Nothing Sacred

That reminder guided her back to the chair. He was there to be their moral example. To teach them about believing, and faith. He was supposed to preach a sermon tomorrow morning to an entire townful of people who trusted him.

An entire townful of people who’d already been betrayed. By the minister who’d come before him. And now…by him.

“I’m guessing you didn’t have a surprise visitor this afternoon,” she said, remembering how Shelley had found out about him in the first place. The woman who’d read about the prostitution arrests in the Phoenix newspaper, which named the minister who’d come out looking like a hero….

“I’ve been out visiting all afternoon. Got home shortly before you arrived and came in here to listen to my messages.”

“Shelley met a woman in town this afternoon. Said her name was Whitney. Just like her friend, you know?” Martha said, watching him closely. It took a second—a second when that tiny thread of hope actually reappeared. And then his face went cold. Hard. Still.

“I guess you do know it,” she said. Handle this like an overflowing toilet in the woman’s rest room, she told herself. An unpleasant thing to deal with, but nonthreatening.

The citizens of Shelter Valley knew how to survive. They’d been through this before.

And so had Martha.

“You want to tell me about it?” she asked with a calm that was so false, she could hardly believe he didn’t see through it. Or maybe he did…. She was afraid she’d end up laughing hysterically. Or crying with equal fervor.

“Why don’t you tell me what you know,” he said.

Fine. It didn’t matter to her how they did this. “The real reason you recognized what had happened to Ellen was that you were intimately familiar with a process through which men could purchase sex with a guarantee of complete anonymity.”

Sitting beside her, he was studying her over hands folded at his mouth.

“For more than three years you bought sex, on a regular basis, through an organization that happens to be the very same organization that you just exposed to the police.”

This time his head dipped once to show her she was still on the right track. “You’d been working your way through night school at a particular business establishment that just happened to be owned by the man who is now Shane’s partner.”

“I was a product manager.” David’s voice was calmer than hers.

“The last time you were with Whitney was a few months before you entered the seminary. She was one of Shane’s women.”

The accusation was unthinkable. Her face burned as she spoke the words to him.

David didn’t flinch. He just nodded.

“You don’t deny any of this.”

“No.”

“Do you have anything else to say about it?”

“No.”

No justification. No argument. No apparent remorse.

It was the last that was more than she could bear.

“I’m going to have to go to the town with this.”

“You have to do whatever your conscience tells you to do.”

No begging. Last time there’d been all of that. Justifying. Arguing. Remorse. And then begging.

“What would you do if you were me?” She had no idea why she asked. Why didn’t she just leave? She knew what had to be done.

Her heart—the one that was supposed to be all trussed up and safe—was breaking. And she couldn’t let him know that.

“I’d tell them.”