Free Gideon - 03 - Religious Conviction by Grif Stockley Page A

the living room. Most, if not all, have something of the foreign or exotic about them. My eyes come to rest upon an oil painting of a scene I recognize from my Peace Corps days in Colombia a famous Spanish fort in Cartagena that is a mandatory stop for sightseers.
    “Gifts to my father,” my hostess says in response to my poorly disguised amazement.
    “Symbols of gratitude from his mission trips on which he takes Christian Life families to work for the poor.”
    “Have you ever gone with him?” I ask, letting my eyes move to her face, thinking they didn’t come from the poor. She is perfectly made up and exudes a fragrance that suggests rose petals. Is this for me or for herself? Chet hasn’t prepared me for her at all. I expected her perhaps to be subdued, but there is some thing standoffish in her manner. Usually, criminal defendants want instant reassurance you can help them, whereas Leigh Wallace seems as if she could care less.
    “Every year for the past five,” she says, walking ahead of me into a formal dining room, “until this one.”
    A massive mahogany table whose wood is nearly obscured by a Spanish lace cloth dominates the room, and I find myself wanting to touch the shiny surface. It is as if she is a tour guide who is answering the same questions for the millionth time in a well-rehearsed, detached voice.
    I look in vain for pictures of her father perhaps exhorting the faithful from the pulpit or mixing cement for the masses in a foreign land, but there is not even a snapshot of a family dog.
    “Would you care for some coffee or something to drink, Mr. Page?” she asks, stroking the lace with her fingers. Though she has on a ring, an opal, I spy no wedding band. A silver bracelet adorns her wrist. Her red fingernails are perfectly manicured Hardly the weeds of a grieving widow and certainly not the getup I had pictured of the daughter of a Bible-toting Jesus freak. In fact, Leigh’s dark, dramatic features remind me of nothing so much as those of a well-to-do, haughty Colombian beauty. Even shop girls dressed to the teeth in the larger cities on the northern coast, and the ones who could afford it decked themselves out in a way that eclipsed their paler American counterparts. Though I am not particularly thirsty or in need of further stimulation this windy March afternoon, perhaps we could use something to break the ice.
    “Coffee would be great,” I tell her and follow her into the kitchen, which gleams with copper pots and pans hanging from the walls like foreign artifacts.
    The perfect hostess, she gives me a steaming cup of dark roasted coffee and offers me a piece of German chocolate cake. Accepting both, I make myself at home at her kitchen table. Sitting across from me, sipping at a glass of water, she asks, “Are you a Christian, Mr. Page?”
    I suppress a sigh, remembering my earlier thought that she might mistrust Chet because of his Johnnycome-lately attitude toward fundamentalist Christianity.
    Fearful that the answer to this question guards the gate to a genuine conversation about the case, I push aside my desire to question its relevance.
    “Does Catholicism count?” I ask lightly, hoping to avoid an inquisition.
    “There are Catholics,” she says, “and there are Catholics
    “That’s true,” I admit, surprised she would know. I suspect it is not the Pope who bothers her but the accommodation made by any modern-day Christian to harmonize faith and science. Ever since Galileo looked through his telescope, the battle has been joined. My latest evidence of the fight, laughably sketchy, since I don’t have anything to do with the church, comes from the popular press. Shamelessly summarizing years of scholarship mainly by European Catholic Biblical scholars, an article I read some time ago in The Atlantic on the historical Jesus put the matter bluntly: the four gospels in the New Testament are best understood as a collection of interwoven faith documents which put a particular