Widows and Orphans by Susan Meissner

When her ultra–ministry–minded brother, Joshua, confesses to murder, lawyer Rachael Flynn begs him to let her represent him, certain that he is innocent. But Joshua refuses her offer of counsel.

As Rachael works on the case, she begins to suspect that Josh knows who the real killer is, but she is unable to get him to cooperate with his defense. Why won’t he talk to her? What is Josh hiding?

CHAPTER ONE

Rachael Flynn had just laid her two-month-old daughter down for a nap and had walked back into her living room when the ringing of the telephone split the early afternoon quiet.

She pushed aside the stack of legal briefs she had been perusing earlier that morning, which were strewn about the coffee table and hiding the cell phone that beckoned her. Rachael mentally reminded herself as she unearthed the phone that maternity leave meant she wasn’t obligated to wade through any of the files. But the polite plea that she stay current with the firm’s caseload while she enjoyed McKenna’s first six months at home had needled her that morning. She had grudgingly succumbed to the call of duty, even though it was a Sunday. She grabbed the phone and sat down on the couch. Her mother’s number blinked back at her on the phone’s tiny screen.

“Hey, Mom.”

“Rachael…” Her mother’s voice on the other end was thick with panic.

“What is it, Mom? What’s wrong?” A sliver of fear pierced the calm. Rachael’s first thought was that something terrible had happened to her father.

“Joshua has…” Her mother’s voice broke away in a sob. Joshua.

Rachael’s younger brother by five years. The missionary to the downtrodden. The hope of the homeless and fatherless. The zealot for social justice. The religious fanatic. The troublemaker.

Joshua was in trouble. Again.

“What has he done, Mom?” Rachael inquired. She didn’t even raise the end of her sentence in the curlicue way a question is spoken. She was tired of hearing the answers.

Her brother, Joshua, was a study in contrasts. A good man, a man of compassion, a man whose credo was easily “first do no harm.” He lived to ease the suffering of the most vulnerable. But he was a man who brazenly took the law into his own hands whenever he perceived it might right an injustice. For all the good he did, he seemed forever in trouble. Joshua had a criminal record in four Minnesota counties for being empathetic to a fault.

My brother is the only decent man I know who knows what it’s like to be in handcuffs, Rachael had said to Trace, her husband, on their first date, when he had asked about her family. She had learned it was best to be up front with people from the get-go when it came to explaining Joshua.

“Rachael, it’s…he’s…” Again her mother’s voice faltered.

As her mother’s words fell away half-spoken, Rachael exhaled heavily. She was continually torn between a lifelong desire to shelter Joshua from the cruelties of the world—like she did when he was young and she had influence—and wanting to clobber him for being so stubbornly independent. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what new offense Joshua had committed in the name of God and all things holy. She had lost count of how many times he had been arrested for being where he shouldn’t, doing what he ought not, and saying what he technically wasn’t free to say. Her mother was no doubt calling to ask for her legal advice yet again. What more could she say than what she had already said a hundred times over? As long as Joshua persisted in exercising his own brand of social justice, he would continue to land himself in jail. There wasn’t any way around it. She could only protect him from so much.

Rachael waited for her mother to finish. She eased back into the couch, tossing her infant daughter’s burp cloth onto the coffee table in front of her. She mentally flipped through the catalog of Joshua’s past offenses: blocking entry to abortion clinics, resisting arrest, obstructing legal process, interfering with police procedure, trespassing, breaking and entering, loitering, making false statements to the police. Mere misdemeanors and strongly worded citations. He had spent more time in court than in actual jail. What could he have possibly done this time?

When her mother remained silent, Rachael began again. “Mom, what did he do?”

“He’s…oh, Rachael, I can hardly say it!”

“Mom, please tell me!” Rachael exclaimed. Above her she could sense Trace looking down upon her from his art studio in the alcove above the living room.

Her mother’s voice wasn’t much more than a whisper. “He’s confessed to murder, Rachael! He told the police he killed someone!”

