Presumed Guilty

Deadlock
Breach of Promise Sins of the Fathers

The Darwin Conspiracy Circumstantial Evidence Final Witness
Blind Justice
The Nephilim Seed City of Angels* Angels Flight*
Angel of Mercy* A Greater Glory A Higher Justice A Certain Truth Glimpses of Paradise

My life is marked by contrasts — then and now, light and darkness. Heaven and hell.
Marked too by memory.
I remember the exact moment it started.
In fact, in a perverse recollection of detail, I even know what I

was wearing — Dockers slacks and a blue golf shirt with the Wailea Emerald Course logo on it. My shoes were the brown slip-ons my wife had bought for me online a couple of months earlier. No socks.

I was in my office, looking out the window at the stunning view of the valley. The church occupied twenty of the most valuable acres in Southern California, prime property we bought when we outgrew our smaller space in Northridge ten years before.

And I can remember my thought patterns that day, leading up to the moment she walked in. I was thinking of Moses, another mountaintop man, and how his human frailty kept him from the Promised Land. He struck the rock, and water flowed, but he had disobeyed God.

As I was about to do.
And that is why I am here.
A jail cell is smaller than it looks in some old James Cagney movie.

When you’re in one it doesn’t seem possible for life to continue, for the paper-thin fragility that is human existence to sustain itself. But since my life has ceased to exist, I suppose nothing is lost.
Do I suppose I can regain my life by writing down these confessions? Or am I writing just so I can eventually place another volume on my shelf?
Yes, even within these walls, my ambition bares its teeth and grinds through the lining of my guilt. Maybe that’s why I’m here. Maybe that’s why God put me here after all.
Maybe that’s why I did the unthinkable.

Unthinkable, at least, if you were to look at me ten years ago. Even five. Then you would have seen a star. Not a comet, flaming out, a fading tail of cosmic dust in its wake.

Then I fell, let it all slip away, that day in my office overlooking the valley.
How did it happen? All I know is that, somehow, it began.
It began with a plea.

A note of hopelessness vibrated under the girl’s voice, a soft trilling like a night bird’s cry. Ron Hamilton felt it in his chest — an electric snap, a static in the heart.

“I’ll do anything I can,” he told the girl. She must have been around twenty, though he had long since given up guessing ages. When he turned fifty a year ago, he was certain selected segments of his brain went into meltdown, like a kid’s snow cone on a hot summer day.

“I’ve done a terrible thing, I don’t know what to do.” The girl looked at the floor, and when she did, Ron couldn’t help noticing her shape under the snug dress. It was a red summery thing, with thin straps over the shoulders. Before he could stop it, his gaze lingered, then he forced himself to look away. His focus landed on his seminary diploma, hanging on his office wall. Doctor of Divinity. But he couldn’t keep looking at it and give her the attention she deserved.

How was he going to avert his eyes if this interview continued? Best thing he could do was put her at ease, then ease her out of the office. The interview would be over and he’d pass her off to someone else, maybe the professional counseling team the church had an arrangement with.

“I’m sorry. Let’s back up.” He looked at the Post-It note on his desk, the one where he’d scribbled her name:
Melinda Perry
.
“How long have you been coming to church here, Melinda?”
“Little less than a year.”
Ron didn’t recognize her face. But then, with the church at
roughly eight thousand members, it would have been easy for her to blend in. So many others did.

“What attracted you here?” he asked, putting his marketing hat on. He couldn’t help himself sometimes. Seventeen years of good marketing sense had built up Hillside Community Church.

Another electrical snap went off inside him. And this time it tripped an alarm.
Danger here. Remember last year . . .
Yet he found himself wanting to know exactly what Melinda Perry meant. What could that hurt?
“I listened to you on the radio,” she said.
Made sense. His sermons were recorded and played on L.A.’s
second largest Christian radio station. Three times throughout the week.
“Well, I’m glad somebody’s listening.” He laughed.
She didn’t laugh. “You don’t know what it meant. You saved my life.”
Now he was hooked. “Really?”
“Oh, yes. You preach from the Bible, right?”
“Always.” Well, he attached Bible verses to his favorite topics.
“You were talking about something to do with heaven. Do you remember that?”
He fought the temptation to smile. “I talk about heaven quite a bit — ”
“In this one, you said heaven was going to be a place, a
real
place, where we’ll live.”
“Yes, what the Bible calls the new earth.”
“And streets made out of gold and all that?”
“All that, yes.”
“And I was thinking of snuffing my candle, Pastor Ron, I really was. You don’t know what I’ve been through.” She paused. “Anyway, I was flipping around the radio stations and I heard you. I heard your voice. I thought what a nice voice. You really have cool tones, Pastor.”
“Thanks.” Heat seeped into his cheeks.
“And what you said about heaven made me cry, it really hit me, and that’s why I started coming to Hillside. I sit in the back mostly. I don’t want people to get too close to me.”
“But why not?”
“That’s part of the reason I’m here. To tell you why.”
Did she have a boyfriend? She looked like she could have many boyfriends.
“But I’m afraid,” she said.
“Of what?”
“Talking about it.”
He wanted to know. “Would it help to talk to a professional counselor? I can arrange for you to have a free session with a — ”
“No. I want to talk to you. You’re the only one who can help me.”
“There are others who are trained — ”
“No.”
She almost sounded angry. “You have to tell me first.”
“Tell you what?”
“If God can ever forgive me.”
Without so much as a beat, he ran off a familiar message. “That’s what God does best. He forgives us. Anything.”
“Anything? Even something so bad . . .” She looked down.
There was no way he was going to let her go now. He almost got up to put a comforting hand on her shoulder, but the alarm sounded again, and he stayed in his chair.
“Go ahead and tell me. Take your time.”
He watched her chest rise with breath.
“All right,” she said. “It started this way.”

