Secrets 01 Secrets in the Attic (8 page)

We didn't catch up with the school bus until we were nearly halfway to Centerville. I tried to see if I could spot Karen looking out the window from the rear seat, but when we passed the bus, I couldn't see through the windows because of the glaring sunlight reflecting off the glass.
When we arrived at school, I stood by the doorway and waited for the bus. It unloaded nearly completely, and I didn't see her, but I thought that was because she always sat in the rear. I stood and waited and watched. The bus driver closed the door, however, and she hadn't come out. Where was she? I wondered.
The first warning bell for homeroom rang, but I didn't move from the doorway.
How could she not come to school? Had something happened again the night before? I hurried to my homeroom, but I was too troubled to pay attention to anything all day. I couldn't wait to get on the bus at the end of the day and stop off at her house. I fidgeted in all my classes and nearly got into trouble and put on detention when I annoyed Mr. Kasofsky in social studies by not hearing him ask me a question twice.
Toward the end of the day, I noticed the teachers coming out into the hallways and talking to each other quietly. The moment any student drew close, they all stopped.
"Something's up," Alice Bucci practically shouted across the classroom when our last period teacher, Mrs. Shannon, went to the doorway, spoke to someone in the hallway, and then told us to read our math assignment while she stepped out.
For no reason I could think of, my heart started to go like a jackhammer.
Mrs. Shannon came into the room, looking very disturbed. She said nothing, went to the front of the room, glanced at us, and took a deep breath. The bell rang, and we rose quietly and started out. I immediately sensed a heavy, almost funereal atmosphere in the building. Glancing at the principal's office, I saw the door was closed, but through the window in the door, I could see people buzzing around the secretary's desk.
I stepped out into the warm, partly sunny day along with the other students who would be riding buses home, but when I looked at the parking lot, I saw my mother standing by her car and waving toward me. I could feel my heart stop and then start. She beckoned, and I started toward her quickly.
"What's going on?" I asked. "Weren't you going into work at three today?"
"I pushed it back to five. Someone's covering for me. I wanted to pick you up, Zipporah. Get into the car," she said.
"Why?"
"Just get in. I'll take you home," she said.
I got in, and almost before I closed my door, she was backing out of the parking spot. She took a deep breath and looked at me.
"You haven't heard the news" she asked.
"What news?"
"Harry Pearson is dead," she told me, and then, to be sure I understood, she added, "Karen's stepfather is dead."
I felt the blood drain from my face.
"Is that why Karen isn't in school?"
"Oh, yes," my mother said, shaking her head, "that's why Karen isn't in school."
She looked as if she was going to laugh.
"What do you mean, Mama? When did he die? How did he die?"
"It's not pleasant, Zipporah. I can barely form the words to tell you," she said.
"Tell me!" I shouted.
"Calm down," she said, even though she was the one who looked as if she needed calming down. "He was stabbed to death. It looks . . ." She started to cry and had to slow down and pull the car to the side of the road.
"Mama?"
"It looks like Karen did it, honey. It looks that way. She's run off."
I actually tried to speak but couldn't. My throat had closed up.
"Oh, Zipporah," my mother said. "I'm so sorry. I know how close you two were. Did you have any idea such a thing might happen?"
How could I answer that question? As soon as I told her yes and told her why, she would be angry that I hadn't come to her. And what would she think now if I told her about our plan?
I just stared to cry.
"Oh, honey, I'm so sorry for you. That's why I knew I had to pick you up. I really am surprised you didn't hear about it before you left the school. The news is flying through the community faster than electricity. I'll get you home. You had better rest," she said, and started driving again.
I felt my body shudder and seem to sink lower and lower in the seat. I kept my eyes closed.
"I know Karen wasn't particularly fond of her stepfather. I know she didn't want to be adopted and give up her name. There was that, but what on earth . . ."
I kept my eyes closed, my head against the window.
"Do you have any idea where she might have gone? Is there someone she knew? It's better she doesn't stay out there, running, hiding."
I shook my head. I didn't know. I couldn't even imagine.
"Her mother is in shock. Dr. Bloom had to give her a sedative. You can just imagine the commotion around the house," she said.
"Where . . . did it happen?" I asked.
"From what I understand, Darlene found his body just inside Karen's bedroom doorway. She had been down to Middletown shopping, and by the time she returned, Harry had closed the drugstore and gone home."
When we drove into town, I saw all the police cars still parked in front. There were village, town, and state police vehicles and officers standing around talking. Another policeman was out in the street moving traffic along. I glanced at the house and closed my eyes again.
After we pulled into our driveway, I practically jumped out of the car before my mother brought it to a stop. I ran for the house.
