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! (99 page)

My thoughts were like the dry leaves blowing in the strong wind of hate as I sat on and on and on, though the marble bench beneath me was hard and uncomfortable. I made those dry leaves, after I gathered them together and twisted them, into a cruel witch’s stick, a thing to stir up a neglected brew of revenge!

Out of the four Dresden dolls only two were left. And
one
would do nothing. He had taken an oath to do what he could to preserve life and keep alive even those who didn’t deserve to live.

I was loath to leave Carrie alone in the night, the first one she’d spend in the ground. I had to spend this one night with her and comfort her in some unknown way. I threw a glance at where Julia and Scotty lay asleep too, near Paul’s parents, and an older brother who had died even before Amanda was born. I wondered what we, the Foxworths, were doing in the Sheffield family plot? What meaning was there to any of this?

If Alex hadn’t come into Carrie’s life when he did and given her love, would she have been better off? If Carrie hadn’t spied Momma on the street and raced to catch up with her, happy enough to take hold of her hand and call her Momma, would that have made a difference? It must have made
all
the difference! It must have! Straight from her mother’s denial she had gone to purchase rat poison because she didn’t feel fit to live, not when even her mother could deny her. And the poison on her doughnuts hadn’t been just a trace, but heavily laced—pure arsenic!

Someone spoke my name softly. Someone reached with tenderness to lift me up by my elbows. With his arm about my waist, supporting me, he led me from the cemetery where I would have stayed until dawn to see the sun come up. “No, darling,” said Chris. “Carrie doesn’t need you now. But others do. Cathy, you must forget the past and your plans for revenge. I see the look on your face and read your mind. I’ll share with you my secret for finding peace. I’ve tried to give it to you before but you refuse to listen.
Now this time listen and believe!
Do as I do and force yourself to forget everything that gives you pain, and remember only what gives you joy. It is the whole secret to happy living, Cathy. Forgetting and forgiving.”

Bitter, bleak eyes I turned upon him and scornfully I said, “You are indeed very good at forgiving, Christopher—but at
forgetting, now that is another matter.”

He flushed as red as the dying sun. “Cathy, please! Isn’t forgiving the better half? I only remember the sweeter part.”

“No! No!” But I clung to him as one who approaches hell holds tight to salvation.

Though I’m not sure, I thought I saw a woman dressed in black, with her head and face covered by a black veil, duck behind a tree as we approached the road and the parked car. Hiding so we wouldn’t see her. But I caught a glimpse, enough to reveal the rope of lustrous pearls she wore. Pearls that were there for a thin white hand to lift and nervously, out of long habit, twist and untwist into a knot.

Only one woman I knew did that—and she was the perfect one to wear black, and should run to hide!
Forever hide!

Color all her days black! Every last one!

I’d see to it that all her remaining days on earth were black. Blacker than the tar put on my hair. Blacker than anything in that locked room and in the darkest shadows in the attic that had been given to us when we were fearful and young and needing so much to be loved enough. Blacker than the deepest pit in hell.

I’d waited long enough to deliver what I must. Long enough. And even with Chris here to try and stop me—even he wouldn’t be enough to prevent what I had to do!

T
he untimely death of Carrie left a hole in the lives of all of us who loved her. Now the little porcelain dolls were mine to cherish and keep. Chris went away to be a resident at the University of Virginia just so he wouldn’t be too far from me.

“Stay, Catherine,” pleaded Paul when I told him I was going back to my place in the mountains to pick up my life as dance instructor. “Don’t go and leave me alone again! Jory needs a father; I need a wife; he needs a man to emulate. I’m sick to death of having you to love only once in a while.”

“Later,” I said with hard determination, backing off from his arms. “I’ll come to you one day and we will be married, but I have some unfinished business to attend to first.”

*  *  *

Soon I was back into my routine of work, not far from where the Foxworths lived in their mansion. I settled down to scheming. Jory was a problem now that I didn’t have Carrie. He grew tired at the dance school and wanted to play with children his own age. I enrolled him in a special preschool and hired a maid to help out with the housework and stay with
Jory when I wasn’t there. At night I went on the prowl, looking, of course, for one particular man. So far he had eluded me, but sooner or later fate would see that we met—God help you then, Momma!

The local newspaper gave Bartholomew Winslow a big write-up when he opened his second law office in Hillendale while his junior partner ran his first office in Greenglenna. Two offices, I thought. What money couldn’t buy! I didn’t plan or, being so bold as to approach him directly; ours would be an “accidental” confrontation. Leaving Jory in the care of Emma Lindstrom, as he played in our fenced-in yard with two other children, I drove my car to the woods that weren’t so far from Foxworth Hall.

Bart Winslow was a celebrity of sorts, with all the details of his life explored, so I knew from the news story that it was his habit to jog a few miles each day before breakfast. Indeed, he would need a strong heart for what was coming up in his near future. For days on end I jogged myself, using dirt paths that twisted and turned, cluttered by dead, dry and crackling leaves. It was September and Carrie had been dead a month. Sad thoughts while I sniffed the pungent aroma of wood-fires burning and heard the noise of wood being chopped. Sounds and smells Carrie should be enjoying—they’ll pay, Carrie! I’ll make them pay, and somehow I forgot, Bart Winslow didn’t have anything to do with it. Not him, only
her
! How quickly time passed and I was getting nowhere! Where was he? I couldn’t prowl the singles’ bars; that was too commonplace and too obvious. When we met, and someday we had to, he’d say something that was a cliché, or I would, and that would be the beginning—or the ending I had in mind since the first time I laid eyes on Bartholomew Winslow dancing with my mother on Christmas night.

