John Mitchell pulled his feet off the desk and extended his left hand to Cindi, who came into his study and sat on his lap.

“Are you sure you have to go to the baby shower tonight?”

“I’m sure,” she said.

“I hate it when you leave me.”

“You’re a dear . . . why do you always say that?”

John had been waiting for her to ask, and it had only taken three months. “It’s from an old blues song I heard on the radio.”

She snuggled down closer to him. He reached up and began to stroke her neck with his finger, the way she liked it. “You be careful,” she said.

“Why?” he said. He thought this was a reasonable question.

“I think Sandy might still be here. We have children.”

He grinned and breathed in her ear. “Do you know why we have children?”

She pushed against his chest, a little half-heartedly, and sat up. “Do you like my hair like this?”

“I love it when you wear it up like that,” he said earnestly. “Your barrettes are twin fawns grazing among the lilies.”

“You are in a state,” she said. “How does the rest of that blues song go?”

“It is similar to Adam’s sentiment in Paradise Lost—‘Her long, with ardent look, with eye pursued, delighted, but desiring more her stay’”

“Right. But what does the song say?”

“I hate it when you leave me, but I love to watch you go.”

Cindi jumped to her feet, but it was clear she had taken no offense. This was a dance they both knew the steps to. “You are absolutely impossible,” she said, and out the door of the study she went. But there was a little extra swing in it for him.

John sat quietly at his desk, fiddled around with his commentaries, and tried to think Second Corinthianish thoughts. It wasn’t working very well. All he could think about was the fact that Sandy wouldn’t be home for a couple more hours—Sandy had told him that herself. And Cindi would be out late at the stupid baby shower. This is was the chance of a lifetime. Or of the week, maybe.

With a sigh that fooled nobody, had anyone been there, John put his books down and headed off to the kitchen. It was time to lift Cindi’s ponytail up and nibble on the back of her neck. To make up for quoting that song.

About four weeks after the Lester divorce was final, Brian and Michelle got married in a small ceremony with a justice of the peace. The witnesses were Shannon and Kimberly, who got on well enough with Brian, and who were happy to be sort of moving on with everything. And Brian and Michelle really were a good match up, more or less, and got along really well together, more or less. They only had two points of conflict, and they had worked out a reasonable truce on those before the ceremony. Michelle had said that she might or might not ever go to church at Grace Reformed with Brian, and all she wanted was absolutely no pressure on it. And Brian had insisted that Michelle keep all her money in a separate account, protected by a pre-nup that he had had his own attorney draw up. He had done this, he told Michelle, because he did not want to be seen in any way by anyone as a money grubber. He had plenty of his own anyway. The second reason for it, which he had not yet explained to Michelle, was that he was still uncomfortable with how she had gotten the bulk of that money from Chad. They had talked about both issues, about the church and the pre-nup, and had agreed to just leave it there. The ceremony was nice.

The fact that Brian Lewis had been attending Grace Reformed intermittently was evidence that he was caught up in what might be called a slow-build spiritual crisis. Not like St. Paul, who by most accounts was blown off his horse all at once, Brian had always been thoughtful and deliberate about spiritual things, and he had been assembling the pieces for a number of years. He had been very diligent in his own way, but he was like a guy putting together a jigsaw puzzle of a lighthouse, but one where things got mixed up in the closet, and the picture on the box lid was that of a sailing boat. He was diligent, but was making slow progress.
After the wedding, he continued to attend church, only more regularly than before . . . it got  to the point where he was attending virtually every Sunday. Then one Sunday something just snapped, and he saw that it was supposed to be a lighthouse, not a sailing boat for pity’s sake. John Mitchell had gotten to the text about bringing every thought to the “obedience of Christ,” and Brian felt like he had been watching a blurry out-of-focus movie for an hour and a half, and then someone had adjusted the focus for him with fifteen minutes left in the film. Everything made sense. Absolutely everything, even the first part of the movie, which he would have to watch over again in his head. Brian talked to John after the service, told him what had happened during the sermon, and asked about baptism.

John told Brian to take care that he not go off and buy a fifty pound Bible in order to go home and tell Michelle he’d been saved. Keep your mouth shut unless she asks. Okay, why? John explained why. “We’ll set up the baptism for you. You should invite her to that, but I bet she asks you what happened before you have to bring it up. Trust me.”

* * *

Chad Lester was living a crumpled up little life in his condo on the south side. He didn’t go out much. He had money to live on, but not enough to do anything in the grand style, and not enough to undertake any monumental projects. He didn’t feel like any monumental projects. He had fired all his attorneys, and rearranged his remaining affairs somewhat lethargically, so that he would continue to have something to do. After three months or so, he gave his book agent an exhortation about doing “something.” The Walking With Christ Through Divorce book had been pulled by the publisher after a raucous board meeting, at which meeting some of the PR people had passed around copies of the Trolling for Chicks With Christ Through Divorce, a web site for “struggling pastors” who needed to learn how to “score.”

“Is this for real?” one of the elderly board members asked, a fellow who didn’t get out much.

“No, it is not for real, Mr. Gerahty,” said someone from marketing. “It is a satiric web site. Legal department said there is nothing we can do, except not publish the book. Which they recommend, by the way. The kill fee is a lot less than what we would likely have to pay in new and interesting ways if we go ahead.”

That was the eventual decision, with the remarkable thing being that it took so long. Chad Lester had received the news with apathy, and was in no frame of mind to fight them over it. But after a few months, his mind began to turn toward other book projects, just for something to do, and hence the exhortation to his agent. His agent was working on a project for him, but said that he couldn’t do much until he had a hook or something. “You losing your faith? Recovering it? In between? I gotta know who to call, Chad.”

But Chad would mostly sit, try to write, watch television, and go to the grocery store once a week. There was an occasional woman overnight, but he didn’t have the star power he used to, and for some reason he didn’t have all the same compulsions he used to have. These women—three of them actually—were alumni who thought that he probably still had a lot of money, which he didn’t. He was just plain bored. He also started going to a neighborhood Episcopal church once a week as well. The vicarette there was a radical lesbo-priestess, but she still did the early service right out of the Book of Common Prayer, nobody being exactly sure why. Chad didn’t listen to her homilies—he was too good a smoke-blower himself not to see right through what she was doing.

So he just sat, not paying attention to much of anything. But occasionally a phrase from the prayer book would create a little spiritual thruppa-da-da, much like what happens when you forget to put the lawn mower in the garage for the winter, and try to get it started in the spring. Nothing much there, but occasionally there might be a noise that might indicate that at some point in the indefinite future there might be something there. Every three weeks or so, the Rev. Jane Hutchens, for that was her name, would read something profound that Thomas Cranmer had written in the sixteenth century, Lord knows why anymore, and Chad would shift in his seat. Thruppa-da-da.

He didn’t think about it much though. He would just go home afterwards, and sit. Then read a bit. Then channel surf. Then he would try to write. But mostly the lawn mower just sat there, and no grass actually got cut.

* * *

It had taken Michelle a week and a half to ask Brian what had happened to him. She had noticed after a day and a half, but waited to see if he was going to say something. When he didn’t, she finally got up the nerve to ask. “Brian, what happened? You have been . . . so pleasant.”

He laughed. “Was I that unpleasant?”

“No, no. You were fine. I just don’t know what else to call it.”

So he told her, and said that his baptism was two weeks away. “I would like to invite you and the girls to come . . . but I don’t want to pressure you . . . I want to honor our deal.”

“Oh, no . . . I would be glad to come for your baptism.” Michelle was actually glad for a face-saving reason to break the ice and attend Grace Reformed. She had been growing increasingly curious, but out of pride had not wanted to ask. And this was just plain weird. She had felt a little guilty about marrying someone without a testimony, but this seemed very different from the testimonies she was used to. But at least it was some kind of a testimony, she told herself.

The service upended her. She had never heard or seen anything like it. At the conclusion of the service, the congregation sang a few hymns while John and Brian were getting ready in the back. After the songs, a little maroon curtain, behind the place where the choir usually stood, came open with two or three herky-jerky motions. Michelle’s first impulse was to laugh because the little rectangle with two people in it looked like one of those old Punch and Judy shows. But when she saw the expression on Brian’s face, she swallowed hard, teared up, not knowing why.

The girls had come also, and acted like that one service was all they needed. But what had really happened is that they saw their counselor in the foyer after the service, and were really pleased to see him, but also thought that they should act like they were really weirded out by it. At least for the time being.

But Michelle, without saying anything, just began attending with Brian. He was pleased, but decided not to press his luck by asking her about it. After a month or two of that, the same thing happened to her that had happened to Brian. When the idea of repenting had first begun occurring to her, she had thought it would involve a few outstanding big ticket items. Her divorce, her adultery, and maybe the money she had sneeveled away from Chad. But when it finally happened to her, the whole thing was far more illuminating than she had thought it would be, and went all the way back to her girlhood. Vanity, selfishness, conceit, superficiality, covetousness, ambition . . . all of them just tumbled off the top bookshelf of her mind, and were just lying there on the floor, waiting for someone to pick them all up and throw them away.

Brian saw right away what had happened to her, and urged her to make an appointment with John Mitchell to ask him what she should do. In the aftermath one of the first things she had brought up with Brian was Chad’s money, and he said “you need to ask John.” All her prejudices against John had vanished by this point, as had all his concern about her, an old flame from afar, being in his congregation. This wasn’t junior high, and Cindi had made friends with Michelle right away.

She made the appointment, and one of the first things she did was throw John a major league sinker, starting high and inside and ending just above the knees. She explained about the money, and said, “You know, the money is really not important. I think that I ought to return a bunch of it to him, and I have no problem with that, but that is not what bothers me. What bothers me is that I will have to talk to him. Sometimes I think I have forgiven him, and other times the thought of talking to him without fighting just creeps me out. I don’t know how to talk to that man without being angry. I haven’t done it for years.”

John just sat there for a moment, scratching his beard, trying to look judicious and wise. You and me both, sister he was thinking. But pastors don’t have the option of saying things like, “This particular sin has me by the throat too. Nothing whatever can be done about it. Go away.” And so he told her what he had told many others—all about the nature and practice of forgiveness. But this was a unique sort of forgiveness—a kind of Chad-forgiveness—that he had never had to deal with before. Still, the teaching he laid out made sense, at least to Michelle, and it appeared to be a great help to her. “Okay, I’ll do it,” she said, and got up to go. “Thank you so much,” she said, and disappeared.

John just sat, staring at the wall. The only way, as I see it, John, he said to himself, to avoid a charge of thundering hypocrisy is for you to go do the same thing. You need to square things with him on a number of levels. The black eye, believing Cherie’s story, hating him in a high righteous dudgeon for years, sheesh. In his mind, John went over the passages he had shown to Michelle. Nope. No way out. Don’t want to do it, though. Still don’t want to do it. What could I do to make a living if I left the pastorate?

* * *

Three days later, Michelle pulled up and parked in the street outside Chad’s condo. She looked in her purse. The sizable check was still there. She swallowed hard, prayed, and got out. She rang the doorbell, and hoped that Chad was not going to be there. She could always do this tomorrow. But Chad was there, as evidenced by him opening the door and standing there startled.

“Hello,” Michelle said.

“Uh, hello,” Chad said.

“Do you have a minute to talk?”

“Um, yeah, sure. Come in.”

She did, and sat down on an offered chair. Chad gestured helplessly. “To what do I owe this . . . um, visit?” he said.

The first thing she did was hand him the check, like Jacob driving his flocks toward Esau, not that either of them were thinking about this exactly. He looked at the check in genuine surprise. “What . . . what?” he said.

“Well,” she said, “I had a change of heart over what I did in the divorce.” She was over the hump. “Not a change of mind, a change of heart. Our marriage was a mess, and I am not here to talk about anything that you did in it. I . . . I just need to seek your forgiveness for . . .” She was trying to find the Bible word, and realized there probably wasn’t one. “. . . for being such a bitch. When your dad died. There was a bunch of other stuff too, and I am so sorry for all of it. Please forgive me.”

Chad was unstrung and could play no tune. “Okay,” he said. He didn’t say anything like me, I’m sorry too for being ten times worse, but she could see that it was just because he was so surprised. If he had been able to put his feelings into words, it would have been something like, “What happened to you?” But he wasn’t, and he didn’t.

“Well, that’s it,” she said. “Thanks for talking with me.”

He showed her to the door, and then walked back to his living room, looking at the check, and scratching his head. He sat down on the sofa. There was something funny going on here. He resolved to pay closer attention to the prayer book readings next Sunday. Maybe God was trying to tell him something. He just sat there for about twenty minutes, and was then startled to hear someone else at the door. When he opened it, there was John Mitchell.

* * *

Just after Michelle’s car turned the corner at the end of Chad’s street, John Mitchell’s car pulled up, and parked in front of Chad’s condo, in Michelle’s old parking spot. He had followed computer directions to get there, which is why he had not arrived in the middle of Michelle’s visit. So he was already mildly annoyed, but it was not because he had gotten slightly lost. It was because he was going to talk to Chad, and he was looking for other reasons to be annoyed.

He pulled into the parking spot, and pulled on the emergency brake, a little too hard. Again, it came off in his hand. He stared at it with malice. Here was an inanimate object that he could be angry with safely. He had taken the car into the shop after he had broken the emergency brake the last time, that night at Cherie’s apartment, and they had clearly pretended to fix it. Sixty-dollars worth of fixing was sitting there in his hand, and was staring back up at him insolently. Do you do well to be angry? came into his head, but he was not sure why.

“Yes, I do,” he shouted at the parking brake handle. A lady walking by with a double stroller looked at him with alarm. He tried to grin at her through the windshield. Sorry, lady. She hastened her step and disappeared down the sidewalk. Two little kids, John thought. Who don’t know their right hand from their left, he added to himself. And then he began to laugh uncontrollably, longer than it seemed. Another couple passers-by glanced into the car with concern, but John didn’t care anymore. He laughed until he was done, and when he was done, he was at peace. All done with that, he thought, and got out of the car, and ran up the stairs two at a time to Chad’s front door.

Michael Martin walked out of the meeting of the leadership team shaking his head in amazement. The vote to call him as the new senior pastor of Camel Creek had been unanimous, no dissension, no hesitations whatever. Michael did not have the same gifts that Chad did, but at the same time he was certainly in the same league. He was professional, cut, chiseled. His slacks had a crease in them that could cut weeds if he walked through a field of tall grass, not that he did this very often. His one idiosyncratic feature was that he always looked like he was chewing beef jerky whenever he talked, but most people who even noticed it thought it made him look masculine in that jaw-jutty way that you see in Eddie Bauer catalogs.

The call was effective almost immediately, and Michael was invited to “share” his inaugural message the Sunday after next. The reason for the delay was that the leadership team wanted the extra time to run an ad campaign so that they could start this new era off with a bang. The church leadership was prepared to spend a great deal of money in order to market the “under new management” theme, and the ad boys in the basement were all over it. Their ads extolling the virtues of flexibility in changing times, adaptability in the face of difficulties, and going-with-the-flowness in the event that your church was ever caught in a flash flood of scandal, were ads that were hip, ironic, self-effacing, detached, and exuded a coolness unto death. The team had pulled a couple of all-nighters, and they now had in hand a flurry of ads that were calculated to bring all the straying sheep back home again. And, it must be said, they knew their business.

