Bullet in the Night

by Judith Rolfs

  Lenora crossed her arms across her chest. “How was this girlfriend involved?”

  “Are you sure you want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  “The police interrogated her. She claims to have known nothing about his plot to harm you. Tucker had told her he was deeply unhappy in his marriage and in the process of divorce. She claims he spoke of extensive travel plans for their future. He recently took a leave of absence from the university.”

  “No way!” Lenora pulled herself to a more upright position. “Last night’s coming back to me. Tucker gave me three sleeping pills. I asked him if that wasn’t too many. He claimed they were super mild.” She turned her head away and reached for a Kleenex. “What you’re saying is beginning to make sense. I mean, I knew he was unhappy about my large charitable donations, especially to the foundation. This week I’d intended to see our lawyer and accountant to check on a few financial discrepancies I’d noticed. I’d asked Tucker about them, but he couldn’t explain. I never dreamt he would be unfaithful and dishonest.” She shook her head again. “Talk about stupidity.”

  I patted her arm. “Tucker’s deceived me, too. The man is smooth and cunning.”

  “If I died at home, wouldn’t Tucker be the first suspect?”

  “I doubt it. He’d spilled a glass of water on the floor to make it look as if you’d gotten up for a drink then fell.” I shook my head. “He said he went to bed, assuming you were fine, claimed the snakes got out, and he never suspected one was in your room.”

  Tears flowed now from her stricken eyes and trickled down her cheeks. “Everyone would believe him based on all the concern he’s shown.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I can hardly comprehend all this. One thing’s not a surprise. Tucker’s very materialistic. It didn’t matter when I married him because I was too.” She snatched another Kleenex.

  “Praise God for saving your life. He’s still got work for you.”

  Her eyes widened. “The snake could have killed you, too.”

  “But didn’t. I’m okay and so are you. We’ll focus on that. And on the One who will never betray you or leave us for a moment.”

  Lenora sighed. “He said he was a Christian. He even went to church with me.”

  “Only God knows the heart.”

  Lenora interrupted. “I know going to church doesn’t mean you’re intimate with our Lord. Being in a garden doesn’t make you a flower. I’ve said as much to clients.”

  “If he was genuine, he’d live by different values. No way did he ever surrender to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.”

  “My poor protégé, Kirk. How can we make it up to him for all he’s been through?”

  “You can start by putting him back to work at your foundation. I’m sure he’d like that. You need to rest now and get home. I’ll be back later tonight.”

  I went home and slept for hours.

  It would be a long while before Lenora recovered emotionally from her husband’s betrayal. This was not how the world should be. I’d coached lots of strong women through similar devastation. In time, she’d be okay. Christ, the Lover of her soul, would restore her.

  EPILOGUE

  Six weeks after we survived possible annihilation, Nick and I drove to downtown Chicago for a three-day museum holiday. We stayed at the Marriot on the nineteenth floor. The second morning there I savored my morning prayer with room service coffee and oatmeal.

  Waiting for Nick to awaken, I reviewed what I’d written in my journal open before me: Lord, Kirk’s a living symbol of Your miracle-working power. He apologized for running away, and Lenora reinstated him to his position of administrative support liaison with the prisoners. The foundation hired Sarah Nichols to handle paperwork. Sarah and Kirk recently started dating. How cool is that?

  When I confronted Chuck Denton shortly after he was taken into custody, he admitted he’d developed the bad habit of unleashing personal frustration on his defenseless wife. To avoid jail time, he was willing to accept help for anger management.

  Fortunately, it turned out Chuck hadn’t set fire to the house with his first wife in it after all. The police investigation came up with proof positive. He’d been at a banking seminar in another state when she died in the fire started by lightning. Chuck used the fabricated story as a threat to keep Angela submissive.

  Like anyone who fell into sin, Chuck had woven such a web of lies he hardly knew truth himself. I made a counseling referral for him.

  In the meantime, I’ve been working with Angela and hoping for the best for their future. Nothing thrills a marriage and family counselor more than a healthy restored marriage.

  Lenora invited Thomas Hartford to sit on the Prison Board. He refused because of present business commitments but seemed sincerely flattered and said maybe in the future. I hooked him up with a charity involved in medical mission trips for children at orphanages in Honduras. He and his wife will travel there next month.

  Carrie enrolled in a college program for returning women students to study counseling. Her personal experiences will make her a gifted healer. Rob amazed me. Within a few sessions, he learned how to be an encourager. His motivation level upped when pressed against the emotional wall of losing his wife. He even watches the kids without complaining while Carrie studies. Another miracle.

  Rob arranged a date for Sandy with a buddy from work. I wouldn’t say there’s romantic interest necessarily, but they enjoyed each other’s company. That’s a mile of progress for Sandy.

  As for Tucker, he hired a crackerjack lawyer who accomplished nothing except draining Tucker’s savings. Truth has a way of ringing loud when the facts are revealed. Tucker will probably be in jail the rest of his life. I’m devoid of sympathy.

