A Touch of Grace

He reached for her. “Gretchen.”

She slapped his hands away, striking out like a wounded animal. “You don’t know me.”

Ignoring the rejection, he offered his hand again, palm up. He couldn’t leave her like this. “You need to get away from here. Come on, I’ll take you inside the mission.”

“Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Take me inside and feed me soup and a pack of lies. Tell me that you have all the answers to my problems like you did for my poor druggie sister.” Her face contorted in sarcasm. “You were different, Maddy said. You could help her get her life together.” She glanced from her sister’s still form to Ian, stabbing him with accusing green eyes. “Well, you really did a good job of that, didn’t you?”

While Ian grappled to understand why he was the focus of her animosity, Gretchen Barker, the Channel Eleven barracuda, stormed across the wet grass to her van and drove away.

Chapter Two

The long, slow notes of “Amazing Grace” reverberated on the air and trembled into silence. Even in the worst of times, Ian found solace in his music and in the beautiful old saxophone his father had given him. Like the Psalmist David, he felt closer to God when he played than when he prayed.

He leaned the instrument carefully against a chair and went to answer the knock on his office door.

The bushy, gray mustache of Roger Bryant twitched at him from the doorway. “You fretting about something, son?”

Roger always knew when something was eating at him. He claimed the saxophone sounded different. Ian figured it was true enough. Through his music he was able to express the emotions that otherwise stayed locked inside.

Roger, skinny and frail with scraggly strands of gray hair slicked down with some kind of shiny oil, was one of Ian’s first success stories. At fifty-nine, his ash-gray face and broken body looked seventy, a testament to years of slavery to alcohol and self-loathing. Homeless and destitute after too many stints in county lockup, he’d asked Ian to help him get his life together. Then he’d stuck around to help run Isaiah House. For Ian, who loved the hands-on part of ministry but detested the business end, Roger had literally been an answer to prayer.

“I just got off the phone with our lawyer,” he said to his friend.

Roger, hampered by a hip badly in need of replacement, limped into the office. His basset-hound face showed little reaction to Ian’s statement. He wasn’t shaken by much. “Bad news, I guess?”

Ian tilted his head in agreement. “The lawsuit will likely go to trial.” He’d thought the whole thing a joke at first.

“Foolishness. Who would expect a Christian mission to allow pornographic magazines on-site?”

“That’s my thinking. But even if a jury agrees, it will cost us a lot of money. And the mission can’t afford that right now.” Donations were down this summer for some reason while the need increased.

“Want to know what I think?” Roger propped his bad hip against the edge of a desk littered with papers, files and orange soda cans.

“You’re going to tell me anyway.”

Roger grinned. Even then, his face looked soulful. “I think that lady politician is at the bottom of this somewhere.”

“Marian Jacobs?” Ian rubbed at the knot forming along the top of his right shoulder. The mission had plenty of naysayers who would like to see it closed, or at least, moved elsewhere. Runaways and street kids were a blight on the thriving tourist industry and any number of nearby businesses wanted them gone. Marian Jacobs happened to be one of the more influential.

“Yeah. Her. She wants to shut us down real bad.”

Last winter, the city councilwoman had enforced some ridiculous zoning ordinance that kept him from setting up cots in the chapel on the coldest nights. Before that she’d complained long and hard about the negative impact Isaiah House had on the happy-go-lucky atmosphere of the tourist district. Her post-Katrina revitalization for the city did not include street people or the ministries designed to help them.

“She doesn’t like me much, that’s for sure.” Outside his office window three bright red cardinals pecked at sunflower seeds sprinkled beneath a willow. “Your birds are about out of feed.”

Roger doted on the birds, just as he did on the equally flighty runaways who landed at Isaiah House.

“You going to Maddy’s funeral?” Leave it to Roger to cut to the chase.

With all the other worries on his mind, the last thing Ian wanted to do on a hot, humid Friday afternoon was attend a funeral.

“Sometimes being a minister stinks.” Most people would be shocked to hear him say such a thing. His mother for one. But not Roger. His placid face, lined and furrowed, never seemed shaken by anything Ian blurted out. He was about the only person Ian could share his frustrations and worries with.

