The Shadow of Death (Psalm 23 Mysteries Book 9) (2 page)

“And?” Cindy prompted when he stopped talking.

“He said yes!”

She blinked in confusion and turned to glance at Geanie who also looked puzzled.

“To what exactly?” Cindy asked.

“To the thing I’ve wanted to do since I started working here!” Wildman crowed triumphantly as if it should be instantly obvious what that was.

He was usually not this difficult to get a straight answer out of, but clearly he was very excited and agitated about whatever it was. As a Youth Pastor he had to be up and act excited all the time. Of course, the thing that really got him charged up was...

“Oh,” Cindy said, suddenly having an inkling of what he was talking about.

“Yes!” he said, grabbing her hands and shaking them up and down. “Can you believe it?”

“I’m still not following,” Geanie confessed.

Cindy turned to look at Geanie. “What is the one holiday that the two of you share an intense passion for?”

Geanie’s eyes widened and she leaped to her feet with a shriek of joy. “Really?” she asked, running out from behind her desk to shake Dave’s shoulders hard.

“Yes, really!”

The two of them began bouncing up and down in uncontrollable joy.

The business manager’s door flew open and a moment later Sylvia poked her head out, a scowl on her face. “What on earth is going on here? I was on an important call and I had to tell him I’d call him back.”

“Amazing news, Sylvia,” Geanie half-shouted before Dave even got a chance to speak.

Sylvia looked from Dave to Geanie and back again. Then she groaned and slumped against the wall. “If both of you are this excited then that can only mean one thing.”

“That’s right,” Dave confirmed. “We’re going to have a Halloween party!”

2

Jeremiah was on edge. The worst part was that there was seemingly no reasonable cause for it. The truth was he had been on edge for months, ever since Martin’s friendly warning back in Las Vegas that retired Mossad agents were being reactivated. He knew he was probably being paranoid. After all, the odds that his former employer would want to reactivate him were a long shot. No, they had retired him for a reason and it was hard to even fathom a reason why they would reverse that.

Cindy had asked him why he had retired. He hadn’t given her a real answer to that question which he knew frustrated her. There was no way to talk about that without talking about what he did, though, and he really wasn’t ready for that conversation.

Sometimes he wondered if he was making things too complicated. Cindy had feelings for him. Of that he was certain. If he asked her to he was sure he could get her to stop asking questions about the past he’d left behind. That wasn’t fair to her, though. Still, he was either going to have to do that or start coming up with things he didn’t mind revealing about that past.

Captain padded into the kitchen and nuzzled his hand. Jeremiah scratched him behind the ears and the dog gave a sigh of pleasure. Animals were easy. People were difficult.

He was making deviled eggs to take to the barbeque at Mark’s. They would keep overnight and this way he
wouldn’t have to deal with them in the morning. He had just finished arranging them all on a platter and was getting ready to put it in the refrigerator.

“Want a taste?” he asked the dog, lowering the spoon he’d been using so Captain could lick it clean.

His mother who made deviled eggs for practically every get together would not have approved. She would have told him that he was spoiling the dog. That was okay. Captain deserved a little spoiling. He was a good dog and life before he had come to live with Jeremiah could not have been easy.

“Mark said you could come with me tomorrow and play with Buster. Would you like that?”

Captain wagged his tail, whether at the prospect of seeing Buster or the hope of having some more deviled egg Jeremiah didn’t know. He put the spoon in the sink and scratched Captain’s head again. “And you can have a deviled egg tomorrow at the party.”

He glanced at the clock. Cindy should just be getting off work soon. Time to clean up and head over to her house for movie night.

When he pulled into his driveway Mark still hadn’t been able to shake the dark thoughts that kept clouding his mind. He turned off the engine and sat for a moment, drawing deep breaths. Since finding out that Traci was pregnant, he had been working hard not to take his work home with him either physically or emotionally. She needed less stress in her life. Truth was, it had been a welcome reprieve for him as well. Slowly but surely he’d been working on truly leaving work at work and not stressing about his caseload while he was home. Traci deserved a husband who wasn’t a basket case half the time.

He flipped down the mirror that was on the back of his visor and stared at his own reflection. “There is nothing weird about Jeremiah,” he told himself solemnly. “You’re just looking at a lot of circumstantial evidence and that doesn’t necessarily mean everything lines up. He’s just a normal guy.”

No matter how convincing he sounded, he still didn’t believe it. There was a connection between the rabbi and the homeless man who had died in his yard. It was possible Jeremiah didn’t realize it and truly hadn’t known the man, but Mark was convinced that where the man had ended up was no accident.

The front door opened and Traci stuck her head out. She must have heard the car and been wondering what was taking him so long. He smiled and waved at her. She crooked her finger at him, summoning him inside. Careful to keep the smile on his face he got out of the car. He retrieved the things from the store and headed inside.

“How’s the most beautiful pregnant woman ever?” Mark asked before giving her a kiss.

“Better now that you’re home,” she said, leading the way to the kitchen.

The baby wasn’t due for another two and a half months but Mark could swear that she was ready to burst. The kitchen, which had been pristine that morning, looked like a bomb had gone off in it.

“You’ve been busy,” Mark noted as he set the groceries down.

“I’m trying to get as much as I can done now so that I can relax and have fun tomorrow.”

“Good idea. How can I help?”

“You already have,” she said, as she pulled out the potatoes he had purchased. “So, what’s got you upset?”