During the scandal, before Chad had accepted the pressure to resign, these graphics impresarios had been just so many advertising hounds locked in the kennels of indecision, with the raccoons of market share running through the woods pretty much as they pleased. It had been a genuine trial for them all. But now with the resignation in hand, the leadership knew what direction they were going, and the woods were soon filled with the sounds of their baying.
And they did know their business. If we peek ahead just a few pages to see if the congregation will in fact be coming back, we can see that is exactly what will be happening. Camel Creek was about to come roaring back—on all eight cylinders—into the life of their community. Those who had left had taken their stand for principle, kind of, and their brief exile among all the other area churches had reminded them how much they didn’t like the few remaining traditional services out there. And on top of that, neither did they like the wanna-be contemporary services with congregations under two hundred, because the drummer was almost always lousy, and the bass player pathetic, largely for size-of-gene-pool reasons. So pretty much all the Camel Creek Diaspora were ready to be talked into coming back. They were already checking the newspapers for the long anticipated ads. They weren’t really looking for repentance; postmodern irony would do.

When the leadership team extended the invitation to Michael they also asked him what he thought his message was likely to be. He had seen their invitation to become the senior pastor coming, and so he was ready with his answer. “I would want,” he said, “to speak on ‘Integrity and Healing.’” A number of heads bobbed up and down around the table. Encouraged, he expanded his little sermonic trailer for them.

“We must never allow integrity to become the enemy of healing. We must never allow healing to become the enemy of integrity. Only in this way can our church recover its footing, its love, and its missional zeal.”

This was not really supposed to mean anything in particular, but the elders were not about to press him on it. All they wanted was for smooth words to flow over them (and everybody else in the audience) like molten butterscotch, and it was looking as though they were going to get everything they were paying for, which was quite a bit of butterscotch.

Martin had been far more discreet about his amours than Chad had been, and speaking quantitatively, if illegitimate dalliances were corn, his Nebraskan combine had not cut so wide a swath, and this meant that many on the leadership team did not even know that they were getting a minister like unto Chad. They most certainly did not know that they were getting the actual fondler of Robert P. himself, but all that did not come out until long after the last page of our story here. And as edifying as it would be to tell the story of how Michael eventually blew up one day, while pastoring another church in quite another city and state, we will refrain. His ten-year tenure at Camel Creek was serene and placid—idyllic conditions for water skiing on, which he certainly did.

The ad boys did their magic, the team in the financial department wrote checks to media outlets like crazy, and when the Sunday morning in question rolled around, the place was packed like the local college gym would be if some cow town university inexplicably made the sweet sixteen one year. The atmosphere was as electric as a gathering as mellow as this can be, with everyone there prepared to get the full neck massage. Maybe electric is the wrong word. Expectant, that’s it.

“Integrity. Integrity and healing. Healing. Healing and integrity,” Michael began. The congregation settled comfortably down in their theater seats. Aaaaaahhhhhh.

* * *

Johnny Quinn was sitting with Brandy in the upper section of the auditorium, near the back row. It was ten minutes after the close of Michael Martin’s address, and Johnny was still reeling. Integrity, he thought. Healing, he thought. Both of them together, he thought. Brandy sat quietly by him. She could tell that great forces were contending with one another in his soul. “Wow,” he finally said aloud.

“Yeah,” she said. “Double wow on me too.”

“What a blessing,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said.

“This is a God thing.”

“I agree, Johnny.” She nodded—pretty, simple, innocent.

And with her acknowledgment that it was a God thing, it suddenly dawned on Johnny that this was the time he needed to do that other God thing. He needed to ask Brandy to marry him. After that police officer had exhorted him about this in his brief foray into pastoral ministrations, Johnny had accepted this course of action as the inevitable will of God. But he had still needed to make the math work, in order to figure out how to pay for a larger apartment and all that other stuff. He hadn’t been able to do that. But here . . . clearly, Michael had delivered a message that was a God thing. And if one God thing had happened here in the auditorium, just a few moments ago, why not another God thing? Why the heck not?

“Brandy,” he said. “Will you marry me?”

She was startled, but smiled widely. She had a beautiful smile. “Johnny! Of course I will.”

He extended his hand and she put her hand in his. “I don’t have a ring yet. We can go shopping for one tomorrow.” She nodded happily, and then leaned over and kissed him. They got up, holding hands, and walked slowly down the aisle, turned left, and headed out toward the escalators. They chatted happily as they glided down toward the first level. When they got to the bottom, they started to work their way outside. The lobby area was still quite crowded.

Before they got to the doors, Stephanie Nelson saw them from across the way, and called out, “Johnny! Johnny Quinn!” Johnny thought he heard someone calling, and so he stopped, puzzled. Stephanie wound her way through the crowd, and came up from behind him and tapped him on the shoulder. Johnny turned around, still in the pleasant glow of the great faith step he had taken. He was still nervous about it, but was certain he was doing the God thing.

“Johnny, the leadership team asked me to talk with you. Dennis Johnston has decided to move on—he has taken a position in Illinois at Sandlefoot. The elders asked me to ask you if you would be interested in taking his place for us.”

Johnny’s eyes widened. This was a leapfrog promotion over a number of others that he would certainly have thought would have been asked first. And he was aware of how much Dennis had been hauling down. He . . . he could afford Brandy now. Brandy was beaming at him, really proud. “I . . . I would be honored,” Johnny finally said.

Dennis had decided to head for the tall grass because he had once been involved in an unwitting ménage a trois with Michael Martin and one Sandy Duncan, a character of note and a disc jockey over at the KING radio station. When Martin had been the choice to replace Lester, Dennis thought that getting while the getting was good would seem to be the voice of prudence, before a day of real reckoning came down upon them all. “Fire on the mountain, run, boys, run” about sums up his feelings on the matter. Camel Creek had to have some kind of reverse mojo going, and Sandlefoot had been after him to join their team for some time now. This was a something of a miscalculation on his part because Camel Creek was actually entering into its golden decade, and Michael Martin did not receive his reap-what-you-sow comeuppance until after he became the senior pastor at another church entirely—Sandlefoot Community, come to think of it.

After Stephanie had offered Johnny congratulations, and told him to check in with her at her office tomorrow to work out the details of his work agreement—“which will be more than acceptable, I can assure you”—she retreated back into the diminishing crowd.

Johnny and Brandy stood, staring at each other. “A God thing,” they both said at the same time, and then laughed. “Now I can afford that ring I’m getting you,” Johnny said. They were both thrilled and delighted, and walked out through the doors leaning into one another. They had a short engagement, just two months long, and they only messed up one time during that whole engagement.

* * *

Sharon Atwater had decided to take the package they offered her. It would have been insane not to. Michael Martin wanted to start the whole senior pastor operation over from scratch, and remove, delicately, as many members of the old office guard as he could. The fewer people from the Chad days, the better he liked it. The subject had been broached with Sharon with great professional sensitivity, and Sharon had responded with a corresponding professionalism. “Oh, I would love to move on,” she had said. “I just can’t afford it. I have to work at least a couple more years before I could move back to Tennessee. I have been planning to go live with my mother, but I would want to help her, not be a drain on her . . .”

Some discrete calculations had been made about what Sharon could likely save up over a couple years, both in her retirement package and elsewhere, and she was offered a severance package that it would have been criminal negligence to refuse. The added benefit of getting away from the gravitational pull of Camel Creek was compelling to her as well.

And so it was that Sharon was busy clearing out her desk, and sorting out the office files, preparing them for her replacement, a one Misti Cooper. Misti was competent, sweet, and a quick study. She was also cute and virginal, and made the kind of visual first-impression statement that Michael thought most necessary to make during these, alas, cynical times. During their two week transition, Misti would come in during the mornings and Sharon would check her out on all the various office procedures. In the afternoons, Sharon would go through all the files and decide what could go in the archives, what could be thrown away, and what she should keep. She had a few personal files of her own here and there, and she was now seated in her rolling office chair in front of one of them.

Many years before, she had been in the second row of that infamous class taught by the equally infamous Jim Wilson. The talk had been on confession of sin, and the effect of it had been the equivalent of dropping a hand grenade in your average living room goldfish bowl. Sharon had (for some reason) saved the handouts from that meeting, and was sitting awkwardly in her chair now, holding the manila folder in her hand, trying to figure out why she had done that. There was something that looked like a confession of sin graph, and another handout with a bunch of Bible verses all over it. Sharon squinted to make out the marginalia she had scribbled on the papers at the time. Damn fool was one comment. Superficial idiot was another. She had been among the displeased in that class, but now a wave of sadness swept over her. At that time she had been in love with Chad, and had been hoping that his wandering attention would return to her. But he never had, and the verses no longer seemed insane to her, the way they once had. She sat there for fifteen minutes, trying to make up her mind about the three sheets of tattered paper. Throw it away or not? Suddenly the phone rang, and Sharon got up without dropping the papers in her trash can that she had dragged over. When she picked up the phone, she placed them carefully in the box for moving stuff that was sitting on her desk. It did not seem like an important act at the time, but those papers would make even more sense in Tennessee.

* * *

Charles Peaborne had literally wet his pants when it had first dawned on him what Miguel had done to him. He was not a brave man in the best of circumstances, and the only time he could be prevailed upon to put up any kind of a show of courage at all was when the stakes were remarkably low—something that other parties to the conflict would be unlikely to be willing to fight over. Paper clips, toner cartridges, grades of copier paper were the way to go. Everyone else would always just roll their eyes at some point, and after a certain amount of time and energy was expended on the quarrel, would just capitulate so that Peaborne would go expend his energetic and remarkable abilities of focus elsewhere. This he would usually do, and so a brief respite for the victim of his dudgeon would be earned thereby.

By this means, Peaborne had come to fancy himself a natural member of the warrior caste. He had been on a retreat once where he sat naked in a little teepee pouring water on hot rocks, and this had helped to release his inner wildness. He talked about that experience frequently as though he had been one of the six hundred who had ridden into the valley of death. In short, he was a coward who had absolutely no idea that this is what he was. He was an irritating midge that some could occasionally be persuaded to brush at absently, or blow half-heartedly off their lip, but he was not the formidable foe that he fancied himself to be.

Except that there had been that one time when he actually got to Miguel, and the level of irritation was such that it prompted some level of action after Charles Peaborne had disappeared around the corner. That didn’t usually happen. But Miguel determined that he would not get mad, but rather just get even, and so he had quietly adjusted the bookkeeping set-up. The arrangement needed an overhaul anyway, but Miguel tweaked it so that if there were any women getting checks from Camel Creek, and said women had, on one or more occasions, engaged in some form of sexual congress with the Chadster, and she was receiving these checks for that reason, Miguel made sure that he had copies of those checks with Charles Peaborne’s self-important flourish of a signature right smack on the bottom of them.

Rourke had obtained copies of those checks from Miguel’s attorney, who was as cooperative as Miguel had been, and when he had shown these checks to Charles Peaborne, and explained what the checks perhaps indicated, that was when Charles Peaborne had wet himself. This had happened at the courthouse, in their first conversation. Rourke was all understanding, and had a hunch within the first few minutes that Charles Peaborne knew nothing whatever about the payoffs, but he needed at least a few more interviews to make sure. Those interviews occurred over the course of a week or ten days, during which time Peaborne lost about fifteen pounds, and slept erratically if at all. He was so eager to convince Rourke of his innocence of all monkeyshines that he actually behaved in such an odd way that it kept Rourke asking questions for an extra interview or so. But when Chad resigned, and it became apparent that no one at Camel Creek was going to pursue him for paying hush money to his former bedchums, the whole line of questioning became pointless. But by this point, Charles Peaborne had become greatly chastened by his interviews with the law, had taken down his web site, gotten a job selling office supplies at Staples, and assumed what might be called a low profile, which he maintained for the rest of his life.

Mercedes Hanson had always believed in swinging for the fence. If she was ever to break out of this local news market, she needed to do something spectacular, and she was always on the look-out for what that might be. Every story was reviewed by her with this consideration in mind. She was competent, hard-driving, and ambitious, which successfully grouped her in with about three million other blonde local news reporters. She had never heard the term News Babe applied to her, but it almost certainly would not have bothered her if she had. She believed in swinging for the fence, and that meant using everything you had. No harm if other people noticed some of what you had.

The court date for the civil trial had been set for the third Tuesday of the month. The months leading up to this point had seen all sorts of motions and countermotions, but this was the first time that everybody was going to be in the courtroom together. Mercedes had succeeded, through flattery, cajoling, and smashmouth negotiations, in securing a very brief interview with Chad Lester at the courthouse just fifteen minutes before he was to appear in the courtroom. She had had the room reserved and secured, she had her people confirm and reconfirm with Lester’s office in the weeks leading up to the interview. At the beginning, it was just going to be a regular interview, but as the date approached, an idea began to form in her mind, and by the week of the court date, she was resolved on what she was going to do. Nothing like a little extra sensationalism in the midst of an already sensational trial. It was a national story already, and so why not? She had been in the corridor outside their reserved room many times, and whenever court was in session, it was always crowded. More than crowded enough.

The court time was at 10:00 am, and Mercedes was there with her crew at 9:30. There were two connected rooms reserved for them. The first room was small, and that was where she intended to put her plan into action. The second room sat empty, and the only significant thing about it was a door that Mercedes had somehow overlooked, a door that emptied out into another corridor. She had set the camera crew up in the corridor outside the first room, so that she could do her preliminary intro, and set the stage for what was to come.
Chad Lester had arrived, right on time, at quarter till. He seemed to her to be a pasty, sickly white. Mercedes greeted him, and opened the door for him. “I have to finish the set-up shot here. We’ll be right in. Second room . . . right, the second room.”

He disappeared into the door, and Mercedes turned to her cameraman. “Get that?” she asked. He nodded. “Great visual,” he said.

Mercedes turned back to the camera, microphone held at the ready. “And so we come to a critical day in a long and distinguished ministerial career. Will this be a day of vindication . . . or of something else?” With that, and with a dramatic flourish, she turned and went inside the door. Her cameraman had been instructed to wait for a few minutes, but he had not known why. News Babe had her quirks. But who didn’t?

When the door closed behind her, Mercedes leaned back against it, and took a few deep breaths. Then, without a qualm or a second thought, she put the microphone down, reached up and tore the front of her blouse, pulled herself askew, and then reached up and disheveled her hair. She picked up the microphone, slowly counted to thirty, and lurched back out the door again. She fell out the door and halfway out of her blouse, plainly looking as though she had just escaped from groping clutches. Her cameraman jumped. “Mercedes!” He started to put the camera down, but she motioned at him fiercely. “The story first,” she blurted, in a hoarse whisper. She stood upright, pulled her blouse together, lifted her microphone, and in a voice that was barely steady, began to report the story.

“Unbelievably,” she said, “this man, Chad Lester, on trial here for sexual misconduct was unable to control himself even . . . even on the threshold of judgment.” She choked up for a moment. “Excuse me,” she said after a moment. She hadn’t done this well since her supreme moment in a high school production of The Glass Menagerie. Tears ran down her cheeks. Her eye makeup was seriously blurred, and she looked out the twin smudges at the camera. Staring at the screen, John Mitchell described her to Cindi as a sensuous and emotionally worked up raccoon.