"Zipporah!" she called to me, but I went inside and ran up the stairs to my room.
I closed the door quickly behind me and folded myself into a sitting position on the, floor beside my bed. I heard my mother coming up the stairs. She knocked on the door.
"Zipporah?"
"Leave me alone for a while. Please!" I cried.
"I want to be sure you're all right before I go to work, honey."
"I'm all right. I'm all right."
"Daddy will try to be home for dinner:'
"I'm all right," I said again. "Tell him it's okay."
She didn't move for a few moments, and then she said she would call from the hospital. I heard her walk back to the stairway, descend, and leave the house. I rose, went to my window, and looked out to see her car going down the road. The silence in the air around me was so heavy I had trouble breathing.
Why did this happen? Why didn't she wait for us to put our plan into action? I sat there sulking. The house was so quiet I felt it was sulking along with me.
Then I suddenly heard a methodical gentle rapping from above. It was like Morse code or something I listened. It stopped and started again. Daddy was always worrying about rats or field mice getting into the rafters. We had pest-control people service the house periodically, and there were traps set in every dark and dank corner. I had yet to see a rodent in the house.
There it was again, gentle rapping, too much in a pattern to be the random noise of any rodent. I rose slowly, listened, and then walked out of my room and looked at the short stairway that led up to the attic. Slowly, I approached and listened and started up the stairs. I opened the attic door and gazed into the long, wide room. Afternoon sunshine flowed freely through the uncovered windows, capturing the dust particles that resembled golden flies floating aimlessly in the shaft of light.
Nothing moved. The rapping had stopped. I stood there thinking, remembering so many happy afternoons up there with Karen in our nest, and I had turned to leave, when I heard her call my name.
It was almost as if a ghost had whispered it. I saw no one when I turned back. Perhaps I had imagined it, but then a shadow suddenly came to life and took her form. She stepped out into the better-lit area, and my heart seemed to bounce under my breast along with a rush of ice water through my veins.
"Karen?"
"Yes, it's me. I'm sorry," she said. "I had nowhere else to go."

"I climbed up the fire escape on your house and through the window," Karen said before I could ask.
Our house was practically the only residence in Sandburg that had a fire escape. All the tourist houses and hotels were required to have them.
"What happened?"
She walked to the leather sofa and sat with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands, staring down at the floor. I closed the attic door and joined her.
"I was unable to wait to put our plan into action," she said, looking up at me. "I knew my mother was going to be shopping and having dinner with one of her friends in Middletown. She wouldn't be home until at least nine, maybe even ten. Your idea was too good to delay, and I knew with my mother away, Harry was surely coming to my room last night."
"What did you do?"
"Exactly what we planned I went into the apartment, got Harry's mother's wig and one of her dresses, put her makeup on my face just the way she did it, and waited for him, trembling so much I nearly passed out before he came to my door."
"What did he do when he saw you?"
"He stopped and looked at me in disbelief at first, and then his shock changed quickly to outrage. I could see his anger bubbling in his eyes and around his mouth. It was as if his skin erupted with tiny volcanic explosions. I couldn't move, and for a moment, he couldn't, either. Then he roared with such power I thought I was blown back into the wall. 'How dare you?' he screamed. 'How dare you make a mockery of my mother?' "
As Karen described this, I couldn't move. It was as if I had been in the room with her, as if I were there right now. She wasn't looking at me. She was looking ahead, with her eyes so wide I felt she was truly reliving it all. I actually glanced in the same direction, thinking I might see Harry Pearson there in front of us right at that moment.
"He took a step toward me," she continued after another deep, painful breath. "I whipped off the wig and threw it at him and shouted, 'Keep away from me!' The wig hit him in the face and fell to his feet. He paused and looked down at it, and then he picked it up gently and with such loving care my blood turned cold. He was crying and petting it as if it was his mother's real hair."
"Crying?"
"Tears streamed down his cheeks, and he looked at me as if I had killed his mother. I was never so afraid."
"I can't imagine .. ."
She rose and turned toward me, her face in imitation of what Harry's face had been like.
"He took another step toward me, now clutching the wig in his fist," she said, her right hand in a fist. "I had nowhere to run, but I even considered opening the window and leaping out."
She stepped toward me, and I sat on the sofa and looked up at her as she continued. "I backed up until I hit my night table. He continued to come forward, his lips stretched so tight and thin they looked like they would snap like a rubber band. And they were as white as milk, bloodless. My hands went down to my drawer."
She reached to her right as if the drawer were there. "I opened it and reached in for my knife "
She held her hand up the way she would have held the knife.