  I closed the journal.

  From my point of view, the pieces of Lenora’s tragedy had come together in a perfect manner except one item. Lenora kept all Tucker’s snakes, except the rattler. She reported she had grown fond of them. Ugghh! I could love all God’s creatures with legs, fins, wings, or tails. The slinky ones, I excluded.

  As for me, I’m back to my unpredictable normal. A delightful blend of God and family plus work. I’ve developed a reputation, to my amazement, as a local crime solver. If my services are needed, I’ll give it my best shot, but I’m not going out of my way to look for trouble. But I did get a call yesterday that sounded intriguing…

  Please read on to learn more about the author, Judith Rolfs, and to read a sample from another Prism Book Group title, Flashback.

  Please enjoy this sample from Flashback by Kevin Mark Smith, available from Prism Book Group!

  Kenneth Cartwright sat in the City Java Cafe, a bohemian-style coffee bar located on the corner of downtown Dallas’s busiest intersection, Grand and Broadway, a little after ten a.m. The tall buildings shielded the cafe from much of the sunlight. However, the sun’s reflection off the windshields of dozens of passing cars and heat radiating from the massive window to Ken’s right told him that this day would be like most in that part of Texas on a late-spring day—blisteringly hot with no chance of rain.

  He sipped a large nonfat mocha and stared out of the window at pedestrians walking past the cafe on the wide sidewalk, mostly other professionals rushing from one point to another.

  It was Monday. Despite the good weather and sweet taste of mocha, a heaviness settled on his shoulders that belied his outward appearance. He wore his most expensive navy blue, custom-tailored suit, red power tie, and French-cuffed white pinpoint oxford shirt, complete with diamond-studded gold cufflinks. The ensemble complimented his closely cropped hair, dark brown and flecked with gray, though he wondered if his attempt to look successful and satisfied mattered anymore.

  As a lawyer, Ken had been working on deposition questions for a case he had been dealing with for more than two weeks and was taking a few minutes away from his office, just one building to the left, and ten floors above his seat at the cafe, to let his mind relax. No book, no Kindle, laptop, or tablet co
mputer, nothing but his mocha and the classical music pumping through the cafe’s tiny ceiling-mounted speakers that the noise of the many patrons almost drowned out, to occupy his thoughts.

  Ken was a junior partner at the firm, thus, he was accustomed to senior partners dropping cases in his lap that they were too ill-equipped, too lazy, or simply too busy to handle, and this case was one of these, qualifying on all three of those levels to some degree. The deposition that he was preparing for the assigning partner would make or break the case, as well as Ken’s reputation. He knew such was the blessing and curse of being, as one of the senior partners called him, “the firm’s sharpest mind.” But that hadn’t compelled him to take a break from his helter-skelter life of one-hundred-hour workweeks and deadlines that even his work ethic wasn’t enough to meet. Nor was it Monday-morning depression. Instead, it was a question that had dogged him for as long as he could remember.

  Why had he chosen the path he had taken so many years before?

  By all the world’s standards, Ken was successful before his divergence to the law occurred. He had more money than he knew what to do with, a five-figure monthly net cash flow from the ventures other people now ran for him. Yet he had decided being rich wasn’t enough. He wanted prestige, too, the prestige that came from becoming a lawyer like his grandfather. So when he graduated college he moved on to law school, all the time collecting weekly checks from the many business ventures he had begun from his early teens and during his college years—paper routes, real estate investments, coin-operated laundries, and car washes—with the first dating back to his freshman year in high school. He had known at the time what led him to become so ambitious at such a young age, but he had managed to block out most of those haunting memories. His dedication to excellence in his studies and making money masked something deeper and very troubling in Ken’s psyche.

  As with everything else that preceded it, he excelled at law school, too—at Harvard, no less. Upon graduating with his service as editor of the Harvard Law Review on his resume, as well as a summer clerkship with the firm after his second year in law school, he was offered a prestigious U.S. Supreme Court Clerkship, which was followed by a $200,000 a year associate offer at the multinational, one thousand-lawyer-plus law firm where he was now a junior partner, the partnership offer coming after only two years of brilliant work on the firm’s most challenging cases. Until this very moment he had no regrets.

  “Why did I do it?” he whispered to himself as his eyes moistened.

  His facial tension relaxed as he allowed long forgotten and suppressed memories to dominate his thoughts. As happened every few years at unexpected moments, images of another life flooded his consciousness. “I miss them,” was all he said before tears burst forth unabated. “Why?” He dabbed his eyes with the paper napkin in the hand not grasping the mug’s handle. “They are only a dream.”

  The cafe was packed with people, a couple of them lawyers taking similar breaks from his own firm. He glanced around the room. No one seemed to notice him. The hustle and bustle of the city somehow masked his mental breakdown from almost everyone there. They were too busy either chatting and talking about their own lives, or ordering and then waiting for their coffees before other patrons mistakenly scooped theirs up by mistake.

  Someone touched his shoulder and said, “Are you okay?”

