Wanton Angel Page 11

  “Both Mr. Callahan and I have tried to reason with him, Bonnie,” Genoa hastened to say. “Eli wouldn’t listen to a word we said.”

  Bonnie left her chair like a sleepwalker and went to stand at the sink, her back to Genoa, near to doubling over with the pain. “I can’t lose my baby. Eli must not take my baby.”

  Genoa said nothing, for there was nothing to be said. After a few moments she rose from her chair, pausing behind Bonnie to lay a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. She left soon after, without saying good-bye.

  Bonnie slept that night, but fitfully, caught in one nightmare and then another. She awakened at intervals, shaken and sick, to plot her escape and Rose’s, but she knew in her heart that she wouldn’t have the shadow of a chance against Eli if he took her to law. What judge would take her side?

  Webb arrived at midmorning with his horse and buggy, having prevailed upon his landlady to prepare a picnic basket. Bonnie wondered distractedly how Earline Kalb, a woman with a reputation almost as tarnished as her own, had reacted to the request. According to gossip, Earline wanted to make Webb a permanent boarder and, on the rare occasions when she encountered Bonnie, she made a point of snubbing her.

  For all that, Webb’s devotion was unwavering. “Good Lord,” he muttered at the sight of her, “you look as though you haven’t slept in a month! Are you all right?”

  Bonnie could not explain, at least not immediately. There would be time enough for the terrible truth later, when they were away from the prying eyes of Northridge. She shook her head and allowed Webb to help her into the buggy seat. He placed Rose Marie carefully in her lap and then rounded the rig to climb up himself and take the reins into his hands.

  They were waiting to board the small ferry that would carry them across the Columbia, when Bonnie finally spoke, and then it was only to say, “The river looks high.”

  “It’s perfectly safe,” Webb assured her gently, as the sturdy craft, built of heavy logs, was drawn toward them by ropes wound around great horse-powered spindles.

  The boat drew smoothly up to the riverbank and Webb drove his rig aboard, greeting the grizzled old operator with a smile.

  Hem Fenwick had been reading the new issue of the Northridge News and he waved it for emphasis as he said, “This here front page article of yours is bound to bruise a few toes, Webb.” He spared a polite nod for Bonnie as he closed the gatelike railing behind them and then signaled his helper, stationed on the other side of the river, to set his team of horses to pulling.

  Webb grinned. “How about your toes, Hem? Did I step on them?”

  “Not me,” replied Hem. “But them union fellas might do a little howlin’ and hoppin’ around.”

  Bonnie was holding Rose Marie so tightly that the child squirmed in protest, and she made a conscious effort to relax a bit. The gray-green water swirled against the sides of the ferryboat and splashed up over its worn decks, but since neither Hem nor Webb seemed concerned, Bonnie was determined not to worry. She smiled and tried to take an interest in the conversation, a decision she was soon to regret.

  “You don’t lack for nerve, Hutcheson,” Hem observed pleasantly, settling back against the boat’s railing and folding his arms beneath his bushy white beard. Overhead, twin ropes suspended from one side of the river to the other squeaked on their pulleys as the craft was hauled through currents powerful enough to carry it away, should it ever break free. “No, indeedy, you surely don’t.”

  Webb looked uncomfortable, not for his own sake, but for Bonnie’s. He tried to ignore what Hem had said, turning to smile at Rose and tickle the underside of her chin.

  “Ain’t afraid of the union, ain’t afraid of Eli McKutchen!” Hem crowed in exuberant wonder.

  Webb paled, and a muscle in his jawline bunched. “Why would I be afraid of Eli McKutchen?” he asked, in a voice that could have frightened Bonnie, had it been directed at her.

  Hem, who was either heroic or stupid, spat over the side of the rail and beamed. “Everybody knows that the Angel is his woman, Webb.”

  Such fury coursed through Bonnie that she was sickened by it. She hated being called “the Angel” and, more than that, she hated being referred to as Eli’s woman, but somehow she managed to keep her temper in check. “Don’t talk about me as though I weren’t here, Hem,” she said in a clear voice. “And I am not Eli McKutchen’s ‘woman.’”

