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! (109 page)

“Merry Christmas!” I called to one and all in a loud clear voice. It resounded like a heralding trumpet to attract others from different, rooms, and they came in by the dozens, as if drawn more by the total silence but for my voice. “Mr. Winslow,” I called invitingly, “come dance with me, just as you danced with my mother fifteen years ago, when I was twelve and hiding above, and she wore a gown just like the one I have on now.” Bart was visibly jolted. Stunned shock made his dark eyes blacken, but he refused to move from my mother’s side!

He forced me to do what I did next. As everyone stood there and waited, held in breathless suspense, expecting more explosive revelations, I gave them what they wanted.

“I’d like to introduce myself.” My voice was high-pitched so it would carry well. “I am Catherine Leigh Foxworth, the
firstborn daughter of Mrs. Bartholomew Winslow, whom most of you must remember was first married to my father, Christopher Foxworth. Remember too that he was my mother’s half-uncle, the younger brother of Malcolm Neal Foxworth who disinherited his only daughter, his sole remaining heir, because she had the unholy temerity to wed his half-brother! What is more, I also have an older brother, named Christopher too—he’s a doctor now. Once I had a younger brother and sister, twins seven years younger than I—but Cory and Carrie are dead now—for they were—” I stopped short for some reason, then went on. “That Christmas party fifteen years ago, Chris and I were hiding in the chest on the balcony, while the twins slept in the end room of the northern wing. Our playground was the attic, and never, never did we go downstairs. We were attic mice, unwanted and unloved once money came into the picture.” And I would have screamed it all out, every last detail, but Bart came striding over to me.

“Bravo, Cathy!” he cried. “You play your part to perfection! Congratulations.” He put his arm about my shoulders, charmingly smiled at me, then turned to the guests who appeared not to know what to think, or whom to believe, much less how to react. “Ladies, gentlemen,” he said, “let me introduce to you Catherine Dahl, whom many of you must have seen on stage when she danced with her husband, Julian Marquet. And as you have just witnessed, she is also an actress of merit. Cathy here is a distant relative of my wife, and if you can see any resemblance, that explains it. In fact, Mrs. Julian Marquet is one of our neighbors now, you may know that. Since her resemblance to my wife is so remarkable, we cooked up this little farce between us, and did what we could to enliven and make different this party with our little joke.”

He ruthlessly pinched my upper arm, before he caught my hand, put his arm about my waist and asked me to dance. “Come now, Cathy, certainly you want to show off your dancing ability after that fine dramatic performance.” As the
music began to play, he forcefully made me dance! I turned my head to see my mother sagging against a friend, her face so pale her makeup stood out like livid blotches. Even so, she couldn’t take her eyes from me in the arms of her husband.

“You brazen little bitch!” Bart hissed at me. “How dare you come in here and pull such a stunt? I thought I loved you. I despise catty women with long claws. I won’t have you ruining my wife! You little idiot, whatever made you tell so many lies?”

“You are the idiot, Bart,” I said calmly, though I was panicked inside—what if he refused to believe? “Look at me. How would I know she wore a gown like this, if I hadn’t seen her with it on? How would I know you went with her to see her bedroom with the swan bed, if my brother, Chris, hadn’t hidden and heard and seen everything the two of you did up on the second-floor rotunda.”

He met my eyes, and he looked so strange, so distant and strange.

“Yes, Bart darling, I
am
your wife’s daughter, and I know if your law firm finds out your wife had four children born from the union of her first marriage, then you and she lose everything. All that money. All your investments. Everything you have bought will be taken back. Oh, the pity of that makes me want to cry.”

We danced on his cheek inches from mine. A smile was fixed to his lips. “That gown you’re wearing, how the hell did you find out she had one exactly like that the first time I came to this house to a party?”

I laughed with fake merriment. “Dear Bart, you are so stupid. How do you think I know? I saw her in this gown. She came to our room and showed us how pretty she looked, and I was so envious of all her curves and the way Chris looked at her with so much admiration. She wore her hair as I am wearing mine now. These jewels were taken from her safe in the dressing room table drawer.”

