Redemption Lake

by Monique Miller

  “Well, amen to that.” Shelby shook her head.

  “I don’t know how the man does it with all the responsibilities; not only as a husband, but also as a pastor of a mega church. He always seems to be able to keep his cool.”

  “I don’t know how he does it either. Hopefully one day in the future, I’ll be able to visit him and gain some nuggets, which will help me in my walk with God.”

  “I’m sure he won’t mind. But if you ask me, I think you’re doing a good job.”

  “Your vote’s bias,” Phillip said.

  “Maybe so, but I’d like to think I’m a good judge of character.”

  “Okay, if you say so. What about the situation with Beryl and Travis?” Phillip asked.

  “What about it?”

  “Do you think I am getting through to those two?”

  “I think you are probably getting through to Beryl. She seems to be taking in everything, taking notes and asking questions. Much of her conversation, and the points she makes, seem to really be directed at Travis. It’s like she is trying to indirectly get him to understand her wants and needs.”

  “Sometimes she isn’t so indirect,” Phillip said.

  “That’s true.” Shelby nodded her head.

  “Her emotions flip flop from being angry and frustrated, to showing signs of wanting to work with Travis to keep their marriage together.”

  “Overall, it is sort of hard to read how strongly she feels about calling it quits or really trying to make it work,” Shelby said.

  “If you ask me, I think her words are speaking louder than her actions. I think if Travis doesn’t start to really hone in to what his wife wants, then he just might find his world completely turned upside down.”

  “Maybe you can pull him to the side and find out where his mind really is.”

  “I think I will. That one on one talk with George was good. I’ll probably talk to Xavier in the same manner,” Phillip said.

  “If you’d like for me to, I can try to talk to Beryl and Charlotte also. Nina and I have already said that we’ll touch bases tomorrow.”

  “Yeah. Could you do that, please?”

  “Of course.”

  Shelby shifted, lifting Phillip’s head a couple of inches in order to readjust her legs, which were starting to feel numb on the thighs.

  “Is my head too heavy for your legs?”

  “No, big head,” Shelby said placing Phillip’s head back down comfortably.

  “What about Xavier and Charlotte? What are your thoughts now about their situation?”

  “I think Charlotte has been harboring a great deal of anger, and I think her being able to finally confront him allowed her to get a huge weight off her chest.” Shelby stroked Phillip’s eyebrows with her index finger.

  “She had a lot to get off her chest.”

  “And I think she may have more. Like I said before, it didn’t exactly look like she was finished with her confrontation the other day,” Shelby said.

  “Maybe she was able to talk to him in private. But as far as I can see, it doesn’t look like she’s talking to him very much.”

  “You never know what goes on behind closed doors.” Shelby didn’t know why, but her comment about closed doors triggered her mind to think about Phillip’s friend, Will.

  Will had recently gotten married to a woman named Morgan who he’d met in church. Their courtship had been relatively short, lasting seven months. There was something about Morgan that didn’t set well with Shelby.

  “Baby?”

  Shelby heard the questioning sound in her husband’s voice. “Yeah?”

  “What’d you do, zone off on me?”

  “Oh, no, I’m sorry. I was just thinking about something, that’s all. What did you say?”

  “You are right, sometimes things aren’t what they seem,” Phillip said. “And I’m hoping this is also the case with Xavier and Charlotte. Sometimes the brain distorts stuff.”

  Abruptly, Phillip sat up. Startled, Shelby jumped.

  “That’s it,” Phillip stated.

  “That’s what?”

  “The fun house effect.”

  “Huh?”

  “My next topic. You know how it is when you’re in a fun house like the ones at the fair.”

  “Okay, and?”

  “Fun houses are pretty blatant, and you know you’re in one, especially when you’re looking into those altered mirrors. From the moment you step into one of those places, almost everything is distorted.” Phillip looked around for his notepad and pen. When he found it, he sat on the edge of the bed and began writing. “I’ve got to get these thoughts down while they’re fresh in my head.”

  “The fun house affect,” Shelby said. “It has a bit of a ring to it.”

  Phillip stopped writing for a moment. “Good, because thus far, this cabin has been anything but fun.”

  Chapter 30

  Charlotte Knight

  Friday: 4:55 A.M.

  In her bed, Charlotte tossed and turned, feeling like something was clinging to her body. Upon waking, she felt the tangled sheets around her. She clawed at the sheets as if trying to tear them off. Ever since going to bed earlier that night, she’d been unable to shake the nightmares she was having. Picking her head up, she looked over at the clock on the dresser. In a little over two hours she’d need to get up and face another tension packed day.

  Forcefully, she pushed her head back onto the pillow, and then pulled the sheet over her head. The light from the alarm clock was bothering her. Maybe if she made it a little darker under the covers, she’d be able to at least salvage an hour or so of sleep.

  After several more minutes, Charlotte still hadn’t been able to fall back asleep, and the darkness hadn’t done anything to swipe her memory of the awful dreams. The dreams were more like out-of-control flashbacks of all the detective work she’d done over the months.

