Steps to the Altar (39 page)

GABE

SHE HAD FORGIVEN him. Though his first wish would always be that this last week and a half would vanish from time, that Del had never come back, that his past had never intruded into this tentative and fragile life he had built, Benni’s forgiveness was the second wish and he was grateful it was answered.

That evening after he’d showed up at her door—
their
door, she would later correct him—and she took him back, as they drank the hot chocolate she’d made, she told him the story she’d been given by the ex-priest who lived in Idyllwild. After he’d heard about Maple’s sacrifice, he pulled Benni to him and held her until his arms stopped trembling.

“What a lucky man,” he’d said.

“She was lucky too,” she answered, her pale face without a trace of artifice. “Loving someone that much. That’s a blessing too.”

“Will you come with me to the Mission?” he asked later. “I want to light a candle,” he said. “For us. For thanks.”

“Light one for Maple,” she said, “And for Garvey.”

As they walked downtown through the rain to Mission Santa Celine, down the dark, silent streets of San Celina, he grasped her hand tighter, leaning close to catch a scent of her hair, the sweet and smoky green apple smell of it, a smell he would crave to his dying breath.

Inside the Mission Church, it was cold and empty. The spring rains had driven even the most faithful home to their warm fireplaces. The high ceilings caused their footsteps to echo and fly through the rafters like darting sparrows. She sat down on the second pew, sliding over far enough for him to join her when he was finished.

He knelt with one knee in front of the altar, crossed himself, and kissed his thumbnail, his heart pounding hard in his chest, feeling like he’d run down the aisle toward the sad, tortured face of the slain Christ.

“Forgive me,” he murmured, staying on his knee a moment before rising. He turned to the row of candles at the side of the altar and slipped some bills into the box. He lit a candle first for himself and Benni, in gratitude for her open heart, for deliverance from his own demons. Then a candle each for Maple and Garvey and their son.

“Descanse en Paz,”
he said, his words a small breath of sound in the old church. “Rest in peace.”

Then he joined his wife in the pew and they sat for a long time gazing at the painted altar, at the flickering candles, the heat of each other’s hands their one warmth.

She had forgiven him. This he knew, though there were times for many months afterward when she glanced at him with a tentative expression. Then, like a hummingbird, it would be gone. He asked Father Mark about it one time, about the ability for one person to forgive another. If forgiveness depended on fickle hearts like his own, God help them all.

“Only God is capable of all-encompassing forgiveness,” Father Mark told him over fettuccine Alfredo. “What we humans do, to badly mangle what the apostle Paul said, is like looking through a glass darkly. We forgive, then take it back over and over. But eventually, if our hearts are truly humble, God grants us a very close facsimile.”

He took a sip of Chardonnay and smiled at Gabe. “Sanctification, the working out of our being more like God who created us, takes us our whole lives, Gabriel. Benni loves you, my friend. How or why people love is something even that wise old homeboy Solomon never could figure out. Just accept the miracle and be grateful.”

Later that night, after he and Benni had come back from the Mission to their new house, they made love. She came to him openly, without hesitation. And though their moving together started gently, tentatively, toward the end, he lost himself in her, in a desperate and fearless passion that left them both breathless and filled, tears wetting their cheeks.

Afterward he curled around her, encircling her with his body. As her breathing slowed, her compact body twitching every so often as she fell toward sleep, he forced himself to stay awake, savoring this moment, trying to make it last a fraction longer. Once she gave a great start, awakened herself, then turned her head to look at him, her eyes filled with fear, not knowing him for a moment. Or perhaps knowing him and still being afraid.

“Querida,”
he said softly, not wanting to startle her further. “It’s only a bad dream. Go back to sleep.”

The knowledge of who he was flooded back into her face and her eyes fluttered and closed.

“A bad dream,” she repeated and laid her head down on the pillow.

“Sí, mi corazon,
a dream
.”

He curled around her again, cradling her body to his. Before he fell toward sleep, he sent up a prayer to the God he would never understand and whom he had no choice but to follow.

“Protect her,” he whispered to the shadows. “Protect us all through this long, dark night.”

