be said. Pastor Gentry immediately grabbed the hands of both Sister Arlene and Sister Margie and began fervently praying in the Spirit.
JEANNETTE HARPERLOVINGLY STARED at the framed picture of Lynn, a picture taken when her daughter had graduated from Sumter High. She squirted some glass cleaner on the frame and gently wiped the glass surface with an old cloth until it sparkled in the afternoon light. Jeannette took great pride in cleaning her house, and what she loved most of all was cleaning the countless pictures that hung in every room.
“Pictures paint the story line of families,” she would always say to anyone who thought her numerous picture frames were cluttering the house. “And the story line of this family begins and ends with Lynn . . .”
Jeannette and Leonard had wanted more children—maybe four or five kids. But a medical condition had prevented Jeannette from having another child; the doctors thought it a miracle that she was even able to carry Lynn to term.
“Yes, you were . . . and you will always be a miracle,” Jeannette now said, setting the graduation picture back on the mantel and picking up the next one. “My miracle.” It was a candid shot of a much younger Lynn and Leonard, playing around at Myrtle Beach. Even though the picture had been taken more than twenty years earlier, Jeannette remembered it like it had been yesterday.
“No, Daddy!” Lynn had been screaming playfully, as Leonard swung her by her arms, around and around. Leonard had been getting closer to the ocean’s edge, and Lynn had been terrified of water.
“It’s alright, baby,” Leonard had reassured her. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”
Jeannette had snapped the picture just as Leonard had pulled Lynn closer to his chest—both of them laughing, wet, frolicking, and enjoying the special daddy-daughter bond they had always shared. Just above their shoulders, the purplish-red sun was peeking through gray-and-white clouds over the Atlantic Ocean. It was Jeannette’s favorite picture because it beautifully highlighted the two people she loved most. She smiled as she recalled again how afraid Lynn had been (and still was, to this day) of the water.
“No, Daddy! You’re getting too close to the water! Don’t let me go under!”
“Relax, Lynn, I got you. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
Suddenly, the picture slipped from Jeannette’s hands and crashed against the mantel’s wooden surface, breaking the glass frame.
“Oh my God,” Jeannette breathed, but for the moment all thoughts about her favorite picture had ceased. A new fear gripped her heart—the kind of terror that could only be linked with a mother’s intuition. At that second, she knew that her child was in trouble—a mother’s worst nightmare.
“Oh, my . . . God!” she screamed. The same horrible feeling had terrorized her at the exact moment Lynn had gotten into that car accident.
“Jeannette?” Leonard hurried into the living room. “Are you alright? What happened?” He carefully steered her away from the broken glass around the fireplace, taking her over to the couch.
“It’s Lynn . . . I feel . . . I know . . . something’s wrong. She’s in danger.”
“Lynn? She’s in Louisiana, right? She went to meet that man who healed her eyes.”
Jeannette wriggled out of her husband’s arms and picked up the cordless phone lying on the coffee table. She dialed Lynn’s cell number, but the call went straight to voice mail.
“Her phone’s not on . . . I told her to keep it on! She doesn’t know anybody in Louisiana . . . anything can happen to her and we wouldn’t—”
“Jeannette, that’s enough now,” Leonard said soothingly, taking his wife into his arms once more. “Getting hysterical is not going to help matters right now. We should pray—God has always protected Lynn, even when . . . and especially when we couldn’t.”
“But she’s in trouble! I know—”
“Shh . . . Jeannette, come on, let’s pray.”
Jeannette nodded, convincing herself that Leonard was right. “God, please help my baby . . .”
Chapter Forty-five
TRAVIS HAD DRIVEN BACK to his motel room in pursuit of some well-deserved rest. The reporter in him wanted to return to the lake to find out what had transpired after the gunshots, but after camping out all night outside Chance Howard’s home and then waiting all morning by the docks, his body was officially shutting down. Besides, he’d gotten what he came here for, so as far as he was concerned—mission accomplished.