  Hem’s grin widened for a moment, but it faltered when he saw the warning in Webb’s gaze. He turned away and busied himself with a series of unnecessary signals directed toward shore.

  “I’m sorry,” Webb said quietly, his hand venturing shyly to cover Bonnie’s.

  She did not withdraw it. “So am I, Webb. So am I.”

  It was a relief to Bonnie when the ferryboat finally came ashore and Webb was able to drive his rig up the bank. The road above was muddy and narrow, but Webb navigated it with his usual skill, turning the horse and buggy north toward the plot of land he’d bought some time before Bonnie’s return to Northridge. He’d been building the house all that time, putting in a wall here and a floor there, whenever he could spare the time. Now, Bonnie suspected, the place was finished and ready to accommodate a wife.

  Dismally, Bonnie watched the horizon.

  “Smile,” Webb reprimanded softly, just as the sturdy white house came into view. Standing on a gentle rise overlooking the river, it gleamed in the bright sunlight.

  “Oh, Webb,” Bonnie whispered, “how beautiful!”

  The pride in his face shamed her. He slapped the reins down to make the horse move faster, and soon they were turning onto the rutted path that served as a driveway.

  Bonnie drew in her breath when they finally came to a stop in front of the house. The windows all had shutters, painted green, and there was a swing on the porch, where a man and his wife could sit of an evening, watching the river roll by. Beyond that river, Northridge was clearly visible.

  Sheer despair swelled into Bonnie’s throat. “You’ve done a fine job, Webb,” she said, speaking with a difficulty that was not lost on her friend.

  Webb took Rose from Bonnie’s lap and set the child on her feet, then helped Bonnie down. He did not release her hand, but instead drew her around the side of the house, past a pretty bay window that would offer a grand view to the rear. Here, though no yard had been planted, a sizable plot had been marked off for a garden.

  Bonnie wanted, for one wild moment, to live here with Webb always, to plant vegetables and flowers in that garden. A quiet joy filled her at the thought of weeding and watering, of cutting flowers to set out in vases, of preserving tomatoes and carrots and peas for her family to enjoy on cold winter days.

  Some dreams, she thought sadly, are so beautiful that we just want to reach out and grab them, even though we know they weren’t meant to be our own.

  “Would you like to see the inside of the house?” Webb asked gently.

  Bonnie didn’t think she could bear to walk through those carefully planned rooms, knowing that she would have to disappoint Webb, but she could hardly refuse. “Certainly,” she said, catching hold of Rose’s hand.

  Webb took the other, and Rose Marie swung gleefully between them as they went up the back steps and entered a spacious kitchen. The room hadn’t been painted, and there was no linoleum on the floor, but the cabinets had been put up and there seemed to be dozens of them. Their glass windows glistened with newness. The stove was large, larger even than Genoa’s, with a long warming oven across its top and a pretty brass woodbox standing beside it.

  The room smelled pleasurably of new wood, and Bonnie could imagine herself baking bread there, washing dishes, brewing fresh coffee for a tired husband.

  Rose studied herself in the gleaming chrome trim on the stove front and laughed at her distorted reflection, while Bonnie examined the sink, with its shiny water spigots, and felt real yearning. “Oh, Webb—indoor plumbing!”

  Webb looked very pleased and proud, but modesty kept him from bragging about such modern
conveniences. He said only, “There’s a well house out back.”

  The next room was a dining room—the bay window they had passed outside graced this chamber—and beyond this was the front parlor, a place filled with light and affording a view of Northridge and the river. The fireplace, made of new red brick, was there for the sake of charm, apparently, for the vents in the floor indicated that this house had a central heating system.

  Adjoining the parlor was a study that ran the length of the house. The walls were lined with bookshelves and there were plenty of windows to let in the sun. Through them, Bonnie could see the snow-capped Cascade Mountains in the distance.

  “I could work here,” Webb said shyly. “And if someone wanted to sew or read—” Bonnie looked away.

  Upstairs there were four bedrooms, the largest at the front of the house boasting its own fireplace with built-in bookshelves on either side. And as if the place weren’t already a miniature heaven, there was a bathroom, too, with a flush toilet, hot and cold running water and an enormous tub.

