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! (70 page)

It hurts to write of how they took Carrie and blindfolded her, then tied her small hands behind her back, then pushed her out into the hall, then up a flight of steep stairs, and suddenly they were outside. Carrie felt the cool night air, the slant of the support beneath her bare feet, and guessed correctly the girls had taken her onto the roof! There was only one thing she feared more than the grandmother and that was the roof—any roof! Anticipating her bellowing screams the girls had gagged Carrie. “Now lie or sit still as a proper owl should,” said the same harsh voice. “Perch here on the roof, near the chimney under the moon, and in the morning you will be one of
us
.”

Struggling and frantic now, Carrie tried to resist the pull of so many who forced her to sit. Then, even worse, they suddenly took away their hands and left her there in the darkness on the roof—all alone. Far away she heard the whispering titters of their retreat and the slight click of a door latching down.

Cathy, Cathy,
she screamed to herself,
Chris, come save me! Dr. Paul, why did you put me here? Don’t nobody want me?
Sobbing, making small mewing sounds while blindfolded, gagged and bound, Carrie braved the steep incline of the huge, strange roof and began to move toward where the latching sound had come from. Inch by inch, sitting up and sliding along on her bottom, Carrie moved forward, praying
every time she moved an inch not to fall. It seemed from her faltering report that she gave me much, much later that she was not only guided by instinct, but she could hear, above and from behind the oncoming spring thunderstorm, the sweet and distant voice of Cory singing as he strummed his melancholy song of finding his home and the sun again.

“Oh, Cathy, it was so strange way up there high, and the wind started to blow, and the rain began to fall, and the thunder rumbled and the lightning struck so I could see the brightness through the blindfold—and all the time Cory was singing and leading me to the trapdoor that opened when I used my feet to force it upward, and somehow I wiggled through. Then I fell down the stairs! I fell into blackness and I heard a bone break. And the pain, it came like teeth and bit me so I couldn’t see or feel anything or even hear the rain anymore. And Cory, he went away.”

*  *  *

Sunday morning came and Paul, Chris and I were at the breakfast table eating brunch.

Chris had a hot, homemade buttery roll in his hand, his lips parted wide to put at least half inside with one bite, when the telephone in the hall rang. Paul groaned as he put down his fork. I groaned too, for I had made my first cheese soufflé and it had to be eaten right away. “Would you mind getting that, Cathy?” he asked. “I really want to dig into your soufflé. It looks delicious and it smells heavenly.”

“You sit right there and eat,” I said, jumping up and hurrying to answer, “and I’ll do what I can to protect you from the pesky Mrs. Williamson. . . .”

He softly laughed and flashed me an amused look as he picked his fork up again. “It may not be my lonely widow lady with another of her minor afflictions.” Chris went right on eating.

I picked up the phone and in my most adult and gracious way I said, “Dr. Paul Sheffield’s residence.”

“This is Emily Dean Dewhurst calling,” said the stern voice on the other end. “Please put Dr. Sheffield on the phone immediately!”

“Miss Dewhurst!” I said, already alarmed. “This is Cathy, Carrie’s sister. Is Carrie all right?”

“You and Dr. Sheffield are needed here immediately!”

“Miss Dewhurst—”

But she didn’t let me finish. “It seems that your younger sister has disappeared rather mysteriously. On Sundays those girls who are being punished by weekend liberty denial are required to attend chapel services. I myself called the roll and Carrie did not respond to her name.” My heart beat faster, apprehensive of what I was to hear next, but my finger moved to push a button that would put Miss Dewhurst’s message onto the attached microphone so Chris and Paul would hear even as they ate.

“Where was she?” I asked in a small voice, already terrified.

She spoke calmly. “A strange hush came in the air this morning when your sister’s name was called and when I asked where she was. I sent a teacher to check your sister’s room and she wasn’t there. I then ordered a thorough search of the grounds and the entire school building from basement to attic, and still your sister wasn’t found. I would, if your sister was of a different character, presume she’d run off and was on her way home. But something in the atmosphere warns that at least twelve of the girls here know what has happened to Carrie and they refuse to talk and incriminate themselves.”

My eyes widened. “You mean you still don’t know where Carrie is?”

Paul and Chris had stopped eating. Now both stared at me with mounting concern. “I’m sorry to say I don’t. Carrie hasn’t been seen since nine o’clock last night. Even if she walked all the way home she should have reached there by now. It’s almost noon. If she is not there and she is not
here, then she is either injured, lost or some other accident has befallen her. . . .”

