When the Spirits Testify

 Part 4- The House of Good Repute

Sunday sunlight poured through the stained-glass windows of First Baptist, painting the congregation in colors too soft for the weight they carried. The air smelled of lilies and old perfume. Fans whispered across the pews, wrists moving in time with the pastor’s voice.

​

“Brothers and sisters,” he boomed, sweat gleaming on his temples, “today we give thanks for the generosity of the Loveless family. Their gift will allow us to build a brand-new Baptism Hall, a place where souls can be born again.”

 

Polite applause swelled. A few women dabbed their eyes. Marlene Loveless sat near the front, a portrait of piety in her pale suit, hands folded atop her Bible. Tater sat beside her, stiff in a pressed shirt, gaze locked straight ahead.

 

At the back, Old Tom McAllister’s hands tightened around his hat. He felt Rosie’s eyes on him, warning, pleading for calm, but something in his chest had been burning since dawn. He rose slowly, voice rough from work and grief.

 

“Preacher,” he said, “I got somethin’ to say.”

 

A hundred heads turned. The pastor blinked behind his spectacles. “Brother Tom?”

 

Tom stepped into the aisle. “I been hearin’ all this about generosity, about blessin’s. But I seen what’s really goin’ on. I seen the funerals, the young’ens dyin’ one after another. I seen kids beggin’ for work while the rich folks build halls to wash the dirt off their own hands.”

 

Murmurs rippled. Rosie’s fingers found her handkerchief. The pastor shifted uneasily. “Now, Brother Tom, this isn’t…”

 

“It is the time,” Tom cut in. “I buried a boy y’all prayed for but never helped. I watched his ghost point the way to the folks profittin’ off his death, and now we’re sittin’ here praisin’ ’em for it!”

 

Gasps. Someone hissed, “Hush!” Another voice called, “You watch your mouth in the Lord’s house!”

 

Marlene rose with practiced grace, Bible clutched to her chest. “Brother McAllister,” she said, sorrow dripping like honey, “grief can make a man confused. We all mourn young Cooper, but slanderin’ good people won’t bring him back.”

 

Tom’s jaw tightened. “Good people don’t poison their neighbors and call it charity.”

 

The church erupted, voices overlapping, fans stilled mid-air. One deacon moved to calm the crowd, another reached for Tom’s arm, but he pulled away.

 

“Keep your hands off me,” he said quietly. “If y’all can’t see what’s right in front of you, maybe you’ll see it when the Lord Himself testifies.”

 

He turned and strode down the aisle, Rosie at his heels. The double doors slammed behind them with a crack like thunder, and every stained-glass angel seemed to shiver.

 

Lemon polish gleamed on every surface. The air conditioner hummed against the afternoon heat.

 

Marlene Loveless sat rigid in her armchair, jaw tight.

 

“That fool farmer’s lost his mind,” she snapped. “Standin’ up in my church like some prophet.”

 

Tater leaned in the doorway, hat in hand. “People’ll forget. Give ’em a week.”

 

“No,” she said. “Words like that fester. You cut out rot before it spreads.”

 

She lifted her teacup, pinky poised. “Make an example. Break the old man’s will.”

 

Tater hesitated. “You talkin’ scare or hurt?”

 

“I said break. He’s been stickin’ his nose where it don’t belong. A little fire might remind him what happens to those who play with it.”

 

From the hallway, Brittany froze halfway down the stairs, listening to a conversation her mother would rather she not hear. A lazy smile crossed her face and matched her glassy eyes. She’d seen what her mother’s orders could mean. She thought she might get to have a little fun herself. Tater never had the nerve to do such things.

 

But when she stepped into the parlor, Marlene’s smile was already painted back in place.

 

“Afternoon, darlin’,” Marlene said sweetly. “Go fetch your brother a glass of sweet tea before he heads out.”

 

Brittany nodded and slipped to the kitchen, a tremor in her hands rattling the glass as she filled it. Outside, a lawn mower buzzed somewhere down Main Street, ordinary life humming while new sin took shape behind lace curtains.

 

Dusk came down like a lid. Heat held to the fields, slow and stubborn, while the whip-poor-wills started their tired song.

 

Rosie shelled beans at the kitchen table, the big blue bowl in her lap, thumbs working with the rhythm she’d kept since girlhood. Tom moved from window to window like a man who could not sit, checking the sky, the line of the ridge, the place where the lane bent toward the creek.