* * *

Chad Lester walked into the first room, stopped for a moment, and then into the second. He had been afraid of being late, and so he had not stopped at the men’s room on the way in. But that woman was still out in the hallway, blowing introductory smoke for the viewing public. He put his briefcase in the middle of the table so she would know that he would be back in a minute, and stepped out the back door. There was a men’ room just down the hall, or so he thought. It turned out to be one hall after that.

A few moments later, standing at the urinal, he felt someone tap on his shoulder. He looked up to see a bailiff. “Excuse me,” the man said. “Rev. Lester?”

Chad nodded, almost said, “Just call me Chad,” but stopped himself.

“Lucky I saw you walk by andn come in here.” the bailiff said. “I was told to get word to you and your attorneys that there has been a problem with the ventilation in Courtroom A, where we were scheduled. We had to move to the other side of the courthouse, down to the old courtroom. It’ll take a few minutes to get there. I’d be happy to show you the way.”

“Thanks. Thank you,” Chad said. He was relieved that he had an excuse for skipping out on the interview with Mercedes. They went out into the corridor, and Chad quickly popped back into the interview room to grab his briefcase—no sign of Mercedes yet—and popped out again. He and the bailiff headed down the corridor, and then turned left, a route that would take them right past where Mercedes was standing, blowsy and disheveled, and astonishing the greater metropolitan area with her story. And her remarkable story was going to go national, but not in the way she had hoped.

“When did this happen?” someone in the crowd cried out.

“Just seconds ago,” she barely managed to reply. “Just now.”

With that reply there was a commotion in the hallway to her right, as the crowd stepped aside to let Chad and the bailiff walk by. Mercedes’ cameraman, in fascinated horror, panned over to where Lester was walking, and then back to his former boss, standing, completely flustered, in front of the doorway.

A voice from the back of the crowd called out to the bailiff, “How long you been with Lester?” The question was from a shrewd observer of the human condition. The bailiff’s brow furrowed. “Five minutes. Why?” He would not get an answer to that question until that evening when he saw himself on the news. Mercedes licked her lips, thinking furiously. “Don’t,” said her cameraman. “I’m turning this thing off now.”

* * *

In some ways, even though the board of Camel Creek had finally dismissed him the previous week, this day at the courthouse was going to be all Chad’s. His life was in shambles, and he would have a lot of debris to sort through later on, but not very much of that debris was going to be falling out of the sky on this day.

Chad walked into the courtroom with a couple minutes to spare. His attorneys had gotten the word about the switch and were there ahead of him. Chad walked into the courtroom, and made his way up to the front table, where his legal team was waiting for him. On the other side, Robert P. Warner II was seated, head down, staring at the table. He was depressed. He didn’t have a good feeling about any of this. Mystic Union had spent a couple hours that morning talking him into a suitable frame of mind, and even then it was touch and go. She was seated in the front row, right behind Robert P., sitting at the ready in case she had to encourage him with an emotional rubber hose again. Their cause was in a parlous state.

Robert P. Warner II took three deep breaths, and then sat up straight. You have to do what you have to do. He then looked over in Chad’s direction for the first time, blanched, turned white, then ashen, and then he blanched again. He tugged furiously on his attorney’s arm. “Who’s that?” he hissed.

“What do you mean, ‘who’s that?’ That’s Lester,” the attorney said. If Robert P. had been following his own case in the newspapers, he would have seen Lester plenty of times. But he had been consumed with sleeping and blogging and watching serious French jiggle art and had no time for the case. The case wearied his soul. Mystic Union had followed everything scrupulously, but of course in her case it did not matter that she knew what Lester actually looked like. It made, as the fellow once said, no never mind.

Robert P. Warner II swiveled in his seat and looked at Mystic Union in desperation. She had been expecting this look of desperation, but didn’t know that this time there was actually an objective basis for it. Nevertheless, she was prepared with soothing encouragements. But Robert was not suffering here from his general malaise, but rather with the sure and certain knowledge that the man they were suing for molesting him years before—not that Robert had minded it, actually—was not the man who had actually done it. His eyes were wide open, filled with panic, as well as filled with a sure and certain knowledge of impending doom. There was no way they were going to win this case before, and now there was no way they were going to win this case either. Same as before, only worse. But when he turned to whisper the problem to Mystic Union, his eyes happened to fall on a familiar face, in the back row of the courtroom. There was no way that Michael Martin could avoid coming to support Chad, but he had taken care to slip into the way back. But Warner’s eye fell on him there, and he suddenly realized what must have happened. Maybe Camel Creek had more than one pastor! And there he was, sitting way the heck at the wrong end of the courtroom.

Instead of telling his attorney about it, Robert P. Warner II stood slowly to his feet. Mystic Union was gesturing furiously at him, but he ignored her. Throwing his head back, he pointed to Chad, and wailed. The courtroom fell silent and listened to Warner, keening and howling and muttering furiously at the ceiling. At first the noise was unintelligible, but after a time, people began to realize that he was saying, over and over again, “That’s not him! That’s not the one!” This went on for a couple minutes. The judge didn’t gavel him to shut up because nothing was in session yet. Everybody just stared, fascinated. And then, as if in response to someone throwing a big breaker somewhere, Robert P. Warner II slumped, shumped, and fell to the floor. He there assumed the demeanor and outlook of a bean bag chair, and ceased cooperating with anyone.

After ten minutes of pandemonium all around him, furious whispering between attorneys, two conferences with the judge, and ineffectual attempts by Mystic Union to get him to sit up, Robert P. quit saying, “That’s not him! That’s not the one!” and started saying, “Drop it, drop it!” Finally, one of his attorneys stood up, shrugged, and walked over to Chad’s table and said, “We are going to withdraw our suit.” He then walked over to the judge, and told him the same thing. The judge told the bailiffs to get a medical spatula crew, scrape Mr. Warner off the floor of his courtroom, and take him somewhere else.

Chad stood up, ran his hands through his hair, and whistled.

* * *

Bradford heard about the Warner meltdown from a detective friend who had been there. He could barely understand the story because his friend was wheezing so much, but when he did get it, he muttered golly under his breath, and said, “Excuse me.” He took off at a run, back to the other side of the courthouse. Radavic was not to be denied, and had thought that it was his bounden duty to file a criminal indictment that very same day. He was furious about all the column inches that had been going to the civil trial in the weeks leading up to it—although he didn’t exactly express it to himself that way of course—and he determined to do the right thing and bring an indictment. It would be a principled stand, and that is all he could or would say about it.

He had a stack of manila folders under his arm, and he was wending his way to Courtroom B. He was about to go in when Bradford came tearing around the corner, slammed into a wall, and then dashed the remaining twenty yards. Bradford slid to a stop alongside the prosecutor, gasped, “Thank God,” and then put his hands on his knees to catch his breath.

“Bradford . . .” Radavic said.

“Yes, sir,” Bradford said, and stood upright. “Thank God you haven’t filed anything yet.”

“Bradford, I am not going to listen to any more of this crap. Rourke’s memo bordered on professional impertinence but I let it go. Sometimes you simply have to do the right thing.”

“But sir, there is something else that has happened, something you have to take into account. I ran . . .”

“That’s enough, Bradford. Not another word.”

“Yes, sir.” Bradford watched in fascination as Radavic pulled open the thick wooden courtroom door, and walked in, the embodiment of civic duty. After the glory subsided somewhat, three reporters followed him in. “It was like watching a helicopter trying to land sideways,” he told Rourke later. “I didn’t go in to watch. That would have been creepy.”

* * *

Rourke had been present at the Warner saga, but only because he was looking for Charles Peaborne, and he thought for sure that he would be there. At least that is where Peaborne had said he would be on one of his latest “rip the cover off” blog posts. Savonarola.com had really taken off—there had been fifty-seven hits there just yesterday. One of them had been Rourke, seeing if Peaborne was planning on attending the opening ceremonies for the downfall of his nemesis Lester. He was, and so Rourke was there waiting for him afterwards.

Rourke was doing that because he had some questions he needed to ask Charles Peaborne. The investigator in Memphis who had arrested Miguel Smith, and done the initial interrogation, had called Rourke to let him know that Smith had fingered Peaborne as the one who had been cutting all the checks to Lester’s ex-mistresses. This had been done because Smith had vowed to himself, years before, that if anything bad ever happened to him, taking him out of his cushy position at Camel Creek, one of the first things he would do would be to confess to his involvement in covering up for Lester, and to do so in a way that would implicate Peaborne, right up to the top of his pencil neck. He could not abide that man. There had been a six-month controversy over which toner cartridges to buy for the church. It had been the easiest thing in the world to arrange the checks in such a way that Peaborne would not know what he was signing. And he did not know anything about all this, although Rourke was about to bring him abreast.

Rourke walked up to him in the foyer outside the courtroom, and tapped him on the shoulder. “Excuse me, Mr. Peaborne? Detective Rourke.” Rourke extended his hand and shook the hand of a somewhat startled man. “Do you have a moment for me to ask you a few questions?”

In the U.S. Navy, a steady bearing rate is not really a happy thing. Since this involves basic physical principles operative all over the globe, it is not a happy thing for other navies either, but the U.S. Navy will work for purposes of illustration. Say a ship spots another ship 30 degrees off the starboard bow, and let us say the ship is a little bobbing dot on the horizon. Then suppose that some time later, it is still occupying the same place 30 degree-wise, but it is no longer a dot, but rather the size of something significantly bigger than a dot. Then, a half an hour after that, if the ship is still right there, 30 degrees off the starboard bow, but this time it is three times bigger and a lot closer still, this indicates that unless something changes, and soon, there is going to be a collision, and at least three heads on the admiral’s desk in the morning.

* * *

Mystic Union was nothing if not industrious. Not only did she continue her ordinary herbal sales, in which her dogmatism more than compensated for her level of expertise, and a demanding slate of midwifery appointments, with no deaths yet, but she also had taken on the equivalent of a full-time job in her advocacy of the Robert P. Warner II situation. Her lover, if you wanted to call him that, wasn’t being exactly helpful because the more energy was expended on the subject in his presence, the more it made him weak and trembly all over. Mystic Union regularly gave him some herbal tea for it, but it really was a nasty business and so he just poured it down the sink when she wasn’t looking.

She had persuaded the two city papers—one morning edition and one evening—to accept an interview with her instead of with Robert. Those interviews had actually gone quite well, with Mystic Union sharing some lurid details that hadn’t really happened. But although they had never actually occurred, they nevertheless made good copy, and the editors ate it all up with a spoon, straight out of the carton. One of those editors had read some Derrida in college, and so he was good with the idea of perspectives from every which direction, especially if it made good copy. Mystic Union also, with the natural shrewdness of a born master, knew when to leak and when to go on the record. In one fashion or the other, she kept a steady stream of information flowing to the appropriate news outlets.

Robert P. Warner II wasn’t stupid though. He was lazy, and he was narcissistic, and could act like a moron sometimes, and for some reason he thought that he knew how to write, but he wasn’t stupid. He could see that Mystic Union was going to shoot the moon, and he instinctively knew that his story wasn’t built for no moon shooting. And when this small instinctive notion lined up with his inveterate slothfulness, it gave him all the moral authority he needed to go limp and stay limp. He would consistently sleep in till noon or after, walk around their neighborhood for a couple hours foraging for the kind of food that was not to be had back at the Health Temple. Come to think of it, maybe that had something to do with his lack of cooperation too. If the moon got successfully shot, then there the two of them would be, as wealthy as all get out, but he would still be eating those slabs of tofu.

Robert walked out of the 7-11 with an order of cheese pump nachos, a hot dog, and a couple of packets of those chocolate thingies with a half-life of 75 years. He backed out the door, balancing all that processed nutrition along one arm with a big gulp soft drink in the other hand. He walked over to a nearby park, and settled with a sigh on the nearest park bench. He could only afford to eat like this because his sister would occasionally send some money. Mystic Union had cut him off a long time ago. Why would a film critic of his caliber have to resort to sneaking around for some decent food? Didn’t they feed the critics at Cannes?

But as he ate, he slowly realized the way of least resistance was still to remain for the present at the Health Temple. Mystic Union knew how much she could get out of him, she didn’t push too much, and so it wasn’t at intolerable levels yet. Robert P. ate the hot dog pensively, looking forward to the yellow/orange nachos.

* * *

Cherie walked confidently up to the main building of the television station. She had called the day before, gotten through to Mercedes Hanson, and told her that she had a bombshell story to tell about Chad Lester and Camel Creek. She was willing to be interviewed on the record, but anonymously. “You know, the way you guys sometimes interview silhouettes?”

Mercedes jumped at it. “Of course we can guarantee you complete anonymity. It is important for the public to know what has been happening here. And we will always protect our sources. The First Amendment . . . what was that?”

Cherie had asked directions to the station, not being all that interested in the First Amendment. All she wanted to do was get even with Chad, and to do so without taking any responsibility for anything herself. Talking to the police would have involved talking about her earlier romps with Chad some years before, in which questions about her cooperation and willingness might naturally have arisen, along with questions about why she stayed at Camel Creek afterwards. Doing it this way, she could just tell her most recent version of the events of the other night, John would feel duty-bound to confirm portions of it if anything did get out, and she did not have to prove anything. All she had to do was tell her story and let the public decide.

So the interview was conducted the next morning, and Cherie felt very good about how it had gone. Mercedes was a deft questioner, one who knew how to look as though she was asking penetrating hardball questions, but who was actually steering the interview straight to the foregone conclusion. Her abilities in this regard gave the phrase video feed a whole new meaning.

The last question was a set up for the final appeal. “Why should anyone believe your story?
“I . . . I guess I am not asking them to.” Cherie spoke with a winsome humility. “All I want to do is provide an encouragement to others who may have been in a similar circumstance. Maybe with Chad Lester . . .maybe with someone else.” Her voice broke.

“Thank you, for women everywhere,” Mercedes said. “Thank you for your courage.”

John Mitchell was staring at the screen in disgust. “Courage!” Cindi had just arrived in the living room, and was standing behind the couch, drying a roasting pan. She had heard the last part of the interview from the kitchen and came out to watch it with her husband.

“John,” she said. “Do you think that’s Cherie?”

John Mitchell was slumped on the coach in a posture of strong disapproval. “Yeah, that’s Cherie. The first part of the interview you missed was the same story from the other night. But why do you think it might be Cherie? They ran her voice through a garble box.”

“Just little turns of phrase she used.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Well, this is a queer business. She said nothing about her fling with him a few years ago, which is something that would have been easy to prove, if proof were ever necessary. She only talked about the other night. I am starting to think that she set Chad up . . . as much as it pains me to believe that Chad didn’t do something grotesque. Maybe she called me as soon as Chad got there . . .”

. . . and maybe John had given Chad a black eye for nothing. Well, there was that satisfaction anyway.

“What are you going to do if they call you for corroboration?” Cindi asked. “If she is lying, and called you over, then that has to be why she did it.”

“They won’t call. They already aired the story. And they will only check after the fact if someone challenges the story. And who is going to challenge it now, given that Chad, in the public eye, is up to his neck in pre-certified guilt? I’ll give Cherie this. Her timing is impeccable.”

