The Flowers in the Attic Series: The Dollangangers: Flowers in the Attic, Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday, and a New Excerpt! (110 page)

A nurse was in the room with her. I didn’t take the time to look at her face.

“Mrs. Mallory,” said Bart, “will you please leave the room and leave Mrs. Foxworth here.” It wasn’t a request, but an order.

“Yes, sir,” said the nurse who quickly got up and scuttled
to leave as fast as possible. “You just ring for me when Mrs. Foxworth wants to be put to bed, sir,” she said at the door and then disappeared.

Bart seemed on the verge of exploding as he stalked the room, and what wrath he felt now seemed directed not only at me, but also at his wife. “All right,” he said as soon as the nurse was gone, “let’s have done with it, all of it. Corrine, I’ve always suspected you had a secret, a big secret. It occurred to me many times you didn’t truly love me, but it never once crossed my mind you might have four children you hid away in the attic.
Why?
Why couldn’t you have come to me and told me the truth?” He roared this, all control gone. “How could you be so selfishly heartless, so brutally cruel as to lock away your four children and then try and kill them with arsenic?”

Sagging limply in a brown leather chair, my mother closed her eyes. She seemed bloodless as she asked in a dull voice. “So, you are going to believe
her
and not me. You know I could never poison anyone, no matter what I had to gain. And you know that I don’t have any children!”

I was stunned to know Bart believed me and not her, and then I guessed he didn’t truly believe me, but was using a lawyer’s trick, attacking and hoping to take her off guard, and maybe get to the truth. But that would never work, not with her. She’d trained herself over too many years for anyone to take her by surprise.

I strode forward to glare down at her, and in the harshest of voices I spoke. “Why don’t you tell Bart about Cory, Momma? Go on, tell him how you and your mother came in the night and wrapped him in a green blanket and told us you were taking him to a hospital. Tell him how you came back the next day and told us he died from pneumonia. Lies! All lies! Chris sneaked downstairs and overheard that butler, John Amos Jackson, telling a maid of how the grandmother carried arsenic up to the attic to kill the little mice.
We were the little mice who ate those sugared doughnuts, Mother!
And we
proved those doughnuts were poisoned. Remember Cory’s little pet mouse that you used to ignore? He was fed only a bit of sugared doughnut and he died! Now sit there and cry, and deny who I am, and who Chris is, and who Cory and Carrie used to be!”

“I have never seen you before in my life,” she said strongly, bolting upright and staring me straight in the eyes, “except when I went to the ballet in New York.”

Bart narrowed his eyes, weighing her, then me. Then he looked at his wife again and his eyes grew even more slotlike and cunning. “Cathy,” he said, still looking at her, “you are making very serious allegations against my wife. You accuse her of murder, premeditated murder. If you are proven right, she will face a jury trial for murder—is that what you want?”

“I want justice, that is all. No, I don’t want to see her in prison or put in an electric chair—if they still do that in this state.”

“She is lying,” whispered my mother, “lying, lying, lying.”

I had come prepared for accusations like this and calmly I pulled from my tiny purse duplicates of four birth certificates. I handed them to Bart who took them over to a lamp and bent to study them. Cruelly and with great satisfaction I smiled at my mother. “Dear mother, you were very foolish to sew those birth certificates in the lining of our old suitcases. Without them I wouldn’t have had any proof at all to show your husband and, no doubt, he would go on believing you—for I am an actress and accustomed to putting on a good show.

“It’s a pity he doesn’t know
you
are an even better actress. Cringe away, Momma, but I have the proof!” I laughed wildly, near tears as I saw them begin to glisten in her eyes, for once I had loved her so well, and under all the hatred and animosity I felt for her, a little light of innate love still waxed and waned, and it hurt, oh, it did hurt to make her cry. Yet she deserved it, she did, I kept telling myself she did!

“You know something else. Momma. Carrie told me how
she met you on the street and you denied her, and shortly afterwards she became so ill she died—so you helped kill her too! And without the birth certificates you could have escaped all retribution, for that courthouse in Gladstone, Pennsylvania, burned down ten years ago. See how kind fate would have been to you, Mother? But you never did anything well. Why didn’t you burn them? Why did you save them . . . ? That was very thoughtless of you, dearest loving Mother, to save the evidence; but then you were always careless, always thoughtless, always extravagant about everything. You thought if you killed your four children you could have others—but your father tricked you, didn’t he?”