 

“You won’t see word from the Lord out there,” Rosie said softly, not looking up. “He’s already spoken to you.”

 

Tom grunted, no argument, only restlessness. “Can’t shake the feelin’, Rosie. Like this is the calm before a storm.”

 

“Then pray with your hands,” she said, sliding the bowl away and reaching for him. “That always settled you.”

 

He took her hands, rough and warm, and the house seemed to breathe. For a blessed half minute they were just two old souls in a kitchen, porch light haloing the yard, Bess chewing in her stall, the world held together by small obedience.

 

Then Tom sniffed and froze.

 

“Do you smell—?”

 

“Smoke,” Rosie whispered at the same time, fear slipping into her voice.

 

A glow rose in the window like a sunrise gone wrong. Tom lurched for the back door as the first pop cracked the air, dry boards taking flame.

 

When he hit the yard, the west wall of the barn was already a sheet of orange, wind pulling tongues of fire along the eaves. Sparks climbed the night like a thousand fireflies set wild.

 

“Bess!” he shouted, the name ripped from somewhere tender. “Etta!”

 

Rosie was right behind him with the hose snaking across the dirt. She thumbed the nozzle to a pale arc, water spattering useless on heat already too mean to mind it. The air tasted like a nail. A milk pail sat near the pen gate; Tom watched the handle sag, the metal soften, the shape give up.

 

“Spray what ain’t on fire yet!” Tom yelled over the roar. “Maybe we can slow it down!”

 

Rosie did as he bid, sweeping water along the dry boards and fence line while he sprinted for the big doors. Her heart clenched as he was thrown back by a wave of furnace air.

 

“No!” The word broke out of him like prayer and curse together.

 

He staggered along the fence, ribcage white-hot with breath, seeking any gap, any way through.

 

On the far side of the yard the little gate stood open. Open, though he knew he’d latched it. Beyond it lay the darker field where the other cows milled, lifting their faces to the strange light.

 

Two shapes stood out, one large, one small, just beyond the spill of flame. The calf bawled once, high and ridiculous, and Bess answered, low and steady.

 

They were there. They were safe.

 

Between the open gate and the orange glare stood Cooper.

 

Tom didn’t question his eyes this time. The boy’s outline shimmered in the heat, but he was as sure and still as Tennessee marble. One hand rested light on the gatepost, like he’d swung it wide and held it until mother and baby passed. His face was young again, not the hunger-struck mask from the end, not the thirteen-year-old orphan either, but something in between. Old sorrow and new peace both present, like two tones in one chord.

 

“Thank you,” Tom said hoarsely, not trusting his legs, and went to his knees right there in the dirt.

 

The pressure of the heat eased a fraction, as if the air had knelt with him. Rosie kept the hose trained to keep sparks from the house, tears slicking her cheeks, lips moving. “Lord, keep us. Lord, keep ’em.”

 

The barn’s roof folded in on itself with a long, failing groan. Embers blew across the yard like a brief fever of stars. Somewhere off in the valley a siren wound up late and thin; out here the neighbors were far, and anyway the old barn would be cinders before anyone got a truck hooked and rolling.

 

Tom stood and took the hose from his wife as the flames settled into a mad red breathing.

 

Rosie wobbled to the pasture, wide-eyed by the fence as Bess nosed Etta’s flank. She laid her palm against the cow’s cheek. “Good girl,” she murmured, voice falling back into gentleness.

 

Tom turned to see his wife calming the girls in the field and couldn’t help but notice the place by the gate was empty. What lingered was the soft thunk of the latch settling into the post, and the fact of two lives saved, not luck, not chance, but mercy with a name.

 

On the front road, tires hissed gravel. Headlights swept the house and went on. Tom’s eyes narrowed. A silhouette leaned low over a steering wheel, then ducked, as if the light itself accused.

 

Rosie came to his side, damp hair clinging to her forehead.

 

“A warning,” she said. It wasn’t a question. She wore the look she wore when a tornado skirted the ridge and spared the valley, fierce gratitude and cold knowing. “They want you afraid.”

 

“I am,” Tom said honestly. “But I ain’t backing off.”

​

“Then we’re agreed,” Rosie answered, wiping her eyes with the side of her wrist.

 

The sirens wailed louder now as the fire truck pulled down the long driveway, tires chewing gravel.

