Chasing Gracie(3)
The loud knocking coming from the door once again shook me back to reality—an awful one, but reality nonetheless.
“I’m coming!” I yelled, cursing the visitor as I made my way to the door.
“Gracie?”
Hearing my first name always left me in a trance. A week before her death, my mom had explained to me the reason for my name choice. It’s one of those epic stories of addiction and recovery.
Before my mom got pregnant with me, she’d struggled with drugs and alcohol. Her high never lasted long enough, so she dived into harder, more life-threatening drugs. My father wasn’t some hero who came to her rescue and brought her back to a life free of her addiction. Their story wasn’t a fairytale—nor was it anywhere near how they panned out in the movies. He was her dealer.
When she couldn’t con her way into funds or steal from people around her, she’d sleep with my dad to get her fix. Now, she didn’t flat-out say, “Hey, I did the deed with your dad for drugs. You weren’t ever supposed to be a thing.” I remember her words exactly to this day.
“Gracie, my saving Gracie. I never thought I’d see the day that your father would be my hope in life. I had an addiction, a terrible addiction that nearly took me out of this world far too soon. Your father supplied that addiction, and our payment arrangement led us to you. It led us to freedom from our demons. It gave us both a purpose in life. You. You were our saving Grace in every sense of the saying. The second we discovered you’d be joining this world, left in our care, we ran for help. We got clean and we turned our lives around. Gracie, you are special beyond words. Don’t ever forget that you brought light into a world that was suffocated by darkness.”
The voice rang out again. “Gracie?” I opened the door to Officer Cady who was wearing a look of shock as he took in the sight of me, no doubt concerned that I was in the same clothes he had seen me in the last time he’d visited. “I’m sorry to bother you again, but we really need you to go over the…the incident report.”
His stuttering amused me. Officer Cady was a twenty-year veteran in our tiny town. He had been there the night my parents died. In fact, he was the one who had insisted that the accident wasn’t my fault. Officer Cady had watched my relationship with Brent and the Hart family grow over the years. I knew him well, but his presence lately left me with nothing but heartache.
He had been the first officer on the scene after a neighbor had called about my hysterical cries for help. The last thing I remembered before the darkness had taken over was his arm grabbing mine and swinging it over his shoulder. His words had tipped me over the edge.
“Gracie, it’s going to be okay.”
No, it sure as heck was not going to be okay. Nothing would ever be okay again.
Chapter Two
Officer Cady had been trying to talk with me since the murder, but I hadn’t had anything to say. There was no ignoring him any longer. If I wanted them to find his killer, I’d have to suck it up. Reliving my worst nightmare brought out the worst in me. It was bad enough I was haunted every second of the day with my own thoughts, but to have to actually talk about it? No, thanks.
He needed my official statement though, and as a favor to me, he’d held off on getting it. While today wasn’t the first time he’d stopped by, it was the first time I’d answered the door.
I didn’t say a word as I turned my back to him, making my way to the kitchen. A soft bang alerted me that Cady had shut the door and followed me inside. Glancing at the clock on the kitchen wall told me that it was coffee time. Eight in the morning and I hadn’t slept in God knows how long. I had nothing holding me together. Nothing but depressing memories and bitter loneliness. That combination didn’t create a glue strong enough to keep myself in one piece, so coffee made the glue a threesome. A glorious, painful threesome.
“Gracie, I’m sorry we have to do this. I know you had nothing to do with…with what happened to Brent. But I need your signed statement. I’ve written it up myself with the information you’ve given me the last week. I’ll add it to a statement from your boss and a couple of coworkers about your alibi, and then I’ll leave you to grieve. I promise you I’ll do whatever I can to find the monster who did this,” Cady said, sympathy dripping from each word. Sympathy or pity—I wasn’t sure which.
He set a typed sheet of paper on the table. I glanced at the statement I had apparently given him. With my inability to speak coherently since I’d found Brent dead, I was surprised to see he’d managed to fill the entire sheet with my account of what had happened when I’d gotten home that night.