CHAPTER 30

When Linda limped down off the levee, she hadn’t known what Pastor Simpson’s argument with the Oneness people was, nor had she cared. All she knew was that for years Simpson had been a good pastor and tried to help people, especially the poor. There’d been some talk about him and a couple of the young girls in the congregation, but she’d never had any trouble with him. He’d recognized Linda almost immediately, and he’d taken her into the church and washed her wounds with water from the sink in the one bathroom they had. She hadn’t told him the truth of course—not because she didn’t trust him, but because she was afraid she might bring terrible harm down onto him or his followers. He’d sat there for half an hour with his silver hair and red skin and sympathetic eyes while she told him a lie about getting involved with a man she’d met on the gambling boat, a man who’d been in prison, who had almost killed her with a beating, and who would kill her if he found her. No, she couldn’t go to the police, she said, because the man had friends in the police, on both sides of the river. Pastor Simpson had shaken his head and promised to do all he could to help, including getting her out of town. And he’d stood by his word, so far. When she’d written out the long note for Mayor Cage, Simpson had called one of the girls in his church to come out from town and pick it up, a girl named Darla, and Darla had promised to deliver it, and to make sure the mayor had no idea where any of them were, or even who she was. Linda wished time would speed up. She’s going to have to move soon because there’s an evening service coming, and the pastor told her to be hiding in the shed well before the first car pulled up. She dreads that fifty-foot walk like nothing in a long time, but she’ll do it somehow. Because after the service, the pastor’s nephew is going to drive her to Shreveport, to stay with another group of Wholeness worshippers. There she will be safe from the “convict” who is hunting her. Linda lifts her shirt and wipes the sweat from her brow, which is burning like the skin around her torn leg. She needs a doctor, but she can hold out another few hours. They might even have a doctor in the church in Shreveport, she thinks. No matter how bad things look, God has taken her into his blessed hands. To know that’s true, all Linda has to do is think about Ben Li.

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