by James Dobson
“Think about it, babe. Kevin is about to offer alternatives to the Youth Initiative. I can think of a lot of people who would like to stop that from happening.”
It hadn’t been that long since Julia had aided such an effort herself. In pursuit of journalistic prestige she had nearly ruined Kevin’s reputation and destroyed his happy home. It wasn’t hard to imagine someone with far more to gain going to much greater lengths. She suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to pray.
For Mr. and Mrs. Tolbert.
For Kevin and Angie.
And, as before, for someone else.
“Are the kids all right?” she asked.
“Fine, as far as I know.”
“Baby Leah?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just…I had another dream.”
“I see. Was Baby Leah one of the faces?”
“No. But I can’t shake the feeling she’s in danger.”
“Should I call Angie?”
Julia thought for a moment. “No, don’t do that.”
“But you just said—”
“I see no use in getting her worked up over a feeling I can’t decipher, let alone explain.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. I’m sure.”
Troy promised to keep her informed before ending the call.
Julia drove back to the house, where she showered and got dressed for the day. Then she retrieved the blanket Amanda had yanked onto the floor and covered her naked bed before sitting on the edge to think. She realized that no to-do list demanded obedience: she had no deadlines to hit, memos to write, or meetings to attend. She had, thankfully, resigned from Daugherty and Associates after obtaining the needed information about the ad campaign.
She glanced at a small notepad resting on the nightstand. It was the same notepad that had been her midnight companion back when she lived in an apartment with her sister Maria and nephew Jared. The same notepad onto which she had captured countless middle-of-the-night sparks of brilliance that might become another Pulitzer-winning feature. And the same notepad that contained her frantic notes from scenes that had once terrorized her restless sleep. She flipped open the pad to read the familiar words.
MAN
SHADOW
FEAR
ANGER
ABANDONED
An hour earlier she had been shaken out of the same progressing dream. Years before it had prompted panic as she felt the downward summons of sadistic laughter. A few days earlier it had frightened her with the vile destruction of iconic beauty in faces she didn’t recognize and, perhaps, would never know. But now, sitting in the quiet of a home she shared with a once-lonely man and a once-orphaned girl, Julia sensed a greater meaning to the nocturnal tale.
She slid a small pencil from the notepad and positioned it over the page to receive whatever ideas might present themselves. But she wasn’t prepared to receive what actually came. Despite an overwhelming urge to use the power of the pen, her greatest strength, to engage the enemy, she felt an overwhelming impulse toward a different kind of action. It was as if someone was assigning a task that, unlike writing, she felt ill equipped to perform. And so, setting aside her journalistic prowess, Julia engaged a very different front of the battle.
She turned around, bent her knees, and bowed at the side of the bed.
“Dear God,” she whispered, “I sense you want me to pray. You know I’m not very good at this. But here I am, asking you to protect my friends, the Tolbert family. Especially Baby Leah.”
The words broke as emotion overtook Julia’s voice. She felt as if she had been given a tiny fragment of a sorrow that no mortal could possibly bear, the sorrow of one who had created a masterpiece beyond words only to see it thrown onto a trash heap of discarded human dignity.
“Father in heaven,” she continued, “I don’t know what to do. Someone hates what the Tolbert family represents. What every family represents.”
A memory flooded Julia’s mind. One of the first sermons she and Troy had ever heard by Pastor Ware described God creating man and woman and inviting them to become fruitful and fill the earth. The union of man and woman, the pastor had said, reflected the very image of a God who is, himself, a communion of persons.
“Father,” she continued, “someone clearly hates what Kevin and Troy are doing. The same someone who, in my dreams, is pulling men, women, and children into darkness.”
She paused.
“You gave me this dream for a reason, I know it. Please, God, tell me what you want me to do.”
She waited in silence. But for what? A voice? A clap of thunder? Surely something that would tell her what to do next. Nothing came, so she said the prayer again, clasping her hands more tightly than before. Still no answer.
