Love the Sinner

  Praise for

  LOVE THE SINNER

  “Lynn Bulock has a talent for combining a fun puzzle with a heartwarming cast of characters for a can’t-put-down read. I look forward to more!”

  —Hannah Alexander, Christy Award-winning author of Grave Risk

  “Lynn Bulock writes with the kind of smart style that makes readers feel like the story is unfolding right before their eyes—and they can’t wait to know what happens next!”

  —Annie Jones, award-winning author of The Sisterhood of the Queen Mamas

  “Gracie Lee is plum adorable. A witty, intrepid heroine and a fast-paced story make Love the Sinner a heavenly read.”

  —Nancy Martin, bestselling author of The Blackbird Sisters mysteries

  “Love the Sinner, with its down-to-earth spiritual insights and spunky heroine, will please many fans of the gentle domestic mystery. Readers will follow with interest Gracie Lee’s search into the secrets of her husband’s mysterious past and then cheer when she finally discovers the truth. A welcome addition to the cozy mystery genre.”

  —Earlene Fowler, author of Broken Dishes and Delectable Mountains

  To Joe, my very-much-alive hero and husband.

  You’re my one and only.

  LYNN BULOCK

  LOVE THE SINNER

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am indebted to so many people in the creation of this book and the set of characters within. My thanks to Dr. D.P. Lyle and Eileen Dreyer, my dynamite agent, Nancy Yost, and the always-encouraging enthusiasm of my editor, Diane Dietz. And always, last but not least, the Princesses of Quite a Lot, who keep me going with prayer and writing advice when things get tough: Sharon Gillenwater, Annie Jones and Diane Noble.

  For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.

  —Ephesians 2:8–9

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Questions for Discussion

  1

  First, I want to go on record as saying that I, Gracie Lee Harris, did not kill my husband, Dennis Peete. When he died I still thought he was my loving husband, and I had no desire to kill him. That mostly came later. Now if you put me under oath in a court of law and asked me to swear I’d never thought about killing his mother, that would be another story. I’ve thought about that plenty, but nobody’s going to come get me on that one.

  To the best of my knowledge I’ve never killed anybody…yet. Even when my first husband, the charming Mr. Harris, dragged me through a divorce I didn’t want, and left me with a two-year-old son, I didn’t commit murder. I even kept his name so that it would be less confusing for Ben. When it comes to murder, everybody has fantasies, I suspect. But I usually aim mine in other directions. And lately there’s been so much going on in real life, who has time for fantasies?

  Even so, I’m usually pretty good in a crisis. Everybody has strong points and that’s one of mine. So it took a long time for the big, disastrous things in my life to boot me over the edge this time. Maybe it was just taking a chance on love, or life—or whatever—that tilted the balance. If so, that’s too bad, because I’m not likely to stop taking chances.

  The chances I took earlier in life usually worked out well. The ones I’ve taken in my relationship with Dennis Peete have been bad news. People who take chances around Dennis don’t always fare so well.

  Goodness knows I haven’t, even before he died. I took a chance on marrying him, and then later another chance nine months ago and sold my condo in Missouri, quit my job and picked up stakes to move out here to California with him, even though he advised against it.

  So far, my time here in beautiful downtown Rancho Conejo (and yes, if you speak Spanish, the town is named Rabbit Ranch) has been one big chance after another. Many of those chances have involved the rollercoaster ride of living with my motherin-law, which I thought would work out just fine even though Dennis thought otherwise.

  At the time I thought some of his arguments against our shared living arrangement were almost sweet. Part of the reason he didn’t want me out here was that he was pouring all his—and my—money into his franchise business, and living with his mother to save on rent. Silly me. I decided if he was willing to take that chance, I was too. Now I wonder. Who knows? If it weren’t for my taking chances, maybe Dennis would still be alive.

  No, I can’t fault myself for taking chances. The first big chance I took threw me straight back into the arms of Jesus, clinging to the little bits of sanity that still exist in my disordered life. Without taking chances, my life wouldn’t be worth much.

  The biggest chance lately came while I was wandering through the college bookstore at Pacific Oaks Christian College, picking up books and putting them back during the first week of this semester. By the end of January when my second semester of grad school started, Dennis had been out of work and in a coma at Conejo Care for four months. Money was tight and I was dithering about how many of these hideously expensive textbooks I could actually afford.

  For about the hundredth time, I was wishing Dennis had shared a little more information about business while he still had the chance. The $30k from the sale of my condo could have gone a long way toward this new education I’d committed to before his car accident. I’d done my best trying to find it in his investments, but so far was having precious little luck.

  So there I am, walking up and down the psychology and education stacks in the campus bookstore when the dam finally bursts. Like I said before, I’m good in a crisis. I do not lose it in public. This time, however, was different. Juggling a pile of outrageously expensive books, taking one off the stack I carried only to be faced with putting another one back, finally put me in tears. Add that to the fact that what I could afford in the way of school supplies made a pile I should have had a cart for, but kept dropping instead, and you can see the lovely picture I presented.

