Page 113 of The Secrets She Keeps

Heather turned to the rest of the room. “At Angela’s funeral, Timothy turned violent. He cornered Marcia. The girls were already living there, and we had the funeral in Oklahoma, with a private graveside burial scheduled for the next day in Coleson Hollow. Marcia and I took Samia back to the house with us. Timothy showed up.”

“Timothy and Heather had had a rather acrimonious relationship since the loss of my father and stepmother,” Bonnie said. “And we are almost certain Timothy was drunk or on drugs that day. He was highly agitated at the funeral.”

“What happened between you and Grundenman before?” Miguel asked Heather. Seconds before Gunnar was going to ask it. It was a given that something had.

“After the funeral for my parents, he started pushing Bonnie, badgering her. He didn’t agree that we should go with Bonnie and not him and Angela,” Heather said. “He thought that with Bonnie already having Cashlyn, who was still very ill, and Cara, who had just been diagnosed as having autism, that Bonniewouldn’t be able to handle it, and well, he wanted Hope, to be blunt. Not me, Joy, or Marcia. He wantedHope.But he wouldn’t have been averse to havingMarciain his houseeither.”

“He had always favored Hope,” Bonnie said. “He actually delivered her six weeks early during a rushed emergency delivery, and she was almost lost to us then. And when we realized how ill Hope was, he was very almost paternal with her. Overprotective. He suggested to me and Angela that they should keep Hope and let me have the teenagers. He thought he and Angela could give Hope more. He wanted to raise her with their girls. He thought he could give her a better future since we had already recognized how bright she was. And he pushed. Which they honestly could have, and she’d have been well-loved and cared for with Angela—I don’t doubt that, but my father wouldn’t have wanted the girls split up. Heather overheard the conversation.”

“We argued that night. Pretty heatedly,” Heather said.

“Especially Heather and Timothy. Angela and I agreed—the four girls stayed together. No matter what. Timothy did not like being thwarted. Not by women—and especially not by a thirteen-year-old girl. That was just not something that was done to Dr. Timothy Grundenman. Once he became my father’s right-hand man of sorts after they married, he had a bit of an inflated sense of self-worth. Angela always thought it was because he was not of prominence as a child. Being in charge, being the owner of the hospital’s son-in-law, made him feel like he mattered.”

“I don’t know if it was because of the age difference between our twins and Hope, but Timothy wanted two things from our father,” Marcia said quietly. “The so-calledmoneyhe said our father had. And Hope.”

“That, and she did greatly resemble Angela’s daughters. Especially when next to Samia,” Bonnie said. “He always favored Hope. Always.”

“Tolerated me, watchedMarcia, and despised Heather—don’t forget that,” Joy said.

“So what did he do the day of Angela’s funeral?” Daniel asked.

“He showed up, making odd demands. About my father’s money and demanding to know where we were hiding it. Wanting his share or something,” Heather said. “He never had believed it when dad’s attorney said there wasn’t anything left for his family. None of us really believed that.”

“He had people with him. Two men,” Samia said very quietly. “They were waiting in his car that day after we got there. I remember looking at them.”

“I was out in the backyard,” Heather said. “I ran in the back door to get to Marcia. I heard her yelling. Timothy had Marcia pushed against the counter. Yelling at her about the money and about taking what he wanted. From her. He was ripping at her dress, then. He had always freaked me out a little, the way he’d started to watch her after our parents were gone. Especially while Angela was so sick and they weren’t…intimate…any longer. I saw what he was doing, and I shoved him away from Marcia as hard as I could. Then he turned on me.”

“Samia was there, yelling for him to stop,” Marcia said, wrapping her fingers around her husband’s hand. “Pulling on his arm. By that time, he had Heather on the counter, choking her. Screaming at her that she had ruined everything for him. That weallhad. I was afraid he was going to kill Heather, to kill us all. I’ll never forget the look in his eyes that day. He turned and lashed out. He hit Samia right in the face. I don’t even think he’d realized it was his daughter there at first. And…then Norm was just there. Out of nowhere. This big, rather menacing man we had never seen before.”

“I had come looking for Angela’s family. To pay my respects. I heard shouting and screaming. And I ran in to help,” Normsaid. “I walked in just in time to see him hit his daughter and go at Heather again. Children. And I, well, it set me off. No denying that.”

“You almost killed him that day,” Heather told him quietly. “I remember seeingyourface when you were hitting him like that. Pulling him off of me. I could breathe again. And I knew things would be okay then. I had no clue who you were, but I knew we were going to be safe.”

“You rather were a fierce sight, dear,” Marcia said.

“The only reason I stopped was Samia asking me not to kill her daddy. When I saw what he had done to Marcia, saw the marks on Heather’s neck, I almost killed him anyway.” Norm looked at Gunnar. “I could have killed him if I wanted, but I stopped. I dragged him outside as people started arriving and threw him in the car with his two friends. And told them to get the hell out of there. Before I killed him for real. And them right after. For some reason, I think they believed I meant it.”

Gunnar would have believed him. He looked around the room. Maris was right there, next to her mother’s knee. Her mother was caressing her hair, so gently. She was a teenage version of Heather, right down to the same shade of hair and the way that girl tilted her head. It wasn’t that much of a leap to imagine what that scene had been like for Norm that day.

“I stuck around…after that. I was between jobs, just retired from the Green Berets, between states and houses, drifting mostly, and was basically in search of answers about my first family’s…deaths in a car accident Angela had witnessed while I had been on an assignment overseas. I stuck with Bonnie and the girls because I was concerned he would come back. I slept in the barn. And watched over them.”

“Mom put him to work for his keep. Practically from sunup to sundown,” Joy said. “There was a lot of stuff we needed to do around the place.”

“It was just to keep him too busy to drool over Marcia like he kept doing,” Heather said, wincing as she shifted. “We were all drowning in the drool. I practically had to put pool floaties on the not-trips whenever Norm and Marcia were in the same room together.”

The not-trips—Cara, Cashlyn and Hope. Three Colesons, within a year of each other. He could only imagine what they had been like.

Probably pure chaos, completely.

“There was a lot of drool from our not-so-normal Norm back then,” Joy said. “He still drools over our Marigold Marcia, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“I always will.”

“I remember following him around, fascinated by whatever he was doing. Cashie and Cara and I followed himeverywhere,”Hope said, then grinned at him. “We were such total brats.”

“We worked at that,” Cashlyn said.

“It was really easy,” Cara added.

---