The cheap motel room he’d gotten was not much for looks, but that was the least of his concerns as he flung his bag to the floor, kicked off his shoes, and tumbled onto the bed. The second his head touched the pillow, he was out cold.
He dreamed that he was sitting at a desk in a sprawling high-rise corner office overlooking Manhattan. Atop the mahogany desk lay that day’s edition of the New York Times, with the right-corner headline displaying, “Travis Everett Captures Pulitzer Prize.”
Travis picked up the newspaper, leaned back in his seat, and scanned through the first few paragraphs. He was now a celebrated writer at the New Yorker magazine and he’d apparently just won the Pulitzer for writing an article documenting the rebuilding project for the Ground Zero memorial. The article hailed his piece as a “courageous effort to capture the patriotism, courage, and honor shown by the heroes of the 9/11 tragedy.” Travis was about to pat himself on the back when a stunning brunette appeared at his doorway. “Mr. Everett,” she began in a voice dripping with pure honey, “you have a call on line one.”
You must be my personal assistant, Travis thought, with a huge grin. He had moved up in the world.
“Thank you. Forward it to my phone.”
When his line began ringing, he picked it up and answered. But there was no answer. The line continued to ring.
What the . . . ?
“Hello? Hello?” he spoke into the receiver, but the phone kept ringing. Why . . . was the phone still ringing? “Hello? Hello?”
And that’s when he woke up to the real-life ringing of his cell phone on the table beside his bed. Still slightly disoriented from his dream, he rubbed his eyes and slowly reached out a hand and grabbed the tiny flip-phone. But the call had gone to voice mail.
Yawning loudly, he waited a few seconds, then entered his voice-mail password and pressed the phone back to his ear.
“Travis Everett, where the devil is my story!” Ryman Wells’s voice barked in his ear with all the friendliness of a pissed-off drill sergeant addressing a truant basic trainee.
Wh-what?
“You told me you were going to have that story e-mailed to me by one o’clock. Well, I’ve been calling every hour since three o’clock, and this is my last call. Since you haven’t checked in, you are now AWOL, soldier!”
Travis glanced at his watch and saw that the time was now 9 p.m. Had he been asleep that long?
“Do I have to remind you that you are using the State’s money to pay for those travel expenses?” Ryman continued ranting. “Do I have to remind you that I had to bend over backwards to get that expense report approved for you? And let me tell you something—if you hadn’t written those two halfway decent stories on this mystery man, your lazy self wouldn’t have gotten my approval to go to Swan Lake, much less Louisiana! You call me back pronto, Everett! You hear me? Pronto!”
“B-but . . . I did send the story to you,” Travis sputtered, feeling the first signs of a massive headache beginning to form in the center of his forehead. He looked at the record of incoming phone calls and saw that Ryman had called a total of eight times since one o’clock.
“This . . . cannot be happening!” He tossed the phone down and reached for his laptop bag on the floor. He took out the laptop, booted up, and accessed his e-mail.
And there it was, a smoking gun mocking him like a horrible
nightmare from which he could not awake. The message he’d sent to Ryman Wells had been returned as . . . undeliverable. Since Travis had not saved Ryman Wells’s e-mail address in the laptop’s personal address book, he’d had to actually type in the address. To his horror, he had misspelled his editor’s name by one wrong keystroke, typing R-y-m-s-n in the address line. Of course, the e-mail server had automatically returned the message within seconds of its sending, but Travis had not seen that return message because he’d closed the laptop and had not opened it . . . until now.
“How could I have made such . . . a . . . stupid mistake!” he yelled, slamming his fist onto the laptop’s keyboard. Misspelling his own editor’s name and not returning phone calls were the mistakes of a rookie reporter, not someone on the fast track to becoming a star journalist!
I’ve gotta call Ryman . . . but what am I supposed to tell him?