  “We could be very happy here, Bonnie,” Webb ventured to say.

  Bonnie’s conviction that one should never marry without love was beginning to waver. “I know,” she said.

  CHAPTER 10

  ELI WAS ANNOYED and distracted. He’d spent hours behind closed doors at the Brass Eagle, wrangling with the union organizers and their more devoted followers, but very little had been accomplished. Now, entering Genoa’s kitchen, he cursed himself; it was no wonder that he hadn’t been able to achieve anything as far as negotiations were concerned—he’d been able to think of nothing but Bonnie. She’d become an obsession.

  Genoa was bent over the open door of the oven, fussing with a shoebox that rested there. The papers Eli carried, which contained Seth’s astute opinions on the smelter situation, fluttered to the floor as the muscles in his hands went slack.

  “Good God!” he boomed, and the impossibly small infant nestled in the shoebox squalled a pitiable protest. He lunged forward and snatched the baby, box and all, from the oven door. “Genoa, have you taken leave of your senses?!”

  Genoa’s pale blue eyes widened for a moment, then filled with quiet laughter. “Give me the child, Eli,” she said reasonably. Even sweetly.

  Eli stepped back in horror, holding the baby protectively. He gaped at his sister, incredulous.

  Genoa extended her arms. “Eli,” she said, the soul of patience. “The child.”

  Eli stared, appalled. How could his sister’s mind, once so formidable, have degenerated to such a state in a few short years? He supposed it was the loneliness of a spinster’s life, the lack of cultural stimulation. He took another step backward and collided with Seth, who bent, muttering, to gather up the notes that were spread out all over the floor. All the while the lawyer dabbed at his neck and forehead with the ever-present handkerchief.

  “What is going on here?” he fussed, light glittering on his spectacles as he looked from Eli to Genoa in puzzlement.

  “That,” blustered Eli, holding the box firmly and squaring his shoulders, “is what I’d like to know! By all that’s holy, Seth, I just walked in here and found my own sister about to roast this baby like a suckling pig!”

  Genoa’s laughter erupted at this, and so, surprisingly, did Seth’s. He rose from his crouching position on the floor, forgetting the scattered papers, and carefully pried the shoebox from Eli’s grasp.

  Genoa took the child, her skinny shoulders shaking, and tucked the toweling that served as a blanket more closely around its squalling little body. “There, there, little one,” she said gently, before putting the box back on the oven door.

  Eli bolted forward, was ably restrained by a still-chortling Seth. “Eli, relax—”

  “Relax?!” bellowed Eli, trying to round his friend and save the child.

  Seth caught Eli’s shoulders in surprisingly strong hands. “Will you listen to me, you hulking idiot? Your sister is not about to roast this infant; it was born prematurely and it needs to be kept warm!”

  Eli closed his eyes, feeling every inch the fool. Memories of the night his son had died swept over him, and he swayed under their impact. The grief, which had never truly left him, followed its wake, and he groped for a chair and then sank into it, his hands rising to cover his face.

  “It’s Kiley,” Seth explained to Genoa in a low voice, and then he left the kitchen.

  Eli struggled to control his emotions, stiffened when he felt Genoa behind him, her hands resting gently on his shoulders.

  “I’m so sorry,” his sister said in a soft voice.

  Eli drew one deep breath after another, willing the trembling, based in the very core of his spirit, to cease. Finally it did. “I should be able to deal with what happened, Genoa,” he said miserably. “It’s been more than two years.”

  Genoa’s fingers moved, strong and capable, forcing the taut muscles in Eli’s shoulders to relax. “The death of one’s own child is not an easy thing to come to terms with, Eli. For all that she has Rose Marie to love now, I don’t believe Bonnie has managed it either.”

  Eli lowered his hands. He still felt a need to weep and rage at the injustice of Kiley’s death, though the anguish was subsiding again. Involuntarily, he trembled, knowing that the pain would return as fierce as ever.

  Genoa swept into the chair beside his and caught one of Eli’s hands in both of her own. “I’ll never forgive myself,” she said quietly, “for not coming to New York when Seth wired me of Kiley’s passing. You needed me then, and so did Bonnie.”

