Redemption (9 page)

That afternoon they had worked out for nearly an hour, sometimes only a few feet from each other. He caught her eye several times, and she met his gaze before returning to her work. When he finished his routine, he took a drink of water and paused as close to her as he dared.

He hesitated, knowing she’d probably laugh at him and send him on his way. Still he smiled at her and wiped his forehead with a towel. “New?”

“Mmmm.” She ripped off a set of ten squats, straightened, and studied the length of him. For the first time that afternoon the haughty look in her eyes faded slightly, and she grinned. “You’re a jock, right?”

Dirk remembered how his face grew hot as her question unwittingly hit a sore spot in his soul.

His brothers had played ball, but he’d stayed away. Who wanted to dribble a ball up and down a court for hours on end or spend long days with fifteen sweaty guys who thought life happened in a dugout? Guys whose greatest accomplishment was hitting a ball over a fence or kicking it over a goal line? Guys who were entertained by seeing how far they could spit a wad of tobacco?

Then there was the other problem, the one he never talked about.

Dirk was afraid of getting hurt.

Though his brothers reveled in the physical contact of sports, Dirk could see only the grim possibilities. The concussion in football, the broken nose in basketball, the pulled muscles in track. And in baseball . . . well, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what would happen if a ninety-mile-per-hour fastball made contact with your face.

No, sports had never had a pull on him.

So Dirk had gone his own way and joined the marching band. Drum major. And like his friends, he had paid the price with hours of weekend practice. Sure, there were girls in the band who became his friends. But not the kind of pretty honeys who came calling for his brothers. In the high school social structure, girls who looked like Angela Manning recognized the fact that drum majors were beneath their rank. They rarely gave him more than a polite passing nod—and that only because his brothers were part of the golden circle.

Was he a jock?

Four years of high school memories swarmed in Dirk’s head that afternoon in the weight room as Angela waited for an answer. He opened his mouth to lie to her, to tell her that yes, in fact, he was. But in that instant he caught a glance of his reflection in the mirror and realized something.

He wasn’t in high school anymore.

His brothers were at separate universities a hundred miles away. He was tall and tan, and he’d put on twenty pounds of muscle since arriving at Indiana University. He smiled at Angela and said, “Drum major.”

She arched an eyebrow, cocked her head, and let her eyes run lazily from his face to his feet. Her grin was just short of suggestive. “You don’t look like a . . . drum major.”

A new feeling coursed through Dirk’s heart, and it took him a moment before he recognized it: confidence. He allowed himself to be lost in Angela’s bright blue eyes, and he smiled again. “And you?”

She lowered her chin, eyeing him playfully. “Journalist.”

“Journalist?” Dirk had never been on this side of the game before, but he’d seen his brothers play it a hundred times. He imitated her, his eyes drifting over her body and back to her face. “You don’t look like a . . . journalist.”

She lifted the corner of her T-shirt and wiped at the sweat on her brow, exposing most of her stomach and causing Dirk to inhale sharply. When the shirt was back in place, she planted her hands on her hips. “I’m free tonight. Want to show me around?”

The evening had been like something from a dream, and four days later they had slept together. Dirk was only nineteen that summer, four years younger than Angela, but she didn’t seem to care. They were together almost every night until school started. She was bright and quick-witted, and she admitted once that she wanted a houseful of children.

Just like he did.

Dirk was sure he’d found the girl of his dreams, the woman he was going to marry.

Things between him and Angela had cooled a little once school started last fall. He told himself that was to be expected because Angela was a senior and really dedicated to her studies. But they still had their moments, weekends when she spent the night and whispered words of love so sweet and true that Dirk had not a single doubt that one day they’d be married. He was so sure that a month before Christmas he had bought her an engagement ring. He told his parents about her, even told them he was going to propose.

“Are you sure? Isn’t it a bit soon?” His mother sounded worried about the engagement, but Dirk had never felt more sure about anything in his entire life.