Unfamiliar with the protocol of fervent prayer, Julia remained on her knees for several more minutes. A sharp pain in her left leg finally compelled her to open one eye, then the other. She stood and walked toward the kitchen to fix herself some breakfast. Surely a bowl of cereal wouldn’t stand in the way should God finally decide to say something.
She heard a single ping come from a tablet that was sitting on the kitchen table, where, she surmised, Troy had been reading the morning headlines before receiving Kevin’s urgent call.
Julia tapped the bouncing icon to open a message. Anonymous.
DEAR MS. DAVIDSON:
I HAVE RELIABLE DETAILS FOR A MAJOR NEWS STORY. I TRUST YOU TO TELL IT PROPERLY. ARE YOU INTERESTED IN SCOOPING EVERY OTHER JOURNALIST?
An annoying bit of spam, Julia wondered, or the answer to her prayer? She decided to find out.
DEAR ANONYMOUS:
I DON’T WRITE ANONYMOUS STORIES. WHO ARE YOU?
JULIA DAVIDSON SIMMONS
A reply came just as fast.
I WILL GIVE YOU EVERYTHING YOU NEED IN TWO HOURS. WILL YOU MEET ME?
Julia considered the offer.
MEET WHERE? AND WHAT IS THE STORY ABOUT? HOW DO I KNOW IT WILL BE WORTH MY TIME?
She waited.
WHERE: CHRIST COMMUNITY CHURCH
STORY: WHO KILLED JUDGE VICTOR SANTIAGO
Chapter Thirty-Eight
“Oh, hello.” Mrs. Mayhew appeared startled and a bit embarrassed by Julia’s approach. She quickly lowered the sealed envelope she had been holding toward the light as if trying to make out the contents. “I’m sorry, dear. I wasn’t expecting anyone. Do you have an appointment?”
“I think I do,” said Julia. “But I’m not exactly sure where or with whom.”
Mrs. Mayhew stared blankly.
“I received an odd message asking me to meet someone at Christ Community Church. But there was no indication of who I’m meeting.”
“That is odd,” muttered the pastor’s assistant.
A moment of perplexed silence.
“Wait. I wonder if your appointment has anything to do with this.” She handed Julia the envelope marked “Urgent and Confidential: For the Pastor’s Eyes Only.”
Julia handed it back. “But I’m not the pastor.”
Mrs. Mayhew frowned at the comment. “I realize that. But someone put this envelope on my desk while I was rearranging the flowers in the sanctuary twenty minutes ago. And now, here you are. Hardly seems like chance to me.”
“So Pastor Ware is out?”
“Oh, no, he’s in his office.”
Julia glanced toward the closed door. “With someone?”
“Alone,” said Mrs. Mayhew.
“And that envelope arrived twenty minutes ago?”
A nod.
“Do you think it might be a good idea to show it to him?”
“What, now?”
“Well, it is marked urgent.”
A look of annoyance swept over Mrs. Mayhew’s face, as if delivering the envelope would thwart her effort to learn what was inside. “Of course,” she said weakly while raising an index finger. “Excuse me for just a moment, will you, dear?”
While Mrs.
Mayhew slipped into the pastor’s office, Julia checked her tablet for another update from Troy. All good news: Mr. and Mrs. Tolbert were doing fine, Kevin’s plane had arrived and he was en route to the hospital, and the police had gathered clues linking the incident to a series of other spurious transitions that appeared unrelated to Kevin’s activities.
She breathed a sigh of relief while typing a quick message to Angie.
GOT THE GOOD NEWS. TROY IS WITH KEVIN’S FOLKS. THEY’RE DOING WELL.
PRAYING FOR YOU.
As usual, she reviewed the message before tapping send. Something was missing. She added one additional line.
HUG THE KIDS FOR ME. ESPECIALLY BABY LEAH.
The door to the pastor’s office swung open.
“Hello, Julia,” said Alex with some urgency. “Please, come in.”