  He looked up, wiping the tears from his face with the sleeve of his suit coat. “Yeah.”

  A young woman with long brunette hair dropping to the middle of her back stood next to him. She was plain, yet very pretty, probably in her early twenties, but she wasn’t dressed like a professional, or even a secretary or office worker. She wore a modest dress that fell all the way to her ankles. It had a high neckline and medium-length sleeves that covered her arms just past the elbows, with a pretty and bright flower pattern.

  Dainty strap sandals adorned her small feet and she topped off her cute and wholesome ensemble with a pink sun hat. She looked enough out of place to attract a few judgmental glances from some of the scantily-clad women in the cafe.

  Her unique cuteness, almost girlish, also garnered a few stares from the men in the cafe. Ken bet they thought whoever got her was a lucky girl with her sweetness and innocent vibe.

  Normally he would have said, “Bug off,” but he resisted the temptation. Actually, the temptation didn’t occur, which surprised him somewhat. “It’s just been a long morning.”

  “Do you mind if I sit here?” She motioned to the seat facing his, glancing toward the cafe with all its occupied chairs.

  He looked around, noting there was no other place for a lady to rest her tired feet. He said nothing, just nodded. She sat and gazed at him with gentle eyes.

  “Who are you?” he asked. Part of him wanted to say, “Leave me alone. I don’t know you and don’t care to.” But he resisted. There was something about this girl that made him want to get to know her better.

  “Just a stranger in a strange land who noticed another stranger in need of a caring ear and maybe a nice word or two.” Somehow, coming from this girl, the words didn’t sound like a pickup line.

  Up until that moment, Ken had not smiled for what seemed like weeks. His tears were certainly a sign he was sad, but his facial muscles had forgotten how to express the range of emotions they were capable of exhibiting. Up until then, his face reflected emotional blandness or total depression, with little in between, a horizontal grimness etched from one ear to the other. But now he felt free to express something altogether different. He allowed a large smile to sweep over his face, all of it, not just the upturned corners of his lips.

  “Much better,” the strange girl said in response. “You look more peaceful and relaxed when you smile.”

  He nodded his head and chuckled a little. “Thanks. I haven’t felt happy in a long time.” He paused a moment, using the silence to pick up his ceramic coffee mug to take another sip of the now much cooler drink, more out of the need to fill the lull in their conversation than from thirst. He glanced out the window for a brief moment then looked back at the strange girl. “What’s your name?”

  “Stacy.” She didn’t ask for his, just sat looking into his eyes, hands crossed in her lap. “So why the tears? What’s going on in there to make you cry?”

  Setting the cup back down, he broke eye contact, choosing instead to stare at the cup. He wanted to tell someone what he was thinking, but he knew what he wanted to say was crazy. Was he going mad? He had read about Hindus and their belief in reincarnation, but the thoughts that periodically resurfaced in his dreams, as well as his daydreams, weren’t visions of an old life in another time. They were of the here and now, yet different somehow. But there was something about Stacy that Ken trusted. He believed that she, a total stranger, wouldn’t view his thoughts as those of a lunatic. He looked up, at first not saying anything at all. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, but was actually no more than a few seconds, he said, “You’ll think I’m nuts.”

  “No, I won’t. I promise.”

  He paused and considered. Looking up and around the cafe, he realized there might be a person or two who would love to tell his colleagues at the office a competing junior partner was bonkers. He looked back at his new acquaintance. “Not here. There’s a quiet restaurant around the corner with a booth deep in the rear, away from prying ears.”

  Stacy nodded. Both stood up and left the cafe.

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Judith Rolfs minored in English and creative writing at college but her major focus became psychology and ultimately marriage and family counseling. Her first article was published in Fresh Ink magazine while a student at Marquette University.

  At her first writer’s conference her novel proposal won the Best New Novel Award. Mystery writing is her first love, although she has ten non-fiction books published on various family issues.
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  Twenty-five years listening to marriage and family clients further validated Rolfs’ awareness that words are the messengers of the heart. She learned to listen for the meaning behind words and tries to convey emotional depth in her characters.

  Writing Bullet in the Night from the perspective of her own and her heroine’s counseling profession lets her share insights with readers who may never enter a professional counselor’s office. Rolfs says, “I value the opportunity to contribute a word or two of wisdom: life is hard, people can be evil, but God is amazing all the time.”

  Judith shares life with her husband and best friend, Wayne, and their chocolate lab, Alex. They enjoy biking, golfing, and spending time with four adult children and seven grandchildren from home bases in Wisconsin and Florida.

  Find her on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/judith.rolfs and twitter @judithrolfs. Judith loves to hear from readers. Email her at: jwrolfs@gmail.com

  Her website is www.judithrolfs.com. Read her blog Thoughts on Fun, Faith Family at www.judithrolfs.blogspot.com.

  If you’ve enjoyed this novel, please consider leaving the author a review. Your thoughts and feedback are very much appreciated.

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  Table of Contents

  Bullet in the Night

  Judith Rolfs

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE