Nothing Sacred

David nodded, right at home with the small voice inside him. He used to question his sanity over that voice, making himself crazy with a need to discern its source. His own mind? Intuition? An angel? There was no way to ever prove it one way or another, so he’d finally settled on an angel. He’d granted himself his own personal guardian angel.

“Yes,” he answered, “this time is harder.”

Why?

“Because this time I’m paying for the sins of another man.”

He felt the truth of those words like a punch to the solar plexus. He’d known, of course, but never consciously acknowledged it. Never gave words to the thought.

Yes.

He turned. And turned again, slowing when he drew close to his destination. “Something with which I am intimately familiar.”

Yes.

Peace settled just beneath his ribs as the next thought occurred to him. “And that makes me the right man for this job.”

Yes.

With this acknowledgment, the uphill struggle of the past six months—visiting home after home, seeking out people in their own surroundings, trying to break through the defensive walls that prevented him from doing his job as effectively as possible—ceased being such a drain on his emotional energy. “Thank you, Angel.” And you can kick me for taking six months to ask, he added as a silent afterthought.

You’re welcome. He was sure the angel was laughing.

David was laughing at himself, too, as he pulled into the driveway of his most standoffish—and yet, he suspected, one of his neediest—parishioners that Sunday afternoon in January.

He’d been trying to pin Martha Moore down to a visit since he’d arrived in Shelter Valley the previous summer. Today, he’d finally been given a very reluctant invitation—and only because he’d finally wised up and gone through her son, Tim. That was one young man who seemed open to new experiences, willing to give a new relationship a chance.

David was looking forward to getting to know Tim better.

He glanced at the well-worn, leather-bound Bible beside him, decided to leave it there, and climbed out of his car. Later. He’d get to the good book later.

DAVID WISHED HE’D BROUGHT the book. Not because he would’ve opened it. Or even considered reading from it. Certainly the atmosphere, even with the smell of chocolate chip cookies in the air, was not conducive to a sharing of his favorite passages.

No, facing the pleasant and completely empty smile of Martha Moore across the coffee table in her living room, David wished he had the book for purely selfish reasons. He wanted something to do with his hands.

No.

Okay, he wanted to hide behind the safety and security it represented.

Yes.

Yes. Well, angel, thanks a lot for that one. He listened while Martha told him how much she’d enjoyed his sermon that morning. He was almost positive she hadn’t heard a word of it. She’d been writing—and David would bet she hadn’t been taking notes on anything he’d had to say.

“So tell me, Pastor Marks, why did you join the ministry?”

“Mom!” Ellen Moore, Martha’s blond and beautiful eldest daughter, reprimanded with some firmness from the armchair facing her mother.

“Mom’s just a little prejudiced,” fifteen-year-old Rebecca explained wisely. Her leggy and very skinny body was sprawled next to her mother on the couch—across from the love seat where David sat.

“Yeah, she was the one who walked in on Edwards and a woman.” Tim piped up from the floor. With his arms over his head, his T-shirt was raised, giving David—and everyone else in the room—a look at the top three-quarters of the dark blue boxers he wore under the too-large khaki pants, which rested dangerously low. “Sly told me her bra was undone and everything.”

Sylvester Young was one of Shelter Valley’s most rambunctious but harmless thirteen-year-olds. From what David had seen, he was in the constant company of Tim Moore.

“Shut up, twerp.” Shelley reached forward from her seat on the couch to nudge her brother with her toe.

“Stop it,” Tim said, slapping at her foot. “Sly heard his mother talking to Pastor Edwards’s wife and that’s what she said.”

“What she said isn’t the point,” Martha insisted, at the same time leaning over Rebecca to place a warning hand on Shelley’s knee. “It simply isn’t your business to repeat something like that.”