“You’re lying,” he said, but doubt was in his voice now.

“I know the combination,” I went on softly, “she used her birthday numbers. She told me that when I was twelve. She
is
my mother. She did keep us locked in that room, waiting for her father to die, so she could inherit. And you know why she had to keep us a big, dark secret. You wrote the will, didn’t you? Think back to a certain night when you fell asleep in her grand suite of rooms, and you dreamed a young girl wearing a short blue nightie stole in and kissed you. You weren’t dreaming, Bart. That kiss was from me. I was fifteen then, and had snuck into your room to steal money—remember how you used to miss cash? You and she thought the servants were stealing, but it was Chris, and one time it was me . . . who didn’t find anything because you were there to scare me away.”

“Nooo,” he said with a sigh. “
No!
She wouldn’t do that to her own children!”

“Wouldn’t she? She did. That big chest up there near the balcony balustrade has a backing of wire mesh screening. Chris and I could see just fine. We saw the caterers fixing crepes and waiters in red and black and a fountain spraying champagne, and there were two huge silver punch bowls. Chris and I could smell everything so delicious and we drooled to have a taste of what was down there. Our meals were so boring, and always cold or lukewarm. The twins hardly ate anything. Were you there the Thanksgiving Day dinner when she got up and down so much? Do you want to know why? She was preparing a tray of food to take up to us whenever the butler John was out of his pantry.”

He shook his head, his eyes dazed.

“Yes, Bart, the woman you married had four children she hid away for three years and almost five months. Our playground was in the attic. Have you ever played in an attic in the summertime? In the winter? Do you think it was pleasant? Can you imagine how we felt, waiting year after year for an old man to die so our lives could begin? Do you know the
trauma we suffered knowing she cared more for the money than she did for us, her own children? And the twins, they didn’t grow. They stayed so small, grew so large-eyed and haunted looking, and she’d come and never look at them! She pretended not to notice their ill health!”

“Cathy, please! If you are lying, stop! Don’t make me hate her!”

“Why not hate her? She deserves it,” I went on as my mother went to lean against a wall, and looked sick enough to throw up. “Once I lay on the swan bed, with the little swan bed across the foot. You had a book in your nightstand drawer about sex, disguised under a dustjacket that read
How to Create and Design Your Own Needlepoint
or something like that.”

“How to Create Your Own Needlepoint Designs,”
he corrected, looking sick and as pale as my mother, though he kept on smiling, hatefully smiling.

“You are making all of this up,” he said in an odd tone that showed no sincerity. “You hate her because you want me, and connive to deceive me and destroy her.”

I smiled and lightly brushed his cheek with my lips. “Then let me convince you more. Our grandmother always wore gray taffeta with hand-crocheted collars, and never without a diamond brooch with seventeen stones pinned at her throat. Very early each morning, before six-thirty, she brought us food and milk in a picnic hamper. At first she fed us rather well, but gradually, as her resentment grew, our meals grew worse and worse until we were fed mostly sandwiches of peanut butter and jelly and occasionally fried chicken and potato salad. She gave us a long list of rules to live by, including one that forbade us from opening the draperies to let in light. Year after year we lived in a dim room without sunlight. If only you knew how dreary life is, shut away, without light, feeling neglected, unwanted, unloved. Then there was another rule very hard to abide by. We were not supposed to even
look
at each other—especially one of the opposite sex.”

“Oh, God!” he exclaimed, then sighed heavily. “That sounds like her. You say it was more than three years you were locked up there?”

“Three years and
almost
five months, and if that seems a long time to you, how do you think it was for small children of five, and one of twelve, and the other of fourteen? Back then, five minutes passed like five hours, and days were like months, and months were like years.”

Doubt fought clearly with his legal mind that saw all the ramifications, if my tale were true. “Cathy, be honest, totally honest. You had two brothers and one sister—and all that time, when I was here too, you were living locked up?”

