Galveston Between Wind and Water - By Rachel Cartwright Page 0,105
could have poisoned you when I thought I was saving your life. I’m so sorry.” Gabrielle covered her chest. “Please, Bret. Don’t look at me like this.”
Bret diverted his eyes, searching around the room for something to cover her.
“That . . . that bastard threw my clothes out the window. Please, I need something,” she pleaded.
In the opposite corner, the contents of a smashed chest of drawers were scattered about the floor. He rummaged through the pile with his good arm until he found a crinkled white blouse and black skirt wrapped up in the center of a damp ball of clothing. “These are the driest I could find.”
Gabrielle grabbed the clothes. Bret turned his back and she dressed herself as best she could. “Gabrielle? Did that animal—”
“No,” she answered in a whisper. Gabrielle turned away to hide her tears.
Bret rubbed his aching forehead. Philip’s words and the faded threads of childhood memories fluttered briefly through his mind like the tattered curtains on the broken window. “Philip was right. About the others and Caden.”
He stared at the derringer in his palm. “He killed Timothy too.”
Bret’s restless guilt—the old burden of promise once obscured by grief and anger, and haunted by a faceless presence of doubt—now gave way to something else.
If not pity, then letting go after having seen such wretched remains of a man, forever consumed by the hellish appetite of his own unforgiving hunger that it left nothing for revenge to savor.
Bret felt the light, soothing touch of Gabrielle’s hand on his bruised shoulder. He turned and saw her dressed in Rebecca’s damp blouse and skirt. “Let’s go home and get this bandaged. There’s nothing more for you here.”
He took Gabrielle in his arms and held her close for a long while, calming himself in the entwined breathing of their embrace. He kissed her hair. It was all he could do to stop his tears from falling on her cheek.
“You don’t have to be afraid anymore.” She touched the tear in the corner of his eye.
He kissed her, long and deep, the way he had kissed her before, when the power of his unspoken love for her had threatened to carry him away forever.
CHAPTER 29
Beaumont, Texas, January 10, 1901
The rattling jolts and backfires from Bret’s automobile parked in front of the Beaumont Hotel were enough to make people cross to the other side of the street.
Trying to idle his newly rebuilt Panhard et Levassor was a risky business for more than a minute or two. It could overheat and blow a gasket or fall suddenly quiet and refuse to budge. Not unlike Gabrielle these days. If she doesn’t get a move on . . .
Bret reached over his seat for the wood toolbox to look for his tire pressure gauge. There, he’d stuffed stacks of old business papers and envelopes recovered from the battered oak desk in the ruins of his home.
The paper was streaked with grease from the small parts Philip and his workmen had salvaged from the wreck of his first automobile. Underneath, he found the glass tire gauge wrapped in a remnant of his old cotton vest.
Carefully unwrapping the frayed rag, Bret felt the crinkle of paper inside the vest pocket. He pulled out a chafed packet of folded writing paper and carefully unfolded the edges of the mildewed sheets.
The writing was blotched and faded, but the voice in the words was still clear. Lord. After everything that’s happened since you’ve completely forgotten about her letter.
He massaged his sore shoulder and looked back at the main doors to the hotel and waited for a few seconds, tapping his foot in time to the rhythmic jostle and bump of the automobile. Why haven’t you thrown this away yet? What more do you hope to find by keeping it?
Bret wiped the sweat off his brow. He peeled off his calfskin driving gloves and began reading.
“I know, dearest Bret, that you must hate me and despise the first moment our lips touched. How could I have deceived you so intimately and left you to suffer at the vengeful hands of my uncle? I don’t have any excuses for you, only to say that it gives me no greater pleasure than to know that you’re alive and reading this letter now.
From the first verse I sang that night, when I lifted my face to meet your warm smile and inviting eyes, I knew that my uncle could not have told me the whole truth about you.