The Rise of Lula Darling by Alex Dean

Author:Alex Dean [Dean, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Trebor & Taylor Publishing

Chapter 10

I had arrived home after a long day’s work. First, there were classes, followed by meetings with the parents of kids who were said to have severe behavioral problems. For most of my time spent on the clock, even without a chance to eat, I tried to mediate a solution between the school’s administration and the parents of these students. Because the last thing I wanted to see was for these children to be put on some type of psychotropic medication.

No sooner than I could get in my bedroom, strip off my clothes, my cell phone started buzzing with texts. My first thought was to ignore them. But what if it was something to do with one of my students? When I picked up my phone and looked at its screen, I saw a picture of Pastor Tompkins lying in a hospital bed. Mama D. was at his side, her hands airborne over his body—a pained look on her face.

I rushed into my mother’s room, where she had been ironing her clothes for work. “I just got a text from Marcus. Pastor Tompkins is in the hospital. It looks really serious.” I held up my phone to show my mother the picture.

She set the iron upright on the ironing board and came over to look at my phone. “That looks serious, baby girl. Why he looks unconscious!” Mama glanced up from looking at the phone’s screen. “The look on his face reminds me of the look I saw on Ms. Martha’s face as she laid on her deathbed.”

“We need to get over to the hospital right away,” I said. Mama unplugged the iron, and then we grabbed our coats and headed over to Jackson Southland Hospital. When we arrived in his room, he still looked asleep. A nurse stood on the side of his bed filling an IV bag with fluid. “My shifts over in forty-five minutes. But I’ll be back to check on him before I leave.” She closed the curtain separating Pastor Tompkins’s bed from that of an elderly patient next to him.

Mama D. nodded to acknowledge me and Mama’s presence. Then she lowered her head like she was fighting an army of emotions. “Lord, I knew they were gonna come at some point. I knew that his faith and his will would be tested by the devil himself.”

Suddenly I was made of stone. I struggled to comprehend exactly what Marcus’s grandmother had been trying to say, what this was all about. I pulled him outside into the hall to get a better understanding. “What’s going on? What happened to him?”

“They think he had a stroke?”

“A stroke?”

“Yeah. Mama D. said that Pastor Tompkins has been under a lot of stress lately, Lula.” Marcus then turned to me from looking down the hall. “Not only is he being investigated for the misuse of church funds. Some local alderman is spurring an inquiry into First Deliverance’s finances. But he’s also being accused of sexual misconduct. Mama D. said that one of the church’s secretaries is trying to blackmail him.

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