“Cathy! Sit down and let me handle this!”
ordered Bart. “My wife has just undergone surgery and I’ll not have you threaten her health.
Now sit before I push you down!
”

I sat.

He glanced at my mother, then at
her
mother.

“Corrine, if you have ever cared for me, loved me even a little—is any of what this woman says true?
Is she your daughter?
”

Very weakly my mother answered, “. . . Yes.”

I sighed. I thought I heard the whole house sigh, and Bart along with it. I lifted my eyes to see my grandmother staring at me in the oddest way.

“Yes,” she continued flatly, her dull eyes fixed on Bart. “I couldn’t tell you, Bart. I wanted to tell you, but I was afraid you wouldn’t want me if I came with four children and no money, and I loved and wanted you so much. I racked my brains trying to figure out a solution so I could keep you, my children and the money too.” She sat up and made a ramrod of her spine as her head lifted regally high. “And I
did
figure out a solution! I
did!
It took me weeks and weeks of scheming, but I did figure a way!”

“Corrine,” said Bart with ice in his voice as he towered above her, “murder is never a solution to anything! All you had to do was tell me, and I would have thought of a way to
save your children and your inheritance.”

“But don’t you see,” she cried out excitedly, “I figured out a way all by myself! I wanted you; I wanted my children and the money too. I thought my father
owed
me that money!” She laughed hysterically, beginning to lose control again, as if hell was at her heels and she had to speak fast to escape its burn. “Everyone thought I was stupid, a blond with a pretty face and figure but no brains. Well, I fooled you, Mother,” she threw out at that old woman in the chair. And at a portrait on the wall she screamed, “And I fooled you too, Malcolm Foxworth!” Then at me she flared her eyes, “And you too, Catherine. You thought you had it so tough up there, locked away, missing out on schooldays and friends, but you don’t realize how
good
you had it compared to what my father did to me!
You,
you and your accusations, always at me,
when could I let you out?
When down below my father was ordering me to do this, do that, for if you don’t you won’t inherit one penny and I’ll tell your lover about your four children too!”

I gasped. Then jumped to my feet. “He knew about us? The grandfather knew?”

Again she laughed, hard, diamond-brittle laughter. “Yes, he knew, but I didn’t tell him! The day Chris and I ran away from this horrible house he hired detectives to follow and keep tabs on us. Then, when my husband was killed in that accident, I was persuaded by my lawyer to seek their help. How my father rejoiced! Don’t you see, Cathy,” she said so fast her words piled one on the other, “he
wanted
me and my children in his house and under his thumb! He had it planned along with my mother, to deceive me and let me think he didn’t know you were hidden upstairs. But he knew all the time! It was his plan to keep you locked up
for the rest of your lives!”

I gasped and stared at her. I doubted her too; how could I trust anything she said now after she’d done so much? “The grandmother, she went along with his plan?” I asked, feeling a numbing sensation creeping up from my toes.

“Her?” said Momma, tossing her mother a hard look of contempt. “She’d do anything he said, for she hated me; she’s always hated me; he loved me too much when I was a girl, and cared nothing at all about his sons whom she favored more. And after we were here, snared in his trap, he gloated to have his half-brother’s children captured as animals in a cage, to keep locked up until they were dead. So, while you were up there, playing your games and decorating the attic, he kept at me, day in, day out. ‘They should never have been born, should they?’ he’d slyly say, and cunningly suggest you would all be better off dead than kept prisoners until you grew old, or sickened and died. I didn’t truly believe he meant this at first. I thought it was only another of his ways to torture me. Each day he’d say you were wicked, flawed, evil children who should be destroyed. I’d cry, plead, go down on my knees and beg, and he’d laugh. One evening he raged at me. ‘You fool,’ he said. ‘Were you idiot enough to think I could ever forgive you for sleeping with your half-uncle—the ultimate sin against God? Bearing his children?’ And on and on he’d rave, screaming sometimes. Then he’d lash out with his walking cane, striking whatever he could reach. My mother would sit nearby and smirk with pleasure. Yet, he didn’t let me know he knew you were up there for several weeks . . . and by that time, I was trapped.” She pleaded with me to believe, to have mercy. “Can’t you see how it was? I didn’t know which way to turn! I didn’t have any money, and I kept thinking his terrible temper tantrums would kill him, so I provoked him so he
would
die—but he kept on living, and berating me and my children. And every time I went into your room, you’d be pleading to be let out.
Especially you, Cathy—especially you.”