“Should we talk to Cherie about it?”

“Probably. Not that it will do any good. But I might have to talk to Chad about that black eye I gave him. But speaking frankly, Cindi my dear, I’m not up to that yet. I will need some seasons of incessant prayer . . . that, and a couple helpings of your cheese potatoes. What a tangle! Pastoral snarls are like the mercies of God—they are new every morning.”

* * *

Michelle Lester had gotten over her anger with Brian. He meant well. He was a genuine sweetheart. And for the first time, it occurred to her that she really had no reason to be dubious about any counsel that John Mitchell might give. That was a strange thought. The glimmer of a willingness to have Brian talking to John about her Chad money unfolded into a momentary openness to meeting John sometime to see what Brian saw in him. It went away almost immediately, but still, it had happened. And she was no longer upset with Brian.

But she was still concerned about her girls. Even though their journaling seemed honest enough—and when they talked to her, they said all the right things—she was still worried. Something didn’t seem right.

They really needed professional counseling. There was a small battalion of professional counselors at Camel Creek, but she knew the girls would not be open to that. Icky, gross, she could hear Kimberly saying. And Shannon would nod.

She flipped anxiously through the yellow pages and came to rest on a small ad for certified counseling services that had a Christian sounding name. She plopped the phone book on the counter, and dialed. The receptionist was cheerful and had some openings for early the following week. When she hung up the phone, the receptionist whistled, and took a note into the Stefan MacDonald, the counselor. He looked at the note, and he whistled. Shannon and Kimberly Lester. Well, imagine that. Stefan had his degree in counseling from Duke, and another degree in theology from Westminster Seminary. He was an elder at Grace Reformed, and was one of John Mitchell’s closest friends.

* * *

“Charles Peaborne is a prophet without honor in his own country. Check out his take on all this at Savanarola.com.” This was the cryptic comment left at multiple blog sites where the Camel Creek reactor scram meltdown was being discussed, and it was the comment left by various posters. There was george@yahoo.com   and littlepete@yahoo.com and jojo@yahoo.com. There were a number of others as well, but this would be to belabor the point because the point of origin for all of them was Charles Peaborne himself.

There were various levels of praise for Mr. Peaborne from these anonymous admirers, ranging from mildly adulatory to idolatrous. And, for the first two days, they did boost his web traffic a skosh. But after that it was back to the flat brain wave. Charles was on a first name basis with the guy in tech support for his web stats page, calling him at least three times a day with suggestions on how he ought to check again. Charles also took out a few web ads on various whistleblower sites. But somehow, no one really wanted to click on “Smell the stench of true corruption.”

Once you got to the Savanarola web site, it was initially impressive, then overwhelming, and then odd, and then funny. This was the ranking, depending on whether you spent 30 seconds there, three minutes, ten minutes, or half an hour. The site was jammed full of pdfs of minutes from ancient meetings, pdfs of long lost memos, mostly from Charles, pdfs of affidavits, all from Charles and immediate family members. Charles had unique views on what constituted corroboration. He would produce an affidavit saying that he had once told Chad Lester, to his face, that if Camel Creek did not repent of its wasteful practice of buying high-grade paper for the copiers, and instead go with the perfectly acceptable middle-grade variety, there would be consequences. Then there would then be two other affidavits, from his mother and younger brother, testifying that Charles had indeed told them that he had told Chad this also.

It was the middle of the evening, and Charles had just finished uploading a whole new line of what he called “exposure documents.” He sat back in his chair in his study at home, and stared at the screen, highly pleased.

* * *

That same night, Miguel Smith was across the state line on one of his periodic forays in search of sexually precocious minors. He always took care to stay away from his home town in the belief that how he got laid was none of his home town’s business. And unless he traveled afar, the chances were good that word would get around in that home town, and it was possible that his home town would not take the same lax views on his private affairs as he did.

The Internet was a great help in setting up these various liaisons, and the state line was only two hours away. And so it was that same night that Miguel cruised slowly up to the agreed-upon Holiday Inn Express, and saw a long-legged blond standing by the garbage can outside, just like she said she would. Her screen name was Tiffany, and she had better be as young as she said she was. She looked like she might be.

The young woman saw his blue-gray Lexus rolling up the drive, recognized it, and sauntered toward the curb. Without missing a beat she opened the door on the passenger side and hopped in, held up a room key, and said “Room 106. Just on the other side.”

He pulled around to the right, and drove into an empty space right in front of 106. They spent a couple minutes negotiating, agreed on a price, and he gave her the money.

“Well, Tiffany,” he said. “It will be a pleasure to . . .  meet you.”

“Well, actually,” she said. “It’s Lt. Tiffany.” And she held up her badge, and at that same moment a flashlight came on just behind Miguel and focused on the steering wheel.

“Damn,” said Miguel.

Lt. Tiffany hopped out, and the voice behind the flashlight said, “May I ask you to get out, and step away from the car, sir?”

“Damn,” said Miguel. “Okay, though.”

But Miguel had contingency plans for everything. The bulk of his money was hidden away in multiple places, and he had resolved some time ago that if he ever got busted—for anything—he would behave in such a manner that the authorities would all believe that they would all go to their graves without ever again meeting such a cooperative prisoner. He would tell them anything and everything about anybody—except where most of his money was—and he would do it with narrowed gaze, looking for the mother of all plea arrangements. He would spill the first free information before he got an attorney there, and would spill as it suited him thereafter. The confession before his attorney arrived would be for establishing his sincerity in confessing all the rest later. In the car on the way to the station, Miguel decided which confessional track it would be.

Forty-five minutes later he was sitting in an interrogation room, heavy on the plastic products, from the table to the floor to the chair to the window blinds, and speaking with a heavy-set officer named Jack in his forties, not nearly so attractive as Tiffany had been. Oh, well.

“What do you do?”

“I am the CFO for Camel Creek Community Church.”

The man’s eyebrows went up. “Camel Creek, eh? You guys get around.”

“You’ve apparently heard about Chad Lester then? Well, this arrest is no doubt God’s payback to me for what I have been doing for him. I have been issuing checks to a number of his ex-mistresses . . . well, actually I wasn’t able to do that by myself. One of my colleagues, Charles Peaborne, was involved in that part of it too.”

The policeman looked slightly panicked. “Look, you have a right to an attorney . . .”

“Oh, I know that,” Miguel said, waving his hand. “In fact, I want to call an attorney now. But that doesn’t change the fact that I intend to cooperate fully with you guys.”

Jack looked pleased, licked his pencil, and wrote down mistresses, pay off, and Charles Peaborne.

* * *

Stephanie Nelson looked thoughtfully at the schedule that Sharon Atwater had given her. No plane trips anywhere on it. Chad had been in town for two straight months. She had then double-checked with her daughter. Yes, Chad had definitely said that he was catching a plane in the morning. No mistake possible.

Stephanie pursed her lips, highly displeased. She was the kind of woman whose absolute support was freely and completely given . . . until it gave way like a saturated California hillside. Then it was mostly at the bottom with a car or two underneath. The final event that would cause the hillside to give way might be completely trivial—perhaps a robin landing too heavily—but once the business was underway . . . well, it was all mostly at the bottom.

Chad had clearly and unmistakably lied to her daughter. This was a breach of trust not to be endured. It was clear. It was unambiguous. It was obviously time to act.

Fifteen minutes later, Michael Martin looked up from his desk, startled. Stephanie had just blown past his secretary (which was actually a pretty difficult thing to manage) and sat down across from him, her normally pleasant evangelical features fixed, hard, and angry. He gestured, magnanimously, and just a second too late. “Have a seat,” he said.

“Michael,” she said. “We have to talk.”

He perked up in spite of himself. He had a feeling that this was the kind of anger that would cause her to start confiding. It did not have that “confronting” feel to it at all. In short, she was angry, but not at him. She was angry and wanted his help in being angry. Okay, he thought. Sure. Who is it?

“I feel betrayed by . . . by Chad,” she said.

Better and better. “Why is that?” he said, with deep concern.

She told the whole story from beginning to end. Chad had said that he was going to catch a flight in the morning, and he actually wasn’t going to. The story didn’t take very long. Wasn’t much of a story. But Michael was a sympathetic audience. He was not a hard sell. Stephanie was the swing vote on the leadership team and Michael was there to help her swing away from Chad. But she had already done that by the time she got to Michael’s office, and all that remained was for Michael to make a few judicious suggestions on how the next leadership team meeting ought to go.

Prosecutor Radavic leaned forward, squeaking his chair with authoritative mien. His long fingers were splayed, hands together, fingertip to fingertip, as though a spider were sideways on a mirror, doing push-ups in an agitated manner. His hair, just a tad longer than it really ought to have been, was slicked back on each side, giving the appearance of an attempted comb-over without actually going for it.

“Tell me that again, Detective Rourke,” he said. “I am having trouble believing my ears.”

The ears that were having this particular difficulty stuck out from the side of his head like a couple of car doors left open whenever Rourke’s wife would unload groceries from the back seat of her little Toyota, stacking them there in their short little driveway. “An SUV would be nice sometime, Daniel,” she would say when he came out to help her bring the groceries in. And Rourke fully intended to fulfill her wish, maybe for Christmas this year, and he used his periodic car-door interviews with Radavic as a little prompt or reminder to keep making the necessary financial arrangements. Shaw in the forensics lab had a nice little Bravada he was willing to sell.

Mike Bradford sat quietly, renewing his resolve to say nothing whatever during the course of this mini-drama. It was unfolding in detailed conformity to the script that he and Rourke had talked about at their office just before they crossed the street from the police station to come over to the courthouse. Just uncanny, thought Bradford. Rourke cleared his throat, and tried again.

“I am sure,” he said, “that there are some very fine evangelical churches out there, and maybe there are even some big ones. But this isn’t one of them. The place is a snake farm. There appear to be all sorts of activities there that would better be conducted under a flat rock in a dismal swamp somewhere. Some sincere people here and there it seems, but they are the ones who are largely clueless. Those who are there and who also have brains—and of those there are more than a few—are running a game that would make a cardinal’s mistress envious.”

Bradford raised one eyebrow slightly. Cardinals had mistresses?

Radavic furrowed his brow in what he thought was a gubernatorial way, a look he had been practicing in the mirror. “So,” he said, “the place is, as you call it, a snake farm. And yet, despite this clear-headed and level assessment, your bottom line recommendation here is that we give it a pass? Help me out here. Is it not part of our sacred duty to the public to be clearing out snake farms?”

“I was speaking of the morality of the place, not the legalities. With regard to the legalities, it appears to me that the main issue in all this—the Robert P. Warner angle—really is a trumped up mess. If Mystic Union is not running a bogus shakedown, I really don’t know my business. I think that is why they went the civil lawsuit route to begin with—easier to try the case in the papers, as is happening while we speak. And, as hard as it might be to believe, there may be some foul deeds in the world that were actually not committed by Chad Lester, and it is my view that this is one of them.”

Bradford had been nodding at certain key places so that Radavic would not come looking to him to contradict or undermine his senior partner. And yet he did not nod so much that Radavic would feel the need to wheel on him and demand that he defend the position himself along with Rourke. Thus far it appeared to be working. Bradford was not a coward, but he was a careful man. Besides, Rourke was doing great.

The prosecutor did some more push-ups with his splayed fingers, clearly unhappy. After a moment or two of awkward silence, he suddenly said, “Have you checked with any of the other counseling ministers over there? Perhaps this Robert P. is confused about which one he saw.” This was not so much a penetrating flash of insight as it was—to use a term popular with clinical psychologists who have studied this kind of thing—a lucky guess. A blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while.

Rourke nodded carefully. “Yes, we thought of that. We checked the counseling logs of all the ministerial staff. The only one we haven’t gotten to yet is Pastor Martin’s logs. They had been stored somewhere and misplaced. They asked us to come back in a couple days. His secretary said she had some staff member hunting around in the basement archives, and they should be able to locate it in ‘just a matter of time.’ We will check back with them on that today.”

Of course, what Martin actually had going on was that a friend of Martin’s secretary, a young man who was an intermittent coy friend of Martin’s, a student at a nearby art academy, was sitting at home in his apartment, copying out a new counseling log for the dates concerned, only with Robert P. inexplicably omitted. It was good pay if you could get it. He had nice penmanship and, being an artist, was able to approximate the hand of the regular secretary. Not that it matters, but his name was Brad.

Radavic glowered. He squeaked his chair again. He grimaced and cleared his throat. “Well,” he finally said, “I want you to make a point of checking back in with Martin’s office today.  And get back to me on it. In the meantime, I have to tell you . . . and I mean nothing against you personally by this . . . that I am disappointed. You are policemen, and you are simply doing your job. Your job, as you see it, is to connect the dots, and if a few dots are missing, you believe that it is your duty simply to stop there. I do not. Sometimes you have to add some dots. So as a public servant with a great deal more responsibility entrusted to me, I have to tell you . . . I have a feeling in my gut about this one.”

So do I, thought Rourke. Me too, thought Bradford.

“I am sure that if we keep shaking this, the facts will come tumbling out. Sometimes you have to run ahead.”

Yikes, thought Rourke. Crikey, thought Bradford.

“After you talk with Martin’s office, unless you have positive evidence that indicates that someone other than Lester did this horrible thing, I will probably bring an indictment.”

With that, Radavic swiveled his head and looked straight at Rourke with what he thought was a steely, gray-eyed gaze, like in those TV legal office drama shows, at an especially tense moment when one of the handsome actors rivets another handsome actor with an unshakeable and hardened resolve and says, “Dammit, Trevor, this is our job!”

We really do need that SUV, thought Rourke.

* * *

Michelle pulled their gray Beemer into their spacious driveway, slowed down slightly as the garage door went up, and then pulled into the bay. Shannon and Kimberly both got out of the back seat, stretched, thanked their mom for the bonding time, grabbed their stuff, and headed off to their respective bedrooms.

The phone started ringing just as Michelle walked into the kitchen, carrying her overnight bag. She dropped it on the floor and picked up the phone.

“Brian! Oh, thanks for calling . . . no, we just walked in.” She paused for a moment. “No, dinner would be great. I’ll tell the girls. They should be okay. I know they have stuff to do. Shall I meet you at South of Texas? Our regular spot? Seven sounds great.”

She hung up the phone, and dashed up the stairs to freshen up. As much as she didn’t want to say so, the weekend of journaling and talking with the girls had done nothing for her at all. The more she wielded her shovel, the bigger the hole seemed to get. And now all she really wanted to do was talk with Brian. And she knew she was going to have to tell him about the divorce settlement sometime. Why not tonight? Still, she didn’t really want to.

Brian had been her investment broker, which is how they had gotten acquainted in the first place. He had recommended a local divorce attorney, a friend of his in their office complex, someone who “had real integrity.” But Michelle had decided that she actually wanted to go with a firm that used to represent her father back home. The reason for this move was Chad would know nothing about him or his reputation. And because the lead attorney in that firm—Joe Shattuck, Esq.–spoke with a thick Mississippi accent, this always put urban sophisticates off their guard. Shattuck had made a lot of money that way. At any rate, the plan he had worked out with Michelle had worked, and Michelle had gotten everything she had asked for in the settlement. She had paid handsomely for Shattuck’s expertise, but it had clearly paid off completely.

