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“We work to educate here,” Susan told him. “To reduce the odds. As far as a single church’s ratio of domestic violence cases, the probability gets higher, the more people you have in a congregation.”
Gabriel looked troubled. “But you can’t tell by looking?”
Susan shook her head. “That’s one of the challenges we face—the perception that you can just look at someone and tell if that person is being abused or is an abuser. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. Domestic violence doesn’t know income, economic, racial or cultural boundaries. And domestic violence doesn’t just mean physical violence. It can take many forms.”
Gabriel had seen no less than five women he recognized from Good Shepherd. Unless he’d completely missed his mark, Good Shepherd was having a domestic violence problem. And if what Susan said was true, there was no way for him to know if a church member or couple was in trouble unless something was said or a couple came in for counseling.
Was he so out of touch with his membership that he hadn’t even realized that?
As if reading his mind, Susan said, “It helps when local leaders can see firsthand the work we do here. I especially wanted you, as the new pastor of Good Shepherd, to be on board with our mission and goals.”
“I’m seeing your mission,” he said. “What are those goals?”
“You’re just seeing a part of the big picture, Reverend. I’d like to show you the rest on another day.”
He hedged. “I have quite a busy schedule.”
“Too busy to make a connection with a neglected part of the community? To meet the people who for too long have had a blind eye turned to their suffering?”
“I sense of note of censure,” he said.
Susan shrugged. “I think it’s deserved,” she said, pulling no punches.
He raised a brow, reminded that beautiful roses had deadly thorns.
“Pardon me for being so blunt,” Susan said. “But there is a need here in this community, the very community served by Galilee, yet despite today, we haven’t been able to get an audience with anyone from Good Shepherd.”
“I’m here now.”
“Only because I corralled you.”
He tucked his hands in the pockets of his slacks. “You have an interesting approach, Mrs. Carter. I thought the idea was to garner my cooperation.”
“It was. And is,” she said. “The frustration is a result of what it took to get your attention.”
Gabriel looked at her in a new light. Had she flirted with him at the picnic just to get him to agree to visit her shelter?
Chapter Five
“That’s why I wanted you to visit Galilee, Reverend Dawson. It’s one thing for people to make a financial commitment to a nameless, faceless charity or cause. It’s something else entirely when you can make the personal connection. When you can look into the eyes of someone who needs help or talk to someone who has been helped.”
Gabriel considered what she had said. This time he didn’t mistake the censure in her voice. It was a quiet but definitive reproach. “What have I done that makes you so hot under the collar?”
There was a time to be coy and a time to be blunt.
Folding her arms across her chest, Susan stared him down. “It’s not what you’ve done, Reverend. It’s what you haven’t done.”
Since he’d been called to Good Shepherd, Gabriel’s focus had been on getting to know community leaders, assessing the congregation’s many needs, and encouraging members to take part in the whole church, existing programs as well as ones he proposed. In addition, he had to stay a step ahead of all the matchmakers who filled the pews. He had a vision for the church, one that he’d promised to implement when he’d been hired as pastor. So he didn’t take too kindly to Susan Carter’s assessment of him as a slacker.
He leaned back in his chair, steepled his hands and met her direct gaze. “What is it, Mrs. Carter, that you see I’m not doing?”
Rising, Susan came around her desk and faced him. “For starters, don’t you think it’s odd that so many of your members or regular visitors call the Galilee Women’s Shelter home? You asked me about the odds, but you didn’t ask the next obvious question.”
“Which is what?” He folded his arms. Then, recognizing the defensive gesture for what it was, he carefully placed his arms along the chair rests.
“Have you given any thought to how you and Good Shepherd might reach out to those women and others in need?”
“I take it you have a proposition?”
“Not a proposition, Reverend. A reality check.”
He shifted in his seat, bristled at her characterization. “My feet are firmly planted on a solid foundation, Mrs. Carter.”