I could have screamed. How could she speak so dispassionately! Why, why every time something terrible came into our lives was it a flat, uncaring voice that told us the bad news?

Paul’s white car sped down Overland Highway toward Carrie’s school. I was sandwiched in the front seat between Paul and Chris. My brother had his bag so he could catch a bus and go on to his school after he found out what had happened to Carrie. He had my hand squeezed tight in his to reassure me that
this
child of ours was going to live! “Stop looking so worried, Cathy,” said Chris as he put an arm about my shoulder and drew my head to his shoulder. “You know how Carrie is. She’s probably hiding and just won’t answer. Remember how she was in the attic? She wouldn’t stay even when Cory wanted to. Carrie’d take off to do her own thing. She hasn’t run away. She’d be too afraid of the dark. She’s hiding somewhere. Somebody did something to hurt her feelings and she’s punishing them by letting them worry. She couldn’t face the world in the dead of night.”

Dead of night! Oh, God! I wished Chris hadn’t mentioned the attic where Cory had almost died in a trunk before he went on to meet Daddy in heaven. Chris kissed my cheek and wiped away my tears. “Come now, don’t cry. I said all of that wrong. She’ll be all right.”

“What do you mean you don’t know where my ward is?” fired Paul in a hard voice as he coldly eyed Miss Dewhurst. “It was my understanding the girls in this school were properly supervised twenty-four hours a day!”

We were in the posh office of Miss Emily Dean Dewhurst. She was not seated behind her impressive, large desk, but restlessly pacing the floor. “Really, Dr. Sheffield, nothing like this has ever happened before. Never have we
lost
a girl. We make a room check every night to see the girls are tucked in bed with lights out, and Carrie
was
in her bed. I myself
looked in on her, wanting to comfort her if she’d let me, but she refused to look at me or to speak. Of course it all began with I that fight in your ward’s room and the demerits that resulted in their loss of their weekend liberty. Every member of the faculty has helped me search and we’ve questioned our girls who profess to know nothing about it—which I imagine they do—but if they won’t talk, I don’t know what to do next.”

“Why didn’t you notify me when you first found her missing?” Paul asked. I spoke up then and asked to be taken to Carrie’s room. Miss Dewhurst turned eagerly to me, anxious to escape the doctor’s wrath. As we three followed her up the stairs she spilled forth lengthy excuses so we’d understand how difficult it was to handle so many mischievous girls. When we finally entered Carrie’s room several students trailed behind us, whispering back and forth about how much Chris and I looked like Carrie, only we weren’t “so freakishly small.”

Chris turned to scowl at them. “No wonder she hates it here if you can say things like that!”

“We’ll find her,” assured Chris. “If we have to stay all week and torture each little witch here we’ll make them tell us where she is.”

“Young man,” shot out Miss Dewhurst, “nobody tortures my girls but me!”

I knew Carrie better than anyone and around the grooves of her brain I ambled. Now, if I were Carrie’s age, would I try to escape a school that had unjustly kept me from going home? Yes!
I
would do exactly that. But I was not Carrie; I would not run away in only a nightgown. All her little uniforms were there, custom sewn by Henny, and her small sweaters, skirts and blouses, and pretty dresses, all there. Everything she’d brought to this school was in its proper place. Only the porcelain dolls were missing.

Still on my knees before Carrie’s dresser, I sat back on my
heels and looked up at Paul and showed him the box that contained nothing but cotton wadding and sticks of wood. “Her dolls aren’t here,” I said dully, not comprehending the sticks at all, “and as far as I can tell the only article of her clothing that’s missing is one of her nightgowns. Carrie wouldn’t go outside wearing only her nightgown. She’s got to be here—someplace no one has looked.”

“We have looked
everywhere!
” Miss Dewhurst spoke impatiently, as if I had no voice in this matter, only the guardian, the doctor, whose favor she sought even while Paul turned on her another of his stern, hard looks.

For some reason I can’t explain I swiveled my head about and caught a cat-who’s-eaten-the-canary look on the pale and sickly face of a frizzled, rust-haired, skinny girl whom I detested merely from hearing the little Carrie had told me about her roommate. Maybe it was just her eyes, or the way she kept fingering the big square pocket of her organdy pinafore that narrowed my own eyes as I tried to pierce the depths of hers. She blanched and shifted her green eyes toward the windows, shuffled her feet about uneasily and quickly yanked her hand from her pocket. It was a lined pocket and it bulged suspiciously.

