Chapter 17

“W hat are you saying?” Jonathan cried in disbelief.

“Do not listen to him, boy,” Ezra urged coldly. “He is only looking for a way to save himself.”

“I am telling the truth!” the minister insisted. “It was all a trick. A fraud! I swear it!”

Jonathan ignored his father and the rifle. “A trick?” he repeated weakly, grabbing the front of Reverend Wilson’s robe. “A trick?”

“I—I wanted Delilah to marry you, Jonathan,” the minister sputtered, his eyes on Ezra’s rifle. “We are so poor, you see. And you are so well off. Delilah—she came home and told me the story of your feud with the Goodes. I—I had an idea. I saw a way we could use it—to trick you into marrying her.”

“To trick me …” Jonathan murmured.

“I made her do it!” the minister cried. “I forced her to.” He lowered his gaze to his daughter’s body. He stared at it for a moment as if he just realized she was dead. Then, with a shudder, he pulled his eyes away.

“Delilah was a good girl at heart,” Reverend Wilson muttered. “A good girl.”

“This is all nonsense!” Ezra snarled. “Prepare to die, Goode! I have waited so long, so long—all my life—for this chance. You will not cheat me of my revenge with your desperate lies.”

“Please, Papa,” Jonathan begged, pushing the rifle aside. “Let him speak.”

“I forced Delilah to pretend that she was a Goode,” Reverend Wilson confessed sadly. “But I knew you would not marry her just because of that. So she made you think your dead sister was haunting you. She made terrible screaming noises at night. Delilah filled your well bucket with chicken blood. She made a cap with blue ribbons on it, like the one she saw in a painting of your sister. And she climbed your rose trellis to appear in your windows at night.”

Ezra lowered the rifle. His face grew red and his jaw trembled as he listened.

“Delilah lured your mother outside with that blue-ribboned cap,” the minister continued in a quivering voice. “She threw it into the well. Your mother leaned over to retrieve it. And—she fell into the well….”

He swallowed hard. “Delilah tried to help her, but she couldn’t reach her.”

He stopped again. He was breathing noisily, his chest heaving under his dark robe.

“Why?” Jonathan asked. “Why did you make Delilah do all this?”

“We had to frighten you, to make you desperate,” answered the clergyman. “So desperate you would do anything to stop the horrors. So desperate you would marry Delilah. We were so poor, you see. So poor—”

“But I loved her,” said Jonathan. “I would have married her anyway.”

He dropped to his knees beside Delilah’s dead body. Her mouth had fallen open, and a trickle of blood ran down her chin. Jonathan stared at the body as if it belonged to a stranger.

The minister shuddered violently now. “I know you cannot forgive me,” he pleaded with Ezra, “but please, please do not kill me!”

Ezra’s face hung slack. The anger faded from his eyes. The rifle fell from his hands and clattered on the church floor.

“My wife—my daughter—” he murmured. “The curse…”

His face had become as pale as Delilah’s. His thin lips barely moved as he whispered, “The curse. The Fiers are truly cursed….”

His hands flew to his head and he uttered a sorrowful wail and tore at his graying hair. Then he ran from the church, screaming.

Jonathan heard a horse whinny. Then a piercing scream, and finally a sickening crunch.

Дата добавления: 2015-07-20