“Let me show you the community. Let me show you what we’re fighting every single day.”
She leaned over and pulled from a stack of file folders a single thick file. Handing it to him, she said, “That’s just the last two weeks of articles from the local newspapers, The Gazette and the Colorado Springs Sentinel, as well as the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News. Street crimes, domestic violence calls to police—up. Drugs and crimes that can be directly attributed to drugs—up. The problems here in Colorado Springs have the potential to spill into other areas. Containment is what city officials like Mayor Montgomery are after.”
Gabriel flipped through some of the clippings. He’d read many of the same stories and had seen television news reports, yet he hadn’t connected the dots in quite the same way as Susan.
“What’s the trickle-down effect of this?” he asked, holding up the folder.
“The woman who ran in here earlier,” Susan said. “That’s trickle-down. An increased number of women and children seeking shelter. More and more children and teens left alone, fending for themselves, they find solace in the very thing that’s destroying this community.”
“Drugs?” he asked.
Susan nodded. “And gangs, where they find the family or the bonding they don’t have at home.”
He glanced at more of the newspaper articles before closing the folder and placing it on her desk.
“Let me show you the human effect.”
He nodded once. “All right.”
When he left the shelter after almost two hours, Gabriel had a handful of handouts featuring statistics, demographics. But he hadn’t seen these statistics. Susan was right. He hadn’t been out in the trenches.
That would change tomorrow afternoon.
Susan wasn’t sure she’d gotten through to him, but she knew one thing for certain: he’d gotten through to her. She chided herself for getting distracted by his eyes, the color of dark chocolate and so penetrating that she wondered if anything ever got past him.
She thought herself prepared to impartially lead Reverend Gabriel Dawson on a tour of the Galilee Avenue area the next day. She’d dressed carefully—for both the minister’s benefit and to acknowledge that they’d be doing a lot of walking—in a pair of blue pants, a cream twinset rimmed in blue, and comfortable flats.
She’d expected him to show up in one of his designer-looking suits, clothing that would immediately peg him an outsider in the neighborhood, as maybe a cop or a government worker. Susan’s mouth dropped open when he stepped into the reception area.
“Gorgeous, isn’t he?” Jessica said.
Susan started, dragging her gaze off the minister, who stood chatting with Christine at the front desk. “I…He—” She cleared her throat and started again. “We’re going on a walk around the neighborhood.” As if to prove her words, she snatched up a stack of the shelter’s brochures.
Jessica grinned at her.
“What?” Susan snapped.
“Oh, nothing,” Jessica said. Susan’s sudden ill-temper made her smile.
“And why are you even here?”
“Just dropping this off for you, boss.”
Susan rolled her eyes at the “boss” label. Though she was, she always viewed herself as more of a battlefield coordinator.
“Enjoy your date.”
“It’s not a date,” Susan said. “I’m just showing him what we do.”
“Whatever you say,” Jessica said with a smirk.
“Good morning, Reverend,” Susan called out, approaching him.
“Hello there. Good to see you again.”
His eyes took in her appearance and he smiled. Susan was grateful she’d spent a little extra time on her makeup this morning. Not, she told herself for the umpteenth time, that that had anything to do with Gabriel Dawson.
Liar, liar. Pants on fire. The line the twins used when they played a game came to her and Susan’s mouth quirked up in an involuntary smile.
“Have fun,” Jessica called.
Gabriel lifted an eyebrow but didn’t say anything.
The day was just right for this sort of outing. The city had been blessed with a week or two of Indian summer and people were out and about, taking advantage of the warmer days. Before long, chilly temperatures and then out-and-out cold would descend on the city. For now, however, they could enjoy the reprieve.
“This is one of my favorite things to do,” Susan said.
“Walk?”
She nodded. “There’s nothing like fresh air. That’s one of the reasons I love Colorado so much. Of course, I’ve never been anywhere else but here, but I’m glad this is home. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
“I’m starting to feel the same way,” he said. “I’ve been here for three years now, and wonder what took me so long to make my way to this part of God’s country.”
