separate ways, and lost track of each other. Now their paths had crossed again, but she felt as distant from Scott Davidson as she would have with a stranger.
Closing the albums, she steeled herself for what lay ahead. Seeing the old Scott, smiling and carefree in the photos gave her the courage she needed to ignore his distant, cold manner. When he hung up the hall phone and came back into the room, she laughed and said, “Look what I found.”
“Dad’s old photos?”
Impulsively, she reached up, grabbed his hand, pulled him down on the couch beside her. Maybe, just maybe, he might be touched by the memories of the wonderful summers he’d spent in Colorado with his father.
Scott stiffened against her nearness as she sat close to him, turning the pages of the album. He didn’t need any old photos to remember the way her face glowed with animation and laughter, nor the way her supple body had felt as she walked hand in hand beside him in the moonlight. His first love had changed little in six years. Her honey-gold hair still glinted with highlights, and a touch of lipstick defined the sweet curve of her lips. Her lavender-blue eyes as soft as a summer sky still radiated an innocent warmth. How foolishly naive they’d been that summer between high school and college. Their childish faith had seemed enough to slay dragons, but the world had been waiting with its unrelenting harsh reality, and they hadn’t even known it.
Aware of his gaze traveling over her face, Allie suddenly felt self-conscious. What was he thinking? Was he remembering the kiss he’d given her, and his promise to keep in touch? They’d been separated by a whole continent when he went to college in California, and she attended an eastern university. Life had spun off in different directions for both of them, and even before the end of their freshman year they had lost touch with each other. Now, for the first time since she’d arrived, he seemed to be aware of her as a person.
Laughing softly, she pointed to a photo taken on skit night at camp when everyone dressed in costume. There they were in the front row, Scott as Robin Hood, and she was Maid Marian. Jimmy stood next to Scott, a 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