  Then somebody came up behind me and a voice said, “You look like you could use some help.”

  It was a nice voice, so I didn’t immediately turn, snarling, and bite her head off, which was my first impulse. “Oh, no. Does it show that badly?” I asked. My voice sounded wavery even to me as I turned around. The tears really started in earnest then, and I was afraid I was going to do one of those awful heaving sob things, like toddlers do when they’re too tired.

  “Well, I was talking about the books,” the stranger said, holding out a handled basket. “But yeah, now that you mention it…”

  Two minutes later the bookstore’s assistant manager, Linnette Parks, was my new best friend. “She has the decaf. I’ve got the real thing,” she directed the teenaged waitress at the Coffee Corner, the shop adjoining the bookstore, who came to the table bearing two foaming lattes.

  “Now let me get this straight,” she said, handing me a napkin out of the tabletop dispenser. I was still a bit of a mess. “You’re living with your motherin-law. Alone.”

  “Since Dennis’s accident. About five months ago.”

  “From what you’ve said so far, she sounds like a harridan.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe that’s a little harsh. Without Dennis to referee, our life together has been kind of grim at times. He could manage his mother—Edna thinks he walks on water. I’m just the horrible woman who stole him away and made him stay in Missouri for years longer than he should
have, according to her.”

  “And before the accident, he was traveling a lot?”

  “From the day I moved out here. And before I could even harp on that properly like a normal wife, he had a terrible accident that put him in the hospital, and then into one of those places euphemistically called ‘long-term care.’”

  Linnette looked at me over her latte. “What are the prospects of him recovering?”

  I used my napkin again before I answered. “They’ve never been good. Although Edna is positive he’s just going to sit up and start chatting with her one day.” I would have argued against that, but Edna doesn’t listen to me. This conversation was so odd. Normally I’m the one doing the listening, not the talking in these situations. One major thing I’ve noticed is that in California total strangers will share information with you that I would have, in Missouri, put on a “need-to-know” basis with my best friend. Maybe it’s because everybody and their golden retriever have a shrink out here. Or maybe the sunshine gets to your brain. Whatever the case, I have never learned so much about so many people by merely standing in line at the grocery store or the library.

  My mother would say it’s not just Californians, it’s that invisible sign on my forehead. The one that seems to say You Can Talk To Gracie Lee About Anything And She’ll Listen. I’m telling you, it’s there. And it’s tattooed in special ink. All the folks who receive radio signals from Jupiter through the walls of their apartment can see it. So why not Californians? A lot of them can tune in Jupiter without even putting tinfoil on their TV antennae.

  This time around I’d seemed to find that rare kindred spirit with the same I Listen tattoo. The craziest part of the whole thing was that even as I sat there sniffling and talking to Linnette, I had the weird urge to ask her where she got her hair done. She had gorgeous red waves, the kind you don’t get from a drugstore tint. Everybody out here does something to their hair and my mousy natural brown, curly or not, suffers in comparison.

  Midwestern sense kept me silent on the hair thing. I just took another sip of my latte and tried to calm down. “And you’re managing all of this okay?”

  “Well, other than losing it occasionally in a bookstore. And if you really want to know, that’s not all that’s nuts about my life.”

  “Let me guess. You have teenagers.” Linnette’s wan smile said she had to be a kindred spirit.

  “One. Ben’s seventeen and I left him back in Missouri living with his grandmother so he can finish his senior year. I’ve been raising him alone since his father and I divorced, which was back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. So Ben is as easy as dealing with teen males ever gets. Mostly I’d have to say that living with Edna with no referee is what has me losing it.”

  Linnette was giving me a real thoughtful look. Finally she drank some of her own coffee and put it down. “I don’t usually do this with total strangers,” she began, starting a little wave of panic in me.

  In Missouri something slightly daring but relatively sane would have followed that phrase. Here in sunny California, she might be offering me anything from acupuncture to EST therapy to things beyond my imagination. Fortunately for me, as I found out later, Linnette was born in Michigan. “Would you think I was too forward if I asked you to come to my church? Not just to attend services, although we want to have you there, too, but to this group we have. It’s called Christian Friends, and I think maybe you’d get something out of it.”

  I’d heard of them before. They weren’t just some odd California thing, but had come out of my stomping grounds in the middle of the country and spread all over. “Where’s your church? And when’s the group thing?” I didn’t have enough time to do much, with classes starting up again and my daily visits to the Conejo Board and Care to sit with my comatose husband.

  “Conejo Community Chapel, right here in Rancho Conejo,” she said. “And my particular Christian Friends group meets twice a month at seven-thirty on Wednesday nights. We’re meeting next week if you can hang on that long.”

  “I think I can. And that would fit into my schedule so I wouldn’t have to miss class.”

  Linnette had a nice smile. “Great. If you come I won’t feel quite so guilty about accosting a total stranger. Let me go into the back room of the bookstore and get my purse. It’s got a Friends flyer in it that even has a decent map of how to get to the chapel.”

