The Crossroads

“Oh, Daddy! The son has come home!”

Gerda Spratling tottered around her bed in the mansion’s library.

Mondays were always difficult. This, however, was the worst Monday ever. Today she had learned that the loathsome sheriff’s son had come home to haunt her.

Miss Spratling’s life had ended when her fiancé, Clint Eberhart, was killed in the crossroads. It ended again twenty-five years later when her father committed suicide. Death surrounded Gerda Spratling. Her whole life was nothing now but a long, slow crawl toward the grave, where she prayed she would be reunited with the two men she had lost.

Memories and anger. That was all she had left, all that dragged her out of bed every morning.

But George Jennings? He must be so happy. Married to that pretty young thing with the flowers. Moving into a handsome new home.

She stared up at the highest bookshelf, at the rolling ladder, up to where her father had hanged himself.

“Sheriff Jennings made you do it, Daddy! I know he did!” She lurched across the room toward the ladder and wrapped one bony hand around a rung to hoist herself up.

“Daddy? Can you hear me? Daddy?”

Her foot slipped. She banged her chin against the sharp edge of a step. Warm blood trickled where she had bitten into her lip.

“Miss Spratling?”

Sharon rushed into the room and saw Miss Spratling sprawled out on the floor. “Let’s get you up from there, ma’am.”

“Get your hands off me, girl! Bring me my book!”

Sharon found the antique Bible on the bedside table and handed it to Miss Spratling. The old woman pried open the cracked leather cover and quickly located her most cherished passage.

Exodus. Chapter thirty-four. Verse seven.

The only words in the whole Bible that gave her any comfort:

“He does not leave the guilty unpunished; He punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.”

To the third and fourth generation.

That meant God would punish the son for what his father, the sheriff, had done. God would also punish the son’s son, the little brat with the filthy dog.

Miss Spratling only prayed that God would let her help.