Ted Dekker - The Bride Collector

She gasped for air and coughed.

“Are you okay? Would you like some water?”

She looked like she might cry, but she held herself together and turned her head slightly to face him. Tears were running down her temples. He would have to reapply the makeup when she was gone.

“Quinton…” Her face was twisted all up, making it hard for her to speak.

“You should be crying for joy, Nikki. Tears of joy. Unless a seed fall to the ground and die, it cannot grow into the beautiful flower it was meant to be.”

She finally found her voice. “Listen to me, Quinton. Please, listen to me. I want to ask you a question. Can I do that? Will you let me ask you one question? I mean really ask you?”

It was the first time he’d faced this kind of reaction. “Of course.”

“What if you have one thing wrong. I’m not saying that you do, but what if you just have one small thing wrong?”

But he didn’t. What was her point?

“What if it’s all true? Everything you said about God, including his favorites. That makes sense to me. It’s perfect logic. It’s true, all of that is true. But what if it’s my choice when and how to go to him, not yours? Not even his. What if because I am his favorite he gave me that choice? Because he loves me.”

She didn’t quite get it. “I’m his messenger,” he said.

“What if you’ve made a mistake and are hurting his favorite? That would make you an enemy of God. Like Lucifer. That would make you-”

Quinton wasn’t really conscious of what happened next, he was only aware that he was leaping forward, swinging his arm, slamming his fist into her face.

He stood over her form, breathing hard, mind buzzing like a hornet’s nest someone had taken a bat to. He’d never lost his temper, not during a ceremony like this. What did it mean? He felt dirty and used, but she’d pulled this reaction out of him.

“Forgive me, Father. Forgive me.”

Now he would have to reapply some makeup. Maybe he should just give her more drugs and drill her heels now. Like he’d slapped sense into Joshie in the bathroom at Elway’s eatery, he’d now beat this lie out of the bride.

Quinton took a deep breath and calmed himself. No, he wouldn’t drain her yet, he still needed her. He needed Nikki because she was wrong, he wasn’t the devil.

Rain Man was the devil.

BRAD RAINES PACED with his hands on his hips, allowing Andrea and Roudy to run through their antics while he tossed in comments as he saw fit. Three hours had passed since his encounter with Paradise. From what he could see, little progress had been made in their efforts to find the jack in the whole, this key they insisted was hidden in the evidence. Depending on how he judged the day, it could be counted as a complete waste of time.

On the other hand, these last six or seven hours had been strangely rewarding. The nature of investigative work often demanded a kind of role-playing, a cat-and-mouse game of wits, endless rounds of twenty questions without any obvious answer emerging, connected dots that formed senseless pictures.

But Brad was used to searching for the hidden clues with “ordinary” people who worked according to unspoken rules.

Working with Paradise, Roudy, and Andrea involved no such rules. They were more like three children playing house or, in this case, detective. Instead of guiding them, he’d quickly become the fourth playmate in their world of make-believe.

There was a freedom here, without expectations other than those Roudy placed on them to hurry, hurry, hurry because his report was due.

“Everyone knows this kind of snake lives in the trees,” Roudy said. “You think the snake that came up to Eve in the garden slid along the ground? Too obvious! Much too obvious. The snake in the hole came to her from the trees if he was a worthy devil. From the sky, like the apple, which he offered her, not from a hole in the ground.”

Andrea was in her own little world. “Holes are like zeros. One zero, but anything divided by zero is zero. So he had to add the woman. Now it’s one plus one which is two. Twice. Perfect, see? ‘Perfect twice’ and then ‘Paradise lost.’” She underlined the corresponding words on the note to underscore her point.

“What’s your point, Roudy?” Paradise was the most lucid of the three, the ace in the hole here. The glue that held them together. And although her constant apologetic glances at Brad indicated that she knew this, she rarely tried to set them straight except through a gentle nudge.

Roudy rolled his eyes as if his point should be painfully obvious. “He gives them apples, not worms. He tempts them. They like what he says. Apples, apples, Paradise!” He snapped his fingers twice. “Focus!”

“I am, Roudy, and I’m seeing the snake plucking the apple with his skillful tail and hurling it at the girl with so much force that it knocks her out. Then he wraps himself around her throat and drags her into his hole.” It was undoubtedly only a fraction of the fully fleshed story that had mushroomed in her mind. Her mind was a fertile, exotic jungle teeming with life.

“Men are like snakes,” Andrea said without turning from the whiteboard. “Only one thing on the mind. You tell them, Paradise.”

“Men are like snakes, Roudy,” Paradise agreed. Then added with another glance at Brad, “Most men.”

“Most men,” Andrea agreed. “Twice perfect. Twice perfect.” She whimpered.

Roudy looked at her. “Seven is perfect.”

Brad had trouble containing his amusement. Unrestrained as they were, their thoughts jumped from track to track like a train with a mind of its own. Still, there was method to the madness in their world without rules.

He couldn’t help feeling like they were on the cusp of discovering the solution to the perfect mud pie. It was every child’s playtime fantasy. There was a perfect mud pie here, they just had to keep kneading the dirt until they formed it. And in the process they would throw a few globs of mud at each other and laugh and stomp off angry, because that’s what children did when they played with mud.

“Are you okay?” Paradise asked, walking up to him at the back of the room.

“Couldn’t be better.”

“I doubt that’s entirely true.”

“Well… we are running out of daylight.”

“I told you it might all be pointless. But you’re okay, right? I mean… you’re not bored?”

“Impossible.” And it was the bone-dry truth.

She grinned. “Nothing like a trip to the zoo, right?”

“If this is the zoo, then I’m the monkey,” he said.

She stared into his eyes for a moment, then blushed. Which concerned him a little because he wasn’t sure his earlier exchange with her had quite dismissed the awkward connection between them.

They had reentered the room and thrown themselves into the puzzle-solving like best friends. Relieved of any pretense, Paradise had opened up and bounced around with a bright smile. But the old, unspoken awkwardness had started to creep back in as the hours ticked by.

Brad was no stranger to relationships with women as long as they didn’t demand commitment. If he could take any lesson away from his thirty-two years, it might be that any bond with Paradise would be a disaster in the making, for her and for him.

Not that he could afford to be even remotely interested in that way.

At first his thinking was that he had to protect her. He couldn’t give her hope while earning her trust, just to drop her later. Then again, Allison had made a good point: Even a short relationship that ended in disappointment might be beneficial to Paradise.

Either way, it didn’t matter. His fear wasn’t for Paradise, was it? He was more disturbed by his own reaction to her, however shameful that was to admit. And that thought gave birth to another, even more disturbing: Could he truly love someone like Paradise? The notion struck him as absurd! He had to end it completely, so he had.