Ministers were always expected to do the right thing, even when it hurt. Ian wasn’t perfect but he didn’t like to disappoint anyone, either. He worked hard to avoid that feeling. Somehow he worried about alienating the people around him.

His hand snaked into his pocket, found the familiar key chain and took it out. He’d had the thing forever, though he wasn’t even certain where it had come from. Maybe his parents had given it to him the time he’d been in the hospital with meningitis. He wasn’t sure, but he was certain that he’d been terrified then of being alone. Every time Mom and Dad had left the room, he’d thought they wouldn’t come back. So, he figured that’s when they’d given him the little fish that said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”

Wherever the key chain had come from, the words never failed to comfort him.

Funny that he would think of that now.

“God called me to heal the brokenhearted, to set the captive free,” he said, paraphrasing his favorite verses from Isaiah. “Maddy was both. I didn’t do enough.”

Roger clamped a bony hand on his shoulder. “How many times have you talked about free will, Ian? Maddy made her own decisions.”

“Yeah. Bad ones.” He felt so inadequate at times like this. Wounded souls were his responsibility. That’s why he drove the streets for hours each night ministering to runaways and street kids. But nothing he did was ever enough.

“You can’t help Maddy, but she’s got a sister.”

Ian drew in a deep breath then let it go in one gust.

“I was thinking the same thing.” Barracuda or not, Gretchen Barker was hurting.

He only hoped seeing her didn’t stir up trouble. He had enough of that already.

Gretchen gazed through dark glasses at the small group assembled amidst the sun-bleached tombs and scalding heat of Carter Cemetery. Not many had gathered to pay their last respects to Madeline Michelle Barker. As hard as that was for Gretchen to handle, she understood. Maddy’s brief life hadn’t made much of a mark.

As the hired minister said the final “amen,” Gretchen swallowed back the sobs that seemed to be constantly stuck below her breastbone straining for release.

The small gathering began to scurry away, eager to escape the energy-zapping heat and humidity. Who could blame them?

Gretchen shoved her slippery sunglasses higher, saw that her fingers trembled. Sometimes she got tired of being the strong one.

The moment the thought came, she nearly buckled. Who would she be strong for now?

Less than twenty people, most of them Gretchen’s friends and coworkers, had attended the simple graveside services. Even Mom and Dad hadn’t come, citing the distance between California and Louisiana. But Gretchen knew the truth. They had long ago washed their hands of the daughter who couldn’t get her life together. And so had everyone else. Everyone but Gretchen.

Tears pushed at the back of her eyes, hot and painful. She’d cried so much these past few days, she should be dehydrated. Digging yet another clean tissue from her handbag, she dabbed at her wet cheeks.

Carlotta, her best friend and roommate, rubbed the center of her back. “You okay?”

“No,” she said honestly. Carlotta would understand. She knew the number of times Gretchen had taken Maddy into their apartment, given her money, tried to get her clean. Enabler, some people called her. And now she was terrified that they may have been right. Had her desire to protect her sister ultimately caused her death?

Her friend’s gorgeous Latina eyes darkened with compassion. “Ready to go home?”

She shook her head, felt her hair stick to the side of her neck. “I want to stay here awhile.”

When Carlotta started to argue, Gretchen said, “Go. I’m fine. I just need a little more time.”

“The service was nice, Gretchen. Maddy would have liked it.”

“Yeah.” Regardless of her ambivalence toward religion, she couldn’t let Maddy leave this life without some hope that things would be better somewhere else. Life here hadn’t been all that good for her sister.

Carlotta hovered for another minute, her concern touching. Finally, she said, “I’ll see you later, then? Maybe an hour or so?”

“Sure. Go on. I’m fine.” She wasn’t fine. She was splintered in half. Maddy had been the other part of her, and now she was gone.

Carlotta gave her one last hug and turned to leave. After two steps, she stopped, turning back. Voice lowered, she tilted her head toward the rear of the funeral tent.

“I don’t know if you noticed, but there’s a man still back there that I don’t recognize. The nice-looking guy in the blue shirt. Do we know him?”

Carlotta wouldn’t leave her alone here in the cemetery with a stranger even if the guy was movie star gorgeous.