He had both the pictures and the story now, but could he still submit them, given that he was now back in Ryman Wells’s doghouse?
Knowing that Ryman was not in his office at the moment (and definitely not wanting to speak to his editor), Travis called his boss’s voice mail and apologized for not checking and at the same time promised that he had a trump card to make up for the delay.
His “trump card” was locating Chance Howard and obtaining some exclusive quotes. Assuming, of course, the man was still alive.
Chapter Forty-six
ABEEPING NOISE, faint at first and then growing louder, continued ringing in his ears like the blaring of a never-ending alarm clock. Chance slowly opened his eyes, blinking quickly to adjust to the new light entering his world.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Howard,” a voice to his right said. “It’s good to see you finally awake.”
“Where am I?” Chance’s tongue felt like a piece of rubber.
“You’re at Christus Schumpert Hospital, in Bossier City. My name is Dr. Peterson. You’ve had quite an ordeal—those two bullets passed close to some vital organs as well as your spinal cord. Thankfully there was no lasting damage, and we were able to cleanly remove the bullets. You did pick up a concussion.”
The lake . . . Jucinda . . . gunshots . . . Pop . . . Lynn! The memory of everything that happened on the boat flooded his brain like a tidal wave crashing onshore. “Wh-what happened to Jucinda, the woman who shot me?” he blurted out. “And Lynn? And Pop? And that reporter—he was there, too, wasn’t he?”
Dr. Peterson laid a hand on Chance’s shoulder. “Those questions will be answered soon enough. Right now, it’s best if you rested some more. I believe one of those questions can be answered for you, however.” He walked back to the doorway and made a motion with his hand. Seconds later, a nurse rolled a wheelchair in the room. The woman riding in it was . . . Lynn.
In spite of his injuries, Chance struggled to sit up in the bed. “Lynn, oh my God . . . you weren’t shot, were you?”
Lynn shook her head. “No, I’m just a little sore from my . . . um, from my little swim.”
“Miss Harper dived into the lake after you . . . twice,” Dr. Peterson explained. “Here at Christus Schumpert, we’ve come to regard her as a hero.”
Chance stared at Lynn, openmouthed and speechless.
“It wasn’t so much heroic as it was foolish,” Lynn said, faintly smiling. “I didn’t know what I was thinking—I don’t know how to swim! And all too late I realized that I didn’t have the lungs or the energy to get us both back to the surface.”
“Fortunately, rescue workers who were less than a quarter of a mile away heard your father’s shouts,” Dr. Peterson added. “They were able to pull both you and Lynn back to their boat and perform CPR to get you both breathing again. Your gunshot wounds posed a greater challenge, however. A helicopter was dispatched to pick you up and bring you here.”
Chance finally discovered his voice. “Y-you dived in after me?” he asked Lynn incredulously.
Lynn shrugged, the faint smile still on her lips. “Well, what was I supposed to do? Let a big fish swallow you like Jonah and then spit you up on dry land in three days?”
HOURS LATER, CHANCE AWOKE to see Lynn still in his room, now sitting by the window.
“I’m surprised Dr. Peterson let you in here,” Chance began. “I’m supposed to be resting.”
Lynn turned from the window and put a finger to her lips. “He didn’t let me in here. I sort of . . . snuck in.”
“You what?”
“Shh!” Lynn grinned. “I know it’s crazy, but I just didn’t feel like sleeping in some hotel room, and I didn’t want to go back home with your father just yet.”
“But . . . how did you get past security? And the doctors?”
“Well . . . I am the resident hero around here, remember? You can’t begin to believe how many perks that affords me.”
Chance was silent for a while. “Thank you. You know, for what you did at the lake and all. That took a lot of heart to dive in after me.”
Lynn stood and moved the chair closer to his bed. “It took a lot of faith, too. I’ve always had a fear of putting my head completely underwater.”
“Then why . . . why’d you do it?”