"I thought, I might frighten him away, but when he saw it, he grew even angrier. He tossed his mother's wig to the bed and reached out for me. I ducked under his hand and lunged to go around him and through the bedroom doorway, but he managed to grab onto the back of the skirt of his mother's dress that I was wearing and tugged so hard I fell back, slamming down on my rear end."
She paused to take a breath. I couldn't move, couldn't swallow, couldn't stop staring at her and waiting.
"At first, all he wanted to do was get his mother's dress off me. He groped and pulled, tearing it but managing to rip it off me, practically lifting me completely off the floor when it got caught on my arms. The knife fell out of my hands and landed in front of me. I fell forward, too. Instantly, his fingers were around the back of my bra, pulling at me to keep me from going any farther forward. I resisted, and the bra unsnapped.
He fell back, and I rose. Maybe if I hadn't stopped to pick up my knife, I could have gotten out of the room and out of the house, but when I did that, he embraced my legs. He was on his knees, and I couldn't pull myself free.
"I looked down at him," she said, gazing at the floor, "and saw he was mumbling and crying as if he were trying to get his mother to forgive him for something. I knew he wasn't ever going to let go of me, and when his hands began to move up my legs, I brought the knife down and caught him in his neck, in his throat. I was just as surprised as he was. I was doing it only to drive him away. He let go of me and grabbed at the knife and then fell to his side.
"I didn't wait to see how he was or anything. I hurried to my closet, pulled a dress off the hanger, and put it on in the hallway as I went out and down the stairs. I didn't know what to do, but Lwas crying so hard and gasping for breath, so I hurried out the door and then just crouched behind our hedges. I was there for a while, calming myself. Then I got up, and as inconspicuously as I could, I walked down the sidewalk.
"I headed into the woods behind Echerts? garage and just walked and walked until I recognized some of the places you and I had been behind your house and realized how far I had come and how I had instinctively headed in this direction. There was no one home in your house, so it was easy to climb the fire escape and climb in through the attic window. I hid up here as quietly as I could until I knew you were home with your mother. I saw her leave the house and thought you might be alone. That's when I started to knock on the floor. I could have yelled for you, but I wasn't positive your father wasn't here."
She closed her eyes and sat again, leaning back to let her head rest against the cushion, exhausted from the effort to describe it all to me.
"You've been here all day?"
"Yes, sleeping most of it. He's dead, isn't he?" she asked without opening her eyes.
"Yes. According to what I heard, your mother found him on the floor of your bedroom, near the door, just as you described."
"She hated me when I was born, and she'll hate me forever now," Karen said.
"No, she won't. We're going to take you right to the police, and you'll tell your story."
She looked at me and grimaced. "Are you crazy? They're not going to believe me. No one in this community is going to believe Harry Pearson would have done such a thing, and everyone knows how I feel about him. I haven't exactly kept it a secret. On many occasions, especially before you moved here, I had arguments with him openly in the drugstore. I can't count how many times I shouted at him in front of his customers, 'You're not my father. You'll never be my father. I hate you.' And he always wore this terribly hurt look on his face, like he was doing everything he could to make a home for me, to be a father to me, and I wasn't letting him He played it up so well for his audience. You know people believed him, felt that I was the one who was ungrateful and felt sympathy for him. How many times have you told me yourself about the way his customers look at me when he talks to me nicely and I don't respond or I answer him without respect?"
"But after what he's done to you . . . especially when they find all that out concerning .
"The police will take my mother into a separate room, and they'll question her. They'll ask her if she knew it was going on. They'll ask her if I ever told her anything, and she'll say no, because she won't know how to describe any of it, when it occurred, how it occurred. She wouldn't listen to me; she wouldn't hear of it, remember?"
"You can tell them. You can give them as much detail as they need."
She shook her head. "It's just my word against hers." She looked down. "How many stories have you heard about me in school, Zipporah, stories some of the boys told, fabricated? Didn't you tell me what they wrote about me in the boys' room?"
"Yes, but .. ."
"No one will believe I lost my virginity to a perverted, crazy stepfather," she said, her eyes cold with the hard truth. "I can't even claim that."
"No boy in school would dare testify that he .
"Can you even imagine such an interrogation, all those boys brought in to answer whether or not they did it with me? Will the police believe any of them, whatever they say? One or two of them might even lie and say yes to make himself look like some kind of big shot."
"How can they?"
She stared at me, and then she smiled in such a chilling way it made my heart stop and start.
"Didn't you tell me you were coming over to my house the other night to warn me about the things your mother had warned you about? You know, how sex can be dangerous?"
"Yes, but only because of Harry, because of what you told me about Harry."
"You're my best friend in all the world, and your face, which you admit is like a window pane, shows some doubt, Zipporah. If I can see it, the police will. Oh, that's right." she continued. "Don't think the police won't call you in for questioning, lots of questioning. You're going to bear witness to my claims, aren't you?"