Gretchen followed her gaze to the well-built figure, recognizing him immediately.

Ian Carpenter. The mission preacher. She should have known he’d show up.

She sucked in the scent of decaying funeral wreaths.

“I don’t want him here.”

He’d phoned her twice, though she had no idea where he’d gotten her number. Once to offer his services and the chapel for the funeral. Another time to ask if he could do anything to help her. Right. As if she would allow that.

She knew his kind. Smile kindly, talk softly, and lure the lonely and needy into a web of deceit under the guise of religion.

The sad, sick feeling in the pit of her stomach was replaced by a slow-burning anger. He had no right. And anger was easier to bear than raw, scalding grief.

Carlotta gave her a funny look. “Who is he?”

“Ian Carpenter. He runs the mission where Maddy was—” The horrible image of her sister lying lifeless on the dew-drenched grass returned with a vengeance. She, who could report the most heinous crime or natural disaster with aplomb, couldn’t seem to keep her emotions in check this time. She supposed that was normal, though she hated the weakness.

Carlotta gave her hand an encouraging squeeze.

“He must feel awful that she was so close to his mission and he wasn’t able to save her.”

“I think he feels guilty.”

From behind the cover of her shades, Gretchen glared at the preacher. He stood alone beneath the green funeral home canopy, quiet and unobtrusive, one hand in the pocket of his black slacks.

If she’d been in any condition to notice such things, the preacher was easy on the eyes. She’d bet a special report scoop that he put those looks to good use for the cause of his mission.

Medium height. Medium build. Medium brown hair. Everything about him was medium, except for the eyes. They were startling, a brilliant aquamarine made even more dramatic by his blue dress shirt.

Was it those hypnotic eyes that had attracted Maddy?

“Gretchen. Come on,” Carlotta chided, her words tinged with both sympathy and exasperation. “Guilty for what? For not knowing Maddy was out there in the middle of the night?”

But Gretchen wasn’t ready for simple answers. She wanted to probe deeper.

“Why was she on the mission grounds? Why not inside? She was supposed to be a resident there, getting help, getting clean. But she wasn’t. Did someone at Isaiah House hurt her? Scare her? Cause her to run away again?”

She’d been mulling over the idea for the past two days. Maddy was vulnerable, easily wounded. Someone who liked to play mind games could do a lot of damage. And weren’t mind games what religion was about?

“Not every ministry is dirty, Gretchen.”

“His is.” Gretchen shot Ian one more glare and turned away. “I just know it.”

Carlotta sighed and shoved her glossy, black hair over one shoulder. She had an amazing capacity to look cool and fresh in the worst of New Orleans’s heat.

“All right, honey. Whatever you think. I’m not going to argue with you today. Are you sure you don’t want me to drive you home?”

“No. You go on.” Gretchen wasn’t quite ready to leave Maddy here alone.

“All right. Call if you need me.”

Carlotta left, her long legs moving with grace and speed across the narrow patches of grass to her sporty car. Gretchen refused to think another thought about Ian Carpenter. For all she cared he could roast.

Taking yet another tissue, she approached the mausoleum that held her sister’s body. She hadn’t wanted to bury Maddy here in a place where tourists prowled the tombs in search of macabre thrills. But she hadn’t much choice. California was too far away. And Mom and Dad didn’t want her there anyway.

“Oh, Maddy. Why couldn’t I help you get over the hurts? Why couldn’t you ever heal?” Fragile Maddy had been broken by the same evil that had made Gretchen strong. No one would ever fool her again. She would spend her career ferreting out the wolves in sheep’s clothing like Brother Gordon and the Family of Love.

She reached out to touch the white stone. Suddenly, the childhood Maddy was alive and well inside her head. The blond princess in pink ballet slippers. At six, Mama had auditioned her for commercials because she was so pretty. That was when they’d met Brother Gordon. He’d invited them to what he called the common man’s Bible study. And none of them was ever the same after that.

She stood there in front of the tomb for a long time, remembering, regretting, wishing for another chance. At one point she glanced back and noticed with relief that Ian Carpenter had disappeared. Good.

