LITMIR.BIZ

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pillow stuffed in his pants, playing chubby Friar Tuck. Jimmy had made up a corny skit about Sherwood Forest. The boys had run around, pretending to use bows and arrows while rescuing Maid Marian from the castle.

      Allie glanced at Scott’s face, expecting a brief smile, but his expression was as tight and full of pain as any she’d ever seen. Stunned by his response to the photo, she stammered, “What…what is it?”

      He turned hard eyes on her. “You don’t know?”

      “Know what?”

      “You don’t know about Jimmy?”

      Her mouth was suddenly as parched as a desert. Living with her parents in the east and going to college there had cut her off from any of her Colorado contacts, and since she’d been back at the start of the school year, she hadn’t heard anything of the Davidsons until the church letter from Scott. “What is it? What happened?”

      She saw him clench his hands so tightly that the veins stood up like purple chords. “He was murdered.”

      “Murdered,” she echoed, cursing herself for not knowing. Oh, dear God, why hadn’t someone told her?

      “Two years ago.” He drew in a deep breath, trying to control the raging anger that was still there. “Jimmy was killed in a street fight that broke out during a demonstration against drug houses.”

      “Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

      Scott’s lips twisted bitterly. “If it hadn’t been for me, my brother wouldn’t have been killed that night.”

      “You can’t blame yourself for something that was out of your control.”

      “Oh, it was under my control, all right. When some Christian young people from various churches were trying to get a handle on some of the street gangs, I talked Jimmy into helping. He always did what I wanted him to do, and was my shadow growing up. My mother kept telling me whatever happened to him would be on my conscience. She was right. It should have been me, not Jimmy, who died in the streets.”

      “But you couldn’t have known what was going to happen.” Allie tried to take his hand but he jerked it away.

      “I decided not to go on the demonstration because I had a religious seminar that night, but Jimmy went. If God wasn’t going to protect him that night, I should have been there, watching out for him. Instead of wasting my time listening to someone preach about God’s goodness.”

      “God is good. Jimmy was a victim of the free choice between good or evil that all people have—why blame God?”

      “Because the shape the world’s in is proof enough for me that God is an absentee Lord. I’m through believing that there’s a divine power interested in me or anyone else. Someone else can carry the banner high—and get killed for it. Not me.”

      “Aren’t you being a little self-indulgent?”

      His jaw tightened. “Save your Sunday school lectures, Allie. I’ve heard them all before.”

      She searched for some way to help him through the guilt that was obviously eating him alive, but her master’s degree in counseling seemed totally inadequate in the face of his bitterness. Not only had he changed on the outside, but a loss of faith was like a malignancy eating away at his soul.

      He stood up. “I’m sorry you made the trip for nothing, Allie. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to working on a hundred details that have to be cleared up before the property sells. You can see for yourself how impossible it would be to get the camp in any kind of shape in less than two weeks.”

      She grabbed the objection like a fish to a hook. “That wouldn’t be a problem. I know we could get a working crew from the church to come up and put the place in order.”

      “I don’t have time to oversee—”

      “I do,” she said brightly, standing up and facing him. “I’m on my summer break from my school counselor’s job. You could leave everything to me and go about your business getting ready to sell the place. You see, there’s this little boy, Randy Cleaver. He’s been on the streets most of his life because of alcoholic parents and there’s a little girl who’s losing her hearing—”

      “Save it, Allie. I told you I’m way past trying to fix the ills of the world.”

      “I know.” She paused, searching for guidance, and suddenly divine inspiration like a heavenly butterfly flitted through her thoughts. She knew exactly what approach she should use to touch his conscience. “I was really thinking about Jimmy and your dad. This place has always been special to them.”

      “What are you getting at?”

      “Even now, Rainbow Camp really belongs as much to your father and brother as it does to you, doesn’t it? If Sam and Jimmy were here, I don’t think they’d disappoint a bunch of kids who have their hearts set on coming to summer camp.”

      “But Dad and Jimmy aren’t here, are they?”

      “I believe they are, in spirit, and you know what they would want you to do,” she countered.

      Of course he knew. Anger built up in Scott that he was the one who had been left to deal with the past.

      Abruptly he walked away from her, and as he let his gaze travel around the room, his heart tightened. Jimmy’s worn baseball glove lay on the shelf where Allie had removed the photo albums, and in a nearby corner of the room stood several fishing rods where his dad had left them.

      Scott put his hand on the mantel of the fireplace, and bent his head as his ears were suddenly filled with remembered sounds; his dad thumping out a hymn on the old piano, and Jimmy’s boyish voice on the stairs. His shoulders went slack.

      You know what they would want you to do.

      Finally, he lifted his head, turned around, and looked at Allie with those intense eyes of his. She drew in a prayerful breath as she waited for him to speak.

      Please, God.

      “All right, Allie. You win,” he said in a thick voice of surrender. “In memory of Dad and Jimmy, you can have your church camp one more time.”

      “Thank you.”

      She could have hugged him in joyful relief, but he was already walking toward the door, opening it, as if anxious to have her gone.

      Chapter Two

      Why did you agree to her request? Scott asked himself as he endeavored to put his thoughts in order after a restless night.

      His time plan for turning the property over to a Realtor for immediate listing had been ambushed by a blue-eyed charmer from his past. When he’d heard Allie Lindsey’s voice on his answering machine, he’d felt an undefinable quiver of excitement, but as soon as she had stated her business, the joy had died. The few days he’d spent in the old house had been trying enough, but enduring a two-week church camp would only create a situation that he’d been trying to avoid. The last thing he wanted to do was to surround himself with a past that had promised so much, and delivered only heart-wrenching disappointment.

      The camp was, also, far from being ready for twenty kids and their chaperones. His father’s death six weeks ago had put an end to any preparations for the summer. Scott had been slow in picking up the reins and canceling reservations because his father had not kept any kind of organized records. Fortunately, the Irish couple, Patrick and Dorie O’Toole, who worked for his dad had filled him in on the summer schedule.

      The O’Tooles had helped Sam run the camp for more than fifteen years. They’d been friends with Scott since he was eleven years old, and all the summers that he and Jimmy had spent in Colorado, the couple had been almost family. The boys had spent lots of nights at their house, listening to Patrick play the guitar, and eating Dorie’s good cooking whenever they got the chance. Patrick was a raw-bone handyman who did everything from handling the camp’s maintenance to supervising

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