The ramifications of what all this would actually mean for Chad would not become apparent to him until after the divorce was final, when it would be too late, over and done. Chad would not be penniless, by any stretch, but Michelle was walking away with far more than Chad was currently anticipating that she would. His attorneys, some of the aforementioned sophisticates, had spent a great deal of time, after their periodic phone conversations with Shattuck, trying unsuccessfully to imitate the way he talked. “Rubes and cornpones are way too easy” was the general sentiment around the firm. After the divorce settlement went into effect, and Shattuck filed a few papers, these same attorneys would have a series of very painful conversations with Chad, with no attempts at mimicry involved at all. Not that they knew about it yet, but Shattuck had pulled all their shirts up over their heads, and rolled all their socks down, creating a little black wool bead around the tops of their expensive Italian shoes. Shattuck, for his part, during a weekly lunch with his partners at a local catfish emporium, was fairly expressive in how he explained what had happened. “Those boys couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel.”

Michelle was pleased with how it was going to work out, and the divorce would be final just next week. The only thing that troubled her was how she was going to explain it to Brian. He was an honest broker, and a really decent sort, and since he would still be handling all her investments after the divorce, he would surely ask some questions about where all the money was coming from. There was no way she could keep it from him—not that she really wanted to—but she was also half afraid that he would disapprove at some level. Or something. She hated the thought of him disapproving . . . but not as much as she hated the thought of Chad getting the best of her. But she would tell Brian tonight.

They were halfway through the dessert before she made her first serious attempt to bring it up. She tapped on the remains of her crème brulee with her spoon. “Brian, there is something we have to talk about . . . something financial.”

“Business?” he said. “Mixing romance and business?”

“No, not business details. You can do all that at the office. It’s something about the divorce.”

Brian reached across the table and took her free hand in his. “Tell me,” he said.

And so she laid it all out. She told him about how shrewd Shattuck had been, and how the whole thing was perfectly legal, and how furious Chad would be. He would be mostly furious because he took great pride in being a world class finance meister, but a good portion of his anger would be because he had not suspected that Michelle would try to get back at him that way. She was still astonished that she had succeeded.

“And so I wanted to tell you about it before it all became final. I . . . I wanted to know what you thought of it.”

Brian had a blank look on his face. After a moment, he said, “Look, honey, I don’t know what I think of it. I have a hard time feeling sorry for Chad over anything. But obviously, you have some level of concern about it. I don’t know. It sounds legal, but I don’t know that I would like that being done to me. You’re asking what I think about the ethics of it, right?”

She nodded, and they both sat quietly for a moment. “Here,” he finally said. “Give me a day or so to think about it. Would that be all right?”

Michelle felt curiously let down. “Sure,” she said. Then, a second later. “You’re not going to talk to Pastor Mitchell about this, are you?”

He said yes, and the following quarrel took about twenty minutes. It was a nice restaurant, and so the quarrel stayed subdued and quite civilized. They mostly patched it up near the end, but she didn’t go home with him to his apartment. They kissed in the parking lot, somewhat perfunctorily, and went to their separate cars. She pulled onto the freeway in an agitated frame of mind. That was the only problem with Brian. Everything else was perfect. Why should he care what this Mitchell character thought? Well, she sure didn’t.

* * *

Earlier that day, standing outside the courthouse, Rourke and Bradford waited at the crosswalk for the light to turn. Rourke had pushed the big flat button on the gray metal pole for a walk signal, and then put his hands back in his pockets.

“Bradford,” Rourke said, “when we get back to our offices, the first thing I am going to do is write a memo to the prosecutor following up on our little visit with him. I will make sure that the memo is from the two of us, and represents our sentiments exactly. In that memo, I am going to make it clear—in an understated and respectful way—that our recommendation had been to not proceed with an indictment. This will not be done in such a way as to enflame our ambitious friend, but the point will at least be registered. I am sure he will not even notice, but in the cold light of day afterwards, our position will be cogent and clear and I would be unembarrassed to read about this memo of mine on the front page of USA Today. I will email you a copy of the memo, and you will email it back to me a couple times, with some sort of clear approval indicated. We will archive this sentiment in numerous places. I bet reporters with their freedom of information requests will have no trouble finding it at all.”

Bradford snorted. “Rourke, I do believe that this is an exercise in what a cynical person might call ‘covering your tail.’”

Rourke smiled grimly, looking at the sky, which had become agitated during their visit with Radavic. The gray clouds were tumbling over one another, each one trying to get to the front.

“Well, Bradford, what should I say if, looking at a sky like that, I said aloud that I thought I should wear a raincoat, and you said, ‘You are just doing that because you think it might rain’? Would an objection of this caliber disturb me? Bradford, it would not unsettle me, not even a little bit. Not even for a little while.”

“Ah,” Bradford said. “You are telling me that there are times when tails need to be covered.”

“You betcher. Nothing else you can do about it when some public servant in authority over you gets his high ambitions all tangled up with moral indignation. Time for the old raincoat memo, I says to myself. Remember that Nifong character and the Duke lacrosse players? I had an old friend from the academy who was involved in that one. Boy, was he glad for the old memo move. To this day, he is still able to make the mortgage payments on his house. His wife is happy and I, as an old friend, am also happy.”

“Ah,” said Bradford. This is what mentoring was all about.

Stephanie Nelson was the last of the leadership team to arrive. She closed the door lightly (and quite thoughtfully) behind her, and walked through the eddying atmospheric tensions to her seat. At that particular moment, no one was speaking. They had apparently opened in prayer already and had even reached their first impasse. And Stephanie was only three minutes late.

Chad looked extremely sullen, and he may actually have been sullen. But of course the black eye would make him look that way whether he was or not. It was a garish overdone display, about a quarter of an acre, with deep magenta and black and a few isolated blue stripes. That is what had happened when Pastor John Mitchell had extended the right hand of fellowship forcefully to Chad’s left eye. Pastor Mitchell had laid hands on him in a way quite dissimilar to what had happened to Paul and Barnabas at Antioch, when relations between clergymen had been somewhat more amicable. John Mitchell had perhaps missed his calling as an amateur boxer, but he had clearly not missed Chad. Chad, still trying to look dignified, despite the purple affront to others, nodded at Miguel.

“Financial report?”

“Tanking. Giving down 35% over the last two weeks, and the trajectory doesn’t look promising. This week was significantly worse than last week. Interestingly, attendance is only down 10%, which means that people are still coming to watch the show, and are sitting on their wallets. This indicates some kind of thought-out plan on their part.” Miguel doodled furiously on the edges of his balance sheet while he was talking.

Bill Turner was on the leadership team because he was a world class bean counter. His many late hours spent in acquiring this valuable profit and loss expertise were a large part of the reason that his wife Mary was currently spending assorted hours in the arms of another man. A country song or two has been written about this kind of thing, and the Arkansas poet who wrote them knows whereof he speaks. Still, Bill knew how to count the beans, and it now appeared plain to him that 35 out of 100 of the beans were missing.

“That’s just unacceptable,” Bill said.

Chad Lester didn’t snarl at him, except on the inside. “We all know it is unacceptable, Bill.” Chad’s soothing outside voice said, sounding just like the library lady at story time. “The reason we are having this meeting is to determine which plan we will adopt in order to not accept it.” You sexless capon, he added when safe inside his own thoughts again.

Usually Bill would wither when subjected to this kind of thing, but he was feeling quite secure in his knowledge of the bean ratios, and this was coupled with the fact that Chad Lester was clearly in no position to be the hegemon at this meeting that he usually was. Bill moved in his seat in a way that telegraphed his continued defiance. He didn’t actually look under the table for the 35 missing beans on the floor, but his body language was as clear as Chad’s smooth and polished but sandpapery-anyway-response had been. Bill’s message was sent, then received, and Chad, appearing as unruffled as a black-eyed master of ceremonies can, looked inscrutably across the table for any other signs of rebellion. It was almost impossible for Chad to run the same kind of disciplined meeting that he used to run, although he was still laboring manfully away. His moral authority was apparently stuck in the sump pump, and this made it hard to control the flooding in this elder-meeting basement of his.

His usual technique had been to control comments and any renegade motions with an imperious glance. Not working well anymore, but maybe the shiner was not letting the withering glances all the way out. Part of this was because the previous week he had been the subject of two editorials in the city’s major paper, not to mention one (pretty funny) editorial cartoon, and on Wednesday the controversy had gone national when he had achieved the high water mark of two running jokes on Letterman. Then somebody took the AP wire, stretched it across the road, and waited for Chad to come around the corner on a motorcycle like some nondescript Nazi in pursuit of somebody important in an 80s WWII movie. That had happened on Thursday.

Chad could see that Bill the eunuch was still unsubdued, and this was unsettling. Bill was almost always the first to go over. If Bill had been a local potentate centuries before, and his city was under siege, neither of which were actually happening here, granted, but this just illustrates a particular Billonic character trait by means of an extended simile, and if he had been told by the randy and imperious besieger to “surrender all your gold, and let us ravish all your women,” Bill would have appeared above the city gates to say something along the lines of “okay!” And in real life, not just in the epic simile, Bill had known all about Chad messing around with his wife Mary the year before, and had done and said nothing. And Mary knew that he knew, and he knew that Mary knew it. And yet the closest he got to open confrontation was the time when he had asked querulously about the overdone lasagna. That conversation had lasted thirty seconds, he ate the lasagna anyway, but boy, there were undercurrents everywhere. Bill didn’t know about David and Mary, but the point was that it didn’t really matter whether he knew anything or not. And here was Bill showing signs of resistance. Chad knew the meeting was in a perilous state.

Mary Turner looked across the table at David. She arched her eyebrow, which meant in this instance, “Say something.” As promising as the sign of incipient feistiness in Bill was to everybody, nobody was counting on him to lead the charge. So David went ahead, clearing his throat first.

“Chad,” he began. “We need to do the same kind of thing here that we do with all the challenges and obstacles that we have overcome up to this point, um, here at Camel Creek. We need to run some contingencies, and we need to have a series of decisions made beforehand, based on each one of those, um, contingencies.”

Chad looked at him, waiting for the next step. David was not quite ready to take it, at least not without help from elsewhere around the table. He wanted to get Chad’s resignation as a mere possibility onto the table, even if only as a potential response to the seventeenth contingency, but it was clear that right now Chad would have to be the one to mention it first. And he was showing no signs of being willing to mention it first.

You know about me with Mary? Chad thought across the table. Well, I know about you and Mary.

Gotcha, David thought. I just thought . . . you know, contingencies.

After the controversy first broke, and the first emergency elder meeting, Pastor Martin had refreshed his own memory with a look at the counseling logs in his office, and realized there had indeed been a Robert P. Warner II in his past. Staring at the log, it all started to come back to him. He consequently thought that his verbal participation in this transparent maneuver by David would be . . . premature. David looked at him helplessly, knowing that Michael knew what he was trying to do. I need a little help here, David simmered. Got my reasons, thought Martin back. Maybe we can talk later.

It was Stephanie who came to everyone’s rescue, albeit thoughtlessly and without guile. “I am sure,” she said, “that Chad would be the first to resign for the good of the church, if that were ever to become necessary. When men of integrity are under assault, they always think first of others. If the flock can best be protected by the shepherd departing, I am confident that Chad will be the very first one to make that suggestion. I know I can speak for you in this, Chad, because it is a matter of principle—and you have taught us all very well. And I know that if you have not yet done this, it is not yet necessary” At this she bobbed her head perkily like a pony-tailed girl in a biscuit commercial from 1957.

Chad looked at her gratefully because she was clearly not interested in resignation at all. The others looked at her gratefully because she had actually mentioned the r-word, and it was now on the table, linked mysteriously to David’s seventeenth contingency. And a few of those others also looked at Stephanie in amazement, realizing for the first time that her innocence was entirely genuine, and that there was actually an attractive woman close to Chad who had no idea of his fornicating ways. No idea.

“Jeepers,” thought Kenneth, an elder hitherto silent. Danielle, who couldn’t say the same as Stephanie, rolled her eyes, trying not to be envious. Miguel, who had contingency plans all his own, didn’t care. Michael Martin had other things to think about. They all, along with the others, were nevertheless grateful that the mere idea of contingencies had been broached, however obliquely. At some future meeting, it would be possible to refer to Stephanie’s “very sad suggestion some days ago.” Chad was happy that no one was going to do that at this meeting, and the rest were happy that they were going to do it at a future meeting, perhaps as soon as next week. The two sumo wrestlers fell back a few paces, panting.

That out of the way, the meeting turned to other aspects of the issue. Chad spoke, after an awkward silence. “As I told you all before, the charge is monstrously false. If we allow charges like this to be leveled, unanswered, then what will the harvest be? I had a good meeting with the legal guys this morning . . .”

By this time, the only people in the room who believed him were Stephanie, who would believe anything, Michael Martin, who knew that Chad didn’t do it because he had, and Sharon Atwater in the corner recording minutes, whose reasons had more to do with her instinctive knowledge of the nature of Chad’s heterosexuality. And out of those three who believed him, Chad’s reiterated denial here was so hollow that two of them didn’t believe him.

“You’re right,” said David. “What will the harvest be? In the meantime, we need to do something about the pounding we are taking in the press. Maybe a congregational meeting . . .?”

“No,” Chad said. “No congregational meeting. The press would have to be there, and that would just be fat in the fire.” Everybody realized that that was right at any rate, and fell silent.

* * *

Chad’s sports car roared down the Interstate, and he took Exit 27A and headed south again. This was his third time around the city, and his automotive excursion reflected his state of mind—only the circles his mind was going in were much tighter, by about a factor of ten. No way out. No way in. No way. He was auguring in. Three miles down that stretch of freeway, he downshifted, and pulled off the highway on the next exit ramp he came to, turned right at the light, and headed off down a strip occupied by mobile home dealers, tattoo parlors, and numerous stores full of retail detritus.

It took about ten minutes to find one, and Chad parked behind the store and walked slowly around to the front. Chad walked into the liquor store, feeling reasonably confident he would not be recognized. He was in a different part of town, a part of town populated by a demographic that was not really the target group for his ministry. He had long ignored them and they, for their part of the deal, ignored him back. This part of town had their crazy pastors too, but they mainly operated out of store fronts with names like Knee Deep in Glory Gospel Center. And some of their pastors had tattoos, but these were tattoos that said, “I was in the Navy once, before I met Jesus,” instead of the uptown ecclesiastical version that said, “I am desperate to accessorize my iPod.”

Anyhow, that, coupled with the black eye, should draw a cloak over this whole business. Secure in his anonymity, Chad walked up and down the cinder block store’s four aisles, putting bottles in his small blue basket at random. He really had no idea, but was doing fairly well at it nonetheless. The majority of his selections were based on the bottle looking scary, but he also filled it out with some less scary items, beer and whatnot, to make his venture look more socially responsible—and less like he was laying the groundwork for a major bender.

The clerk, who had seen it all before, knew within the first few minutes that this was a customer laying the groundwork for a major bender. He leaned on the counter and made small talk with Chad as he walked around the store. “Yeah, that’s a popular one,” he said. “Hard to keep that in stock.” Quiet for a moment, he then added helpfully, “Nice little punch.” A helping hand for the novice, the sort of random kindness that helps make the world a better place. But the kindness was wasted because Chad just thought he was asking about the black eye, and quickly changed the subject.