As contrary as life would be, I didn’t meet him jogging. One Saturday noon I sat in a sleazy café and suddenly Bart Winslow sauntered in the door! He glanced around, spied me
seated by the windows and came toward me in his three-piece lawyer’s suit that must have cost a fortune. With attaché case in hand, he actually swaggered! His smile was wide, his lean, tanned face slightly sinister—or maybe it was me scaring myself.

“We-ll,” he drawled, “as I live and breathe, if it isn’t Catherine Dahl, the very woman I’ve been hoping to run into for months.” He set down his attaché case, sat across from me without my invitation, then leaned on his elbows to peer into my eyes with intense interest. “Where the hell have you hidden yourself?” he asked, using his foot to draw his case nearer and guard it.

“I haven’t hidden myself,” I said, feeling nervous and hoping it wouldn’t show.

He laughed as his dark eyes scanned over my tight sweater and skirt and what he could see of my foot that nervously swung. Then his face grew solemn. “I read in the newspaper about your sister’s death. I am very sorry. It always hurts to read of someone so young dying. If it’s not too personal, may I ask what killed her? A disease? An accident?”

My eyes opened wide. What killed her? Oh, I could write a book about that!

“Why don’t you ask your wife what killed my sister?” I said stiffly.

He appeared startled, then shot out, “How can she know when she doesn’t know you or your sister? Yet, I saw her with the clipping cut from the obituary page, and she was crying when I snatched it from her hand. I demanded an explanation; she got up and ran upstairs. She still refuses to answer my questions. Just who the hell are you, anyway?”

I bit again into my ham, tomato and lettuce sandwich and chewed irritatingly slowly just to watch his vexation. “Why not ask
her
?” I said again.

“I do hate people who answer questions with questions,” he snapped, then motioned to a red-haired waitress who
hovered nearby and gave her his order to have the same as I. “Now,” he said, scooting his chair forward. “Some time ago I came to your dance studio and showed you those blackmail letters you keep writing to my wife.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out three I’d written years ago. From the dog-eared look of them, and the many stamps and cancellations, they had followed her about the world to end up again in my hands, with him almost shouting again, “Who the hell are you?”

I smiled to charm him. My mother’s smile. I tilted my head as she did hers and fluttered one hand up to play with my simulated pearls. “Do you really have to ask—can’t you guess?”

“Don’t play coy with me! Who are you really? What is your relationship to my wife? I know you look like her, same hair, same eyes, and even some of your mannerisms are the same. You must be some kind of relative . . . ?”

“Yes. You could say that.”

“Then why haven’t I met you before? A niece, cousin?” He had a strong animal magnetism that almost frightened me from playing the kind of game I had in mind. This was no adolescent boy who would be timidly impressed with a former ballerina. His dark appeal was strong, almost overwhelming me. Oh, what a wild lover he’d make. I could drown in his eyes and, making love with him, I’d be forever lost to any other man. He was too confidently masculine, too assured. He could smile and be at ease while I fidgeted and longed to escape before he led me down the trail I thought I’d wanted up until this very moment.

“Come,” he said, reaching to forcefully restrain my departure when I rose to go, “stop looking frightened and play the game you’ve had in mind for some time.” He picked up the letters and held them before my eyes. I looked away, unhappy with myself. “Don’t turn away your eyes. Five or six of your letters came while my wife and I were in Europe, and she’d
see them and paled. She’d swallow nervously—as you are swallowing nervously now. Her hand would lift to play with her necklace, just as you are playing with your beads now. Twice I saw her write on the envelope, ‘Address unknown.’ Then one day I collected the mail and I found these three letters you’d written to her. I opened them. I read them.” He paused, leaned forward so his lips were only inches from mine. His voice came hard and cold and fully in control of any savagery he might feel. “What right have you to try and blackmail my wife?”

I’m sure the color left my cheeks. I know I felt sick and weak and wanted to flee this place and him. I imagined I heard Chris’s voice saying,
Let the past rest in peace. Let it go, Cathy. God in his own way will eventually work the vengeance you want. In his own way, at his own speed He will take the responsibility from your shoulders.

Here was my chance to spill it forth—
all of it!
Let him know just what kind of woman he’d married! Why couldn’t my lips part and my tongue speak the truth? “Why don’t you ask your wife who I am? Why come to me when she has
all
the answers?”

He leaned back against the gaudy, bright orange, plastic-covered chair and took out a silver cigarette case with his monogram in diamonds. That just had to be a gift to him from my mother—it looked like her. He offered that case to me. I shook my head. He tapped the loose tobacco from one end and then lit the other with a silver lighter with diamonds too. All the while his dark, narrowed eyes held mine and, like a fly caught in a web of my own making, I waited to be pounced upon.

“Each letter you write says you need desperately a million dollars,” he said in a flat monotone, then blew smoke directly into my face. I coughed and fanned the air. All around the walls bore signs reading
NO SMOKING
. “Why do you need a million?”