Mark shook his head. For some reason ever since she had been pregnant Traci had been so much more in tune with his emotions. That was one of the reasons he had tried so hard in the car to settle himself down.

“Just working through all the angles of a cold case,” he said.

“Is it Paul’s?”

“No.”

“Then why are you upset?”

Mark took a deep breath. “I found a possible link that I don’t like.”

She turned from the sink where she had begun peeling the potatoes. “Does it connect to Cindy or Jeremiah?”

“You guessing that because they keep popping up in so many cases the last couple of years?”

“No, I’m guessing that because there aren’t that many people you like well enough to care if they were connected to a case.”

Despite his mood that got him to chuckle. It was true. The list of people he would call friends was short. “You’ve got me there.”

“Look, I know that a lot of bad guys tend to get killed when Jeremiah is around, whether or not he’s actually responsible for that.”

“You’ve noticed?”

“How could I not? Particularly after your diatribe during the cattle drive.”

“You know what they say,” Mark muttered. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.”

“You know what they also say?” Traci countered.

He shook his head.

“People who play with matches get burned.” She turned back to the sink and continued peeling potatoes.

“So, you don’t think I should take too close a look?”

“You don’t think you should or you would have by now. That’s good enough for me.”

“Sometimes being friends with a person can be a real pain in the butt.”

“Being married to some people can be even more so,” she said.

He could hear the smirk in her voice. “Okay, fine. No more thinking or talking about work until Monday.”

“Better. Now help me peel these potatoes. I need to sit for a few minutes.”

Traci was right. She always was. Now if he could just let it go before he saw Jeremiah at the barbeque everything would be fine.

Both Geanie and Wildman were still beside themselves with excitement. Cindy instinctively knew that their excitement coupled with the prospect of a three day weekend ensured that no more work was getting done that day at First Shepherd.

“What exactly did Benjamin agree to?” Sylvia asked, folding her arms across her chest.

“He agreed to let us put on our own Haunted House maze!” Wildman said, still bouncing up and down in time with Geanie who was laughing and clapping her hands together like a three-year-old.

Sylvia’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Really?”

“Really! As long as all our scenes depict Biblical events.”

“Isn’t that going to be a little limiting for a Haunted House?” Cindy asked.

Sylvia nodded. “Don’t those things usually have characters more in line with vampires, psychotic clowns, and serial killers?”

“Normally, yes, but I’ve got it all worked out. Just imagine, a recreation of Jael hammering the tent nail through Sisera’s head and blood spurting everywhere!”

Sylvia shook her head and glanced at Cindy. “I don’t think Benjamin knows what he’s let us in for.”

Cindy nodded as Dave went on to describe more horrific scenes that he had planned. Sylvia let him talk for a few more seconds and then she raised her voice.

“On this...exciting...note, I think it’s time that we close up for the day.”

Cindy couldn’t have agreed more. Thirty seconds later her computer was turned off, her purse was on her shoulder, and she was out the door. She would have enough time once she got home to change clothes before Jeremiah arrived.

Three blocks from the church she stopped at a red light. A bicyclist pulled up next to her. He leaned over and tapped on her passenger side window startling her. He spun his hand in a circle indicating that she should roll down the window. Cautiously she hit the button and lowered the window a couple of inches.

“I just thought you should know that it looks like your back tire on this side could use some air. It looks pretty low,” he said.

“Oh, thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome. Light.”

She glanced back at the streetlight and saw that it had turned green. As she pulled her foot off the brake she turned to say thank you again, but the bicyclist was already on his way through the intersection.

Cindy stepped on the gas and pushed the button to raise the window. She’d have to look at the tire once she got home. Hopefully it wasn’t too bad since the low air pressure warning light hadn’t come on. She had a pump in her trunk. Then again maybe she could convince Jeremiah to do it for her. She felt a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. It was handy to have a guy around sometimes.

A few minutes later she pulled into her driveway and parked. She walked around to the back of her car and inspected the rear tire on the passenger side. It did look low, though not as much as she had anticipated. It wouldn’t take but a minute or two so she decided she might as well get it over with.

She retrieved the air compressor from her trunk and then opened the passenger front door so she could plug it into the charger. She paused as she noticed that there was an envelope in the footwell. Cindy frowned as she picked it up, trying to figure out when she could have dropped it there. She turned it over and froze. What looked like Hebrew words were scrawled on the front in a handwriting that she didn’t recognize. It read
malakh ha-mavet.
She tried saying them out loud, but there was nothing familiar about them.

Could Jeremiah have dropped the envelope in her car the last time he was in it? That was certainly the most logical conclusion, but that had been more than a week ago. Surely she would have noticed it before now if he had.
Maybe it had been under the seat and just now slid out to where she could see it. When he got there she’d ask him about it.

She put the envelope down and plugged in the compressor. After adding air to the one tire she double checked the other three which all seemed to be okay. Finished, she put the compressor back in the trunk, grabbed her purse and the envelope, and headed into the house.

She dropped her things on the kitchen counter, washed her hands in the sink, and then hurried to her bedroom to change clothes. Since they were going to be watching Independence Day as a pre-Fourth celebration she opted for jeans and a red and white striped shirt. She had a T-shirt with the flag on it, but she’d be wearing that the next day to the barbeque at Mark and Traci’s. As soon as she was dressed she went into the bathroom where she ran a brush through her hair and reapplied some lipstick.