The Sacred Trust

On a chilly Friday afternoon at Whit's End, Connie Kendall comes racing through the door, late for her first day back at work after a holiday Whit had given her off. She is surprised to find that she has competition. Eugene Meltsner, a young science student and self-declared genius, has been spending his time inventing things alongside Whit, tinkering with refractors and improving what he insists on calling Mr. Whittaker's End, since he finds nicknames disingenuous. Connie decides the best way to prove herself is to get straight to work, and she waves off Eugene's offer to help with the vacuum cleaner. That turns out to be a mistake, because Eugene has boosted the machine's suction to something closer to a small hurricane, and it makes off with his necktie before anyone can reach the plug.

Sitting quietly in the middle of all this is Lucy Cunningham-Schultz, waiting for her friend Heather to arrive for a sleepover. Lucy tells Whit that the two of them plan to make a sacred trust that night, an idea she picked up from a movie: a promise to be faithful friends forever and never reveal a single secret they share. Whit likes the idea of the two girls growing closer, but he tries to warn her that a promise like that is not something to enter into lightly. Before he can explain what he means, the runaway vacuum cleaner calls him away, and by the time he returns Lucy is already gone.

At Lucy's house that night, the girls seal their trust by trading treasures. Heather hands over a soft angora sweater she never wears because it makes her itch, and Lucy gives up her own necklace and locket. Then come the secrets. Lucy goes first with a small one about a boy named Bobby Reynolds, but Heather's is much bigger. A couple of weekends earlier, when she was supposed to be at Sunday evening church, she was not delayed by a flat tire the way she claimed. She had gone dancing at a teen club with an older friend named Marjorie, who made her up to look old enough to get in, and there she met a boy named Todd. Worse, Heather announces she is going back the coming Sunday night, with her parents' permission already secured under false pretenses. Lucy tells her plainly that skipping church, going where she does not belong, and lying to her parents are all wrong. Heather brushes it off, invites Lucy to come along, and then reminds her of the one thing that matters most: Lucy cannot say a word, because she is under a sacred trust.

The next day Lucy's mother reminisces about her own childhood sleepovers with her best friend Ellen, and Lucy begins asking careful questions about whether secrets should always be kept. Her mother says it depends on the secret, and then admits there was one she wishes she had not kept. Ellen once told her she was going out with a boy her parents had forbidden. The two were in a car accident, and Ellen injured her back so badly that she still suffers from it, and doctors believe it may be why she has never been able to have children. Her mother could have stopped it all by telling someone. When she gently asks Lucy whether there is something she wants to say, Lucy admits that there is, and the two of them go inside to talk.

The fallout arrives quickly. Heather storms up to Lucy, furious that word reached her own mother and landed her in serious trouble. She accuses Lucy of breaking the very trust Lucy invented, demands her locket back, and thrusts the sweater into Lucy's hands. Lucy says she told only because she is Heather's friend. Heather answers that friends do not tell on friends, and that they cannot be friends anymore.

Lucy carries that heartache to Whit's End, where Whit guesses most of the story before she tells it. Promises like a sacred trust nearly always end this way, he explains: either someone is hurt by breaking the promise, or someone is hurt by keeping it. It is why Jesus said in Matthew 5 not to make oaths at all, but simply to let your yes be yes and your no be no. When Lucy repeats Heather's parting words, Whit tells her they were not true. Sometimes friends do tell on friends, and sometimes that is exactly how you learn who your real friends are, because a real friend does not want to watch someone get hurt. Lucy wonders whether Heather's choices were her own business, and Whit gives her an answer he admits she may not like. Heather is eleven. She is not an adult responsible for her own actions the way Mr. Riley or Eugene would be, and her parents need to know when she is headed toward something harmful so they can stop her. That, he says, is why God made parents. Lucy may not fully understand it yet, but the important thing is that she did the right thing.

Meanwhile Connie and Eugene are still racing each other through chores, polishing silverware and recataloging the library, until Whit finally calls a halt to the silly contest and tells them both what they had each been afraid to hear otherwise: they are both valuable, and he is glad to have them working at Whit's End. The two immediately start arguing about who was more worried, and Whit and Lucy make a quick escape.