When he was done, Chad walked up to the counter and began emptying the basket. The bottles gradually accumulated next to the register, looking like some architect’s rendition of a futurist silver city. When there were a sufficient number of high octane skyscrapers, some of them with lightning bolts all the way down the sides, Chad dropped a couple hundred dollar bills on the counter. Not a good idea to use the card, Chad thought. This guy doesn’t care, but somebody else probably does. “Have a good one,” Chad said, gathered up his clinking bags and walked out. The Hyatt was on the other side of town, and he would circle the city two more times before he came in for his landing.

* * *

It was Mindy’s first week working the check-in desk at the Hyatt. She was a sweet girl, and she looked every bit as sweet as she actually was. Her previous job was in the bookstore at Camel Creek, and she had moved here reluctantly. She had loved her previous job, but, of course, she was the kind of person who loved everything she did. Now she loved it here.

“Welcome to the Hyatt! How may I help . . . Pastor Lester!” she said. The black eye had obscured recognition for just a moment.

“Hello,” he nodded.

She recovered herself. “Checking in for just one night?”

“Yes,” he said. Feeling that to be insufficient, he added a lie. “Have an early flight in the morning.”

“Oh!” she said, perky as anything. “Shall I put you down for a wake-up call?”

“Uh, no, that’s all right. I may call down later.”

“Okay!” She looked down at the two brown bags he was carrying. “Do you need help with your, um, luggage?”

“No, my bag is in the car,” he lied again. Why did I come here? Oh, that’s right. People would find him if he did this at home. He would wind up naked on the roof if he did this at home. He had no idea how to predict the results of what he was planning. He had a vague idea that throwing up might be involved at some point. The housekeeper would ask about that at home. Chad took his credit card back, and made his way across the lobby to the elevators, clinking merrily as he went.

Just as the elevators were closing, Mindy’s cell phone sang a delicate little tune from her purse in the back. There were no customers, so Mindy went and picked it up. “Hi, mom!” She was silent for a moment. “Uh huh. Yes, I can pick that up on my way home . . . well, gotta go. On the job . . .” She had heard the sliding doors at the front of the lobby whisk open. “Oh, but you’ll never guess who just checked in. Pastor Lester! Yeah, he has a flight in the morning.” Mindy heard bags thumping in front of her counter. “Gotta go! Love you!”

On the other end, Stephanie Nelson slowly closed her cell phone. For the first time in a number of years, a thoughtful look came over her face.

John Mitchell was steamed in the abstract. In the concrete world around him at that very moment, to wit, his time at the evening dinner table with his wife and daughter, he was most content. But Chad Lester got to him at the basic worldview level, at the place where theological doctrine and principled animosity intersect.

On top of that John had been in puppy love with Michelle Lester in junior high school. But that hadn’t been her name then. What was it? Davenport, that was it. He had never asked her out or anything, preferring instead to worship her from afar, usually at a distance of thirty yards or more. The thought of Chad Blister just taking one of his early feminine icons off and then treating her that way . . . John was not even sure that he could recall what she looked like back then, and he had never seen her since.

Part of the reason he had not played the role of an aggressive shepherd to Brian Lewis was that he knew that bringing Lewis into the fold would also probably bring in Michelle at some point. And then what? Had he ever told Cindi about that junior high crush? Probably. What did it matter? There had been three other crushes, probably that same year. That’s what junior high is for. And the earth would go around the sun ten entire times before he had finally met Cindi, who, as Puritans go, was as hot as it gets. And, John thought smugly to himself, for those who think that means “not very,” he could write a book, although no Christian publisher would ever touch it. She could make him bleed from both his ears, like some very unfortunate kind of parachute accident. John grinned inside his head.

“Careful, these are hot,” Cindi said, bending over to place the cheese potato casserole at the head of the table.

John opened and closed his mouth, remembering just in time that Sandy was present. You bet they are, John thought. Cindi read his mind and gave him one of her warning looks. After she was seated, they said grace, and passed the food gratefully around.
“Anything new about Camel Creek, daddy?”

“No news today. But I was thinking this morning . . . remember that story that Cherie told us about six years ago? The one about the guest speaker in their college and career group?”

Cindi laughed, “Oh, that was wonderful. Some man named Wilson . . . Tim Wilson, or Jim Wilson, something like that.”

“What happened again?” John asked. “I was trying to remember it.”

“Somebody in the group suggested a special guest speaker for a week when the designated group facilitator—that’s what they call them—was going to be out of town. It was a last minute thing—they didn’t do their normal vetting process, and the person who recommended Wilson had only been at the church for a few months. She didn’t have any notion of the worlds-in-collision she was setting in motion.”

“I never heard this one,” Sandy said. “What happened?”

“Well, the thing was arranged quickly—Wilson was going to be in town for some other event anyhow, and he didn’t know Camel Creek from any other big box church. So he just did what he normally did, which was apparently to teach on confession of sin (acting throughout his presentation as though there really was such a thing as sin), and he told everybody that they ought to be doing exactly whatever the Bible says to do. He had to catch a flight right after lunch, and so he never had any idea of the pandemonium he left behind him. About ten people in the class—out of two hundred or so—thought something like, ‘You know, that’s right.’ The rest of them were about as indignant as a room full of wet cats.”

John chuckled. “That’s it. That’s what I remember.”

“In fact,” Cindi continued, “I was just talking to Karen Watson last week, and she told me that she and Tom were part of that small group that wound up leaving because of it. The Watsons and the Craigs. So two of our families eventually wound up at Grace Reformed because of that meltdown.”

John’s eyebrows went up, which was a significant and bushy event. “I didn’t know that part.”

“Why were you trying to remember this?” Cindi asked.

“Oh, I just have had Camel Creek on the brain the last few days. Everything I hear reminds me of what they are doing over there. I was looking something up today in Calvin and came across the phrase confession of sin. And then I remembered that those words were uttered one time on the actual premises of Camel Creek. But I couldn’t remember the story.”

“Now John, you aren’t thinking too much about Camel Creek, are you? You know how it agitates you.”

John grinned, somewhat grimly. “But it gives my preaching that secret fire.”

“You have also been up at two in the morning with heartburn three times in the last few weeks. I just don’t want you . . . you know.” And Sandy nodded her cheerful agreement with her mom.

John was mildly irritated, not at Cindi, but with that special kind of vaguely-aimed irritation that we reserve for ourselves when in the presence of people who are being correct in our direction. And so he did what always did whenever he felt that way about his dear wife being right, which was to swallow it, say nothing, and show nothing. He knew she was right. He needed a different secret fire pretty darn quick.

A phone in Cindi’s handbag, hanging by the door from the kitchen to the garage, chirruped merrily. Cindi left her ice cream on the table and after a few moments of rummaging around, found it. “Hello?”

Within seconds the pleasant look on her face vanished. “Here,” she said, “you need to talk to John.” This was not because Cindi did not know how to handle her cousin Cherie, but rather because her husband was better than she was at deciphering code whenever Cherie was hysterical. And Cherie, on the other end, was speaking something like high-volume Navajo under stress.

John listened gravely for a few minutes, and then sat bolt upright in his chair. “Lester? Lester is there?” The random collections of syllables from Cherie indicated the affirmative. “I’ll be right over,” John said. He snapped the cell phone shut, handed it back to Cindi.

He got his jacket on, and stood for a moment by the door, waiting for Cindi to warn him about letting Lester get to him. But she just kissed him on the cheek. “You are a good pastor,” she said.

Cherie’s apartment was about ten minutes away when the traffic was light, which it was this evening. By the time John veered off the freeway exit, he had several opening speeches prepared. He wasn’t sure which one he was going to use. They were all very fine, and all built on the foundation of total depravity, a doctrine that had been so lucidly formulated by the theologians at the Synod of Dordt in seventeenth century Holland. Not that he expected Lester to know all that historical theology stuff, but he did expect that Lester would still catch the drift. He was going to be civilized about this—he had already dropped the words worm, cockroach, and invertebrate weasel from his sermons, and yet they all still retained a very robust character.

He pulled up in front of Cherie’s apartment, and yanked on the emergency brake harder than he usually did. The handle came off in his hand. Stupid brake. He walked deliberately up to the door and knocked more softly than he usually did. Self control is one of the fruits of the Spirit. He found himself doing breathing exercises that he and Cindi had learned in a birthing class many years ago.

Within seconds, Cherie pulled the door open. Her hysterics were gone, but her eyes were puffed up and she was sobbing. Her blouse was badly disheveled.

John stepped into the apartment, past the small bathroom that was the first room on the right. The narrow hallway led into a kitchen on the left, and a small dining area on the right. It was a screwy apartment. “It’ll be all right, Cherie,” he said, patting her hand. He led her to a chair in the dining area, where she sat down, still sobbing. “Is Lester still here?” he asked.

She nodded silently.

A male voice came from the living room, located way at the back of the apartment. It really was a screwy layout. “Cherie? Is someone here?” Lester came around the corner, and stopped abruptly when he saw John. “What . . .?” he began, and then he saw Cherie and her disheveled clothes. If John had been paying attention to Lester’s face he would have seen him go white, the way men do when they see a trap swinging shut on them. But John was not paying attention to Lester’s face—he was deciding which of the speeches he was going to launch into. And as for that, it probably didn’t matter, because he was going to use them all, and it was just a matter of which order they would come in. But still, he wasn’t watching Lester closely, who was staring in high indignation at Cherie.

Lester turned to John. “Surely you don’t believe . . .”

“What am I supposed to believe?”

“I came over to talk, visit a little, catch up . . . old friends . . .” His sentence rolled to a stop against the wall and just sat there, abandoned.

“He attacked me,” Cherie said. “I said no, no . . . he wouldn’t listen.”

Chad Lester was appalled by this dishonesty, as only a dishonest man can be. For those who have never seen this phenomenon in action, let us say only that he was the kind of man who was entirely unaccustomed to looking at lies from this end of the barrel. He was counting the rounds in their chambers. He could see their pointed, silvery tips. He licked his lips.

“She . . . she is lying . . . we visited a bit . . . she said she was having digestion problems and had to use the restroom. She must have called you from there.”

Cherie shook her head violently. “He said he wanted to talk. But after just a few minutes he started pawing me again, just like old times. I said no, but he insisted. So . . . so I pretended to change my mind and asked to freshen up first. I went to the bathroom and called you.”

John went to the phone and picked it up, intending to dial 911. “What are you doing?” Lester asked.

“Calling the cops. What does it look like?”

“No,” said Lester and Cherie simultaneously. “Don’t do that.”

“Why not?” John said, looking at Cherie.

“No cops. I don’t want to talk to cops.”

Chad said nothing, but was looking immeasurably relieved. He wasn’t thinking three chess moves ahead like a man in his position really ought to be doing. Had Cherie set him up this way just to give John Mitchell a chance to give him the ungarbled word? The chances were not likely. In fact it was a long shot of the first order for anyone who thought about it, but Chad Lester in his relief was in no frame of mind to think about it.

John didn’t argue, but just put the phone down. He knew from long experience that no one was more obstinate than Cherie when it came to things like this. If he pushed, she would just set her mouth in that odd position of hers, and forty-five minutes later it would be all settled, and the settlement would be whatever Cherie had decided to do in the first place.

“No cops.” John said. “Alright, then. Lester. I have a few things that I think you need to hear, and I most certainly need to say. If you will permit me?”

Lester nodded, not really hearing. He was still rejoicing over the no cops attitude displayed by Cherie. Mitchell-words would be no trouble at all. Lester had a toggle switch in his brain that he used to flip years before whenever he was being lectured by his mother, schoolteacher, or any other superior, and it had enabled him to assume the appropriate demeanor of thoughtfulness while being chewed out, and all while his mind was meandering elsewhere. He hadn’t used that switch in years—he didn’t get chewed out anymore—but he still knew right where it was.

John started in, not knowing that his congregation of one had already wandered off, and by the end of the short medley of sermons would be in bed with a nubile someone, far more cooperative than Angela or Cherie.

“The fact that your congregation wants you the way you are does not mean that you have any right to be that way. Of course they want you that way—it grants them the right to live however they want, and still have a scratch n’ sniff version of the Christian faith. And that is the secret of your success. Your congregation assembles with a good will. Of course they do. The prophet Micah says that if a man prophesies wine and beer, he would be just the spokesman for this people. People want what they want, and they heap up teachers for themselves, teachers who will give them what they want. You are just one more ear-tickler in a growing pile of ear-ticklers. How you can . . .”

After the first few minutes, Cherie stopped listening also. It was a dressing-down such as she had never heard, at least since her father had died. The fact that it was addressed to Lester was somewhat gratifying, but still, the whole idea made her unsettled. So she just sat quietly for the ten minutes or so that John unburdened his soul, speaking with accumulating vehemence as he warmed to the topic of Lester’s uselessness in the ministry. He did not get quite as far as to say that Lester was a waste of perfectly good skin, but he came close several times.

Finally, after repeating several phrases unnecessarily (the sermonic equivalent of a blinking fuel gauge) John decided that he had to wrap up. He didn’t feel any better. He felt like he had just tried to give the tar baby a bath in vegetable oil. Lester didn’t look any cleaner, and John just felt gunked. So John stopped talking and just stared for another moment at Lester.

“Anything to say?” he asked.

Lester came back to the conversation, and shook his head without speaking.

“Are you sure no cops?” John asked, looking at Cherie.

“No. No cops.” Cherie had settled in her mind—when Lester had first called her that evening—what she was going to do. A story in the media is not subject to rules of evidence, cross-examination, and other such discomfiting things, and the media was the arena in which a slow-roast of Lester was already occurring. She would grant a silhouetted interview to Mercedes Hanson—Cherie called her Mercedes, but she was known to Rourke and Bradford as News Babe.

“Alright then,” John said. “You can leave now.” He jerked his head toward the door. Lester started toward the door, and as he began his exit, he clumsily slipped on a throw rug in the hall between the kitchen and the dining area, and lurched heavily into John.

John stepped back quickly, and without meditating at all on what he should do, and impelled by forces he only understood partially, unleashed a powerful right hook. He had done some amateur boxing in high school, and let us just say that all his old skills had not departed from him. His fist connected with Lester’s left eye in a satisfying grinding sound and feel—not at all like the thwack of the movies—and Lester straightened up, astonished beyond measure. As soon as he did, John’s satisfaction fled from him, and Lester, holding his hand over his eye, departed with a silent and upright dignity, like a butler leaving the drawing room of an English manse.

When the door clicked shut behind him, John just stood silently in the kitchen, and Cherie just sat in the chair. After what seemed like an interminable pause, John finally shook himself and looked down at Cherie.

“Are you going to be okay?” he said kindly.

Cherie nodded, no longer sobbing. She seemed very composed, given what had happened. “I’ll be fine,” she said. Picture perfect fine, she thought.

John sat down on one of the other dining chairs. “Can I pray with you before I go?” he asked.

“Sure,” Cherie said, and half-smiled. “But are you in any shape to pray?”

“No,” John said. “But we still should.”

