Nothing Sacred

Martha sank to the floor, clutching the phone. “What?”

“An idea or two that I’m fairly certain warrant a follow-up.”

Martha held the phone tighter. “You’ve talked them over with the sheriff?”

“No, I haven’t.” She noticed the pastor’s hesitation. “That’s the thing,” he continued, sounding almost unsure of himself—which wasn’t something she’d ever noticed in him before. “These suspicions. I’d rather not tell Greg about them.”

“Okay.”

“And I hope you’ll agree not to mention this conversation to anyone yet.”

Right now she’d agree to just about anything to get some answers. To catch the bastard who’d hurt her daughter. “I’ll agree on one condition—that you let me help.”

“I can’t do that.”

She stared at the floor. “Why not?”

“I…”

A preacher with secrets. At the moment she didn’t care. “That’s my deal, Pastor,” she said with finality.

Dear Reader,

We’re back in Shelter Valley. It’s so great to return to the town and the people I’ve grown to love. And it’s even better to have you here with us.

If this is your first time in Shelter Valley, welcome! You’re going to feel right at home.

Finally we get to walk hand in hand with Martha Moore. So many of you have written to say how much you care about her and that you’d like to spend more time with her. I, too, needed to hear what she’s got to say. I hope you’ll agree that it was worth the wait.

And we meet David Marks, a man with a mission and a past, with strong teachings and dark secrets. And I think you’ll find he’s a man you want to know.

What happens in Shelter Valley this time shocked even me. It’s not the story I originally set out to tell. I’m asking with all sincerity that, even if you’re as shocked as I was, you won’t give up on this story. I might take you places that make you uncomfortable, but I promise to bring you back, satisfied and with a sense of happiness.

Preliminary reviews of Nothing Sacred have been very positive. I’m eager to hear what you think. You can reach me by mail at P.O. Box 15065, Scottsdale, AZ 86226 or by e-mail at ttquinn@tarataylorquinn.com. And I hope you’ll visit my Web site—www.tarataylorquinn.com.

Wishing you perfect moments…

Tara Taylor Quinn

Nothing Sacred

Tara Taylor Quinn

To the “cool girls.”

(Mary Strand, Lynn Kerstan, Carol Prescott and Pat Potter)

Your friendship and support helped more than you know…

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER ONE

“LOVE IS A REMARKABLE thing….” The man’s voice droned on and Martha Moore pulled out her notepad and pen.

Eggs.

Milk.

Cereal—for Tim.

Granola—for her and the girls.

Lunch meat.

Chips. Tim had finished up the last of them the night before while watching reruns of Upstairs, Downstairs on Masterpiece Theater.

It was a show she and his father had watched when it originally aired. They’d had sex for the first time after a particularly moving episode.

Damn Todd Moore.

“When you’re loving others, you don’t have to worry about what anyone else is thinking or doing.”

Glancing up from her list, Martha almost snorted at the new preacher.

“Because what you give will be reflected back.”

Yeah, right. Get a life. She gazed skyward—past the good-looking man standing to the left of the pulpit—rather than in front of it like his predecessor. No flashing lights or threatening noises came from above at her lack of reverence.

Just checking.

“What are you doing?” Shelley, her sixteen-year-old daughter, whispered irritably. Shelley had recently developed an attitude that Martha found challenging, to put it mildly. “Someone might see you.”

Biting back the words she wanted to say, reminding her daughter with a look that she was a fully grown adult with the right to stare up at the ceiling if she wanted to, Martha returned to her list.

Bread. She always forgot the bread. Probably because ever since her psychology-professor husband had left her for a twenty-something-year-old student she’d been a bit obsessive about her forty-one-year-old thighs.

“When you look at everything and everyone in your life through eyes of love rather than fear, you disassociate yourself from the possibility of pain, and live, instead, with the constant assurance of peace.”

