Rachel's Redemption
by
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Coffee had been set to brewing just before Eric answered the door. When offered to the stranger, hot tea was preferred. This was no effort but required Eric’s absence from the man’s presence very briefly.
Returning with two cups of steaming hot tea, Eric found the exhausted traveler with head resting on folded arms along the table’s edge as if in sleep. Eric touched him gently on the shoulder, and the old man up-righted himself to accept the tea. Eric wondered how long it had been since the poor man had eaten. But noticing, after a considerable length of time, the cooling and neglected tea, he perished the thought of offering him food. There is a time and season for all things, and this was not the time for anything, apparently, but whatever had brought this visitor to this particular door.
The professor, in his normal manner of meditative patience, waited, graciously permitting the visitor to go first. He took a pipe from the breast pocket of his open throated, forest green corduroy sports shirt, carefully filling the pipe with tobacco. With respect for the old man’s earlier coughing, the professor did not even consider asking permission to light up, as he was accustomed to doing the rare times he smoked in anyone’s presence. Actually, he did little smoking anyway. His involvement with the pipe was more a habit of self-composure, something to fill time’s space when words were less advisable.
So Eric, pipe still held aimlessly in his graceful, strong and meticulously groomed hand, pondered what seemed nervous hesitation of his visitor to open up with whatever matter was so desperately on his mind. Nothing of the professor’s persona should have been intimidating. His concern for others than himself was genteel. The serious expression behind the bespectacled eyes should have conveyed to the visitor that he had more than a casual audience.
When the gentleman seemed sufficiently alert from his brief nap, and still did not speak, Eric plunged. This had to begin somewhere.
In response to Eric’s carefully structured questions, the old man, staring first at ceiling or heaven-ward, and his pleading expression seeming to favor the latter, managed a name, just a softly and reverently spoken name, Rachel.
The characteristically calm, complacent professor was so shocked by what he had heard, he spilled hot tea all over his tweed pants, the liquid soaking through to sting his thigh with the same piercing pain the spoken name stung his heart. The name registered instantly and dramatically. After all, he had lived with it in the recesses of his memory, his conscience, for almost seven years.
Swiping at the spilled tea on both the table and pants with a crisp white handkerchief, still striving for recovery from shock, he simply reiterated the name in the form of a question,
“Rachel? Rachel Evans?”
Now the old man, nodding briskly in the affirmative, answered, “Yes, yes, my little girl!”
“Rachel is your daughter?” The question was all Eric could muster for the moment. He had been so jolted he could think of nothing else with which to fill the awkward space, waiting for the old man to continue the conversation or exchange of questions.
By now, tears were streaming down the old man’s unshaven face. A floodgate had been opened and progressed to uncontrolled sobbing. He kept swiping the tears with the wrinkled and stained shirtsleeve. Eric offered him the tea stained handkerchief, which, blindly accepted, replaced the sleeve.
Emotions, suddenly resurrected, left the professor cold and violently sick at the stomach. The room was spinning and the old familiar anxiety, which had cost him so many sleepless nights, had suddenly returned. The impact of this unexpected visit, this forced re-visit to that disturbing past era, dealt a vicious blow that left him reeling.
Rachel was a young woman sitting on death row at this very moment for the murder of her husband, Mark Evans. Eric had sat on the jury that, almost seven years previously, had found her guilty of murder in the first degree.
She had been quite young, in early twenties, as he recalled. She should now be, he calculated, close to thirty.
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About the Book
Rachel’s Redemption is a love story/mystery, the essence of the narrative distilled in the life of a young South Korean woman whose marriage to an American military man leads to a most horrendous miscarriage of justice. The reader may be challenged to a closer look at views too long blindly accepted, particularly concerning the death penalty.
Preview readers report inability to put the book aside, it is so filled with surprises and mini-stories of the diverse characters involved. Tender love stories and the revelation of unexpected events intertwine with the main story line about Rachel, providing incentive for non-stop page-turning and over-whelming emotional response. Rachel’s story should be difficult to soon forget.
About the Author
The author of Rachel’s Redemption has had 77 years of living, reading, observing, and experience for her imagination to draw on in producing this first novel. To this author, writing is an obsession far more compelling than sleep, which results in lying awake nights fantasizing and putting thoughts on hold till morning, when they are recorded.
This habit has rendered three previous publications from the author, The Poet’s Eye, Potpourri, a Collection of Poetry, Essays, Short Stories and Vignettes, and Encore, a New Collection of Poems. Lack of time, while addressing the daily demands of family function and a Florist/Catering business for more than twenty years, prevented an earlier novel, which has always been her choice of literary expression.