A few moments later, he was walking toward his car. He got the parking brake released more easily than he thought he was going to be able to, started up, put the car in gear, and glided out into the street. Like driving into a thick fog, the ministerial guilt settled in around him.

After the police officers left the Health Temple, Mystic Union spent a long afternoon with the woman in the back room who was in labor, a woman who finally produced a man child sunny side up, despite all attempts to keep it from happening the way it usually happens in nations with indoor plumbing. At the Health Temple, the best efforts were made to recreate conditions for mother and child that approximated the conditions found at higher altitudes in Nepal, and the effect of this was that both of them almost died several times, but since no one actually did, they happily departed the Temple late the next day, with no one the wiser.

But when the delivery itself was accomplished, and the aftermath of the delivery settled down to a semblance of quiet, Mystic Union trudged slowly up the wooden stairs at the back of the Temple. The steps were tucked away behind the painted scenery that made the usher girls feel like they were a couple of the chief feminine ornaments of Solomon’s court, although Solomon would likely have been nonplussed by the Raiders tat. Mystic Union (Robert P. called her Mys) had the self-assured glow of a job well-done, work accomplished, time for some herbal tea, and then a late dinner. She was pleased also by the fact that Mitchell had come that morning. The policemen had been expected, but he was most certainly not expected. What was his game? Another surprise was that Peaborne fellow, with the interesting offer of a working alliance. More than enough to think about. Good things happening here, and the horoscope concurred. The only stress in her life was waiting for her upstairs, good old Robert P. Warner. Mystic Union’s soul did not have teeth, but if it had, they would be gritted, and occasionally grinding. If he doesn’t have that thing written, I’ll just do it.

There was a landing near the top of the stairs which Mystic Union rounded, and then took the remaining three steps at a bound or two. Slouched across the decrepit sofa was her tattered lottery ticket out of there—Robert P. Warner II—poet, prophet, pasty blogger of the early a.m. The sofa was of the old gray mare swayback school of design, and from somewhere within the cushions, de profundis, came a groan from Robert P. He was disconsolate, and had been listening for her steps on the landing for the last half hour or so. He timed his groan according to the short melodrama he had worked out as he laid there.

Pretending that her soul did not have dental issues, Mystic was all solicitude. “Love! What is the matter?”
Robert opened one rheumy eye, again according to drill, and greeted her as one greets the sole remaining person in one’s life who is prepared to act sympathetically, which in fact, Mystic Union probably was.

He stifled another groan, and got unsteadily to his feet. “Oh, not much to speak of. I spent a lot of time on that statement you wanted for the attorney . . .” He trailed off.

Mystic Union glanced over at the notepad that was on the kitchen table right behind the sofa, and saw, even from that distance, that there was but a sentence or two on it. Not only did she see this, but Robert saw that she saw, and moved adroitly to the next barricade. “My carpal tunnel started acting up again . . . and I spent a lot of time hunting for my old brace.” With this he held up his right arm. “I found it in the box with my old journals from high school . . .” And he stopped.

Speaking of high school, Robert P. Warner II had been the kind of boy in that setting who managed his injuries as a mother hen hovers over her chicks. He was a master of communicating physical distress to others, but the nature of the injury and the nature of the distress he would subsequently manifest were not really in accord with the laws of logic first outlined in such a cogent way by Aristotle. For example, one time, when he had been beaned in the forehead by a volleyball in Mr. Walker’s phys ed class, the injury, such as it was, resulted in a mild ringing in the ears. But this had translated, by the end of the period, into a clear limp, by the end of the day into a striking limp, and by the next Monday morning, into a pair of crutches and a leg brace on the outside of his jeans. This was a violation of Aristotle’s law of identity, an injury to the head being an injury to the head, and not, say, an injury to the right knee. The brace on his right hand at this very moment had been acquired under similar circumstances and in a similar way. He was glad he had found it under all those journals, which he had then spent a couple hours going through. Good stuff. It was amazing how insightful he had been in high school.

Mystic Union appeared to be all sympathy, but also managed, somehow, to be all business. “Dear, how you must have suffered . . . I am so sorry about your wrist, but you know, Robbie, that we really, really must have that statement for the attorney by Wednesday.”

Robert actually knew this and he nodded his head as though he knew this. The spirit was willing. It was not that he was incapable of writing—he had churned out millions of words for his blog. The physical activity of writing was nothing to him. When it came to pensive reflections of man and his existential condition (as mirrored in the experiences of Robert P.), foreign film reviews that were allowed to make as little sense as the films themselves, extended discussions of how the pert French breasts in those films could not really be deconstructed, Derrida or no Derrida, and long, protracted discussions of how people—particularly food service personnel—misunderstood him, Robert was a machine. If it was narcissism and self-indulgence you were after, he could write like a bat out of the bad place. The problem with this stupid statement for the attorney was that it had to conform to certain . . . objective realities. Robert was astute enough to know that a statement for his attorney was not to be a creative writing exercise, and so he had to stick to the facts. But he hardly knew any facts, and was thus having trouble sticking to them.

The initial statement for their attorney, the one that had kicked off the suit, had been easy enough. It was only a paragraph long, and about summed the whole thing up. Ten years prior, Robert had gone over to the Camel Creek offices in order to “see the pastor.” He never attended church there, and did not know one office from another, one pastor from another, or, for that matter, one thing from another. He was experimenting with Buddhism at the time, and yet was feeling depressed. He was confused about his sexual identity, and wanted someone to talk to, which is to say, he wanted to find someone who would listen to him talk. He had found himself sitting across the desk from the pastor, who found out about the sexual identity thing almost right away, and who took it from there. All of that was clear as day. It was burned in his memory much as a Circle R brand would have sizzled on the rump of a writhing calf. Out west. A hundred years or so ago. So to speak.

When he told Mystic Union about it, six months ago, she had come alive. Her eyes had sparkled, sparkling just like her crystal earrings that kept her in touch with her two grandmothers, now deceased. “Oh, Robert,” she had said. “We really need to do something about this. We should see an attorney . . . this is not tawdry at all. I see it as part of the healing process . . . that, and the corn flakes poultice.”

So inspired by the moment, Robert had written out the paragraph like nobody’s business, and both Mystic Union and the attorney had assumed (wrongly) that when called upon, he would just open the spigot again, and all the other details would flow out. But when it came time to produce, Robert didn’t. He didn’t remember anything else, was unwilling to make things up in this legal context (having seen more than one daytime tv courtroom drama where bad things happened to people who did make them up), and he had quickly discovered that to research the subject, checking dates, getting corroboration for other details, looked and smelled suspiciously like work. Which is why he got carpal tunnel syndrome today. Yesterday he had twisted his ankle.

Suddenly a happy thought struck him. “When I was finding my brace, I said that I found some journals . . . I thumbed through them for just a minute, and noticed how cheerful I was back then. This was before that pastor at Camel Creek took my childhood away from me. I bet I could get a few quotes from those journals that would make that point in quite an amazing way.” But of course, in this, Robert was quite mistaken. He had not been cheerful back then, but, being young, had been comparatively ignorant of all the different and creative ways of being miserable. Now that Robert P. had been exploring those different ways for some years on his blog, his lack of scope exhibited in his high school years struck him as being full of sunshine. So he would write down some of the quotes tomorrow, and on Wednesday, his attorney would just stare at him.

“That would be just wonderful, Robbie. I think that is a wonderful idea.” Mystic Union just wanted to get him writing, perhaps now, and maybe the journal entries would prime the pump. But Robert wanted to blog instead, he wanted more than a little open field running for his emotions. No fences. No boundaries. No one to say no. If he wrote things down on that notepad, first thing you know bailiffs would be having him raising his right hand, and so help me Goding, and the whole truthing, and nothing but the truthing. And beyond what he had given already, he could find out no more apart from work. And his wrist hurt.

Mystic Union was in the kitchen, bending over the stove, fixing water for her tea, and rummaging through her canister of selections. “You want some tea, Robbie?” She was also rummaging through some ideas for how she could write Robert P’s statement for him. Although Robert’s grasp of the correspondence theory of truth was tenuous, it did exist. Mystic, it must be confessed, was not constrained in any way. And the attorney needed it.

An affirmative grunt came back regarding the tea, and Robert P. schlepped into the kitchen.

“What did you do today?” he asked. “Besides the baby, I mean?”

Mystic Union brightened, and thought this might be an opportunity to stir the embers of Robert’s lethargy with the iron poker of interesting coincidences. Not that she put to herself that way, of course.

“The policemen came,” she said, “as I thought they would. I have a customer who works in the DA’s office, and she told me in strictest confidence that old Radavic was furious about our suit the day after we filed it. So I thought I would see some policemen sometime.”

Robert P. was staring down into his mug of green tea, wondering if he could blog anything about the little reflected shapes he could see floating on the surface. Mystic took this as encouragement, and said, “But the really interesting thing was the two other visitors. One was Charles Peaborne, who used to work at Camel Creek. He appears to be a man who is truly . . . truly centered. He wanted to work together with us on this. He told me that Camel Creek was rotten to the core, which I suppose we already knew. But he spoke quite authoritatively.”

Mystic Union, despite the informative crystals hanging from her ears, was not really in a position to critique the value of Mr. Peaborne’s intelligence. But judging from the intensity of his obvious conviction, and the shaky timbre of his voice when he spoke of “nefarious doings,” she could only assume that he was in possession of the real goods. It would turn out later that his web site would be devoted more to concerns about paper clip and toner cartridge misfeasance, malfeasance and nonfeasance than anything else, but we do best to not blame Mystic for not knowing this. After all, it was not like she was psychic or anything.

Robert looked up from his tea, his first blog post having been formed in his mind, and he pretended to show interest in what Mystic had been talking about. “Well, Mys,” he said. “You said there was one other?”

“Ah, yes,” she said. “Pastor Mitchell. He replaced my ex-husband as the pastor of Grace Reformed back in . . . back in . . . my previous life. I listened to him preach for a few months. He was a nice man, but I had decided long before he got there that I had had quite enough of that, thank you.”

“So why did he come?”

“Well, he said it was about my ex-husband’s books that were still at the church. But then he as much as told me that this was just an excuse for seeing me. He said that if I wanted to visit, he would be happy to. But I have no idea why he might want to do that. He knows I am connected to Lester’s little difficulties, but what could his connection to them be?”

“So why don’t you meet with him and find out?”

Dinner, as Mystic had anticipated, was a little late. It was a slab of white tofu on a crimson plate, with a few cashews sprinkled on the top. Robert looked at his meal, heartsick, aware that this was the price he had to pay for all the other perks attainable nowhere else. But he didn’t mind the tofu so much as he minded having to interrupt his blogging after Mystic was in bed in order to walk down to the corner 7-11 for his 32 oz. pack of Doritos. And he had to eat them all on the way back too, because Mystic had strong opinions on what she found in her trash cans.

The evening dragged out. Conversation lagged, even before it began drooping. Then the evening dragged some more. Then, unbelievably, there was even more boring stretches later. After nine, they both went to bed for some listless and perfunctory sex, after which Robert P. got up again to watch a couple videos he had rented earlier. They were both deep videos, and Robert was so confused by them that when he fired up the computer for some blogging, he was really ready to roll. First, he knocked out the piece on green tea that he had thought through earlier. Then he went on to write about the angst he felt whenever he quoted Sartre, although he was unsure whether the angst caused the quoting, or the quoting caused the angst. Whatever. Ham and eggs. After that was his Dorito break, washed down with a liter of Mountain Dew, with all the evidence tossed in the dumpster behind the Health Temple (that was shared with a neighboring apartment house, so he was okay).

When he came back, he was ready to review the movies, but first thought that he needed to check his blogging stats. In the week before the civil suit, his monthly average was about 30 visitors a month. And, to be fair, about half of those were from his sister in Memphis who was so proud. The day the Camel Creek story broke, there had been 300 visits in one day. And the next day, after the wire services picked it up, there had been 3000 visits, and 25,000 hits as visitors flailed around trying to find something about Camel Creek. But of course, there was nothing there about the scandal. Mystic had been insistent on that point—she was not too bright, but she was shrewd—and so Robert was now back to writing for his usual audience, whoever they were.

The first movie was The Cry of Doucette. The second was like unto the first, only more so. He began typing furiously:

4 shure I thought my head would explode. dont think it wont one day. Twists and turns 2 bend the head, and rock this complacent whirled. papa dont preach. the subtext in the first one that was drilled into my soul was the text of the second one, and the subtext of the second one was the text of the first. these films were made in different decades, people! the french know their business . . .

When he was done, thousands of words later, it was three am. For no particular reason, he got up and looked in the refrigerator. Nothing there. Nothing was ever there. He thought about another 7-11 run, but then stopped. Too much exertion for one night. Robert then went and got out the journals he had found earlier, and took the one from his freshman year, the one he had not gotten to that afternoon. He would spend a few minutes writing down quotes that would establish his sunny disposition for the court, a disposition that he had right up to the point where the Rev. Lester started groping with his lusty paws.

He opened his journal, and stood there blinking a couple times. I thought my head would explode. dont think it wont one day . . . Robert put the journal down, swiveled around, and went off to bed.

He slept till noon, and when he finally came out of the back, trying to scratch his back, he staggered over to the cupboards and got out the cereal he found least intolerable. He thought it was made out of shredded lawn clippings. He carried it and a bowl over to the kitchen table, and scooted the notepad aside. He was halfway through the bowl when he noticed the note from Mys on it.

Love, I thought I would just save you the trouble—we have certainly talked enough about it! So I just wrote up your statement for you and took it by the attorney’s office to drop it off this morning. We can still visit with him tomorrow, but he can use it today.

Robert clattered down the stairs in a panic. He burst out onto the street and stared helpless both ways. He didn’t have a car. He walked back upstairs.

My baby showed up and said, “I will tell you when.” (Tore Down)

Michelle Lester had decided about a half an hour after the scandal broke that she and the two girls were going to go up to their mountain condo for the weekend, in order to do some journaling, grieving, and deep communicating. There were so many issues, and there always seemed to be more, no matter what they did, or how fast or how much they wrote in their journals. The girls were used to this process and really would have been fine about the whole thing except that each one of the girls thought the other one was going to bring the pot. Turned out neither of them brought it, and there they were, confronted with a long weekend of quality time with their mother, without any assistance from the world of herbal remedies.

Michelle had called Brian about the weekend away, and he had encouraged her to go. He said he would miss her, and asked what time they should connect again on Monday. He was so nice—the only thing that was worrisome about him was his attraction to that Mitchell church. They had only talked about that a few times, and Brian was apparently far less non-committal about it in his conversations with her than he was in his conversations with Pastor Mitchell. She had never attended Grace Reformed with him, and was quite content with the perceptions she had formed at fifty yards. She wasn’t really going to church anywhere, but she remained a contemporary evangelical to the back teeth. She had lost her faith while still managing to hang on to all the platitudes.

The three of them—Michelle, Shannon the elder and Kimberly the younger—dropped their bags just inside the front door of the condo, and headed out for a bite to eat. Their condo was located within walking distance of a number of upscale eateries, and they had no trouble picking out a little bistro with espresso and ferns, the kind of place that served sandwiches with bark still in the bread, exotic little art sandwiches. The only problem with these places is that there were always waiters there named Chad, and that kind of kept the tender issues right on the surface.

