Mastim's Curse

Chapter 7

The girls pull up in the driveway just as I'm drying the newly cleaned sword with a towel. Once they get out of the car, Nicole looks quickly from the sword to me and her face drops.

My emotions are a jumbled mess but I put on a poker-face. "Did you girls enjoy your shopping?"

Jaidee manages to give me a quick kiss even though her arms are overloaded with packages. "Yes. Did you miss us?"

"Of course I did, and so did the nice detectives who were kind enough to pay me a visit while you were out."

Jaidee's smile disappears in an instant. "Really? What did they want?"

"Well, it seems there was a vigilante style killing at the university and they wanted to make sure Nicole and I had nothing to do with it."

Nicole's eyes go wide and she drops one of her bags.

"That's ridiculous. Why would they think that?" Jaidee says angrily.

I explain what the detectives told me about Nicole saving that girl from the two rapists. Her face goes pale with shock. She peppers us both with questions that I don't have good answers too and Nicole refuses to respond to. Eventually, I ask Jaidee to leave Nicole and me alone so we can talk. I might be hurting her feelings by excluding her, but I think there's a better chance of getting Nicole to open up if we're by ourselves.

Once she's inside, I pull up two foldout chairs and offer one to Nicole who accepts it without a word. Now that Jaidee is out of sight, I lose all pretense of the casual atmosphere I was putting on for her benefit. "Have you had any problems with your gifts you haven't told me about?"

She looks away and takes a long moment before speaking. "Dad, do you believe in heaven and hell?"

I'm caught off guard by her question. "Do I believe in heaven and hell? Well... I don't really have a yes or no answer to that."

A tear forms in the corner her eye followed by more. "Dad, I don't want to go to hell."

The sight of her crying is too much for me, so I put down the sword and lean over to give her a hug.

"You're not going to hell baby. No matter what you've done, you're not going to hell." Prison is a possibility, but I don't say that. I just hold her while she cries into my shoulder.

Once she quiets down I say, "As far as heaven and hell go, I think religion is like a sealed box that people pass around and try to guess what's inside. Anyone claiming to know for sure is fooling you and themselves."

She wipes her eyes and looks up at me. "What about what it says in the Bible?"

"The Bible?" I say with a deep sigh. "Ok, I want to paint a picture to help you understand the Bible a little better." Part of me welcomes this change in subject. It allows me to steer away from questions I'm not sure I want answered right now. "On the race circuit there is always someone spouting off about this religion or that one. What you need to keep in mind is that the Bible is a collection of scrolls written by different people before and after the birth of Jesus, and that people throughout history have had arguments on exactly which scrolls should be in the Bible."

She sits up straight, and I can see the interest in her face. "I didn't know that."

"Right. So, let's talk about these scrolls. These scrolls are basically a historical collection of what happened a long time go and what was said by lots of important people. These important people were trying to explain what's in that sealed box called religion. Only, in this case, some of these people claim to have been told directly by God exactly what's in the box."

She listens intently to my every world.

"But even if God did tell those people, I doubt we can truly understand the reality of what he said to them. I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about. I'll make it a story."

She smiles up at me. "I remember how you used to tell me bedtime stories every night when I was little."

That brings back pleasant memories. Story time when she was small was my favorite part of the day. As she grew older, and I spent more time racing, the story times grew further and further apart until, one day story time just never came again. I miss that special time together.

"I want you to imagine that Steve Jobs is alive again and is transported back in time two thousand years."

"Steve Jobs?" she smirks.

I poke her in the side and get a giggle out of her. "Yes. Steve Jobs, the guy that started Apple computers goes back in time to Biblical days. I want you to imagine him going from village to village explaining to anyone that will listen about computers and the Internet."

She arches an eyebrows. "I'm sure that went over well."

"Exactly. It wouldn't have gone over well at all, would it? These people don't even know what electricity is, so how can they understand computers?"

"Not unless he had a way to show them," she says.

"Well, that's the thing. You see, he doesn't have any way to show them. So he tries to come up with examples they can understand in an effort to get these high tech concepts across to people that don't have the slightest idea of what he's talking about."

Nicole rubs her temples with the tips of her fingers. "It gives me a headache just thinking about trying to explain the Internet to sheep herders."

"Right, so he spends years roaming around talking about the Internet and smart phones, and other crap they can't understand until they've had enough of that and hang him up on a cross to die for blasphemy."

Her face turns into a frown. "That's not a very good ending to your story."

"I know, but that's life." We sit in silence for a while. "Where are the clothes you were wearing last night?"

She shifts in her seat and looks down at the ground. "I lost them."

"Where did you lose them?"

She doesn't answer.

"I need to know that they will stay lost," I whisper.

"I put them in the storm sewer."

Well, that's as good of a place as any I can think of short of burning them. The police can't get in there and the next good rain should take them out to the ocean. "Ok. I'm going to put your sword someplace safe for a while."

Her expression hardens. "But I need that."

I look deep in her dark eyes and don't like what I see. There's an aged harshness that doesn't belong in a young girl. "You'll get it back... someday."