The boy looked at her, confused, then shook his head. “That’s not a pirate.”
“You think all pirates have to say
argh
?”
The boy, a six-year-old named Jamaal, nodded tentatively.
“How boring! You can be any kind of pirate you want. That’s the thing about the imagination. And this ship can be as big as you want it to be.”
Dallas picked up the square of Styrofoam from the craft table, took a straw, and stuck it in the middle of the square. The boy and his mother watched Dallas as if she were a diamond cutter.
“See that?” Dallas said. “That’s the mast.”
“What’s a mast?” Jamaal said.
“The place where the sail goes. We’re going to put a sail on the straw, see?” Dallas held up a square of construction paper. “And that’s how you get a sailing ship. And here’s the best part.” Dallas took a couple of thumbtacks and a rubber band from the clear plastic box on the craft table. She’d carved out a square section from the stern of the foam boat and now secured the rubber band across that span with the tacks.
“This is where we’re going to put the paddle. You wind it up in the rubber band, and it’ll make the boat go in the water. No batteries required.”
“That’s nice, huh, Jamaal?” the boy’s mother said. Her name was Tiana Williams. She was twenty-three, but to Dallas she looked ten years older. The ugly puffiness around Tiana’s right eye was part of the reason. It marred what was otherwise a pretty face of smooth, dusky skin.
“That’s your ship,” Dallas said, “and you don’t have to be like any other pirate. You can say
whoop-de-do
or any other word you want.”
Jamaal smiled. It was what Dallas had been looking for all along. Smiles rarely occurred inside the women’s shelter on Devonshire. Six years ago, the church board at Hillside Community gave Dallas the go-ahead to start Haven House, a place where abused women could find safety. The board appointed her to oversee the daily operations and fund-raising. She also taught classes in child rearing and women’s self-defense.
On a couple of occasions, she’d given a room in her own home to one of the women, for a few days anyway, when Haven House got overcrowded. Ron, good husband and Christian that he was, supported her all the way.
Her favorite place, though, was right here in the craft room, where the kids could imagine and create. So many of the women had children with them.
“Would you like to color some?” Dallas asked Jamaal. The boy looked at his mother. Tiana nodded.
Dallas got a fresh coloring book and a box of crayons from the cabinet and set Jamaal up at one end of the craft table. There was a little girl there, hunched over her own book. Jamaal grabbed a red crayon, opened his coloring book, and took to his work with an optimism that made Dallas want to weep.
“You got kids?” Tiana asked as they watched Jamaal.
“Two,” Dallas said.
“How old?”
“My daughter, Cara, is twenty-seven. Jared, my son, is twenty
four.”
“They turn out all right, don’t they?” The anguish in Tiana’s voice was familiar. Dallas had heard the same anxiety in countless voices over the years. “I want Jamaal to be all right. I don’t care about anything else.”
Dallas had no doubt about Tiana’s sincerity. It was her choices that mattered most, and she would have to make one right here and now. “Tiana, you can’t go back to where you were.”
Tiana looked at Dallas with sunken eyes, cavernous with dread. “I’ve got nowhere else to go.”
“We have a network of places, rooms. We can find something.”
“Got no way to pay for it.”
“We can help get you on your feet. Maybe look for a job with you.”
“What do you know about it?”
Dallas put her hand on Tiana’s arm. “Don’t go back, Tiana. Let me help find you a place.”
Tiana pulled her arm away. “Jamaal needs a father.”
“He’s an abuser, he — ”
“I can talk to him. I know how.”
“No, you can’t, not someone like that.”
“You don’t know him.”
“I know about abusers.”
Tiana slapped the table with her open palm. “I can talk to him! He loves me and Jamaal, and you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Tiana paused. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“Maybe I know more than you think. I was down pretty low once, had someone who took it out on me, but God was there to pull me up.”
Tiana shook her head. “I used to go to church. With my mama, before she died.”
“Our church isn’t far from here. My husband’s the pastor. We’d love to have you and Jamaal come.”
“Your husband preaches?”
“He’s wonderful. Has a radio program. You may have heard him sometime.”
“Don’t listen to the radio much.”
Jamaal’s voice broke in. “Look, Mama!” He was holding up the coloring book, which was now a madcap swirl of multicolored lines.
“That’s good, baby,” Tiana said, as if willing herself to believe it. “That’s real good.”
“It’s a pirate ship,” he said.
“A big one, huh?” said Dallas.
Jamaal nodded and said, “Whoop-de-do.”
Dallas’s heart melted into a mixture of hope and uncertainty.
Oh, Lord, let these two make it. Please, let them make it.