Chief Harris climbed out first, gray hair, big shoulders, a man who’d put out more bad nights than most folks could imagine. He took one look at Tom and didn’t waste time on pleasantries.

 

“Tom! Y’all hurt?”

 

“No,” Tom called. “Cows are out. Barn’s a goin’.”

 

Harris snapped his fingers at his crew. “Line to the back! Keep it off the house. Watch that wind!”

 

Two young firefighters dragged hose across the yard, boots kicking sparks and ash. Water arced into the orange, steam rising like ghosts set loose.

 

Harris stepped close, voice pitched lower. “You got power out there? Any chance this started from wiring?”

 

“No power,” Tom said. “And no lanterns. No gas cans stored inside.”

 

Harris’ eyes narrowed. He stared at the burn line, the way the flame had climbed—too fast, too clean. He bent, scooped something gritty between gloved fingers, then sniffed.

 

His expression tightened.

 

“What is it?” Rosie asked, voice small but steady.

 

Harris looked up at Tom. “Smells like accelerant.”

 

Tom’s face went hard. “So it was set.”

 

Harris didn’t answer right away, just watched his men work, watched the water fight a fire that had already eaten its fill.

 

Then, quiet as confession, he said, “I can’t put that in the report till the marshal confirms it. But yeah, Tom. This don’t look like an accident.”

 

Tom’s jaw worked once. “You tellin’ me as a friend or a chief?”

 

Harris met his gaze. “Both.”

 

A firefighter jogged up. “Chief, we got it knocked back. It’s still hot in the middle, but she ain’t jumpin’ now.”

 

Harris nodded. “Good. Keep wetting it down. Tom, ” He paused, and for a second, the official mask slipped. “You got enemies?”

 

Tom’s eyes flicked toward the road where the headlights had passed. “I got truth,” he said. “Seems that’s enemy enough.”

 

Harris exhaled. “I’ll have the deputy take statements. And Tom?” His voice roughened. “You be careful.”

Rosie stepped closer to her husband, shoulder to shoulder. “He will be,” she said.

 

They went inside with soot on their sleeves and the porch light burning steady behind them.

They’d barely crossed the threshold when Tom’s phone trilled on the counter, the sound shattering the quiet. Unknown number. He put it to his ear.

 

A woman’s voice, breathless, shredded by panic. “Tom? It’s… it’s Nicky. Please, I didn’t know who else to call. We’re at the ER… Thomas… he…” The words dissolved, came back strangled. “He got into somethin’ at Miss Marlene’s. He’s… we’re waiting on the helicopter… please--”

 

“We’re coming,” Tom said. He had already picked up his keys.

 

Rosie’s hand was on her purse without needing to ask. The porch light threw their shadows long across the yard as they hurried to the truck, the burned barn still muttering in the dark like an old man recounting a loss.

 

When they hit the lane, Cooper was there.

​

A chill ran down Tom’s back, and even Rosie shuddered. Then he was gone.

 

Tom didn’t speak of it. He didn’t need to.

 

Rosie kept her palm flat against the seat between them, like she was holding something steady that couldn’t be seen.

 

“Hold on, baby,” a whispered prayer leaving her lips, as Tom’s grip tightened on the wheel.

 

The ER doors shushed open on a world made of fluorescent light and shoe squeaks and the tidy terror of people trained to move fast while sounding calm. A nurse at triage lifted a hand without looking up.

 

“Name and date of birth.”

 

Someone sobbed instead of answering. A baby hiccupped through exhausted cries two bays down. The air smelled like antiseptic and overbrewed coffee.

 

Nicky stood at the far end of the waiting area near the vending machines, both hands twisted in the hem of her shirt. Her hair was half-pulled through a band, mascara streaked in lightning tracks she hadn’t noticed. When she saw Tom and Rosie, she broke, not falling, not fainting, but folding like a person whose strength had been jerked out from under her bones. Rosie caught her before the tile did.

 

“He was on the floor,” Nicky said, words coming choppy and coughing. “I had to take the laundry out. I told him not to leave the living room. I told him… and he was so quiet, I thought he was playing hide-and-seek again. He loves that game. And when he didn’t come when I called… I was mad.” Her voice fractured. “Then I seen him. On the floor. And his lips… and I…I called… I—”

 

She pressed both fists hard against her temples like she could push the image back inside her skull.

