Wake the Dawn by Lauraine Snelling

Author:Lauraine Snelling [Snelling, Lauraine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780892969050
Publisher: Faith Words
Published: 2013-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

They held Chief’s funeral in the almost-new St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, not because he was Episcopalian—he was not—but because it was the biggest sanctuary for miles around and could hold the most people. Also, it had a dandy closed-circuit television system that could carry the service to overflow crowds in the parish hall and to the Lutheran church right next door. Still, the seating space was not enough, and mourners filled the Lutheran church and stood out in the courtyard.

When Jenny mentioned the viewing beforehand, Esther came early just to see; yep, his casket was open. How…She paused before him far longer than expected, searching for marks from the autopsy. There were none. Wait. Above his hairline there, the skin had been laid back and reattached with staples. You would never notice if you didn’t know. And with a demure silk coverlet up to his armpits, his hands neatly folded, they didn’t have to be careful about breaking apart his rib cage. She hurried out back, barely making it to the peony bushes before she threw up.

She really should go back in. She walked around to the front in order to enter the back of the sanctuary and just stand there against the wall near the door, not letting all those people crowd in too close to her.

She paused out front, for here came Ben, dressed in his class A uniform, military creases in his shirt and his real gold badge (probably brass, but it looked gold), not the fabric sew-on of the field uniform. She found herself thinking, Oh, man, he looks good! She didn’t say it aloud.

He stepped up beside her. “You doing okay so far?”

“So far.”

“I heard about the autopsy. Dennis called me and I came in, talked to the two doctors awhile. They’re calling it medical research. I guess it is.”

“At least we know how he died.” She could feel the terror mounting. She desperately wanted to get out of here and she desperately wanted to stay.

“And I hope you realize now that there was not a thing you could have done to prevent his death or delay it. Nada. Scientifically proven; autopsy by two qualified doctors.”

She nodded. Why did people keep harping on that? “You told me that on the night he died, remember? When you sat with me. How did you know? Or did you just guess?”

“Almost always, when a person just drops like that, he’s gone. I didn’t know then, no. Guessed. I was saying anything I could think of to keep you from blaming yourself.”

“How did you know I’d blame myself?”

“’Cause I do it all the time.”

She snorted. “Well, I still do. If only I’d insisted he come in for a check.”

He gripped her upper arms and turned her to him, eye-to-eye. “Read my lips. He had two simultaneous events going on, a coronary occlusion and an aortic aneurysm. The aneurysm took that moment to burst. End of story. Unless you had big-city imaging equipment, there was no way you could have found them ahead of time.

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