She didn’t know what to make of him. He’d been kind the day of Maddy’s death and she’d been too distraught to see that. She didn’t want to be unfair, but she feared men like Ian. Preachers, as she well knew, wielded power over their followers, whether for good or for bad.

Which was Ian Carpenter?

She remembered one of her last conversations with Maddy, two weeks before her death. She’d seemed so full of hope, excited to be attending classes at the mission. Thrilled to see her sister happy, Gretchen hadn’t asked what kind of classes, though a cold fear had snaked down her spine that day. She’d warned Maddy to be careful. Had even begged her sister to let her find a more conventional rehab. But Maddy had assured her that Ian Carpenter was the real deal. He could help her get her life together. She would make it this time.

But she hadn’t.

Now Gretchen needed to know. What exactly went on inside Isaiah Mission?

The afternoon sun angled from the west casting shadows over the rows and rows of pale tombs. As much as she hated leaving her sister behind, Gretchen was too tired to stay any longer. Carlotta would be calling soon, wondering where she was, if she was all right. And she’d promised to be back at the news station tomorrow morning, bright and early. She desperately needed some sleep.

She leaned her cheek briefly against the vault and whispered, “I love you,” and turned to go.

A long human shadow touched her toes.

She jerked her head up.

Ian Carpenter came toward her, a tall soft drink cup in hand. “You look like you could use this.”

As parched as she was, Gretchen balked at the idea of taking anything from him. Brother Gordon had been nice at first, too.

A near smile softened the edges of a very nice mouth. “Go ahead. I promise it’s only lemonade, not cyanide.”

Did he have any idea how not funny that was?

She took the cup and drank deeply, the tart citrus cutting the terrible dryness in her throat.

All the while, she watched him over the rim of the cup. His electric eyes held hers, steady and quiet, studying her.

He had a serenity about him that was almost eerie.

“Thank you,” she said, after gulping half the super-sized drink. “I didn’t realize I’d stayed so long.”

“It’s been a hard day for you.”

Gretchen was too uncertain about his motives to answer.

“Maddy was a sweet girl,” he went on. “A gentle and kind person.”

“And weak.” She took another sip of lemonade. The sides of the cup dripped condensation onto her black crepe dress.

“We all have weaknesses.”

“Even you, Reverend?”

“Me most of all. And one of my weaknesses is being called Reverend. I prefer Ian.” Lightly, he slid a hand under her elbow. “Your nose is getting pink. You need to get out of the sun.”

Normally opposed to anyone telling her what to do, Gretchen was too numb and exhausted to resist. She walked with him to an iron bench in a small, shady spot. Her insides trembled with fatigue and emotion. She really should go home.

“My roommate will be worried.”

“The woman with you? Tall. Black hair.”

She expected him to expound on her roommate’s beauty as most men did, but he didn’t. He settled onto the bench, keeping a polite distance between them. Gretchen couldn’t help but appreciate that.

“Carlotta Moreno. She’s a good friend.” She shook her head and studied the real slice of lemon floating in her cup. If Maddy had more friends like Carlotta, maybe someone would have been with her that night. “I wish…”

As if he understood the direction of her thoughts, Ian said, “Maddy had friends, too. People who cared about her.”

Unable to stop a bitter laugh, she swept her arm around the cemetery. “Oh, yes, the place is brimming with them.”

“They were here.”

She looked at him, trying to comprehend why he would tell an obvious lie. His startling eyes gazed back at her, steady and quiet.

“Are they invisible?” she asked sarcastically.

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Metaphysically speaking, you mean? As in astral projection or some spiritual out-of-body experience?”

He laughed. She was dead serious and he laughed.

“I meant that some of Maddy’s friends were here, paying their respects out of sight of the other mourners. They were worried that you’d be upset if they showed themselves.”

“Are you telling me that there were people behind the tombs listening to the funeral service?”

“The residents of the mission who knew her and a few street people.”

“I don’t believe you.”

He shrugged. “Come to Isaiah House and ask them yourself.”

Gretchen smiled grimly. She should have seen that one coming.

“Maybe I will.” But not for the reasons he had in mind.

