Ring of Truth by Nancy Pickard

thin.
    A few members started praying for a benefactor.
    They might better have heeded the wry old adage, “Be careful what you pray for, because you just might get it.”
    “I'll never forget the first time I saw Artemis,” the church secretary avows. “Of course, she wasn't Artie McGregoryet, she was still Artemis Hornung. I'll swear, when she walked in, she was like a breath of fresh air, like a sea breeze. She was so nice, so friendly and polite, and she had the face of an angel. Just lovely. She introduced herself— and I thought, what a beautiful and unusual name, Artemis—and she said she was looking for a new church home. She said she hadn't actually set foot in a church for, gosh, twenty years.”
    What Mrs. Artemis Hornung didn't confide was that she was newly divorced from a man who was almost the exact opposite of her. Taylor Hornung was a “meat and potatoes” kind of guy who had married a woman who could whip up soufflés at the drop of a slotted spoon. Taylor's idea of a good time was a few beers and a football game; his wife liked museums, parties, and “good works.”
    It seemed almost inevitable when Artie and Taylor divorced.
    “We were just too different,” she told people.
    “I couldn't keep up!” was his humorous version.
    That was all right for a long time, though, because they were both busy with the operation of Hornung Dock & Pier, Inc. You know those wooden posts that pelicans sit on all over Florida? They're slatted and grooved and ringed with metal? Ever wonder who makes them, or where they come from? Hornung Dock & Pier, most of them. “There's a lot of water in Florida,” Taylor Hornung liked to say, stating the obvious in his humorous way. “And one hell of a lot of seagulls. They all need perches, right?Wouldn't be right to keep them from landing somewhere. Even seagulls got to rest now and then, you know. Millions of seagulls and pelicans, thousands of boats, and lots and lots of piers and posts.”
    And, over the years, lots and lots of money.
    After their marriage of twenty years they split their property without so much as a squabble because, “We started with nothing and earned it all together,” as Taylortold his lawyer. “People say I'm generous to her, but they never stop to think that she's had to be equally generous to me. I mean, it's her company, too.”
    “He's a sweet man,” Artie was known to say.
    “Too nice,” said some of his friends who didn't view her contributions in quite the generous light that he did. “Like ten million dollars too nice.”
    Their business sold for twenty million dollars, with half for each of them, after taxes. Their union had not produced heirs.Taylor moved happily onto a sailboat and took off for the South Pacific, where he was reachable only by E-mail. Artemis moved into a smaller house and began to look for something besides business to fill her life and something beyond her wardrobe on which to lavish her money.
    Later she would say, “I prayed for guidance.”
    Her penetrating glance fell upon Sands Gospel Church.
    “She said she had heard good things about our pastor,” Pat Danner, the church secretary, remembers about that first meeting with Artie.
    A lot of people were hearing good things about Bob Wing.
    SANDS GOSPEL PREACHER FILLS PEWS one headline proclaimed on the religion page of the local Bahia Beach newspaper. And of course there was increasing publicity about his campaigns against the Florida death penalty. The word had gone out to tourists and residents alike that the sermons were lively at Sands Gospel, that the minister was young and charismatic, and that anybody could find a welcome there.
    “Young” is a relative term, of course.
    The Reverend Dr. Robert F.Wing was forty-three at the time of that article, forty-four at the moment when fate walked into his church in the guise of a “breath of fresh air”with the beautiful name of Artemis and the face of an angel. She was just turned forty herself. His