  She was gone and back again before I could chicken out. The brochure was nice. It described a caring, Christian circle of “praying friends to get you through life’s hard spots.” Okay, so maybe it was a little too much happy talk, but that was okay. I could use the friends right now, and prayer is never a bad thing.

  I got a hug from my new best friend, and went and paid for the textbooks I thought I could afford. Then I spent a week just getting through my crazy life. Whenever it got too bad, I went back into my mostly empty bedroom and looked at my Christian Friends flyer. That thing was getting raggedy around the edges by Wednesday night.

  I was really surprised by the number of cars in the church parking lot when I got there. If you’d asked me how many people would attend a church meeting like the one I was going to, I would have said maybe half a dozen. This parking lot had a couple of dozen cars in it, easy. Surely they had to be here for something else. The place looked big enough to have several classrooms and such that people could meet in.

  I had found Conejo Community Chapel on the first try, even in the dark. The map on the flyer was good. It helped that the building was recognizable as a church. It even looked like some of the churches in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, which was my gold standard for churches, although it wasn’t like the one my Granny Lou had gone to there.

  That one had been the most imposing, and maybe the most intimidating church I’d ever been in. This one was a nice homey little church built out of brick, with actual stained-glass windows.

  The look of the church was typical of what surprised me at many turns in Southern California. So much of it was a slightly twisted version of Mayberry. Sort of like you took Mayberry and blended it with Hollywood, so that everything is slightly off-kilter.

  On one hand you had seventy-five-year-old churches nestled in groves of trees, and then the new California intruded and you’d run into a guy in a Hawaiian shirt, black rubber thong sandals, jeans and a cell phone glued to his ear as he went into the building. Chances are good he was the kind of guy who was church council president and tithed, too. Like I said, Mayberry meets Hollywood. It was decidedly odd, but I liked the whole feel. In fact, it was beginning to grow on me. For everyday wear, I’d more or less adopted the jeans and black sandals thing myself. Hawaiian shirts, too, for that matter. When I was feeling a little unsure of myself, like tonight, I at least wore a tame one.

  When I got into the building there were little handwritten signs on cardboard that made me feel vastly relieved because there were several other things going on. I could have gone to an AA meeting, it looked like, or some other kind of loud support group cheering for somebody who was meeting in one of the Sunday school rooms just down the hall from the kitchen.

  Now that I was here I was a little nervous. It felt like the first day at a new school, where you don’t know where your locker is and you haven’t found the bathroom and you’re sure you’re not nearly as cool as the popular kids. Didn’t like that feeling in junior high school and wasn’t any fonder of it now, thank you.

  It was moments like this that I understood why smokers smoked. At least they had something to entertain themselves with and something to do with their hands. Maybe if I had a cup of coffee, life would be better. I could smell some brewing someplace, but it didn’t seem to be coming from the kitchen where the Christian Friends meeting had been listed. I headed that way, anyway.

  There was a woman who looked like Linnette from the back, stacking up chocolate-chip cookies on a plate on the counter. Naturally, chocolate chip. My least favorite, but I’m the minority. Everybody else thinks they’re wonderful. I was just glad
to see somebody familiar. Her hair made me want to ask that stylist question while I still remembered it. Finding a good hairdresser was better than cookies any day. “Hi. Coffee ready yet?” I asked in what I hoped was a breezy, cheerful “I’ve been here forever” kind of voice.

  “Nope. The can’s in the refrigerator and the carafe for the coffeemaker is broken again, so if you’re desperate you can wrestle Big Bertha.” She didn’t even turn around to look, so she couldn’t see the face I made. So much for knowing all of the insider stuff.

  “Uh. And Big Bertha would be…” My confusion got her turned around, and now she was the one making a face. “Oh, phoo. I’m sorry, I thought you were Dot. You sound like her a little and I guess I just wasn’t paying attention.”

  “Nope. Still Gracie from the bookstore.”

  “Please, please, don’t flee in terror because some wacko made you get your own coffee the first time you came to a meeting. Pastor George would shoot me.”

  She redeemed herself right there. Anybody who said “Oh, phoo” was my kind of woman. “Don’t worry about it. I won’t tell. And I’ll even make the coffee if you’ll tell me where the pot is.”

  She gave me a conspiratorial smile. “Welcome to Christian Friends. The coffeepot is Big Bertha, and she’s huge and under that cabinet. You want to hold the pot, Gracie, or fill the water?”

  “I’ll hold and you fill. That way you can figure out how much coffee to make for whoever you expect. There were so many cars in the parking lot I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.” We wrestled the coffeepot into position near the sink, where thankfully there was one of those faucets on a flex line where Linnette started filling.

  “It’s not that intimidating. Probably six or less will show up. This is way too much pot for the coffee we need, but we need some, so there it is. Dot should be here any minute. Lexy will be late, because she saves all her timeliness for her work as a corporate lawyer. Once she goes off duty, she slows down. Heather will be even later, if she makes it at all. I’d go into Heather’s problems, but we don’t have that much time. Probably Paula will show up, as well, if nothing else more pressing comes up.” Her nose wrinkled and I wanted to ask about Paula, but just then we got company.