Читать книгу Train 653 - Angela Yvette Thurman - Страница 13

Chapter 9

Gracie refused to get medical treatment, so her husband, Lieutenant Brooks, drove her home and put her to bed. She was very distraught, and she wanted to be alone. She made him leave the house so that she could gather her thoughts through meditation. The days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months since she had been locked in her bedroom. No one knew of the extent of her grief. All she said was that if she could make things right, she would. Whatever that meant, only she knew. She did not want to see her husband, so he had no choice but to sleep at the police station. The boy who had led her to the dead body was to blame, but he was too young to be put in jail, so the lieutenant waited until he messed up and put him in a home for troubled boys.

The lieutenant talked to everyone who worked for Gracie to see if there were any issues that she may have been dealing with before the accident. They assured him that she showed no signs of being under any type of pressure nor did she express that she was unhappy. Seeing his wife slip away from reality made him more anxious to help her. Her mind seemed to be fixed on the past mistakes that she had made because she prayed to God to forgive her.

Their preacher would come by often to pray for her and ask her if she had something that she needed to confess. All she said was “No, it was not my fault, I did all that I could do.” No one had any idea what she was talking about. Sometimes even she did not know what she was talking about. Because of her height and weight, it did not take long for her to start to deteriorate from a lack of food. Even when she did try to eat, nothing would stay down.

Gracie forced herself to get out of bed, and she took a long bath. She knew in order to keep her secrets, she had to go down to her office to destroy some papers that she had been hiding in a safe. She was too tired to make the trip by herself, so when her husband left the house after eating his lunch, she had her servant drive her and her maid to the orphanage. She was too weak to exit the car, so she gave her servant a key to enter her office and retrieve a box locked in a file cabinet. After giving her the box, she took a book of matches out of her pocket and burned the papers enclosed while sitting in the parking lot, telling them that they were never to mention what she had done to anyone. After they had promised to keep her secret, she told Cornelius that she was ready to go back home.

When she arrived back home, she saw her husband’s patrol car parked in front of the house, and he was sitting on the steps waiting for her. He held her by the arm and helped her up the steps, making sure not to go to fast. She was too exhausted from her trip to make it up another flight of stairs to their bedroom, so he sat her on the couch and sent the maid to go and get her a pillow and blanket from the closet and he made his wife comfortable on the sofa in the den and then he put more logs in the fireplace to keep her warm. He sat in a chair and begged her to talk to him.

She said nothing at all. She did not want to look at him.

After several days on the sofa, Gracie sent for their preacher to pray for her because she knew that her time was coming to an end. Not only did the preacher come, he brought with him a few of her closest friends from church to say their last goodbyes. The preacher led the prayers, asking God to have mercy on her soul, and when they had said amen at the end of the prayer, Gracie closed her eyes and took her last breath, which, to her husband, sounded like a sigh of relief.

The preacher covered her face with her blanket, and everyone started to cry except her husband—he stood there with his eyes full of water, but he did not let a teardrop fall. All of her friends knew that she took pride in her appearance, so they washed her body and dressed her in her finest nightgown and brushed her long hair and covered her lips with her favorite ruby red lipstick before the lieutenant sent for the coroner to remove her body and take her to the morgue.