 

“They said it was, it was her stuff. I’d never let him near it. God, I never thought they’d be so careless. He’s just a baby. I’m so sorry!”

 

“Hush now,” Rosie said, the way she would to a fever. “Hush. Breathe with me. In and out. That’s it.” She didn’t say It’s not your fault. The truth was more tender and more complicated than that. She said what a woman ought to hear when the world comes apart in her hands. “We’re here.”

 

Tom laid a steady hand on Nicky’s shoulder. “Where is he?”

 

“Back there,” she said, pointing toward double doors holding the sound of clipped voices and rolling wheels. “They got the medicine in him but he wasn’t waking up. They said life-flight’s on the way. The pad’s on the west side.”

 

A clerk approached, expression professional but not unkind. “Ma’am, are you the mother? We need consent for transfer.”

 

Nicky nodded too fast. “Yes. Yes. Anything. Please.”

 

“Do you have someone who can ride with you?”

 

Nicky looked at Tom and Rosie the way a child looks to the front pew for an answer.

 

“We’ll be right there,” Tom said. “We’ll follow you to the big hospital and sit with you till you’re sick of us.”

 

The doors burst open. A gurney wheeled through with its own urgent gravity: IV bag hanging clear as a raindrop, respiratory therapist moving with practiced hands, a physician speaking in short, controlled bursts. Under a small mountain of blankets lay a boy so small the adult-sized bed looked cruel around him. His face was turned upward, lashes wet, lips faintly blue at the edges.

 

For three seconds, Nicky’s hands lifted toward him and then fell because there was no place to put them.

 

“We’ll stabilize on the pad,” the physician said gently. “Meet us at Summit Ridge.”

 

The automatic doors swallowed them whole.

 

Silence fell wrong without motion.

 

A man stirred sugar into coffee he would never drink. A toddler stared open-mouthed. Somewhere someone whispered a psalm.

 

Nicky’s voice came back low and hollow. “It was her stuff. He got into it at her house. She kept it in the pantry. ‘Out of reach,’ she always said.” Her throat worked. “When I got back from the laundry, he’d climbed up and grabbed the box of. He was just hungry.”

 

She swallowed. “I shouldn’t have left him alone.”

 

“Marlene,” Tom said. Not a question.

 

Nicky nodded. Shame tried to climb into her face and failed, there was no room left for it.

 

“Sheriff was there ten minutes later,” she continued. “He told me to say it happened at my house. Said folks don’t need to be upset with Miss Marlene when she does so much for the community. Said I could keep my job if I kept my mouth shut. Then he told me to be more careful like I did it on purpose.”

 

A muscle jumped in Tom’s jaw. He looked down so the anger wouldn’t scare her.

 

“What did you tell him?”

 

“That I’d pray for him,” Nicky said, almost surprised at herself. “Then I walked away.”

 

Rosie rubbed slow circles between her shoulders. “Good girl,” she murmured, not condescension, but recognition.

 

A tech hustled in. “Helicopter’s wheels-up. We need that form.”

 

Tom took the pen from Nicky’s shaking fingers and turned the paper so she could see it.

 

“Here. Here. Date. You know how to write the truth. It’s the lies that take a different hand.”

Nicky signed.

 

Outside, night wind lifted hair and paper. The helicopter’s rotors beat the dark into submission. The stretcher lifted. The machine rose. They watched until it was a blinking star headed west.

 

They drove the hour behind it.

 

Nicky’s hand stayed laced with Rosie’s. Rosie hummed “Amazing Grace” low and steady, filling the space where fear tried to take root. The highway rolled under them. The dark pressed its forehead to the glass.

 

When they reached Summit Ridge, everything gleamed and hummed and promised competence.

 

Inside Pediatric ICU, the air felt different, thicker with vigilance.

 

Nicky’s voice steadied into something deliberate.

 

“You need to know everything,” she said.

 

She didn’t look down anymore.

 

“The cash envelopes come Wednesdays and Fridays after lunch. The sheriff visits most Mondays, sometimes Sundays ‘for prayer.’ He goes out the side door with a tin she keeps lemon cookies in. Sometimes he brings it back. Sometimes he don’t. The donations to church come after big deliveries. Brittany runs drops on Fridays after dark, usually has Jenson drive because he don’t say no to her. Tater calls orders on a blue flip phone, number ends in 77. They keep the books in a white binder in the kitchen. She wipes the cover top to bottom when she’s done like she’s polishing furniture.”