Then, one week before he planned to pop the question, he had seen Angela and the professor at one of the tables in the cafeteria. His stomach had slipped down to his knees as he watched Angela tip her head back and laugh when the professor spoke. The way her eyes danced from across the room, the way she seemed lost to everything but their conversation.

That same week she stopped answering his phone calls, refused to return his messages. By the time Christmas came around, they were barely speaking to each other. Still, Dirk remained undaunted. Angela was merely going through a phase—soul-searching, his father used to say.

She didn’t love the professor. He was too old for her, too . . . too married.

No matter what Angela said or did, Dirk was sure that deep inside, her heart still belonged to him. Would always belong to him. He could wait for her to come around. She was worth it.

Time passed, and Angela went home to Boston for the summer. Dirk used the time to perfect his workout and hone his body. He was sure that come fall the professor would be out of the picture. But days into the new semester, he realized that Angela was spending more and more time with the man. And that was when Dirk started keeping closer tabs on the situation. Often Dirk was not far away when the two of them would leave the journalism building or the cafeteria or walk across campus together.

Dirk didn’t think he was acting crazy, really. Just keeping an eye on a woman who would one day be his wife. But he had never expected to catch Angela and the professor together at her apartment. Alone. The way she and Dirk had been when they first fell in love.

Dirk imagined the gun, its smooth black handle, and pictured it in its box, safely tucked beneath his bed. He needed it, no question about it. He couldn’t stand by and watch Angela be taken advantage of by a man who was supposed to be a trusted teacher, a mentor.

But even with all his determination, Dirk hadn’t done anything to stop it. Sure, he’d called the professor’s wife, but that had just made things worse.

He fingered the bottle of pills in his hand and watched the professor and Angela finish eating lunch, laughing, sharing quiet secrets. The whole thing made him furious, filled him with an unspeakable rage. That’s why he needed the gun. In case Angela didn’t come to her senses soon.

Dirk imagined himself cornering the professor, putting the gun to his head. Talking some sense into the guy with a little added persuasion.

He frowned, grabbed an industrial-size bottle of ketchup, and left the storeroom. He had work to do now, but the professor’s day was coming. The gun would scare him away from Angela. It was just a matter of choosing the right time.

Chapter Seven

Tim Jacobs knew he was no saint. He had cheated on his wife. He had lied too many times to count. But even with all the questionable choices he’d made, the one that never even tempted him involved the liquid gold that came in a bottle.

Raised in a home of teetotalers, Tim had not been exposed to alcohol’s seductive lure, and the stories he heard about its wily way of possessing a man left him determined to avoid it. In his high school and college days, he had no trouble saying no to the beer and hard liquor available at parties. Booze was a crutch, and back then Tim had prided himself on not ever needing one. Even in grad school and his newspaper days, when his friends relaxed with a beer after long days in the library or on the job, he had been perfectly comfortable enjoying the company but not the drinking that went with it.

Tim’s parents had moved to Indonesia the summer before he entered college, and among the pieces of parting wisdom they left him with was this one: Don’t join a fraternity; the hazing could kill you.

It was true. Tim had read about a case once where a 4.0 student who was his family’s pride and joy entered college and a week later participated in a hazing ritual. The frat boys forced him to drink half a bottle of gin in an hour’s time. Not wanting to be mocked or to fail the initiation, the student did as he was told and promptly passed out on the floor. Sometime before morning the gin worked its way through the boy’s system, emptying the contents of his stomach. When his newfound frat buddies checked on him the next day he was dead, suffocated in his own vomit.

And death wasn’t the only problem associated with drinking. There was also the chance that Tim might wind up like his uncle Frank, which, at least by his mother’s standards, might actually be worse.

Uncle Frank was his mother’s younger brother, and Tim had seen him only twice. The first time was when Tim was eight or ten and Uncle Frank came for Christmas. Even as a young schoolboy, Tim could tell there was something different about Uncle Frank. His hair was unruly, the soles of his shoes worn clear through. But the most obvious oddity about Uncle Frank that year was his breath.

