Courageous (29 page)

Ninety minutes later, Adam, Dylan, and Victoria headed for the parking lot. Adam’s arm was around Dylan. “So your mother doesn’t want me to yell too loud and embarrass her, and pretty soon she jumps up on the bench and screams like a banshee.”

“You were actually up on the bench, Mom?”

“I guess I got a little excited,” she whispered.

“I was pretty excited myself,” Adam said, “though I certainly held it together better than your mother. How are you feeling, Son? You must be on top of the world!”

“It was amazing. I kept thinking about Eric Liddell when he came from behind.”

“So did I!”

Dylan tossed his duffel bag onto the truck’s backseat. “I kind of felt bad for Billy.”

“Billy always wins. He ran well, but it wasn’t a personal best. He got first, but it was your night. Hey, let me pray right here. Father, You gave Dylan such a great night. Thanks! Please help him enjoy his success and be grateful to You and give You credit.”

“I think Dylan should pick the restaurant.” It took three attempts for Victoria to communicate this opinion.

Adam’s eyes shot past Victoria, and he froze. About forty feet from their truck, a man in jeans and an old jacket watched them.

Victoria turned pale. “What’s he doing here?” she whispered.

“Get in the truck. Both of you.”

Adam walked toward the man, who looked down. When Adam got within fifteen feet, he stopped.

“Mr. Mitchell, I saw on the Westover website that your son was running today. I figured you’d be here.”

Adam remained silent, but his eyes betrayed his intense emotions.

“My lawyer told me not to communicate with you or your family.”

“Maybe you should have listened to him.”

“I just can’t stop thinking about what I did.”

Mike Hollis tried unsuccessfully to find a safe landing site for his eyes. “I start my sentence in a few days. I’ll be in prison a long time, but I wanted to tell you that . . .”

His eyes and Adam’s finally met.

“I’ve got a little girl, too. She’s seven, lives with my ex. It would kill me to lose her.” He paused a moment and swallowed hard. “I guess I
will
lose her. I know I can’t do anything for you, Mr. Mitchell, but I had to tell you . . . I’m sorry. I know you must hate me. I understand.”

Adam braced himself. “Look, Mr. Hollis . . . Mike.” Something changed when Adam stopped thinking of him as “the drunk” and called him Mike. “I don’t hate you. I hate what you did. But hating you or trying to get even won’t bring Emily back.”

Mike looked down.

“There’s just one thing you
can
do for me.”

“What?”

“You can never touch alcohol or drugs again—not now, not when you get out. And go to your little girl while you still can and love on her. View every moment you spend with her as priceless. Hear me?”

Hollis wiped his eyes with his sleeve.

“And just so you know, God is your judge, not me. Jesus Christ forgave me. How can I not forgive you? I do. But above all, Mike, you need God’s forgiveness.”

“Thank you. But if you knew everything, I don’t think you could forgive me. I . . . saw you at the Fun Park not long before the accident.”

What does he mean?
Adam hadn’t been to the Fun Park for six months, when he last took Emily.

“I’ve felt the same way myself, Mike. I guess if we deserved forgiveness, we wouldn’t need it. God’s seen me at my worst and still loves me. He knows everything about you too. And if you ask Him, He’ll forgive you.”

Mike nodded. “Thank you.”

Adam walked back to his truck, weighing what had just happened.

“What did he want?” Victoria whispered.

Adam closed the door and sat with his hands on the wheel. He took a moment to calm himself. “He said he was sorry. I told him God loves him and we choose to forgive him.”

Victoria looked incredulous.

“We have to. Jesus has forgiven us for all our worst sins. He commands us to forgive others. Mike Hollis is no exception. That’s the gospel.”

Dylan listened from the backseat. “He’s going to prison, right?”

“Yes, for a long time. And he has a daughter, who’s seven.”

Victoria looked at him, then stared straight ahead. She prayed aloud, barely audible, “God, give me the grace and strength to forgive. I want to, but I need Your help.”

“He will help us,” Adam said. “Each of us.”

They sat in silence. Finally Adam said, “Dylan, you had an amazing night. And if Emily could talk to us right now, she’d say the same thing I think Jesus would—
‘Go out and celebrate!’
So, Son, where do you want to go? You name it.”

Dylan took a full five seconds to decide. “Bruster’s Ice Cream. I want a turtle sundae.”

“Hot fudge brownie for me,” Victoria might have said; Adam wasn’t certain.

“And,”
Dylan said, “I want a banana split with a pretzel rod and extra whipped cream.”

“You got it, Son,” Adam said, already picturing a Bruster’s peanut butter cup.

Adam pulled out of the parking lot, spraying gravel.

“Way to peel out, Dad!”

“If I had the patrol car, I’d turn on the lights and siren.”

The next evening Dylan and Adam stood in the driveway cooling down after a run.

“You’re quiet,” Adam said. “What’s on your mind?”

Dylan stretched. “There’s something I think I should tell you.”

Adam leaned toward him.

“You asked me before if there was an adult I bought drugs from.”

“You ready to tell me his name?”

“It’s eaten at me ever since Emily died. I feel so guilty.”

“We talked about that. God forgives us.”

“This is something else, Dad.”

“Why? Who sold you the drugs?”

Dylan put his face in his hands and mumbled a name.

“Who?”

“Mike Hollis.”

“What?”

“If I’d turned in Mike Hollis a long time ago, if I’d told you he sold to high school kids, then—” Dylan sobbed—“then he would have gone to jail. And Emily would still be alive!”

Adam moved closer. “Dylan, you couldn’t have known. If we had do-overs, we’d all choose differently. Maybe you wouldn’t have done the drugs, but if you had and we had the kind of relationship that I think we’re developing . . . then you could have talked with me. And then maybe Mike Hollis would have gone to jail. If anyone’s to blame, it’s me.”