Turn the page
for an exciting preview of

Sunshine and Shadow

the next Benni Harper mystery by
Earlene Fowler

Prologue

March 18, 1995

Saturday

Dove’s Wedding Day

“ARE YOU SCARED?” I asked my gramma Dove as I pinned the delicate spray of baby’s breath around her smooth white hair, arranged today in an elaborately braided bun. She had sent everyone away but me, her matron of honor and oldest grandchild. Her bright lupine blue eyes were glassy with excitement.

We stood in the pastor’s book-lined office at San Celina First Baptist Church. Muted conversation and laughter seeped through the thick mahogany door to the sanctuary. In ten minutes she would walk down the church’s center aisle clutching the solid right arm of her oldest son, my father, Ben Harper. The church, built a hundred years ago of smooth gray and tan stones dug from the hills of San Celina County, was filled to almost law-breaking capacity with five hundred people, including friends and neighbors, her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They were all excited for this momentous and unexpected occasion to commence.

“So, are you?” I asked again.

Dove turned away from the round mirror we’d hung next to the picture of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane to stare at me with solemn eyes. “Down to my very toes,” she said.

“Isaac loves you,” I replied, picking a speck of black lint off her lacy, sky blue dress. Isaac Lyons, world famous photographer, five-time-married man-of-the-world, had fallen face-down-in-love with my gramma from the first moment they met.

“Love isn’t always enough,” she said flatly, her still obvious Arkansas accent slightly slurring the words. She fingered one of her deep blue sapphire earrings, Isaac’s engagement gift.

I pondered her words for a moment, knowing what she said was true. “But sometimes you have to take that chance. Sometimes love is all you have.”

Her ample chest rose and fell in a sigh. “Maybe so.”

“It must be weird, getting married after all these years.”

Dove was seventy-seven years old and had been widowed since she was forty-two.

“Thirty-five years I’ve done as I’ve pleased.” She turned back to the mirror, critically eyeing her reflection. With a wetted finger, she smoothed down a stray piece of hair.

I looked at her reflection in the mirror, rearranged a small piece of baby’s breath. “Isaac won’t try to tell you what to do. He knows better.”

She smiled at herself. “Yes, he does.” Then her face turn soft with what seemed like sadness.

“Are you thinking of Grampa?” I asked.

Her eyes dropped, revealing the delicate blue veins on her eyelids. “How did you know?”

“I thought about Jack when Gabe and I got married.” Jack was my first husband, my high school sweetheart, who was killed three years ago in an auto accident.

Her eyes came back up and caught mine. “Both times?”

“Yes.” My second husband, Gabe Ortiz, and I had eloped to Las Vegas, but were married in a second ceremony in this very church a little over two years ago. “But especially when I was married here. Jack and I spent so much time here.” My own reflection showed a thirty-seven-year-old woman in a round-collared peach dress, reddish-blond hair pulled back in a French braid. I’d worn my hair up when I married Jack, in dancing curls that took a can of hair spray to hold in place.

“I am thinking about your grampa.”

“You still miss him.”

She ran a finger under one eye, uncomfortable with the mascara she was wearing. “You know how I feel. He was my first love.”

I slipped my arm around her shoulder. The stiff lace tickled my palm. “Remember standing in this room with me when I was getting ready to marry Jack? Daddy was so nervous. He still smoked then and I think he had ten cigarettes in ten minutes. He reeked of tobacco when we walked down the aisle.” I wrinkled my nose.

We both laughed. I had been nineteen, full of hope and excitement, bubbling over with youthful arrogance. Now I can look back and savor those carefree times, as brief as they seemed now. Perhaps we’re given those perfect moments to sustain us through the hard times that inevitably come as we maneuver through this life on earth.

“Your daddy is pacing outside the door right now,” she said. “He told me last night that he hopes all the women in his life are settled for a while, that he was tired of all the romantic intrigue.”

I grinned at her in the gray-tinted mirror. Part of my smile was hidden by a clover-shaped dark spot in the silver. “He needs some romantic intrigue of his own.” It would be hard to imagine my father in love. He’d been widowed himself for over thirty years.