Bottled water. Martha glanced again. Was this guy for real? Walking around up there in slacks and a dress shirt with a tie that was probably real Italian silk and had more colors than the checkered and striped dinnerware she’d drooled over in the Crate and Barrel catalogue that had come earlier in the week. There’d never been a preacher in Shelter Valley Community Church, or in the other churches in town, who didn’t wear the long flowing robe and sash associated with the calling, and who didn’t hide behind a pulpit when he preached.

Constant peace? Who was he kidding? Constant aches and pains, more like it.

But then, from what she’d heard, the man was thirty-eight years old and had never been married. He had no family. What did he know about loving?

Hamburger.

Dryer sheets.

Boneless chicken breasts.

Toilet paper.

“The soft kind,” Tim leaned over to whisper. He was on her other side, next to his oldest sister, Ellen. Rebecca, Martha’s fifteen-year-old daughter, was on the other side of Shelley.

“Pay attention!”

With exaggerated force, Martha pointed to the preacher. After all, her kids were the only reason she was even there.

Once, shortly after Todd had left and before she’d landed her job as production assistant at Montford University’s television station, she’d let tight finances convince her to buy bargain toilet paper. That had been the first time her son had expressed the anger that had been building since his father’s defection.

“You aren’t paying attention,” Tim whispered, more loudly than Martha would have liked. Raising this boy was certainly different from raising the three girls who’d come before him.

“She doesn’t have to, stupid, she’s the boss.” Shelley leaned across Martha to hiss at her brother. Much to Martha’s distress, Shelley’s youngest sibling was most often the target of the girl’s disdain.

“Nuh-uh,” Tim said in a low voice. “God is.”

With a roll of her eyes, accompanied by a dramatic flounce for all the congregation to see, Shelley settled back against the pew.

Martha looked straight ahead, pretending that all was well in Mooreville. And saw that the members of the entire congregation weren’t the only witnesses to their little interchange.

David Cole Marks, the new preacher at Shelter Valley Community Church, had seen the whole thing.

She held his gaze until she realized she was behaving as belligerently as Shelley in one of her more “charming” moments. Then Martha returned her attention to the paper in her lap.

Or attempted to.

The preacher’s eyes seemed to bore into her mind, interrupting her ability to focus on the list in front of her. There’d been nothing disciplinary in those eyes, nothing condescending. No rebuke.

Only kind understanding. And a question. As though he wanted to help.

Yeah, right. She’d seen that same compassionate regard from this man’s predecessor—and knew firsthand that what a person showed on the surface was no indication of what might lie beneath.

Forget the grocery list. Next time she’d bring a book.

“IT’S ALWAYS A BIT of a challenge coming into a new church,” Pastor David Marks said aloud as he drove his hunter-green, two-door Ford Explorer away from his house behind Shelter Valley Community Church. With four bedrooms, the place was far too large.

He’d stopped home only long enough for a frozen burrito after church. He’d had a couple of invitations to dinner, but hadn’t wanted to pass up the opportunity—until now, nonexistent—to visit with Martha Moore and her family. Her meeting his gaze during services this morning had been a first. “Trust and confidence has to be earned,” he continued.

But this time is harder.

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

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

Why?

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

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

Yes.

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

Yes.

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

Yes.

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

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

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

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

David was looking forward to getting to know Tim better.

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

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

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

No.

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

Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Knocking her mother’s hand off her knee, Shelley turned her back on Tim. And looked right into David’s eyes.

The belligerence—and was that fear?—he saw there sent a jolt to his heart. He’d thought his job was merely to be friendly, offer a helping hand to a woman single-handedly doing the job of two people. He hadn’t realized there were problems other than a family stretched too thin. His work was going to require more of him than he’d expected.

Yes.

“I don’t mind your mother’s question, Ellen,” David said, including the entire Moore clan in his smile. “I became a minister so I could spend my life immersed in big-picture endeavors.”

“I don’t get it,” Rebecca said, one of her long, jean-clad legs swinging back and forth.

“Things that affect lifetimes instead of just minutes.”

His words were directed at Rebecca, but he spoke to her mother. He had a feeling big-picture issues were something Martha Moore would understand—if she let herself think about them.

“Why?” Martha was looking at him.