"Of course, I will."
"But you never saw any of it happen to me. You have only my word for it."
"That's okay. I'll tell them how desperate you were, and I'll tell them about our plan. When they hear about the wig, the dress, they'll believe us. I'll show them the book of short stories to prove where we got the idea."
"You'll admit to conspiring with me to rid me of Harry? You'll admit to never telling your parents about it? They'll be so hurt. Your father is an attorney. It might even affect his career here. Maybe he'll lose his job. Do you really want to be part of all this?"
I didn't speak. She had injected a quart of terror into my blood, and it congealed around my heart, freezing it in my chest.
"Well, what can we do, I do?"
"I warned you that day. I told you that you don't want to be my best friend. I pleaded with you to stay out, but you insisted, and you vowed we would be friends forever. Bird Oath, remember?"
"We will be friends forever," I said, but weakly. "Sure, we will," she muttered.
We were both quiet, wallowing in our muddled thoughts. How had all this happened so fast? I gazed around the attic. Was it all just a terrible nightmare? Would I wake up and be so happy it was only a dream? Would I hurry over to her house to warn her about what could happen? Could I change the course of the events? Could I go to my mother and my father and ask them for help as I should have done? Could I have a phone conversation with Jesse and get him to help as well, even if it were only to talk to our parents for me?
Oh, Fate, give us another chance, please,
I pleaded in my secret thoughts.
We'll be good. We'll do the right things. Don't let this all be true, all be happening to us.
The attic creaked with the gust of wind coming in from the northeast, snapping at the leaves, forcing thin branches to nod in respect. The great house that had survived so many different kinds of weather seemed to groan as if it were having a bellyache because of us. Surely, it was thinking,
Oh; no, not another dark and horrid story to attach to the rafters and cladding, not another notorious legend to inhabit the rooms and cling to the walls to make it harder, if not impossible, for another warm and loving family to live here.
Abandoned, it would rot away and slowly disintegrate into nothing more than an empty shell to be pummeled by teenagers on some Halloween rampage, smashing out all the windows and splashing imitation blood on its outside walls and walks, until some merciful vagrant set it on fire and sent its memory up in smoke to be carried away in the same wind that visited us right now.
"Well, what are we going to do, Karen?" I asked, struggling to control my panic.
"I'm not sure yet." She stared a moment longer at the floor and then turned to me. "For now, I want to stay up here, hide up here."
"Here? In the attic?"
"Remember
The Diary of Anne Frank,
and how adults as well as children stayed safely in an attic to hide from the Nazis? They were there for years. If all those people were able to do it, we can do it. I can do it. I'll be dead quiet when your family is here, too. During the day, when everyone is at work and you're at school, I'll do what I have to do and move around undetected."
"But . . ."
"Don't you want to help me? Help us?"
"Of course, but how can you stay up here by yourself so long and be so quiet no one will know?"
"I can do it. I've actually got it easier than Anne Frank I can leave the attic sometimes, most of the time, thanks to both your parents working. I could go out when no one is here and get some air. You and I are practically the same size. I can wear some of your things, use some of your things. When no one is here, I'll shower and bathe in your bathroom. It will be okay. At least, until we come up with a better plan:' she said.
"Everyone is looking for you. They'll probably make up those wanted posters with your face on them and put them in post offices."
"I know. That's what makes this so smart," she said, holding her hands out and looking around the attic. "It's big. I have a place to sleep. I'll be fine for a while. As long as you want to help me, that is."
"I want to help you. Of course, I want to help you."
"So? Just now, neither you nor your mother knew. I was here until I decided to let you know, right? We can do this. You'll see. It will be a lot easier than you think, and besides, I'll be the one who's doing any sort of suffering, not you."
"Don't you want to talk to your mother, ask her to help you?"
Her face turned hard, her eyes as dead as marbles. "She didn't help me when I needed her the most. All she's doing right now is mourning what she lost, the life she lost, but she'll find a way to fix it without me, believe me." She looked away a moment and then turned back to me. "I always believed she drove my father to his death. I never told you the things I remembered about them, how my mother aggravated him about our not having enough money, how she belittled him and tried to get me to think less of him."
"No, you never said anything about that," I said, now amazed and shocked at her new revelations. It was truly as if what had happened, what she had done, had stripped away any pretense. Nothing could be hidden from me any longer, no matter how terrible it was.
"Yes, well, besides it being so painful to think about, I was ashamed of it as well. My mother is . . . what's the word . . . an exploiter. She knows how to milk everything to her own advantage. She's actually the most selfish person I know. Her favorite words are