Having no knowledge of such things, Tim wasn’t sure what caused the smell until late that Christmas Eve. Everyone else was asleep when Tim sneaked downstairs to see if he could make out any surprises near the Christmas tree. Instead, he spied Uncle Frank near the coat closet, a bottle of amber liquid raised to his lips.

He remembered hearing his parents talk later that week about Uncle Frank and his alcohol addiction. When Tim asked his mother what that was, she told him some people could drink alcohol now and then and it wouldn’t hurt them. Other people had a disease that, whenever they had even a little, would make them drink until they dropped.

Uncle Frank had the disease.

Every now and then—say in June, on Uncle Frank’s birthday—Tim would catch his mother crying and know it was because of her brother.

The second time Uncle Frank came around, Tim was a junior in high school. That spring afternoon he showed up at their front door, staggering and reeking with a stench Tim had never imagined before. The man’s clothes were tattered and stained, and he had a backpack of half-empty liquor bottles with him.

While Tim’s father was in the next room getting a soapy washcloth, Tim stared at his uncle. “Why do you do this? Don’t you know it hurts my mom and dad?”

Uncle Frank had leveled his gaze and given Tim an answer he never forgot: “It’s one way to stop the pain.”

Tim’s father brought Uncle Frank in that day, cleaned him up, and gave him a sandwich. That night he drove Uncle Frank to a facility where he could “dry out.” Drying out, Tim’s parents explained, was a horrific process in which a person addicted to alcohol would sometimes undergo terrible hallucinations and bone-chilling pain, a mental place that would convince a man he’d died and gone to hell.

Tim’s two encounters with Uncle Frank made such an impression on him that until he moved in with Angela, he had never considered taking a drink. After all, what if his parents were right? What if he had inherited the gene, the peculiarity in his system that would make him an alcoholic like Uncle Frank?

It simply wasn’t worth it.

But after he moved in with Angela, Tim’s attitude began to change. For one thing, she liked wine—found it fun to experiment with different types and vintages. Often she enjoyed “loosening up” with a glass or two when she came home. She made it seem not only harmless but also pleasant, and Tim began to think he’d been a little too rigid all those years. After all, Angela was never drunk or out of control like Uncle Frank.

But something else was affecting him, too—a quiet, underlying pain in Tim’s soul, a pain he hadn’t known existed. It came as something of a surprise because, after all, it had been his decision to leave. And he still figured the best thing was for him and Kari to divorce quickly so they could get on with their lives.

Tim figured the pain came as a result of something he had no control over—a spiritual guilt that had been trained into him since childhood. It was a kind of guilt that chafed at him and made him wonder if Kari was praying for him. Not that her prayers would affect him, but either way he couldn’t get around his feelings. The guilt was so strong at times it was paralyzing.

He was in love with Angela, true. In her arms he felt as if he’d been given another chance at life. But there were other times when he’d be lecturing to a class and catch himself in midsentence, not sure what he’d said or where his train of thought was going.

Then there was his office time. Sitting alone in the shadows of his own guilt, the pain of what he’d done to Kari was suffocating.

The problem was, these feelings had begun carrying over into his time with Angela. Though the holy whispers were gone, though the tears hadn’t come for a while now, he couldn’t shake the memory of Scripture verses he’d memorized as a boy.

And never had it been worse than that night. He’d had a long day and was about to use his new key on the apartment door when Angela opened it first.

He leaned against the doorframe and allowed a slow smile to creep up the sides of his face. “So,” he drawled suggestively, “where were we?”

Some words from the book of Revelation kicked in before Angela had a chance to respond.

Remember the height from which you have fallen!

Angela must have said something because she lowered her brow. “Tim? Did you hear me? I was talking to you, and you had this . . . I don’t know, this faraway look, like you weren’t even listening.”

Tim laughed, but it sounded nervous even to him. “Sorry . . . long day.”

Her grin made his knees weak. “Well, then, welcome home.” She moved her toned body to one side so Tim could see far enough into the apartment to notice lit candles and dimmed lights. Something freshly baked mingled with a smell that was sweet and intoxicating. Her hand found his. “I’ve been thinking about you all day.”