When they had ordered their bark sandwiches, Michelle folded her hands together, and said, “Girls, we need to talk like this because we really need each other. I know we have the inner resources to get through this.” Her facial expressions and cadences were just like Oprah, only a great deal whiter.

The girls just looked at her blankly, although she had no idea that this is what they were doing. They knew better than to argue with this kind of girl time together, so they just did what they always did, which was to blink occasionally, followed by a nod. Their father had taken all their oxygen years before when he went philandering over the horizon, and when natural forces, abhorring a vacuum, restored some of the oxygen, their mother took it away by other helpful and certified means—clustering round with a suffocating blanket of therapeutic clichés. Still, she was a devoted mother, which meant that the girls were simultaneously appreciative and at their wits’ end. They were good students, because they both thought this meant that it would increase their chances of going to college a long way away, and then hooking up with a man who had come to college from a long way in the opposite direction.

Michelle was a very smart woman, but it must also be said she had always been a “will that be on the test?” kind of smart. She had a perfect score on the verbal portion of her SAT tests, and was no slouch on the math portion either. She had gone to college on a full ride academic scholarship, and had been pretty ambitious, if that phrase can cover being very ambitious. All of this, along with some corollaries, was about to tumble out of her because Michelle had come to the condo that weekend prepared to share way too much with her daughters. They had gone through some journaling marathons a couple times before, but Michelle had always held back thinking it the principled thing to do. But now she had resolved to be completely transparent. Michelle’s grandmother, a grand dame of the old school in Mississippi, would have said that Michelle was about to go stepping in high cotton.

In college, Michelle had occasionally day-dreamed about one day being the First Lady, but was humble enough (to herself) to not be set on it. She was naturally beautiful, but over the years she had minor cosmetic surgery on several occasions, including a couple of Barbie implants. She belonged to the fitness club, had a personal trainer, and was always slightly, winsomely, tanned. She was blonde naturally, but was not above giving herself a nudge in that direction from time to time.

“About two years after I found out about your father’s behavior, as you know, I met Brian. Such a considerate man. What you don’t know is that his consideration has been a sharp contrast in every area.”

The field of high cotton was approaching, but so was the waiter, a young man named Chad, no relation. He stopped next to the table, and remained quiet, as many waiters do, to give the conversationalists a moment to wind down. But Michelle had launched into the first part of the monologue she had prepared and appeared oblivious to the presence of the waiter. He, however, was very aware of his presence there, as were the two daughters.

“After your grandfather passed away, your father was impotent for about six months. So selfish, so self-absorbed. I spoke to him about it a number of times, sometimes quite forcefully . . .”

Chad cleared his throat. “Excuse me? May I share with you the evening’s special?”

The two girls looked at him with grateful and pleading eyes. Tell us all the specials the restaurant has ever had. In the moment of silence that followed, Michelle blinked a couple times, and thought over the scenario again. After Michelle had found out about Chad’s infidelities, she had drifted into her adultery with Brian, who had been her investment broker. Unlike her husband, who was doing everything he apparently could to cover the waterfront, she was faithful to her lover, and he was faithful to her. Brian was a pagan, but a decent sort. She initially felt bad about sleeping with someone who didn’t have a testimony, but she got over it soon enough.

“And the blackened catfish, with our special Cajun sauce.”

They all looked at Chad the waiter blankly, but it looked to him like they were looking at him thoughtfully, and Michelle’s thoughts were wandering again. Michelle had initially taken up with Brian as an act of attempted “take that” revenge on Chad, but then lost her nerve when she was going to tell Chad about it. She had initially assumed the information would devastate Chad, but on the threshold of telling him, suddenly realized that it probably would not do anything of the kind. Then, after that, she found that she was emotionally attached to Brian, and the Lester marriage staggered ineptly toward the point of divorce.

Chad the waiter left them with their menus, along with the information about the specials, and retreated quietly. Shannon and Kimberly watched him go with sadness, and Michelle started up again.

“Some forms of selfishness are bearable, and in the give and take of any relationship, you certainly have to deal with it. But selfishness in love-making is simply unendurable. And that is what I told him, a number of times.”

The two helpless daughters began thinking that perhaps that boy back in school really knew what he was talking about when he would alert the class with his constant refrain of “Overshare!” Shannon, in an attempt to get the subject off things she didn’t want to know about, had to resort to asking about things she did know about.

“Tell us more about how it went over at the church. I . . . I was too much in shock to notice very much then.”

Of course, in the church, the announcement of the impending divorce was amicably and professionally accomplished, as it pretty much had to be, and the repercussions did not seriously affect Chad’s ministry at all. In fact, he got a book deal with Zondervan out of it—Walking With Christ Through Divorce. As John Mitchell had once said to Cherie, in one of his periodic and vain attempts at getting through to her, the congregation at Camel Creek had gotten such a steady diet of relational goo from Chad’s messages that they were fully prepared to accept the “growing apart” line, along with the “still best of friends” bit. And Cherie had said to him, “You’re always so negative, John. Cranky almost.”

Michelle was focusing intently on her daughters, wanting them to hear everything she said, regardless of what she said. They had come up here to this place to share. “The elders had me meet with that counselor a few times, just so they could say they had, and I knew that, but told the counselor about everything anyway.”

“Even about, about the . . .” Kimberly started to ask.

“The impotence? Of course. Especially about the impotence. I told the elders about it too, just to see some of them smirk and turn red. Two of them in particular.”

Shannon thought her mother was shouting the word impotence, and looked up at her second use of it to see that Chad the waiter was right there, right on time, to take their order. He stood there, looking as solemn as a judge, for which the girls were thoroughly grateful. He attended a small charismatic church in the area, and for him dealing with overshare was a way of life, an art form.

But after Chad the waiter receded with their orders, the girls turned back to their mother, interested in spite of themselves. “Two of the elders?”

Like her husband, Michelle had been a perfectionist and when it became apparent that her marriage was not a suitable venue for a perfectionist to practice her arts, she had turned her attention to their two girls. Michelle had become the uber-mom, and was involved up to her chin in developmental activities for her daughters—ballet, soccer, violin, therapy, soccer, and more therapy. The girls had always done well at King’s Academy Christian School, which was sponsored by Camel Creek in more ways than one. It was an academically sound school, but it had long ago lost all moral authority with the students. The one rule that was enforced was that any moral disorder must not be conducted in such a way as to embarrass the headmaster in the newspapers, and for the most part the students honored this working truce with the administration. Both daughters were quasi-regular users of marijuana (but anything harder would be stupid), and both had slept with several of their classmates. They had been careful not to get pregnant (which would have embarrassed the school and church in the newspapers), but felt completely free to do whatever they wanted to do. They did not want to wreck their lives, but they did want to suit themselves. They were accomplished musicians, decent athletes, and decent students. Their mother was thoroughly invested in their development, which they both knew, and so they did not really detest their mother. It would be more accurate to say they tolerated their mother with affection, sandpapering the rough spots of their relationship with a little help from some hippie’s illegal garden. The worst part was having to do all that damn journaling, and here they were with a whole weekend stretching out in front of them like a very straight highway in Wyoming, the only bend in the road involving the very slight curvature of the earth.

But the waiter who had seated them (not Chad the waiter, but the first employee to greet them behind the lectern thing, the one who said “table for three?” and carried the silverware) looked like he might have some connections with Colombian agriculture. If not, the next rest area was 58 miles. The girls had detested their father since they found out about his adulteries, but what their mother was telling them now awakened the first glimmer of sympathy that either one had ever had for him.

Of course, it is easy for all of us good Christians to detest Chad, joining right in with the Lester women on this point, because, taking one thing with another, he was, well . . . detestable. But even creeps have hopes, dreams, aspirations. Even creeps have a story, and perhaps a brief moment in their toddler years when they were cute. Michelle thought she was giving the girls the back story, the information that would make their detestation and bitterness mature. It was actually having the opposite effect. But of course, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

“Your father grew up with an indulgent mother and a severe, distant, and demanding father. You girls don’t remember them. Everyone who knows your father knows that he was born a CEO, and his gifts were manifested early on in student government in high school and college. Half the faculty thought he was an inevitable and tragic choice in running for governor. He had everything in control except for his relationship with his father, who was impossible to please.”

This was quite true, if something else might be inserted here. The more Chad exhibited control of his grades, ambitions, hair, junior high Day-timer, briefcase, and other sundry accomplishments, the more his father withheld approval. This battle between them was actually a battle for fundamental control of their relationship, and a year after Chad graduated from college, his father triumphed in their running battle by dying of a massive heart attack, leaving Chad with no real way to get back on the scoreboard.

“So after we graduated, we got married. I figured out later that this was so that Chad could say ‘take that’ to his father. Your grandmother was formidable but, um, plain. I was homecoming queen—did you know that?—oh, of course.”

Things were quiet at the table for a few moments. The girls played with their napkins.

“He was a virgin when we married,” Michelle said suddenly. Shannon and Kimberly looked around in alarm for Chad the waiter, but he was inexplicably at another table. “I wasn’t, but only because of the youth pastor at my home church. And what a lecherous goat he was. He made it to the big time, though. He is some kind of wheel at Families International now.”

If Chad the waiter had been there for the whole conversation, and if he had been a trained counselor, he might have been able to read between the lines and say that, despite everything, things were okay in the Lester marriage, depending on what kind of scale you use, until Chad’s father died. This threw Chad into a deep blue aquamarine funk, and his resultant bout of impotence. Michelle had said she had spoken to him firmly about it, but it would be closer to the point to say she taunted him mercilessly over it, which led eventually to Chad’s sexual rebellion, and the manifestation of this new (and inevitable) area of his life which he could not control. A control freak everywhere else, his father had thoroughly taught him that there had to be one area where he had to be helpless. It might as well be an area with some short term rewards.

“I met your father at Camel Creek, back when it was Evangelical Alliance Church. We both grew up in severely conservative homes, and so we both liked the contemporary worship. Your father had told me that he was going to be the governor, which I took as a promise, and we were preparing for law school, but then the church asked him to reorganize the youth ministry. And a year after his father died, the pastor of the church retired, and your father was asked to consider the post. He had never been to seminary, but the church only had several hundred people in it, and they really liked his easy, conversational style of speaking. And he was a hard, driving organizer behind the scenes. And credit where it’s due, he was good.”

“And then what?” Kimberly asked.

“I thought he had promised me to run for governor. I finally said okay to the church offer, but I still think our agreement was for just a short-term thing. But within six months, the attendance at the church had exploded.”

* * *

Around the time Michelle was describing, Chad’s sexual flailing was limited to motelporn and occasional strip clubs in other cities while away on business. But within several years of taking the pastorate at the church, now renamed Camel Creek, several observant women counselees saw their opportunity and seduced him without very much difficulty at all. “Like hitting the floor with my hat,” one of them said afterwards to a friend. “Not that difficult.” After those two fiascos, Chad tried to get ahead of his lack of control in this area by becoming the predator, creating an illusion of mastery to himself. His infidelities became known to Michelle after about ten years, and then had become an open secret to about half of the church staff and personnel. The other half continued with their labors in trying to fulfill the Great Commission.

Chad was a very capable speaker (he didn’t really preach) and for those who liked that kind of schmoozing, he was very good at it. Those who did not care for this genre of speaking—like Pastor Mitchell, say, to take one sample at random—found it intolerable. Chad subscribed to CEO magazines, read business guru books, devoured the Wall Street Journal, and while away on business trips looked every inch the Fortune 500 businessman. Because of his salary, book deals, and so on, he had become a very wealthy man.

He had a very winsome smile, every hair was in place—without looking too much like helmet hair. He was immaculately tailored, but in a way that was always deliberately casual. He was never flustered or angry. In office matters, he always knew what to do, and was the undisputed master of the elder board, ministry teams, and church staff. In one area of his life only, deeply hidden, was this sense of sexual panic.

And speaking of panic, at this very moment, while the Lester women were washing their sandwiches down with five dollar bottles of water, Chad Lester was looking over his shoulder in a metaphorical sense. Not physically. Nothing was coming up from behind him that way. But he knew it was over. It had to be over. Nothing but over.

He had fallen off a skyscraper, and nothing really was to be done about it. What he did between now and the time he hit the sidewalk would not really affect things one way or the other. He needed to do what was necessary to do, and not just go through the motions. Perhaps it was not inevitable. But it probably was. Not so inevitable that he should not continue to work with the attorneys, the staff, and the authorities. But it was inevitable enough to not matter if he called Cherie. Angela had been a disappointment, and had really acted very selfishly. Cherie was a warm person. Of course, she had reacted very strongly when they drifted apart some years ago, but perhaps she would be willing to talk with him this afternoon. He had checked with Miguel, and as one of the pensioners, she had assured him of her continued silence. She had also appeared to understand that this meant that the pay scales would be adjusted. Miguel had said something about a balloon payment, but whatever. Perhaps she still had feelings, or needs, or something. Sure, why not call Cherie?

The weekend was approaching, and he needed to go over his message for Sunday. Chad walked down the corridors of Camel Creek’s administrative wing, and turned abruptly into the sermon-writers’ office. There were nine writers in there—fewer than some of the other megachurches—and they were responsible to have Sunday’s message delivered to his desk by noon on Friday. He usually did not look at it until he was actually delivering it, but after the “positions for women” flameout the other night, he thought he was probably rattled enough to have to go over it beforehand. The message was late, probably because they were trying to nuance the heck out of it. Of course, Chad had a certain measure of sympathy with their dilemma. How do you write a sermon for somebody in such . . . um, unique circumstances? And at least two of the writers were privy to information that could keep them from writing with great verve and moral authority under such circumstances. But those two whassnames had been okay in bed. Chad decided not to be angry about the message being late.

A few moments later he was walking out to his car, fifteenth draft of the message in hand, and he found himself dialing Cherie as he pulled out of the parking lot. He began to leave a message on her answering machine, when she suddenly picked up.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Cherie. Chad here. I was wondering if you had a moment to talk. Can I swing by?”

* * *

Michelle folded her hands primly on her lap. “There. I am glad we came. Let’s go back to the condo. We can all do some journaling for a little bit, and then share before we go to bed.” The girls nodded gamely, and they all got up to go. When they all got out to the parking lot, Kimberly pretended to have left her purse inside, and said, “Hold on a sec,” and dashed back in to ask the waiter at the lectern her question. She had clearly misjudged her man, because she came back out after a moment with her purse, and shook her head slightly at Shannon. The three walked slowly down the sidewalk back to their place, all three chatting aimlessly.

* * *

John Mitchell looked out across the all done dinner table. “Another triumph, Cindi. Yet another triumph. Like the Pittsburgh Steelers of a few decades back—unstoppable. Viva la cheese potatoes.” Cindi smiled and began clearing the table. Sandy sat playing with her napkin. “Daddy?” she said. “You have met Pastor Lester, right?”

“Right,” he said.

“Couldn’t you just . . . explain to him . . . from the Bible or something . . .?”

Her father shook his head. “Not any opportunity.” He started to say something else, but the phone rang, and Cindi hopped up and grabbed it. “Hello?” After a couple seconds, she handed the phone to John. It was Cherie.