“In the beginning, we believed in her, every word she said, for we loved her, trusted her, she was our only hope, and our salvation. And we wanted her to inherit all that money from her father. We agreed to stay up there until the grandfather died, although when our mother explained how we were to live in Foxworth Hall she failed to mention we were to be hidden away. At first we thought it would only be for a day or so, but it went on and on. We filled our time by playing games—and we prayed a lot, slept a lot. We grew thin, half-sick, malnourished, and suffered through two weeks of starvation while you and our mother traveled throughout Europe on your honeymoon. And then you went to Vermont to visit your sister, where our mother bought a two-pound box of maple-sugar candy. But by then we’d already been eating, doughnuts with arsenic laced in the powdered sugar.”

He gave me a hard, fierce look of terrible anger. “Yes. she did buy a box of that kind of candy in Vermont. But Cathy! whatever else you may say, I can never believe my wife would deliberately set out to poison her own children!” His scornful eyes raked over me, then back to my face. “
Yes, you do look like her!
You could be her daughter. I admit that! But to say Corrine would kill her own children. I can’t believe that!”

I shoved him away forcefully, and whirled about.
“Listen
everyone!”
I yelled out.
“I am
the daughter of Corrine Foxworth Winslow! She
did
lock her four children in the end room of the northern wing. Our grandmother was in on the scheme and gave us the attic for our playroom. We decorated it with paper flowers, to make it pretty for our little twins, all so our mother could inherit. Our mother told us we
had
to hide, for if we didn’t our grandfather would never have her written into his will. All of you know how he despised her for marrying his half-brother. Our mother persuaded us to come and live upstairs, and be as quiet as attic mice; we went, trusting and believing she would keep her word and let us out the day her father died.
But she didn’t!
She didn’t! She let us suffer up there for
nine
months after he was dead and buried!”

I had more to spill out. But my mother shrilled out in a loud voice,
“Stop!
” She stumbled forward; her arms outstretched as if she were blind.
“You lie!”
she screamed. “I’ve never seen you before! Get out of my house! Get out this instant before I call the police and have you thrown out!
Now you get out, and you stay out!
”

Everyone was staring at her now, not me. She, the ultra-poised and arrogant had lost control, was trembling, her face livid, wanting to scratch the eyes from my face! I don’t think a soul there believed her then, not when they could see I was her very image—and I knew too many truths.

Bart left my side and went to his wife to whisper something in her ear. He put his arms consolingly around her, and kissed her cheek. She clung to him helplessly, with pale, shaky hands of desperation, beseeching his help with great teary eyes of cerulean blue—like mine, like Chris’s, like the twins’ blue eyes.

“Thank you again, Cathy, for a fine performance. Come into the library with me and I’ll pay you your fee.” He scanned over the guests clustered around and quietly he said, “I’m sorry, but my wife has been ill, and this little joke was ill-timed on my part. I should have known better than to plan
such a show. So, if you will please forgive us, do go on with the party; enjoy yourselves; eat, drink and be merry; and stay as long as you like, Miss Catherine Dahl may have some more surprises in store for you.”

How I hated him then!

As the guests milled about and whispered and looked from me to him, he picked up my mother and carried her toward the library. She was heavier than she used to be, but in his arms she seemed a feather. Bart glanced over his shoulder at me, gestured with his head that I was to follow, which I did.

I wanted Chris here with me, as he should be. It shouldn’t be left up to me to confront her with the truth. I was strangely alone, defensive, as if in the end Bart would believe
her
and not me, no matter what I said, no matter what proof I gave him. And I had plenty of proof. I could describe to him the flowers in the attic, the snail, the worm, the cryptic message I’d written on the blackboard, and, most of all, I could show him the wooden key.

Bart reached the library and carefully put my mother into one of the leather chairs. He snapped an order my way. “Cathy, will you please close the door behind you.”

Only then did I see who else was in the library! My grandmother was seated in the same wheelchair her husband had used. Ordinarily you can’t tell one wheelchair from another, but this one was custom-made and much finer. She wore a gray-blue robe over her hospital jacket, and a lap robe covered her legs. The chair was placed near the fireplace so she could benefit from the heat of a roaring log fire. Her bald head shone as she turned it my way. Her flintstone gray eyes glowed maliciously.