  When she’d gotten the copies of Xavier’s cell phone records, it was as simple as going online and pulling up past bills, which had the details of each call. She uploaded each file one by one, then pressed print. Within a matter of minutes, she had a neat stack of pages detailing thousands of calls placed to and from her husband.

  To her dismay, the dreams were distorting those very simple steps. In her dream, when she pressed the button to print the pages, they’d ended up flying out of the printer, causing pages upon pages to fill the room. It reminded her of one of the old I Love Lucy episodes where Lucy was in a chocolate factory and the chocolates kept coming so fast that she couldn’t keep up with them. Lucy ended up putting the chocolates any and everywhere to hide them.

  Charlotte’s dream shifted as she remembered the time when she’d placed a home phone recording device on their home phone. She’d read in a book once about a character who recorded her phone conversations because she was being harassed by a crank caller. During a quick trip to an electronic store, she’d explained to a salesman what she wanted, and he led her to exactly what she needed.

  It was a little recording device, unlike a regular answering machine, in that there was no announcement to leave a message. There weren’t any beeping or clicking sounds to make anyone aware that the recording was being done. Whenever the phone rang and the call was answered, the device would automatically start recording the conversation between the people talking.

  During Charlotte’s quest to catch Xavier in as much dirt as she could, she wanted to also catch any actual conversations he might be bold enough to have from their home. The device ended up working like a charm, recording all of his conversations and even all of Charlotte’s conversations, since she’d left the machine hooked up at all times. It was hidden behind the couch in her living room, hooked up to a phone jack they never used.

  But again, Charlotte’s dreams were taking her actions to a whole new level. In the dream, she saw herself back at the electronics store buying an arm full of the recording devices. She’d placed more around her house, and had even put recording devices on th
e phones in Xavier’s office at work and various other offices throughout the car dealership.

  In another dream, she remembered the time she’d taken a little handheld voice activated recorder and duct tapped it under Xavier’s driver’s side seat in his SUV. It turned out this device hadn’t been as effective as the home recording device. The sound of Xavier talking to people, whether it was on the phone or to other passengers riding with him, were often muffled. At times, there were also the competing sounds of the engine and the radio.

  This last dream was the worst of all in distorting her true life detective actions. Charlotte was in a hardware store buying an Acme sized roll of duct tape. The huge size of the roll reminded her of something the Coyote would have bought to try to catch the Road Runner.

  Charlotte used the roll of duct tape not only to put a recording device in Xavier’s SUV, but also in her own car, just in case he borrowed it, which he rarely ever did. Then one night she snuck out to the car dealership, picked the locks and broke in to obtain the keys to all the cars on the lot. Charlotte proceeded to duct tape mini-sized recorders under the driver’s side seats.

  With sticky fingers and a sweat drenched forehead, Charlotte ran from car to car, installing the devices. After a while the Acme size roll of tape started wrapping around her body like a boa constrictor, trying to squeeze her. She clawed at the tape, trying to tear it off. That’s when she woke up realizing the sheets were actually tangled around her body.

  She was happy to be awake and glad the nightmares had come to an end. But now she faced the true life living nightmare she was currently in. Charlotte sighed in frustration. She wasn’t proud of the things she’d done to try to catch her husband in his lies. Especially since the listening devices hadn’t helped her find anything new about his extracurricular activities. Most of the phone calls made to and from their home were the ones she’d made. The phone calls Xavier had made were one hundred percent legitimate—calls regarding bills, telemarketers, and conversations with his kids.

  It was when she overheard the conversations Xavier had with his kids that Charlotte felt she had hit her lowest point. She stepped back and re-evaluated things. Even now she shook her head, not wanting to think about the other minute things she had done to gauge whether her husband was telling the truth or not.

  All the detective work she’d done had almost driven her crazy. The things she’d been doing were so out of character it was amazing. Charlotte had gone to so many desperate measures trying to keep a twenty-four-seven watch on her husband. She knew if her friends or family ever found out the extent she’d gone, they might actually try to have her committed to an institution.

  She hated the person she’d become, always suspicious and harboring anger toward a man she once loved and adored to the utmost. She’d give just about anything to have her old life back again. The life where she could trust her husband without a shadow of doubt, and a life where the women on the commercials with him hadn’t fazed her in the least bit because she knew Xavier had a woman at home who wouldn’t hesitate to take care of his every need.

  A tear trickled down her face as she wished for at least one night of peace. A night in which she might be able to dream of a better time, making her forget the living nightmare she was playing a staring role in.

  Charlotte looked back over at the alarm clock. It was now five thirty-eight. Throwing the covers off, she sat up and let her legs hang over the side of the bed.

  On the other side of the room, Xavier continued to sleep. She’d heard him tossing and turning during the past few nights also. Neither one of them were getting any sleep. But for now he seemed to be resting pretty well.

  If she were a vindictive woman, she would turn on all the lights and start making noise to wake him. If she weren’t sleeping well, why should he? But she wasn’t a vindictive woman. She hadn’t pulled out all that damaging information in front of six other virtual strangers to embarrass him. If she wanted to do that she could have done so in many other ways at home with people they both knew.