“We have chapel mornings and evenings at seven. Bible studies are pretty much ongoing, some formal, some informal.”

“Or I could come for the soup.” The silliness slipped out and she laughed. Then guilt rushed in. How could she laugh on the day of her sister’s funeral?

“Laughter is the best medicine, and it’s a lot less expensive.”

The preacher was uncannily intuitive. She’d better be more careful. “But my sister was buried today.”

He grew quiet for a minute, as if he drew inside. Gretchen wondered if he was praying. Elbows to knees, hands clasped together in front of his face, he bounced thumb knuckles against his chin.

“I won’t pretend to understand Maddy’s death, because I don’t. If I was God, she’d still be alive today.”

His intense honesty surprised her. He didn’t sound like any preacher she’d ever heard before. She had expected platitudes.

“Aren’t you going to tell me that Maddy’s suffering is over now? Or that she’s in a far better place?” Trite little sayings that infuriated her.

He shook his head. A small scar gleamed white through the brown hair above his ear.

“All I know for sure is this, Gretchen. God cared about Maddy. He loved her. And Maddy wanted to love Him in return.”

Yes, Maddy had always longed for God, tormented that she’d left the faith but too wise and too scared to go back. She could almost hear her sister’s frequent worry. “What if Brother Gordon was right? What if we’ve lost our only chance at Heaven?”

Gretchen jabbed the straw up and down in her lemonade cup, rattling ice. The noise seemed out of place here among the quiet tombs. “Do you think my sister went to Heaven?”

“I don’t know.” Again he answered honestly and she was grateful. “No one but Maddy and the Lord knows what transpired between them in those last hours of her life. But she was on her way back to the mission. Don’t you think that means something?”

Sincerity oozed from the man like whipped cream between the layers of a sweet cake. She wanted to believe he was the “real deal” as Maddy had claimed. But she always came back to the same thing. Maddy was dead. Where was Ian Carpenter and Isaiah House when her sister needed them most?

“Why did she leave there in the first place?”

He drew in a deep breath and leaned forward, shoulders hunched. His gaze grew distant. “At some point in her counseling Maddy hit a wall. She was afraid to face something from her past.”

Gretchen knew Maddy held secrets. She also suspected what some of them were. “Did she give you any indication?”

Ian shook his head. “More than once she talked about needing to find her higher purpose. And then she’d clam up.”

Gretchen froze. Higher purpose? A vision of Brother Gordon’s gentle face reared up before her, urging her and Maddy to do things in order to attain their higher purpose. In the end, the higher purpose had been Brother Gordon’s bank account and his desire to control others.

The memory had no place at her sister’s funeral. She stood. The movement, coupled with the heat and fatigue, made her wobble. Ian reached out to steady her, his strong hand oddly comforting. She slid away from his touch, not wanting her reporter’s objectivity to be hindered by the fact that the preacher was an attractive man and outwardly kind. The inner Ian was the one she needed to know about.

What was his part in Maddy’s death? Was he as innocent and kind as he seemed? Or did he make false promises and give false hope to the vulnerable? She’d once reported on a ministry that had tragically convinced a suicidal teen to stop taking his antidepressants and spend more time in prayer. The boy had shot himself.

Did Isaiah House also indulge in unethical and dangerous practices?

A headache pushed at the inside of her temples.

It wasn’t that Gretchen disliked preachers or religious groups. Not at all. Some were excellent, but the public had a right to know. Her job was to find out what the general public couldn’t, to force charities, especially religious groups, out into the open. To make them stop hiding behind the cross.

An idea for a new investigative series popped into her head. After the hurricane, she’d worked day and night for weeks investigating distributions to the relief effort, uncovering any number of discrepancies, misappropriations and downright theft of public monies. She wasn’t too popular with the local authorities but a couple of her stories had been picked up by the networks, and since then the station allowed her free rein.

She was a watchdog, a guardian for the people. Her viewers depended on her to shoot square. To help them choose the best groups to support and those to avoid. Gretchen took this responsibility very seriously. She and her family had once been duped. She didn’t want such a thing to happen to anyone else.

The hair rose on the back of her neck. Had it already happened to Maddy?

“Would you mind if I visited Isaiah House?”