She followed him into the office.
“Please, have a seat,” he offered, his eyes still fixed on the handwritten letter in his hand.
“I received a strange message a few hours ago asking me to meet someone here,” Julia began. “Something about getting the scoop on an important story.”
“Yes, I know. I just received this.” He handed her the note.
Dear Pastor Ware:
Thank you for promising to protect the confidentiality of my confession. I hope you don’t mind that I intend to confess over the phone. Two reasons.
First, my childhood priest, Father Tomberlin, listened from the other side of a thin veil hanging between us in the confessional. That made it easier for me. I’d prefer letting the phone conceal our faces.
Second, and more to the point, I have asked someone to join you. Her name is Julia Davidson, a journalist. I want her to expose the person who framed me by reporting what I say as if I’m a confidential informant. You will serve as a corroborating witness, her second source. Unorthodox, I realize, but confirmation from a minister will provide credibility to her story without exposing my identity.
Please call me if and when Ms. Davidson arrives.
Thank you, again, for your concern and help in this matter.
Frank
Julia looked up from the page. “Is this legitimate?”
Alex nodded slowly. “He was in my office this morning. There was blood on his sleeve and he said he wanted to confess something. But he left before explaining further.”
Julia glanced apprehensively at the pastor’s assistant, who, it appeared, had no intention of leaving the room.
“You may as well sit down, Mrs. Mayhew,” the pastor finally said. “I think we’ll want a third witness to whatever we’re about to hear.”
The woman quivered like a little girl accepting a bright-red balloon. “How exciting,” she said, quickly planting herself on the sofa.
Julia joined her and Alex around the coffee table. The pastor placed his tablet in front of them and tapped in the contact code that appeared at the bottom of the note.
“Here goes,” he sighed while bowing his head as if offering a silent prayer.
They heard a click on the line. “Thank you for calling Confidential Conferencing.” Julia had heard the same woman’s inflection every time she booked an airline ticket, pressed two for her credit card balance, or waited on hold for a government official. “Please hold while I connect you to your party.”
Mrs. Mayhew sat up on the edge of her seat as if anticipating a roller coaster’s dip.
“Hello,” said a male voice.
“Frank? This is Pastor Alex. I received your note and I’m here with Julia and, I hope you don’t mind, my assistant. I thought it might be a good idea to have a third witness.”
“Fine,” came a tense reply. “Thank you for honoring my request.”
Julia leaned in closer to the phone. “This is Julia,” she said. “Before you begin, can I ask a question?” She took silence as consent. “Why me?”
“Sorry?” said the voice.
“Why did you specifically ask me to hear your confession out of the countless possible journalists?”
“Why not you?”
“Well, I’m not currently part of a syndicate, for one thing. There’s no guarantee I’ll be able to convince someone to run the story.”
“They’ll run the story,” he said dismissively. “And you’ll tell it as it should be told.”
“What makes you say that?” she asked.
“Because you understand me.”
Julia felt alarm. “Have we met?”
“Not directly. But I know you pretty well.”
She swallowed hard. “How?”
Several seconds passed. “I dated your sister.”
Julia rushed through a mental checklist of Maria’s flings. Then she remembered. A year earlier the police had used Maria in a sting operation to catch a man suspected of threatening Judge Victor Santiago.
“Matthew? Matthew Adams?”
A prolonged silence. “I can’t tell you my name,” he replied nervously. “Nor can I allow you to speculate. I’m an anonymous source. Understood?”
Julia nodded toward the voice. “Yes, I understand.”
“Pastor Ware?” the voice insisted.
“I understand also,” said Alex.
“Me, too,” added Mrs. Mayhew eagerly.
The man continued. “The main reason I chose you, Ms. Davidson, is that I know you’ll understand why I made the choices I did.”
“How do you know that?” Julia asked warily.
“You were part of my inspiration, for one thing.”
“Was I?”
“Does the title ‘Free to Thrive’ ring a bell, Ms. Davidson?”