He held that gaze. “So I can make lives better, bring people hope and help them find a touch of the elusive joy most of us crave.”

No.

David wasn’t sure who’d delivered the message, his private angel or his own disgusted ego. Or maybe it had been her.

She turned to the window, but not before David saw the small glimmer of disappointment in Martha Moore’s remarkable brown eyes. This woman might want him to think she was hardened beyond hope.

But she wasn’t. Not quite yet.

Still, he couldn’t tell her the whole truth—which was what she’d seemed to need.

A father to many because he would never, ever father children of his own, a mentor and caregiver to all as he would never provide for a wife and family, David Cole Marks had a secret to keep.

Elbows on his knees, he clasped his hands between them. “You ever come up against things in life that just don’t make sense?” he asked.

“I do.” Tim piped up again from the floor, the electronic game he’d been engrossed in now ignored. “Algebra. It’s stupid. Why waste time with as and bs and stuff when you’re just gonna have to stick numbers in there, anyway?”

“You are so lame,” Shelley whispered, with a surreptitious glance at her mother.

“Of course I have.” Martha answered as though her children hadn’t spoken. “Most of the things that happen don’t make sense.”

“Exactly.” David nodded, his eyes on her bent head as he willed her to look up at him. To engage in what might be an actual conversation. “So instead of making myself crazy trying to find sense in senseless things, I decided to devote my energies to the pursuit of universal truths. I really believe that’s the only source of lasting peace and happiness.”

If he was ever going to be able to influence this very jaded woman, he’d have to speak with an honest and open heart. His sincerity, his conviction, would convey the power of his message.

Her head rose, her eyes slowly meeting his. He could read intelligence in their striking brown depths—and, after that initial second, the skepticism with which she considered his words.

“You’re paid to say stuff like that.”

And that was why David hated being a minister. People automatically assumed that his message was the stereotypical religious platitudes. But there was nothing stereotypical about what he had to teach.

About what he believed.

“I don’t know, Mom,” Ellen said, wrinkling her forehead under the cropped and sprayed blond bangs. “Sure doesn’t sound like the kind of thing Pastor Edwards would say.”

A compliment, indeed. David smiled at the slim teenager.

Tim, once again engrossed in his handheld electronic game, was making noises to emulate the crashes and high-speed chases he was attempting to control.

“Pastor Marks.” Martha frowned at her son but said nothing to him. “Please tell my daughter that you get paid to say these things.”

Okay, he had his work cut out there. “I get paid to preach,” he said. “I don’t get paid to believe.”

Even Shelley was listening to the exchange.

Martha sat back, arms crossed over her chest, and such a clear I-told-you-so expression on her face that he couldn’t bite back his next words, in spite of his better judgment.

“And I do believe.”

“Point to the pastor,” Shelley said under her breath.

Martha sat forward. “So what about before you joined the ministry?” she asked.

He’d left that part of his life behind. Forgiven himself. Forgotten.

“I graduated from high school,” he said, repeating the story by rote. “I went to college, got an undergraduate degree in social work, took a job with a private corporation, trying to figure out what I wanted to do. A friend of mine jokingly suggested one night that if I was so filled with lofty ideas, I should have studied theology. His words struck a chord that wouldn’t be silent.”

“Cool,” Tim said. “So you became a minister then?”

David grinned at the boy. “After three years of intense study, yes.”

Martha stood. “Yes, well, it’s been nice—”

The phone on the end table beside Rebecca rang. The skinny young teen with the pitch-black hair in a ponytail handed the mobile receiver up to her mother.

With scarce intimate knowledge of this family, there was no way for David to guess who was on the other end of the line, receiving Martha’s pleasantly delivered message that her children were busy and couldn’t come to the phone. But if he were a betting man, he’d bet last week’s entire paycheck that the caller was not in her favor, despite her friendly tone. Before the phone had rung, Martha had been concluding David’s visit.

The sudden whiteness of her cheeks only heightened his curiosity.

“Oh,” she said, turning her back on the curious eyes of her children. Seconds later, she admitted, “Yes, they’re here, but—”

“It’s Dad,” Tim said quietly, head lowered as he glanced up at his three sisters.

