Page 62 of If The Fates Allow
“Yes.” There was no hesitation in Noah’s voice. “And always will.”
“Good.” Bending down, Cal retrieved a shovel from the brush and held it out to Noah. “Then you can help me bury the sack of shit.”
Noah didn’t say no, only waited. “Explain to me what he did to Willa.”
“You were such a beautiful baby, Wilhelmina.” Her mother’s lips pursed, and she crossed her arms, angling her head to look up at the swaying treetops. “Prettier even than Grace.”
“My little girl looked so much like you.” Bonnie came forward, lowering the gun finally. “And when you arrived, I fretted. I was worried that you would drop dead just as she did.”
Cal held up a hand for them to stop speaking and addressed Willa. “Did you really believe Bonnie came to work at Haven House because she couldn’t stand to be away from him even after he married our mother?”
“I-I…yes?” Willa didn’t know how to respond. “Didn’t you?”
“I did, at first, but when Grace died, I began to suspect that something was off,” Cal replied. “Why would Bonnie stay with us all these years? Why were you the only one with an illness where there was no cure?”
“It’s best to start at the beginning, Cal.” Bonnie stared down at the man everyone had forever assumed she was devoted to. “When hemarried Margaret, I did still love him. That much is true. But when it became too much, and I tried to leave, he threatened me.”
“Fairweathers own tiny plots of land in and around Hollingsdale,” Cal said when Bonnie teared up again. “Nothing large enough to do anything with, but—”
“But my family’s homestead sits on one of them,” Bonnie interjected. “It’s not a big place, a little clapboard house where I grew up.”
Willa knew the house she was referring to. Bonnie would point it out when they went to town but never wanted to stop for a visit.
“He told her he would throw her family out of their home.” Cal’s already flushed and sweaty face twisted in revulsion. “He was going to do this to the woman he loved. A woman he manipulated for years, just so she would stay with him.”
“And poor Bonnie began to understand how evil he truly was,” Margaret added. “Lucky for me, I was never so disillusioned, but she was brave enough to question things.”
“About my baby.” Bonnie looked past Noah, aiming her words directly at Willa. “About how sick you were. I think you were eight when I first got an inkling that something wasn’t quite right? Maybe nine? I listened to every quack doctor who came to Haven House, and none of them had a solution. It didn’t make sense.”
“You were always in the room whenever those doctors would come to Haven,” Willa said, remembering how Bonnie and her mother would stand in the corner together, clutching hands as doctor after doctor examined her. “Neither of you ever left my side.”
“He hired only idiots. None of those supposed doctors knew what they were doing, and when I confronted him during one of those horrible bouts where we almost lost you, Margaret and I urged him to get you to a real hospital.” Bonnie replied wearily. “But he refused, saying that if it were God’s will, you would get better on your own.”
“And suddenly, your attacks lessened. We had our very own miracle right here at Haven House.” Waving a hand erratically at theheavens, Margaret rounded on Noah. “Do you believe in miracles, Dr. Anderson?”
Noah shook his head solemnly. “I do not.”
“Well, then, I guess you’re both handsome and smart.” Margaret’s sneer returned. “There’s no such thing as miracles, and if there were, a miracle would never grace the halls of Haven House. This place is cursed. This land is cursed. Stolen by the Fairweathers a hundred years ago, they doomed the entire line, damning it with an evil so eternal that it will take generations to purge from the blood.”
“Enough!” Noah’s shout bounced around the forest, sending the silently watching creatures scattering about in every direction. “Someone please explain what he was doing to Willa.”
“I think you know, doctor.” Margaret crept closer as if she were trying to examine something in Noah’s expression. “I think the signs were there, but you’re such a decent man that you couldn’t accept what was in front of you the whole time.”
“Tell me!” Willa demanded. Trembling in her fear and anger, she broke free of Noah’s hold and came around to point a finger at the three of them. “Tell me now!”
Her mother and brother went quiet, allowing Bonnie to deliver the blow. “Poisoning you,” Bonnie said without any hint of emotion in her voice. “Stephen was poisoning you and had been since you were in your toddling years.”
Shock propelled Willa back, causing her to stumble over some vines winding through the edge of the path. “He was awful, but he wouldn’t do that.”
“Oh, yes, he would,” Bonnie scoffed. “I followed you everywhere when you were little, seeing nothing but the ghost of my daughter growing before my eyes. It was then, when I tried to leave—when he threatened my family’s home, and I remained steadfast in going—that you started having breathing attacks.”
Willa shook her head violently, holding her hand up as if it could make Bonnie stop talking. “No.”
“I couldn’t leave you, girl.” Bonnie approached a step or two but thought the better of it and remained where she was. “I didn’t have proof of something going on, and neither Margaret nor I said a word, even to each other, but we both felt it. We both lived for years with this sick feeling. A feeling that screamed something about the whole situation wasn’t right.”
“But…but…” Willa couldn’t believe it, and in her peripheral vision, she saw Noah making his way slowly over to her father’s corpse, where he stopped to loom over it. “Noah?”
“The attacks would come and go, becoming worse as Wilhelmina got older,” Margaret followed Noah, coming to stand on the opposite side of what was once her husband. “They always seemed to arrive around the time the mill’s bank notes came due. Those pesky loans poor Stephen could never repay.”