Lynn shrugged. “At the time, it was something that I just had to do. For one thing, I wanted to repay you for laying hands on my eyes. And I’d seen those bullets hit you, and how the water was so . . . was so . . .”
“Red,” Chance finished. “I remember the water being so red.”
“Right. So, I figured that even if you were a great swimmer, you were hurt and you needed some help.”
“What happened to Jucinda?”
“The police caught her a few hours later and your father identified her as the shooter. She’s at a correctional facility, awaiting formal charges to be brought against her.”
Chance slowly shook his head. “I never thought she’d actually . . . I mean, I knew she had that anger problem, and that she was still upset over losing Nina and all, but I still can’t believe she would do something like this. I think she needs prayer and psychiatric help more than what the criminal justice system has to offer. How’s Pop doing?”
“He’s doing okay, best as I can tell. He was up here throughout your surgery. The doctors told him to go home and get some rest, but he said he’ll be back in the morning.”
“And what about the reporter with the Clemson Tigers cap?”
“You are certainly full of questions, now that you’re awake. You must be talking about Travis Everett—I saw him briefly at the docks. To tell you the truth, I’m surprised we haven’t heard anything from or about him since. He clearly gave me the impression he was coming here solely to talk with you.”
“Maybe what happened at the lake scared him off.”
“Maybe. I seriously doubt that, though.”
A page sounded over the hospital intercom system then, requesting that a doctor come to the emergency room.
“This place never rests,” Chance said, nodding toward his door. “Nurses come in at all hours, poking you with all kinds of needles and taking blood like vampires.”
“You should be thankful you’re still here for them to take your blood, Chance. You were almost a goner.”
“A part of me . . . wanted to go. Did you know that? No, no, of course, you couldn’t. But when I hit that lake bottom, and I felt the little air I had left in my lungs dissipating—I wanted to go. I remember praying to God that if it was my time, then I was ready. I was ready to spend eternity with Him. And . . . and with Nina.”
“I thought it was my time to go, too, Chance. I saw you there—even tried pulling you up from those rocks, but I couldn’t. And then I realized I didn’t even have the strength to swim back to the surface. I remember laying my head on your chest and praying for my spirit to be with Jesus.”
“Y-you wanted to go, too?”
“If it was the Lord’s will, then yes, I did. Chance, it always goes back to the Lord’s will. The Bible says in Hebrews chapter nine that it’s appointed for man to di
e once, and after this the judgment. You see, the Lord knows our birth date, and He knows the date when He will call us back home to be with Him. If it had been our time to go, then we would have been in heaven right now.
“But it wasn’t our time, don’t you see? The two bullets Jucinda’s gun put into you didn’t kill you, and neither did hitting your head on that rock at the bottom of the lake. And I didn’t drown in that lake, even though all the odds were stacked against me. God must still have a plan for both of our lives—there is unfinished Kingdom business that we must do!”
“Unfinished Kingdom business, huh?”
“You have to see this from God’s perspective, Chance. The incredible healing gift God has given you—He intends for more lives to be changed for His glory! And it’s because He can trust you with this gift—you are not someone who thinks that the power to heal is somehow of your own doing. You know that such a power only comes from God. And from what I can tell, every time you lay hands on someone and pray for the healing, you make it clear that God is the true Healer, and the only One worthy of the praise. The Bible says in 2 Corinthians that we have the treasure of God’s glory in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us. You have a treasure inside of you, Chance Howard. And God is not finished unveiling that treasure.”
“Unveiling that treasure to whom?”
“To the nations, Chance. To all nations of the world.”
Chapter Forty-seven
TRAVIS’S PROMISE TO DELIVER quotes straight from the mystery man’s mouth had bought him a little time from the State, although Ryman Wells clearly remained furious that he had waited so long to report back.
“You’d better write the best story of your career with this one, Everett!” Ryman had barked, after calling Travis early the following morning. “Or your career has just gone down the toilet!”
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