Susan directed their path. “We’ll head up Galilee, then turn down some of the side streets.” He fell into step beside her, walking on the street side of the walk. “Three years? I thought you’d just arrived in Colorado Springs a few months ago.”
“I am new to this city, but I’ve been in Colorado since I got out of the Marines.”
“What brought you here?”
He glanced at her and smiled. “The lure of fresh air. That and snow.”
“Well, we get a lot of that. So you should be thrilled.”
“Tell me about how you got started working at the shelter.”
Susan looked up at him, wondering if she should tell the whole story, wondering how or if he’d judge her if he knew. A moment later, she realized she couldn’t be anything except totally honest. Not only did she pride herself on being a woman of integrity, but also he needed to know that she knew what she was talking about.
She handed him one of the brochures. It featured a woman and child embracing as they shared a book together. “We’ll be passing these out today,” she said. “Not too long ago, I could have been that woman on the cover.”
For just a moment he looked surprised. “What do you mean?”
“Exactly what you think,” she said. “My husband got caught up in drugs. Even before that, he had a temper. He could get really ugly when he was angry or thought he’d been slighted in the least bit. I was the outlet for his anger.”
Gabriel’s mouth tightened. “You’re still together?”
“No,” she said. It could have been a trick of the light, but Susan thought she saw his jaw loosen a bit when she said that. “He died a few years ago. He OD’d.”
“So that’s when you took up the crusade to save other women?”
“I’ve never thought of my work as a crusade, but I suppose it is,” she said. “And to answer your question, no. That came a long time later. After the healing. After living in the shelter. After rededicating myself to the Lord and getting my life together.”
Not comfortable being the focus of their conversation, she deftly turned the tables. “You were in the military.”
Gabriel nodded. “Marines.”
“Semper fi and all that.” She glanced up at him. “What does that mean anyway?”
“It’s short for semper fidelis, always faithful.”
Susan smiled. “Really? I like that. It works on a couple of levels, including a faith-based one. So how’d a big, strapping marine end up as a minister in Colorado Springs?”
“Being faithful to my calling,” Gabriel said. “I’ve always ministered to people whether I was ordained or not. But accepting the call to ministry in this way enabled me to put my own faith on the line for a higher cause.”
“And people shooting at you in a war isn’t a higher cause?”
The edges of his mouth curved up. “Yes, but…”
She waved a hand in dismissal. “Just messing with you, Rev.” They paused in front of a house, all of its first-floor windows boarded over. “It’s been a real tragedy to see what’s happening to our city. It’s turning into something like the ‘killing fields’ you probably encountered overseas.”
“What happened?”
Susan didn’t know if he was asking about the house they stood before or the decline of the city she loved, but the answer in either case was, unfortunately, the same. “Drugs. Too many people indifferent until it’s way too late. Neighborhoods don’t decay overnight. But one day someone in the city looks up and says, ‘Hey, how did this happen?’ It seems like an overnight transformation only because no one notices the slow decline. We all just woke up one morning and our community had been taken over.”
“But it wasn’t overnight?”
She shook her head. “Hardly. My husband got caught up in what was probably the first wave of this epidemic. He killed himself by overdosing on cocaine.”
He reached for her hand. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about. Reggie…” She paused before she said got what he deserved, the bitter words swirling in her head surprising her. After all this time she had thought she’d put the experience with him behind her. She had thought she’d let go of all the anger.
But how could she really? Everything she was today, from her position as director of the Galilee Women’s Shelter to the woman standing here on this street corner with Gabriel Dawson, was a direct result of what Reggie had put her through. If it hadn’t been for the way he’d forced her to grow up, Susan knew she could very well be one of the people she was trying to reach out to.
“Reggie was a man who let his compulsions get the best of him,” she ended up saying.
