A Touch of Grace. Linda Goodnight

officer’s dark, rough hand rustled the plastic. “Are you ready, ma’am?”

      Shoulders stiff and resolute, she gave one curt nod.

      When the still face was revealed, Gretchen didn’t react. She knelt there, staring down for the longest time. At last, when Ian wondered if perhaps there had been some mistake and this wasn’t her sister after all, she nodded.

      “That’s Maddy.”

      The policeman slid the cover back in place and moved quietly away, leaving them alone. Gretchen still didn’t move.

      Another siren wailed in the distance. Across the street teenagers bounced a basketball while staring openly at the swarming police, trying to get a peek at the tragedy. Motors roared. Doors slammed. Voices carried on the morning air. Other news crews had arrived by now and were filming from outside the barrier.

      Regardless of her occupation, Ian wanted to get Gretchen away from the reporters.

      “Tell me what you need, Gretchen. What can I do?” Ian asked.

      “Do?” she asked. “Do?”

      She shot up from her knees, and that quick the barracuda returned. She turned on him, green eyes flashing fire. “I think you’ve done enough.”

      He had no idea what she meant, but the lady was distraught.

      He reached for her. “Gretchen.”

      She slapped his hands away, striking out like a wounded animal. “You don’t know me.”

      Ignoring the rejection, he offered his hand again, palm up. He couldn’t leave her like this. “You need to get away from here. Come on, I’ll take you inside the mission.”

      “Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Take me inside and feed me soup and a pack of lies. Tell me that you have all the answers to my problems like you did for my poor druggie sister.” Her face contorted in sarcasm. “You were different, Maddy said. You could help her get her life together.” She glanced from her sister’s still form to Ian, stabbing him with accusing green eyes. “Well, you really did a good job of that, didn’t you?”

      While Ian grappled to understand why he was the focus of her animosity, Gretchen Barker, the Channel Eleven barracuda, stormed across the wet grass to her van and drove away.

      Chapter Two

      The long, slow notes of “Amazing Grace” reverberated on the air and trembled into silence. Even in the worst of times, Ian found solace in his music and in the beautiful old saxophone his father had given him. Like the Psalmist David, he felt closer to God when he played than when he prayed.

      He leaned the instrument carefully against a chair and went to answer the knock on his office door.

      The bushy, gray mustache of Roger Bryant twitched at him from the doorway. “You fretting about something, son?”

      Roger always knew when something was eating at him. He claimed the saxophone sounded different. Ian figured it was true enough. Through his music he was able to express the emotions that otherwise stayed locked inside.

      Roger, skinny and frail with scraggly strands of gray hair slicked down with some kind of shiny oil, was one of Ian’s first success stories. At fifty-nine, his ash-gray face and broken body looked seventy, a testament to years of slavery to alcohol and self-loathing. Homeless and destitute after too many stints in county lockup, he’d asked Ian to help him get his life together. Then he’d stuck around to help run Isaiah House. For Ian, who loved the hands-on part of ministry but detested the business end, Roger had literally been an answer to prayer.

      “I just got off the phone with our lawyer,” he said to his friend.

      Roger, hampered by a hip badly in need of replacement, limped into the office. His basset-hound face showed little reaction to Ian’s statement. He wasn’t shaken by much. “Bad news, I guess?”

      Ian tilted his head in agreement. “The lawsuit will likely go to trial.” He’d thought the whole thing a joke at first.

      “Foolishness. Who would expect a Christian mission to allow pornographic magazines on-site?”

      “That’s my thinking. But even if a jury agrees, it will cost us a lot of money. And the mission can’t afford that right now.” Donations were down this summer for some reason while the need increased.

      “Want to know what I think?” Roger propped his bad hip against the edge of a desk littered with papers, files and orange soda cans.

      “You’re going to tell me anyway.”

      Roger grinned. Even then, his face looked soulful. “I think that lady politician is at the bottom of this somewhere.”

      “Marian Jacobs?” Ian rubbed at the knot forming along the top of his right shoulder. The mission had plenty of naysayers who would like to see it closed, or at least, moved elsewhere. Runaways and street kids were a blight on the thriving tourist industry and any number of nearby businesses wanted them gone. Marian Jacobs happened to be one of the more influential.

      “Yeah. Her. She wants to shut us down real bad.”

      Last winter, the city councilwoman had enforced some ridiculous zoning ordinance that kept him from setting up cots in the chapel on the coldest nights. Before that she’d complained long and hard about the negative impact Isaiah House had on the happy-go-lucky atmosphere of the tourist district. Her post-Katrina revitalization for the city did not include street people or the ministries designed to help them.

      “She doesn’t like me much, that’s for sure.” Outside his office window three bright red cardinals pecked at sunflower seeds sprinkled beneath a willow. “Your birds are about out of feed.”

      Roger doted on the birds, just as he did on the equally flighty runaways who landed at Isaiah House.

      “You going to Maddy’s funeral?” Leave it to Roger to cut to the chase.

      With all the other worries on his mind, the last thing Ian wanted to do on a hot, humid Friday afternoon was attend a funeral.

      “Sometimes being a minister stinks.” Most people would be shocked to hear him say such a thing. His mother for one. But not Roger. His placid face, lined and furrowed, never seemed shaken by anything Ian blurted out. He was about the only person Ian could share his frustrations and worries with.

      Ministers were always expected to do the right thing, even when it hurt. Ian wasn’t perfect but he didn’t like to disappoint anyone, either. He worked hard to avoid that feeling. Somehow he worried about alienating the people around him.

      His hand snaked into his pocket, found the familiar key chain and took it out. He’d had the thing forever, though he wasn’t even certain where it had come from. Maybe his parents had given it to him the time he’d been in the hospital with meningitis. He wasn’t sure, but he was certain that he’d been terrified then of being alone. Every time Mom and Dad had left the room, he’d thought they wouldn’t come back. So, he figured that’s when they’d given him the little fish that said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”

      Wherever the key chain had come from, the words never failed to comfort him.

      Funny that he would think of that now.

      “God called me to heal the brokenhearted, to set the captive free,” he said, paraphrasing his favorite verses from Isaiah. “Maddy was both. I didn’t do enough.”

      Roger clamped a bony hand on his shoulder. “How many times have you talked about free will, Ian? Maddy made her own decisions.”

      “Yeah. Bad ones.” He felt so inadequate at times like this. Wounded souls were his responsibility. That’s why he drove the streets for hours each night ministering to runaways and street kids. But nothing he did was ever enough.

      “You can’t help Maddy, but she’s got a sister.”

      Ian