back seat?” Cindy asked. “She died?”
“No, not her. Although she was injured, she didn’t die. She was pregnant. It was her baby that died. That was where they were going, to the hospital.
“Nora Gray was a next-door neighbor whose husband was in the military, stationed overseas in Vietnam. They had worried that he wouldn’t be able to get leave, so they had already arranged that Paul’s parents would take her, just in case. So when the baby started coming early, they were ready.
“Paul knew her well. She was kind and gentle, and he considered her not only a friend but another parent when he needed one. He was quite the nerd when being a quiet, nerdy boy didn’t make you popular. Which meant he struggled in school and with people’s expectations. He felt understood by Nora.
“This is all something he told me later. How much he loved her, how much Nora had stood by him when he needed it. That was what was eating him up. He had run away, and then her baby died.
“Nora called the house asking to see Paul more than once, but he refused to see her. He told me he couldn’t face her. The baby died, and it was his fault.”
“Because he believed he caused the wreck?” Cindy asked.
“Yes, and then because he ran away. He believed that the baby would have lived if he had stayed with her. But instead, he ran. The ambulance was at the scene of the wreck almost immediately, so really, if they could have saved the baby, they would have done it. That’s what Nora wanted him to know, that it wasn’t his fault.
“However, in Paul’s mind, everyone in town knew him as a murderer. He pleaded with me to help him be someone else. And that’s what I did. I helped him.
“We found a couple who would be his foster family, and we changed his name. Within a few months, he was gone. He asked me to let him be, let him have another life, and tell no one what happened to him. I always wondered if running away again was the right thing for him to do.
“But he had asked me to never contact him. He wanted to be free of his past. That, too, is something I wonder if I did right. Was a fourteen-year-old boy making a good decision? But I did what he asked. Every time I thought of him, I would pray that he found happiness.
“Now, looking at you, Bree, I see he did, and perhaps that means I did the right thing. He made a life for himself, one that he deserved.”
Bree stood up, the blanket dropping to the floor, and gave the other women in the room what Marsha called her ‘look.’
“Well, there must be more to this story because if that’s all that happened, tragic as it was, I believe that eventually, he would have told me. There has to be more to it.”
Taking a deep breath, Bree said, “And I am going to find out what it is. Can we find Nora Gray? Maybe she can help find out what else he was hiding. Because I am sure that Paul was hiding something, and I need to know.”
“That was over forty-five years ago, Bree,” Grace said. “She might be hard to find.”
“How old was she then?”
“In her late twenties.”
“Well, then, she could still be around, couldn’t she?
Cindy got up and got her computer and turned it on. “Well, we know her name. And now that we know how all this began—with an accident and a boy named Stan Joseph Ford—we can get Judith on this. She’ll know how to find out more.”
A few minutes later, she said, “Okay, done. I told her what we know and asked her to get help. She’s at dinner with April, so she said she’d contact her “guy” and have him get started.
“Oh, and she said to check our phones, she sent us a picture.”
“Wow,” Marsha said. “Look at April!”
She showed the picture of their other two friends to Grace and then asked her if she would take a picture of the three of them.
After the photos were exchanged, it was Marsha who said, “That’s all we can do tonight. Let’s get some rest. Perhaps by morning, we’ll have something to go on to find this mystery woman and get more answers.”
A few minutes later, after Grace said goodnight to Cindy and Bree, she closed the door of her room and leaned against it, exhausted but relieved of a burden she had carried for too many years.
She would never have imagined she’d be back again when she left this town years before, but she was glad that she was. And although she had told what she knew, there was still work to do. This was a story with a loose ending, and for Paul’s sake, she would help close the loop.
Grace only hoped that it brought peace to his wife in doing so. Perhaps that was what Paul meant when he said it was his last gift. By giving her a chance to tell someone, he had given her a last gift, too. Because Grace knew that sometimes the dead stay around until what they left undone is completed, she whispered her thanks to Paul, hoping he was listening.
As she snuggled down into bed, she thought about how grateful she was to be given this chance to help Bree. But she couldn’t wait to head home and resume her life in Doveland.
However, first, she had to make sure she had done everything she could to finish what she and Paul had started so many years before.