A soft snort came from her pale pink lips. “I’ll leave that to you.”

From behind the wall we could hear the muffled sound of organ music. The door to the sanctuary opened and MacKenzie “Mac” Reid, our minister, walked in. His six-four, ex-football-player figure seemed to fill the warm room.

“How’re we doing, ladies?” he asked, grinning widely from behind his bushy chestnut beard. Forty-three and a widower himself, he was thrilled that Dove had found someone after all these years. “Means there’s hope for me,” he told us at the rehearsal dinner last night.

“How much time does she have left before walking the plank?” I asked, grinning back.

He glanced at his black sports watch. “Five minutes. Looks like everyone’s here.” He took both of Dove’s hands in his massive ones and gazed down at her with his gentle, pewter gray eyes. “Sister Ramsey, are you ready?”

There was a small moment of hesitation, then a strong, “As ready as I’ll ever be, Brother Mac.”

“Then I’ll see you out there.”

After he left, I grabbed her hand. “I’m so happy for you. It’s about time you had someone of your own.”

Her eyes grew misty. “Maybe this isn’t the right thing. Time is so short. One of us will have to survive being widowed again. Isaac has lost three wives to death. I’ve lost your grampa. I don’t know if I want to go through that again.” Her normally booming voice was low and afraid. It was a voice that had soothed me and scolded me, threatened me and praised me throughout my life. “I don’t know if I can.”

I paused a moment before answering, wanting to comfort her, wanting to help her through this dilemma as she had helped me through so many sad and difficult times in my thirty-seven years. She’d essentially been my mother since I was six years old and my own mother died of cancer. Without hesitation or complaint, she’d uprooted her whole life in Arkansas and moved to the Central Coast of California to help Daddy raise me as well as run the Ramsey ranch. She deserved this happiness.

I held her cold hand tightly, trying to transfer my hand’s warmth to hers. “Remember when Jack was killed and so many people were telling me that I was young, that I could still find someone, that my life wasn’t over, that I shouldn’t give up?”

She clucked under her breath. “People never just say they’re sorry. Always got to be giving advice.”

“Remember when I finally blew up and yelled at you that I was sick of people telling me what I should or shouldn’t do, that I never wanted to love anyone again, that I never, ever wanted to suffer the pain of losing someone again? You listened to me rant and rave and then told me that I didn’t have to, that I could sit in my room and do nothing for the rest of my life if I wanted and that you’d support me in that decision and would always love me and never nag me to do anything else.”

Her pink lips turned up in a smile “I lied. I did eventually nag you to start a new life.”

“Yes, but not at first. You let me wallow, you let me
grieve.
You gave me the gift of time. That was what I needed. Time to get used to my new life, a life that didn’t include Jack. I had to get used to that life before I could even think about having a life with someone else.”

She glanced up at the clock on the wall. Its ticking seemed like a tiny, insistent voice telling us time was running out.

“I know, get to the point. My point is, if you want to ditch this marriage and run back to the ranch, I’ll drive you. My truck is right outside. I’ll support you in whatever you want to do and I will love you no matter what. Just like you always have me. But first, tell me truly, how do you feel about this man?”

She sighed again. “I’ve had a long time to get used to a life without your grampa.”

“Yes, you have.”

“His passing tore my heart to shreds.”

“Yes, I know.” I continued to hold her hand.

“But I didn’t fall apart.”

“No, you didn’t. Ramsey women don’t fall apart. You’ve told me that more than once.”

“We had us some wonderful times, me and your grampa. Oh, honeybun, I wish you could have known him. He had the most beautiful singing voice. He was always a’singing, when we’d pick cotton and beans, when I was going through labor to have our babies, when they’d get the colic and couldn’t sleep. I knew he’d died when he was chopping wood because he quit singing in the middle of a song.”

She sang softly, “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine . . .” She stopped, swallowed hard. “He stopped right there and I knew something was wrong because he never stopped singing in the middle of a song, not in all the years I knew him.”