“I know—” Martha began again. She was obviously cut off a second time by the persistent caller.

Ellen nodded. Rebecca draped her leg over the end of the couch and swung it back and forth. Motionless, Shelley sat there with no expression whatsoever. All three girls were watching their mother.

“I’m not—”

None of the kids seemed particularly worried—other than perhaps Ellen. As she looked at her mother, her eyes filled with a warm compassion. David was beginning to associate that quality with Martha’s eldest. None of the children seemed particularly eager to connect with the voice at the other end of the line, either.

Most interesting to David was the complete change that had come over the woman who’d topped the list months ago as his hardest sell in his new job. She was assertive, at least on the surface, but there was a vulnerability, a lack of self-confidence he didn’t recognize at all.

He’d felt drawn—no, guided—to her from the beginning. Compelled by the sense that she needed help she would never ask for. Her current reaction strengthened the inner resolve that had kept him trying, in spite of no success, for months.

“Fine. You’re right.” David was surprised to hear the words. And even more startled when Martha turned and, without another word, passed the phone to Ellen.

“It was good of you to come by.” She spoke to David immediately, loudly enough to camouflage at least part of her daughter’s telephone conversation.

He stood, taking the hand she offered. But he wasn’t ready to be dismissed so easily.

Or to leave when there might be a crisis unfolding. “You’ve got your hands full here,” he said. “I’ve got two very able ones—and some free time.”

Her expression distracted, Martha shook her head. Pulled back her hand. “I’ve been managing this brood just fine for more than four years, Pastor Marks. But thanks.”

Behind her, Ellen, lips pinched, gave the phone to Shelley, whose dark spiked hair was a sharp contrast to her timidly offered hello.

“I don’t mean to imply that you aren’t doing a terrific job,” David said, returning his gaze to the woman trying to get rid of him. He refrained from reminding her that he’d asked them all to call him David. “Just that I’m here and I’ve found that almost everyone can benefit from a lightening of the load sometimes. I’m quite proficient at mowing grass, fixing cars or even seeing that there’s dinner on the table if you ever have to be too many places at once. And I can help out on very short notice.”

Head turned slightly to the side, Martha was obviously attempting to hear both conversations at once—the one in which she was engaged and the one going on behind her. Shelley’s voice had grown even softer than Ellen’s. Mostly she appeared to be listening without saying much at all.

“Not usual duties for a preacher,” Martha remarked, although rather than sounding impressed by his efforts she seemed annoyed.

Or maybe it was just her daughter’s conversation that was having that effect on her.

“I’m also fairly adept at just listening without offering advice, if that’s what’s needed.”

Behind her, Rebecca flopped over to the middle couch seat to take the phone from her sister. “Hi, Daddy, how are you?”

The start Martha gave was almost indiscernible.

So it was her ex-husband, just as Tim had predicted.

“I have lots of friends,” Martha told him now. “But if there’s ever a time when I can’t reach one of them when I need help, I’ll be sure to keep your offer in mind.”

She was wearing a smile that looked painfully forced.

Rebecca had grown silent behind her. The ponytail that was almost constantly bobbing was oddly still now.

“I’d love to see Tim play ball sometime,” David said, before the boy’s mother could order him out of her house—which, he suspected, was coming next. He didn’t want to leave while the family was so obviously upset. There must be something he could do. Some counsel he could offer. “I used to be a little leaguer myself.”

Pushing buttons on his video device and biting his lower lip, the boy didn’t seem to hear.

“Half the town comes to see the games,” Martha said. “There are usually teams playing every night of the week during the season. There’s only one lighted field in town so you can’t miss it, and the games always start at seven.” She barely took a breath. David had the impression that she was trying to prevent a moment’s silence during which he’d be able to hear Rebecca’s conversation with her father.

Not that she was having much of one. Like her two older sisters, the girl had grown very quiet. But while Ellen and Shelley were staring at their laps, Rebecca kept glancing nervously at the back of her mother’s head.