 

Rosie nodded once, eyes wet and fierce. “You say it plain, honey.”

 

Nicky swallowed.

 

“When Thomas got into it tonight, it was because she left it in the pantry behind the cereal. I told her not to keep it in the kitchen with me working. She smiled and said, ‘Bless your heart, you worry too much.’”

 

Her voice cracked.

 

“I thought I could keep my job and keep my boy. I thought she was the safety I didn’t have when I was little.” She pressed her knuckles to her mouth. “She ain’t.”

 

“She never was safety,” Tom said quietly. “You were safety to that boy. You still are. That’s why we’re going to carry this where it can be heard.”

 

The ICU doors opened.

 

A nurse stepped out, lines at her eyes earned and kind. “Ms. Nichols? He’s responding. We’re keeping him on support tonight to let him rest. The medicine’s working. We’ll watch him like a hawk.”

Nicky nearly missed the chair behind her. Tom slid it in place.

 

“Can I see him?”

 

“Two minutes. One at a time.”

 

“You go,” Rosie said. “We’ll be right here.”

 

When Nicky returned, her face looked torn open and clean.

 

“He squeezed my finger,” she said softly.

 

Tom pulled out his old pocket notebook, the one smudged with dirt, cow tallies, prayer requests, and names the county forgot. He wrote every word she’d spoken.

 

A man in a necktie and badge drifted closer.

 

Tom did not stop writing.

 

When the man leaned nearer, Tom looked up with the face of a man who could lift an engine block.

 

The badge drifted away.

 

Tom slid the notebook toward Nicky.

 

“Read it. Tell me if I wrote any of it crooked.”

 

She read carefully.

 

“It’s right.”

 

“Then that’s the truth we’ll carry.”

 

He tucked the notebook into his shirt pocket like scripture.

 

Dawn broke heavily and gray over Summit Ridge.

 

By the window overlooking the mountains, Tom unfolded the paper Darlene’s ghost had dropped on Marlene’s porch.

 

Loveless Clinic Trust
To: Peterson Consulting Fund
Same P.O. box as the sheriff’s
$4,500.00
Note: community outreach donation

 

The rising sun made the paper nearly transparent.

 

In the reflection, Cooper stood beside him, young, quiet, waiting.

 

“All right, son,” Tom said. “We’ll carry it where it can be heard.”

 

Behind Cooper, faint as hymn-echo, stood Darlene. A sixteen-year-old Jesse.

 

Then only daylight remained.

 

Tired and worn in a way only hospital waiting rooms can leave you, Tom and Rosie pulled down their drive just as the light began to thin. The kind of tired that sits behind your eyes and in your bones, fluorescent hum still echoing, the smell of antiseptic clinging to your clothes.

 

Nicky had stayed behind with Thomas. Once her cousin Candy arrived, breathless and wide-eyed, she gently shewed them toward the door.

 

“You rest while you can,” Rosie told Nicky patting her cheek. “He’ll need you steady when he wakes.”

 

So Tom and Rosie left, carrying fragile mercy home with them

 

The barn was a black scar against the orange skyline.

 

Neighbors had stacked hay bales under tarp. A note pinned to the fence:

For the feed y’all lost. We’re praying.

 

Tom smiled faintly. “Guess not everybody’s blind.”

 

Rosie brushed his sleeve. “The good ones just take longer to speak.”

 

He laid the notebook open on the table.

 

“We go over the sheriff’s head. State boys. Maybe that reporter from Knoxville who ain’t afraid of printin’ small-town rot.”

 

“You’ll need rest.”

 

“Rest later. Too many ghosts up waitin’.”

 

She studied him the way you study someone whose edges have grown into yours.

 

“Then we do it together.”

 

He nodded.

 

The porch light still burned, though daylight had rendered it useless.

 

He left it on…they’d need all the light they could get.

​

That evening, before driving back to Summit Ridge, Tom stepped onto the porch.

 

The air smelled of rain, and the bitterness of the ash and soot.

 

He held the deposit slip in the porch-light glow.

 

Across the yard, near where the barn once stood proud, Cooper lingered, faint as breath.

 

He nodded once.

 

Tom nodded back.

​

“All right, boy,” he whispered. “We’ll tell it. Every last word.”

 

He turned off the porch light.

 

The night accepted it without fear.