Regretfully, it did. It had been one of the more popular columns from her RAP Syndicate days, advocating genetic prescreening over blind conception. It was something she had written before meeting Troy, before discovering their infertility, and before viewing children as gifts to be received rather than products to be manufactured to match picky customer specifications.
“You said we should give babies the freedom to thrive by eliminating the risk of unnecessary disease and disability,” he continued.
Julia thought of Baby Leah.
“The last words of that article helped me make a very difficult decision. You said we should give the same freedom to those of us already burdened by both.”
Julia looked toward Alex with embarrassed eyes.
“What kind of decision?” the pastor asked.
“Excuse me?”
“You said the article helped you make a difficult decision.”
“My mother was doing poorly,” the man explained. “It was costing us a fortune, too much for me to pursue her dream that I become a college professor.”
“I see,” said Alex. “So you ‘set her free’?”
“Well, not me specifically. But yes, we chose a transition.”
“Who chose?” Julia asked.
“She did!” the man snapped with offense. “My mother chose to transition so that I could afford tuition.”
“I don’t follow. How did my column help?”
“I was reluctant to go through with it,” he explained. “I guess I never fully recovered from my Catholicism.” A pensive chuckle. “My old priest even told me it would be a sin for her to volunteer. But your column helped open my mind to a less rigid religious view. Long story short, I came to believe that our bodies and minds decay so we should free those who suffer from unnecessary anguish.”
“Was your mother suffering?” asked Alex.
No reply.
“Frank? Was your mother in pain?”
“That’s not the point,” the man said. “My point is that you, Ms. Davidson, will understand why I went down this path.”
“What path is that?” she asked.
“A path that got me in trouble with the law.”
He told his story. A wrongful death lawsuit against NEXT Transition Services had held up the man’s transition inheritance money. The case had gone to a federal appeals court. It had hung on the opinio
n of presiding judge Victor Santiago. The man had written to the judge, hoping to open a dialogue. Somehow, someone had gotten copies of the letters and forged a final, threatening note. When the police found the judge dead in his chambers they had naturally assumed the man had been the culprit.
“But I know who the real killer is,” the voice insisted. “And I know who hired him to do it.”
“We’re listening,” said Alex.
“The killer goes by the name Mori. He works for a lady who calls herself Serena Winthrop and a man named Dimitri.”
“Evan Dimitri?” asked Julia with alarm.
“You know him?” asked Alex.
“Not personally. But my husband has met him. A power player behind Franklin’s campaign.”
Mrs. Mayhew’s eyes became saucers. “Joshua Franklin?” she shouted. “The senator?”
Julia nodded. Then she remembered. Pastor Alex had mentioned blood on the sleeve of the man she now knew for certain to be Matthew Adams. “Did you…kill Dimitri?” she asked.
“If only I had.”
“Then what did you do, Frank?” asked Alex. “You arrived in my office this morning clearly distraught about something. You had blood on your shirt. Whose blood was it?”
“He threatened to turn me in to the police if I didn’t accept another assignment.”
“What kind of assignment?” asked Julia, feeling the same dread that had pervaded her dreams.
“They hired me to help with at-home transitions,” Matthew confessed. “Everything appeared to be aboveboard. I had no idea…”
He stopped short as if realizing he had said more than he should. Then he continued through a breaking voice, “I can’t forget their faces.”
“What faces?” asked Alex. “The ones that look like religious icons?”
“Yes,” he admitted.
“Can you give me names?”
“Brianna Jackson. Saul Weinstein. Josephine Green.”
A pause.
“Jim and Gayle Tolbert.”
Julia leaped to her feet. “Is that whose blood was on your shirt?” she shouted.
“I didn’t kill them,” Matthew was saying. “I promise. The old man attacked us. That’s when I realized the assignment was a sham. I ran. Mori, he’s the killer, not me. I did nothing wrong. I’m a victim. I just did as I was told.”