“Both of you are wrong.” The voice came out of the darkness.

“I’m no eavesdropper.” Victoria held her hands in the air as she approached from the side yard. “But when I go outside to find Maggie’s chew toy and hear my husband ask, ‘Who sold you the drugs?’ I hope you understand why I kept listening!”

“Of course,” Adam said.

“Then let’s talk,” Victoria said. “But it’s cold; can we go inside?”

While the men showered, Victoria fixed decaf for Adam, hot chocolate for Dylan, and green tea for herself. They met in the living room, and Adam started a fire.

Maggie curled up at Victoria’s feet. “Drink up and get your insides warm while I tell you what I think. Do you know how many what-ifs and should haves there are? I’ve come up with a hundred. First, I could have told Emily she couldn’t go to the party. Or I could have insisted that one of us pick her up from school and drive her to the party. I could have even discouraged Emily from ballet class as a seven-year-old, where she first met Hannah. There’s no end to it. But you know what difference I think all those things would have made?”

The question sounded rhetorical, so neither answered.

“Well,
do
you?”

“No,” Adam and Dylan answered together.

“No difference at all. Because either God is in control or He isn’t. And if God isn’t in control, if our destinies are in the hands of birthday parties, traffic flow, demons, or a man who gets drunk and takes cocaine . . . then God is not God. Why worship Him?”

“But you believe God
is
in control, right?” Dylan asked.

Victoria nodded and opened her Bible to a marked spot. “Listen to this verse from Proverbs 16:9: ‘In his heart a man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps.’ Did Mike Hollis have a choice? Yes. And he made a bad one. But Emily’s life was
not
in his hands. It was in
God’s
hands. God could have prevented that crash.”

“Then why didn’t He?”

“Dylan, I don’t know. Here’s another verse that might help. Genesis 50:20. When Joseph was maybe your age, his brothers sold him into slavery. But years later he says this: ‘You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good.’ He could look back in retrospect and see that what God
intended
triumphed over what his brothers intended.”

Adam sat up straight. “You’re right! Think about Good Friday. It was the worst day in history, but we call it
Good
. Why? Because looking back, we know that God used the worst thing to accomplish the best thing—our redemption.”

Dylan turned to his mother. “You really think someday we’ll see that God made the right decision when He let Emily die?”

“I couldn’t say this a couple of months ago, but yes, I do. It’s the only thing that keeps me sane. I believe that if she’d never met Hannah, she still would have died that day. I don’t know why or how. But I
do
know this—God never lies. And He makes a promise in Romans 8:28—‘In all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.’”

Dylan shook his head. “I don’t think I can believe that.”

Victoria understood Dylan’s struggle. “Your father knows this, Dylan, and I wasn’t sure if I should ever tell you. After Emily died, I was really angry when someone quoted Romans 8:28 to us. I wanted to rip it out of the Bible. If He will work all things together for our good, the ‘all things’ must include the very worst thing that has ever happened to us—even Emily’s death. Could I believe that, in the end, God will use it for all of our good? At first I couldn’t. Yet, if it
isn’t
true, then Romans 8:28 isn’t true. And if it’s
not
true, the Bible’s not true.”

“You really thought that?” Dylan asked.

“Yes. But finally I decided Romans 8:28 is as true as John 3:16 and every other Bible verse. I asked myself, even if I can’t see God’s purpose now, can I by faith trust Him that one day, in eternity, I will? By faith I choose to believe God is good and He loves me. With what He did for me on the cross, how could I ever believe anything less?”

Adam stood and put one arm around Victoria. Then he pulled Dylan up beside him, putting the other around him. Maggie pushed her head against their shins.

Chapter Thirty-three

Adam walked down to the sheriff’s department evidence room, part of the county courthouse complex. Through the window he watched the evidence room custodian, Sergeant Smith, catalog entries. The room had rows of shelves filled with bins of bags and folders.

“Hey, Sarge, Bronson said the bags of cocaine we found on Highland have been logged in; is that right?”

He flipped open the evidence log and ran his finger down the page. “Yep. Sergeant Bronson turned them in. 4:30 p.m.” He chuckled. “He ranted about the PIO getting some big award tomorrow night and wondered if she would fly in on her broomstick to pick it up.”

“That’s Bronson. Listen, he mentioned twenty-four bags, but I could have sworn there were thirty.”

Sergeant Smith looked at the sheet. “It says twenty-four went to the lab. Sure you guys counted right?”

Adam thought about it. “Bronson should know since he turned them in.”

Adam started to leave.

“Your shift has brought in some heavy hitters this month. You had that bust on Hoffman last week and that shoe box with six bags of rocks.”

Adam stopped. “There were
six
bags in the shoe box?”

“Yep. Says so right here. Keep this up and you’ll put these guys out of business.”

“I wish.” Adam hesitated.
You can always say more later, but you can’t unsay what you say now.

Adam strode down the hall past several sheriff’s department employees. He noticed Nathan and David walking by. “Nathan, hold up.”

Nathan stopped and turned as Adam approached.

“I just need a second alone, David.”

David left, casting an unsettled gaze on Adam.

“You know the Highland bust?” Adam said to Nathan. “You, David, Shane, and I were there; then Bronson showed up before the narcotics inspector came. How many bags of coke do you remember?”

Nathan thought about it. “Seems like . . . what, close to thirty?”

“The log says twenty-four.”

“I don’t think that’s right.”

“And the shoe box we found when we were all tasin’ Big Leon and Bronson showed up at the end? How many bags were there?”

“I’d say ten.”

“Six were turned in.”

Nathan studied Adam’s face. “Be careful, man. Before we start down that road, we better be sure it’s the right one.”