  No, she was once again just trying to get her husband to come clean about all of his wrongdoings. She had to admit that when she had confronted him with everything, he did come clean as far as she could tell. But Charlotte still couldn’t get over the fact that her husband had strayed from home with at least one other woman and the fact that he’d found it so easy to lie to her for months about his extracurricular activities. How in the world was she going to be able to believe him now? Why would he all of a sudden start telling her the truth, especially when she’d caught him in so many lies? She wondered how he would feel if the shoe was on the other foot?

  She also wondered what Xavier would do if he really knew where she had gone those three days when she’d left their home. What would he think if he found out Charlotte had been less than eight miles away on the other side of town, closed up in a house with her co-worker, Shawn—the same co-worker Xavier didn’t like because he thought the man was a little too friendly with her.

  Deep down, she knew the answer. Xavier would freak out.

  Chapter 31

  Charlotte Knight

  Friday: 9:26 A.M.

  Everyone in the house sat in the living room patiently waiting for Phillip. Shelby had asked them to meet in there instead of at The Round Table. Charlotte was glad to see that Nina was looking better than she had the previous evening and had even gotten a little bit of her spunk back.

  Breakfast had been over for almost thirty minutes, and Phillip had failed to appear as he normally did during breakfast. And now he was late to start their morning session. The group had already gone through as much small talk as they could take during breakfast and during the first few minutes of their assembling in the living room.

  Nina sat on the loveseat, leaning her head and body against George, and Beryl sat on an armchair on one side of the room while her husband sat in a matching chair on the other side of the room. Xavier sat on one end of the couch, while Charlotte had made sure to sit on the other end, as far as she could get away from him. Now all that could be heard was the ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner of the room.

  Shelby had pulled two chairs from The Round Table and set them in the front of the living room area, on opposite sides of the fireplace. At first, even Shelby’s face had been pleasant, but now her eyebrows furrowed as she looked up at the grandfather clock every other minute to check the time.

  When the clock’s bell chimed indicating it was half past the hour, Shelby leaned forward and stood up. As she did, Phillip entered the room. A look of relief washed over everyone’s face.

  “Good morning, everyone,” Phillip said. His face and demeanor was calm and refreshed. He walked over toward the seat designated for him. Passing it, he leaned down to give Shelby a kiss on the cheek. He sat, continuing to look at his wife. “Thank you, Shelby, for having everyone gather in here.”

  “You’re welcome,” Shelby replied.

  Phillip brought his hands together in a single clap. “I guess you’re all wondering why we’re sitting in here. Very simply, I thought we needed a change of scenery. And I think the chairs,” Phillip pointed to the living room chairs, “are a great deal more comfortable. It’s Friday, and I don’t know about you all, but to me it feels like this week is going by pretty slow. So I want us to have a little fun and kick our feet up a little.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Travis said.

  Out of the corner of Charlotte’s eye, she saw Beryl roll her eyes.

  “I’ve given you all a great deal of notes and things to consider in your decision to move your marriages forward,” Phillip said. I am going to give you a few more things to ponder for the remainder of your time here and once you get back to your homes.

  “We won’t be spending the whole day working, per se. During this morning’s session, we’ll go over some things, but this afternoon, I want you all to make a true effort to find somewhere quiet to talk to your spouse about any and everything you want to and nee
d to talk about. Who knows when you’ll have the luxury of time to do so again? Especially once you get back to your busy lives at home.”

  Charlotte didn’t mind sitting and listening to more insight from Phillip and didn’t care if they did so from sun up to sundown. What she didn’t want to do was say two words to her husband, much less spend time alone with him carrying on a whole conversation.

  Looking at the scowl on Beryl’s face, it seemed like her sentiments were the exact same. The only two people who looked like they were okay with the suggestion were Nina and George. They sat all snuggled up, looking like they were on their second honeymoon or something.

  “Do we have to—” Beryl started to say, but was cut off by Phillip’s hand. He’d held it up indicating she didn’t need to finish the sentence.

  “Yes, you have to,” Phillip said. “You need to know that you and your spouse have had ample time to hash out any problems and concerns.”

  Like a child upset about not getting a lollipop, Beryl folded her arms.

  “During your conversations with your spouse, you may also realize that sometimes things are not always what they seem. Which brings me to our last main topic of the week: the fun house,” Phillip said. “How many of you all have been inside a fun house, like at a state fair or an amusement park?”

  Charlotte, along with a couple others, raised her hand. Charlotte had only been inside one fun house and vowed never to enter another. She’d had a hard time navigating the maze of mirrors and ended up walking into so many of them, that she’d bruised her nose. She’d also fallen a couple of times on stairs, which had been moving from side to side.

  Then she’d bruised her hip trying to walk through a cylindrical shaped walkway, which continually turned around and around like the mixer on a cement truck. The walkway hadn’t been what caused her to bruise her hip. That had happened when just after she’d safely maneuvered out of the cylinder and came face to face with a large, distorted, neon-colored face which seemed to be barreling straight at her.