Emerald Windows (31 page)

Bill struggled to his feet. Nick grabbed the man’s collar and shoved him against the wall, his face inches from Bill’s. “Don’t you
ever
lay a hand on that girl again!”

“All this White Knight stuff is pretty noble coming from you,” Bill spat out, his lip dribbling blood. “You know, you and I aren’t so different. You liked them young too, if I remember.”

Nick jolted the man’s head against the wall again and jerked his face up so that Bill couldn’t avoid seeing the fire in Nick’s eyes. He threw Bill to his knees, and the man crawled to his feet again— then turned, only to see Roxy’s father coming toward him with his own raging intentions.

“Call the police, Alice!” George shouted.

Bill barreled past them toward his car, his eyes luminous.

George started after Bill, but Roxy stopped him. “It’s over, Daddy,” she said, her sobs punctuating her words. “I don’t want everyone to know about this. The Hemphills will just tell more lies, and it’ll get out of hand, and we’ll spend the next ten years fighting them. Nick stopped him before he did anything.”

“That man should be in jail,” Nick said, his shoulders rising and falling with each heavy breath. His eyes met Brooke’s as she ran out of the house. “You have to report this,” he said.

Brooke took a tentative step toward him. “Thank God you were here,” she whispered.

Nick wiped the cold sweat from his face, then looked down at his feet, his heart pained with regret. “I came over to tell you how sorry I am about the sculpture, and there he was…”

George Martin tapped Nick’s shoulder, and Nick turned to face the man who had once wanted to kill him—the man who had believed for nearly a decade that he’d stolen his daughter’s
virtue as shamelessly as Bill had tried to steal Roxy’s. Holding Roxy protectively under one arm, George extended his right hand to Nick. “I think I’ve been wrong about a few things,” he said quietly. “I owe you an—”

“You don’t owe me anything, not after the trouble you folks have had over the years because of me,” Nick cut in, his eyes misting with emotion.

“Well, maybe I was wrong about that too.”

Brooke’s eyes filled with tears as Nick took her father’s hand and shook it in both of his. When her family had gone back inside to call the police, Nick fell back against the side of the house and raked both hands through his hair. He looked at Brooke, the moonlight casting curved slivers of light in his weary eyes.

“Nick, there’s something I have to tell you,” she whispered. “When I was at your house tonight, I started reading your Bible. And before you came home, I prayed, and…I gave my life to Christ.”

Nick closed his eyes, wondering if he’d heard right. Sweet relief began to gently ease its way into his heart.

“Tonight when you came home and said those things and broke the sculpture, I would have thought my life was over, if I hadn’t prayed that earlier. And I came home and prayed some more, and I know that God knows what’s best for me. I know that whatever He has planned, it’s better than anything I could have come up with. So it’s okay that you don’t want to be more than friends and colleagues. If we weren’t meant to be—”

Before she could finish, he pulled her into his arms and clung to her with all his might. “He did have it planned,” he whispered as tears rose in his throat. “We are meant to be. I thought I was being obedient, listening to Him about how we were different. But we’re not different, Brooke. We’re the same.”

She pulled back and looked at him. “Those goals and beliefs and values? Is that what you mean?”

“Yes. It was all about God, Brooke. I want to be obedient.”

“I do too. But I’ll need help. I don’t know much about God.”

“I’ll teach you.” He crushed her against him again, then whispered, “Let’s not wait and play the dating game and pretend we don’t know what we want, Brooke. Will you marry me?”

Brooke pressed her forehead against his mouth and closed her eyes, savoring the words she had longed so many times to hear. “Yes, I’ll marry you,” she whispered.

His kiss was everything she had expected, more than she had dreamed. Bright light glowed in her grateful heart as she thanked her God for giving her such joy.

CHAPTER
   

T
HE WHITE LIMOUSINE DRIVEN BY
the pastor pulled to the front entrance of the new Hayden Bible Church, parting the hundreds of townspeople who had gathered there for the unveiling of the windows.

Nick’s hand tightened over Brooke’s, and she looked up at him with wonder and awe in her emerald eyes. “Nick, look at all these people,” she whispered. “They actually came.”

“They came as much out of gratitude as curiosity,” the pastor said. “I’ve been making phone calls myself, making sure everyone in town realizes the sacrifices you two made for those windows.”

Nick leaned over and gazed, awestruck, at the cars he recognized in the parking lot.

“Let’s just hope they like them, or we’ll be tarred and feathered by sundown.”

Horace chuckled. “I’ve seen the windows. I don’t think that’s likely.”

A cheer rose from the crowd as Brooke and Nick got out of the car, hands clasped tightly. They stood still for a moment, utterly amazed at the emotional welcome they received, but finally the pastor gestured for them to cut through the crowd and enter the finished church.

They went in, shaking hands as they went, and found that the inside held even more people than were outside. The room resounded with a loud roar that crescendoed as they made their way through to the pulpit.

Brooke felt a heady feeling of disbelief as she climbed the wine-colored steps. She glanced anxiously up at the windows, now covered in sheets that would drop to the floor at the assigned moment. Would the church members really like them when they saw them? Would they understand them?