The air in the apartment stiffened around her. Echoes of the word murder seemed to float above her, uninvited and wholly in the suddenly airless space.

What her mother was saying was impossible.

Joshua was incapable of killing. He despised cruelty. Hated injustice. Detested abuse against the body and soul. Every infraction that put him behind bars and in front of a judge was related to wanting to ease suffering, save lives, and help the poorest and most helpless people, mostly destitute women and children. Above all, he was a walking monument to the sixth commandment. He was living testimony to all ten.

Since the time he was old enough to attend Sunday school, Joshua had been a modern-day prophet of God Almighty, afflicted with a passion for the holy that annoyed Rachael as much as it inspired her. He had the books of the Bible memorized before his own telephone number, and his childhood prayers at the dinner table were so lengthy their mother had to leave foil on the serving dishes when it was his turn to pray.

Joshua had always had an innate and unexplainable awareness of the spiritual realm, a keen sense of the divine as well as the profane that began as soon as he knew there was God and there was evil. In his younger years, he had often come tiptoeing into Rachael’s bedroom at night to sleep at the foot of her bed, or, even more often, to sleep on her floor with one hand on the door so that he could slam it shut on whatever minion of hell had chased him out of his own room and might possibly follow. It was a long time before Rachael realized he came to her room not for refuge, but to protect.

Her brother’s hypersensitivity to the forces of darkness had always scared Rachael, but strangely, his equally heightened awareness of the sacred unnerved her just as much. His fascination with the Trinity made him “other-like,” put him out of reach, and obviously made him different than the other boys in their St. Cloud neighborhood. Joshua had few playmates as a child and spent most of his free time drawing pictures of heaven and hell and staging elaborate battles between angels and demons with green plastic soldiers.

It worried her parents, too—especially their mother, Eva. It was most evident to Rachael how much their mother was troubled by her only son’s eccentric ways the Christmas he was six and Rachael was eleven. Eva had set up her olive wood nativity set in the entry on a tall mahogany table that boasted framed family portraits the other months of the year. On the night of a rather elaborately planned dinner party, Eva came downstairs to find that in addition to the three Wise Men giving the baby Jesus audience, there was also a contingent of Star Wars storm troopers, G.I. Joes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and several dinosaurs—all lined up in neat rows, as if paying quiet homage to the Infant Savior. With guests due to arrive at any minute, Eva yelled for Joshua and ordered him to “get those toys off that table!” But instead of rushing off to attend to last-minute details, Eva stood and watched her son dutifully but sorrowfully remove the toys with a look on her face that made Rachael, watching also, wince. Fear was in her mother’s eyes, not annoyance.

Much later, when the guests were getting ready to leave, Rachael, who had been helping her mother in the kitchen, noticed that the Baby Jesus wasn’t in His manger. The carefully arranged crèche was missing its Emmanuel. When she went upstairs to get ready for bed, Rachael peeked into her brother’s room and saw that the holy Babe was within the stiff curl of Joshua’s right fist, and clutched tightly to his chest as he slept. She never forgot how she felt when she saw her little brother clasping God to his bosom as if he would perish right there in his PJs should the Almighty be taken from him. She felt like that right now.

Afraid.

Two thoughts immediately crystallized for Rachael: first, it was unthinkable that Joshua could kill. And second, it would be her turn to protect Joshua. Her mind suddenly rushed to an image of Joshua at three, running to her in tears, arms out, afraid of a towering Hamburglar statue. They were at a McDonald’s restaurant and their mother was in line to buy cheeseburgers. She felt his young arms around her neck and heard herself say to him, “It’s okay. Sissy will protect you.” “Rachael!” Her mother shouted her name across time and space, bringing her back to the present.

And the only response Rachael could immediately give was the one she had no control over. Her milk let down.

Taken from Widows and Orphans by Susan Meissner
Copyright 2006 by Susan Meissner
Published by Harvest House Publishers, Eugene, OR
Used by permission.