“You,” I said, “you’re Carrie’s roommate, aren’t you?”

“I was,” she murmured.

“What is that you have in your pocket?”

Her head jerked toward me. Her eyes sparked green fire as the muscles near her lips twitched. “None of your business!”

“Miss Towers!” whiplashed Miss Dewhurst. “Answer Miss Dollanganger’s question!”

“It’s my purse,” said Sissy Towers, glaring at me defiantly.

“It’s a very lumpy purse,” I said, and suddenly I lunged forward and seized Sissy Towers about the knees. With my free hand, as she struggled and howled, I pulled from her pocket a blue scarf. From that scarf tumbled Mr. and Mrs. Parkins and baby Clara. I held the three porcelain dolls in my
hand and demanded, “What are you doing with my sister’s dolls?”

“They’re my dolls!” said the girl, her gimlet eyes narrowing to slits. The girls gathered around began to snicker and made whispering remarks to one another.

“Your dolls? These dolls belong to my sister.”

“
You
lie!” she fired back. “You are stealing from me and my father can have you thrown in jail!”

“Miss Dewhurst,” ordered the small demon, her hand reaching for the dolls, “you make this person leave me alone! I don’t like her, no more than her
dwarf
sister!”

I got to my feet and towered threateningly above her. Protectively I put the dolls behind my back. She’d have to kill me to get to them!

“Miss Dewhurst!” shrieked the imp as she attacked me.
“My mommy and daddy gave me those dolls for my Christmas!”

“You lying little devil!” I said, itching to slap her defiant face. “You stole those dolls and the crib from my sister. And because you did Carrie is at this very moment in extreme danger!” I knew it. I felt it. Carrie needed help and fast. “Where is my sister?” I raged.

I stared hard at that red-haired girl named Sissy, knowing she had the answer to where Carrie was but knowing she’d never tell me. It was in her eyes, her mean, spiteful eyes. It was then that Lacy St. John spoke up and told us what they’d done to Carrie the night before.

Oh, God! There was no place in the world more terrifying to Carrie than a roof—any roof! I went reeling back into the past, when Chris and I had tried to take the twins out on the roof of Foxworth Hall so we could hold them in the sunlight and keep them in the fresh air so they’d grow. And like children out of their minds from fright they’d screamed and kicked.

I squeezed my eyelids very tight, concentrating fully on Carrie, where, where, where? And behind my eyes I saw her crouched in a dark corner in what seemed a canyon rising tall on either side of her.

“I want to look in the attic myself,” I said to Miss Dewhurst, and she quickly said they’d already thoroughly searched the attic and called and called Carrie’s name. But they didn’t know Carrie like I did. They didn’t know my small sister could go off to a never-never land where speech didn’t exist, not when she was in shock.

Up the attic stairs all the teachers, Chris, Paul and I climbed. It was so much like it used to be, a huge, dim and dusty place. But not full of old furniture covered with dusty gray sheets or remnants of the past. Up here were only stacks upon stacks of heavy wooden crates.

Carrie was here. I could sense it. I felt her presence as if she reached out and touched me, though when I looked around I saw nothing but the crates. “Carrie!” I called as loudly as possible. “It’s me, Cathy. Don’t hide and keep quiet because you’re afraid! I’ve got your dolls and Dr. Paul is with me and so is Chris. We’ve come to take you home, and never again are we going to send you away to school!” I nudged Paul, “Now you tell her that too.”

He abandoned his soft voice and boomed, “Carrie, if you can hear me, it’s just as your sister says. We want you to come home with us to stay. I’m sorry, Carrie. I thought you’d like it here. Now I know you couldn’t possibly have been happy. Carrie, please come out, we need you.”

Then I thought I heard a soft whimper. I raced in that direction with Chris close at my heels. I knew about attics, how to search, how to find.

Abruptly I drew to a halt and Chris collided with me. Just ahead, in the dim shadows created by the towers of heavy wooden crates, still in her nightgown, all torn, dirty and bloody, gagged and still blindfolded, I spied Carrie. Her spill of blond hair gleamed in the faint light. Beneath her a leg was twisted in a grotesque way. “Oh, God,” whispered Chris and Paul at the same time, “her leg looks broken.”