  “There was nothing anyone could have done, Genoa,” Eli said, his voice bleak. Bitterness filled the raw hollow in his soul where the pain had been. “And Bonnie recovered very nicely, it seems to me.”

  “Bonnie did nothing of the sort,” Genoa responded immediately with brisk kindness. “She’s broken to pieces inside, just as you are. I declare, when I think of how you failed each other, both of you, I could spit!”

  Eli stared at his sister. “What are you saying?” he demanded. “I didn’t fail Bonnie—”

  “You did,” Genoa insisted. “And Bonnie failed you. For God’s sake, Eli, and for your own, face the truth!”

  Eli remembered the distance that had arisen between Bonnie and himself that horrible night and ached. She’d come to him, shattered by the loss of her child and his, and he’d turned her away. Blamed her. There had been a strange, irrational comfort in blaming Bonnie. “What truth is that, Genoa? That my son is dead? That I’ll never see him again?” Unmanly tears were dangerously near; Eli choked them back. “Believe me, I’ve come up against that unholy reality often enough. It haunts me every minute of every day.”

  “Your son?” Genoa emphasized the words quietly. “Eli, Kiley was Bonnie’s son, too. Her loss was as profound as yours, don’t you see?”

  As the room seemed to be closing in on Eli, he shoved his chair back and shot to his feet, all but smothering. “Enough,” he growled, striding toward the door and the fresh air and freedom beyond it.

  But Genoa caught his arm in one hand and held on. “Go to Bonnie,” she urged her brother desperately. “Tell her how you’re hurting and let her tell you what she feels. It’s the only way you’re ever going to get past this, Eli. The only way!”

  Eli wrenched the door open, his lungs dragging in clean summer air in despairing gasps. The pain was back, threatening to crush him. He shook his sister’s hand away with a vicious wrench of his arm and hissed, “In the name of God, Genoa, let me be—”

  Genoa followed him into the yard, tears of frustrated compassion slipping down her face. “Stop running away, Eli, and let yourself mourn,” she begged. “Don’t you see that you’re poisoning your very soul by holding all that pain inside?”

  “There is no pain!” Eli bellowed the lie, and then he stormed away toward the pond, driven by the very anguish he denied.

  “How long has Eli been this way?” Genoa asked despondently, as Seth Callahan returned to the kitchen and began
collecting his papers.

  “From the first,” Mr. Callahan answered, his tone glum. “Emotionally he’s a volcano. The ground fairly shakes around Eli sometimes, but he will not allow himself to erupt.”

  Genoa’s heart broke within her. “He’s afraid?”

  Seth shuffled the papers into order, tapping their edges against the tabletop for something to do. “I believe Eli fears that if he lets himself fall apart, he’ll never be whole again. The problem is, of course, that it takes all his energies—and they are formidable, Genoa—to maintain the mere semblance of sanity. The longer Eli refuses to give way, the more perilous the situation becomes.”

  “And now there is the smelter—”

  Seth sighed. “Yes. And Bonnie.”

  Genoa took a handkerchief from the pocket of her skirt and dried her eyes. “Yes. Bonnie. Whatever can we do to help them, Seth?”

  Seth removed his spectacles and rubbed his myopic eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “Very little, I fear. I pray that when Eli reaches the breaking point, Bonnie will be there for him. He needs her desperately.”

  Genoa shuddered, hugging herself. “I do believe the world is collapsing around our ears, Mr. Callahan. Bonnie is very, very strong, but for all the brave show she puts on, she’s just as badly wounded as Eli. I’m not sure she has the strength to help anyone else.”

  Mr. Callahan sighed again and put his spectacles back in place. “You may be right, my dear,” he said, his voice husky and distracted. “May heaven help us all.”

  They sat quietly on a blanket spread over the ground, Webb and Bonnie, Rose Marie sleeping soundly between them. Her heart in her throat, Bonnie busied herself putting leftover food back into the picnic basket, having already washed the plates and utensils inside the house, at the kitchen sink.

  Webb stopped her nervous motions by cupping one hand under her chin. “Bonnie,” he said, with gruff gentleness. “Look at me.”