Nick nudged her lightly and gestured toward a cluster of people standing near the platform. Roxy and Sonny were standing arm in arm, beaming proudly up at them, and her parents stood next to them, their pride evident on their faces. And then she saw Mrs. Marcello and the Castori clan, all waving at Nick as if to show everyone in the room that he was one of them.

The mayor stepped to the podium and quieted the crowd, and they saw the captive, anxious faces turn to listen. He began to speak about the reasons for the renovation, the steps involved in reconstructing the church, the church growth it would accommodate. Brooke’s mind wandered, and she glanced over the proud faces, one by one, and asked herself if these had, indeed, been the same people who had condemned her and run her out of town. Had they also been the ones who gossiped after she and Nick got married in the empty, unfinished church?

But they were also the ones who had given donations out of their personal, individual funds to make up the balance of what they needed to complete the windows.

Abby Hemphill was conspicuously absent, but Brooke had expected that. So much had gone wrong in the woman’s life in the past year. Bill, her son, had been arrested the night of his attack
on Roxy, but had been released the next day because Roxy had refused to press the issue. But Bill had still wound up in jail the day after his baby was born, when he’d driven drunk and rammed his car into the glass front of a gas station, injuring the young woman in the car with him—a young woman who wasn’t his wife. The scandal had created an uncrossable chasm in Mrs. Hemphill’s family, and she had ultimately left her husband and her immaculate house and taken a condo in downtown St. Louis.

“But these two weren’t daunted by the lack of funds available for a project they so believed in,” the pastor was saying, and Brooke moved her gaze back to him. “They made supreme gestures of sacrifice to get the money to build the windows for a town and a church that had been less than gracious to them. I consider this a real act of love for the Lord. But in gratitude for that love, the town of Hayden has a love offering to give to them in return. A belated wedding gift, if they want to consider it that.”

Brooke looked up at Nick, who seemed as confused as she as the crowd roared with delight, and she wondered if everyone in Hayden except she and Nick had been let in on the secret. The pastor stepped toward them. “We’ll need you to step outside for a moment, if you don’t mind.”

Brooke and Nick looked at each other, and as the crowd parted, they stepped through and made their way to the door.

As they stepped out into the sunlight, they saw the gift they had never expected. Nick’s grandfather’s Duesenberg sat in the parking lot, as shiny and perfect as the day he had sold it.

Nick’s face went slack, and Brooke burst into tears.

“The Finance Committee agreed to match, out of the church budget, whatever the members themselves could raise,” the pastor said, laughing with delight at the shock on their faces. “And boy, did they come up with it. It meant a lot to all of us to get the Duesy back for you.”

Tears filled Brooke’s eyes, and she turned back to the crowd as another wave of applause swept over them. Nick drew her against
him, his own poignant, eloquent expression touching her heart as he pulled Brooke with him to the microphone. “Thank you,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion. “I can’t tell you…” His voice broke, and he took a moment to control himself. “…how much this means to me.”

The crowd erupted in applause. He waited a moment as it died down, and finally he swallowed and nodded to Brooke that the moment of truth had come. “So now, if you’re ready, I guess it’s time to see what all the fuss is about.”

He leaned down, cupped Brooke’s chin, and dropped a kiss on her lips. “I love you,” he whispered.

“I love you,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

Together they reached for the single rope that would release the veils all the way around the church, and the crowd grew still with anticipation.

They pulled, and the sheets billowed to the ground, revealing a panorama of some of the most poignant stories in the Bible—all of them about the covenant-keeping God who worked in each of their lives.

For a moment, not one of all the hundreds of people present made a sound as they gazed up, their eyes circling the room, quietly experiencing the poetry of the windows.

Brooke’s mouth went dry, and she shot Nick a panicked look. His frown told her he was as bewildered as she by the absolute silence.

Then suddenly, near the front, someone began to clap.

Then everyone was clapping, and Brooke saw other faces wet with tears, and children pointing overhead and asking questions of their parents, and elderly people nodding in affirmation. And it was as if each person there embraced the windows; as if they had been put there to speak directly to them.

Nick pulled Brooke into his arms and kissed her before God and the world, beneath the halo of beauty they had created with their own hands. And as she held him close, Brooke knew that the rest of her life with Nick would be as intense as the work they
produced together, as emotional as the visions they shared, as all-encompassing as the windows that skirted the ceiling of the church for all the world to celebrate. Because God was guiding them, together…

Down the same lighted path.

C
hrist is the author and finisher of my faith, and the power and provider of my books. He is the One who gifts me with ideas that often keep me awake in the night. And it is He who grants a shared vision to those who play crucial roles in the publication of my work: Greg Johnson, Dave Lambert, Lori VandenBosch, Bob Hudson, Sue Brower, and so many others who have come to mean so much in my life. God has blessed me more than I could ever have hoped or imagined, and so often, these precious people are instruments of those blessings. I thank them for allowing me to dig through the layers of worldliness, youth, and misunderstanding originally written into this book so many years ago, and get to the heart of what the Lord intended for this story. And no words can ever express the depth of gratitude I have for my Lord, who is in the merciful business of granting second chances to those of us who long ago ran out of first ones.

D
on’t you hate it when things change? I sure do. And at this writing, I’m looking ahead to a spiritual time of change. You see, my pastor, Dr. Frank Pollard, announced this week that he will be retiring in just a few months.