“And what else did he do to make you keep us prisoners?” I asked sarcastically, “except scream and rail and hit you with his cane? It couldn’t have been very hard, for he was very frail, and we never saw any marks on you after the first whipping. You were free to come and go as you wanted. You could have
worked out some plan to slip us outside unknown to him. You wanted his money, and you didn’t care what you had to do to get it! You wanted that money more than you wanted your four children!”

Before my very eyes her delicate and lovely restored face took on the aged look of
her
mother. She seemed to shrivel and grow haggard with the countless years she had yet to live with her regrets. Her gaze took wild flight, seeking some safe refuge in which to forever hide, not only from me, but from the fury she saw in her husband’s eyes.

“Cathy,” pleaded my mother, “I know you hate me, but—”

“Yes, Mother. I do hate you.”

“You wouldn’t if you understood—”

I laughed, hard and bitterly. “Dearest Mother, there is not one thing you could tell me to make me understand.”

“Corrine,” said Bart, his tone sterile, as if his heart had been removed. “Your daughter is right. You can sit there and cry, and talk about your father forcing you to poison your children—but how can I believe when I can’t remember him even giving you a hard glance? He looked at you with love and pride. You did come and go as you chose. Your father lavished money on you, so you could buy new clothes and everything else you wanted. Now you come up with some ridiculous tale of how you were tortured by him, and forced by him to kill your hidden children. God, you sicken me!”

Her eyes took on a glassy stare; her pale and elegant hands trembled as they unfolded and fluttered up from her lap to her throat, and there they fingered over and over again the diamond choker that must be keeping her gown from falling off. “Bart, please, I’m not lying. . . . I admit I’ve lied to you in the past, and deceived you about my children—but I’m not lying now. Why can’t you believe me?”

Bart stood with his feet spread apart, as a sailor would to brace himself on a rocky sea. His hands were behind his back and clenched into fists. “What kind of man do you think I
am—or was?” he asked bitterly. “You could have told me anything then, and I would have understood. I loved you, Corrine. I would have done anything legally possible to thwart your father and help you gain his fortune, and at the same time keep your children alive, free to live normal lives. I’m not a monster, Corrine, and I didn’t marry you for your money. I would have married you if you were penniless!”

“You couldn’t outwit my father!” she cried, jumping up and beginning to pace the floor.

In that shiny crimson dress my mother appeared a bright lick of flame, a color that made her eyes dark purple as they darted from one to the other of us. Then, finally, when I couldn’t stand to watch her as she was, broken, wild, with all her queenly poise gone, her eyes came to rest on
her
mother—that old woman who slumped in the wheelchair, as if without bones. Her gnarled fingers worked weakly at the afghan, but her gray zealot’s eyes burned with a strong, mean fire. I watched as the eyes of mother and daughter clashed. Those gray eyes that never changed, never softened with old age or fear of the hell that must be lying in wait for her.

And, to my surprise, from this confrontation my mother rose straight and tall, the winner in this battle of wills. She began to speak in a dispassionate way, as if discussing someone else. It was like hearing a woman talk who knew she was killing herself with each razored word, and yet she didn’t care, not anymore—for I was the winner, after all, and to me, her most severe judge, she turned to appeal. “All right, Cathy. I knew sooner or later I would have to face up to you. I knew it would be
you
who would force the truth from me. It has always been
your
way to look through me, and guess I wasn’t always what I wanted you to believe I was. Christopher loved me, trusted me. But you never would. Yet in the beginning, at the time your father was killed, I was trying to do the best I could by you. I told you what I believed to be the truth, when I asked you to come and live here hidden away until I won back
my father’s favor. I didn’t truly think it would take more than one day, or possibly two.”