Petals on the Wind

  When he brushed the hair from his fingers I hurried forward to pluck them from his hands, and in a plastic box I carefully laid them out. The electric static of the box kept them in place. An idiot notion, but I couldn't bear to see her beautiful hair swept up and thrown away. Her hair glinted on the pillows, on the bedspread, on the white lace of her bedjacket. As in a trance of nightmares unending I gathered up the long hairs and arranged them neatly while Alex prayed on and on. Even as he was introduced to Chris he paused only long enough to nod.

  "Paul, answer me! What is being done to help Carrie?"

  "Everything we know how to do," answered Paul, his voice low and soft, the way people speak when death is near. "A team of good doctors are working around the clock to save her. But her red blood cells are being destroyed faster than we can replace them with transfusions."

  Three days and nights all of us lingered beside Carrie's bedside while my neighbor took care of Jory. Each of us who loved her prayed that she'd live. I called Henny and told her to go to church and have all her family and church members pray for Carrie too. She tapped over the line her signal for "Yes, Yes!"

  Flowers arrived daily to fill her room. I didn't look to see who sent them. I sat beside Chris or Paul, or between both, and held to their hands and silently prayed. I looked with distaste upon Alex, whom I believed responsible for much of what was wrong with Carrie. Finally I could keep my question to myself no longer; I got up and stalked Alex and backed him into a corner. "Alex, why would Carrie want to die during the happiest days of her life? What did she tell you and what did you say?"

  He turned his bewildered, unshaven, griefstricken face to mine. "What did I say?" he asked, his eyes red-rimmed from lack of sleep. I repeated my question with an even harder edge to my voice. He shook his head as if to clear it, looking hurt and sleepy as he ran long fingers through the tumble of his uncombed brown curls. "Cathy, God knows I've done everything I can to convince her I love her! But she won't listen to me. She turns her face aside and says nothing. I asked her to marry me and she said yes. She threw her arms about my neck and said yes over and over again. Then she said, 'Oh, Alex, I'm not nearly good enough for you.' And I laughed and said she was perfect, just exactly what I wanted. Where did I go wrong, Cathy? What did I do to make her turn against me so now she won't even look my way?"

  Alex had the kind of sweet, pious face you expect to see carved only on marble saints. Yet, as he stood there, so humbled, so racked by grief and torn by love turned against him, I reached out and soothed him as best I could, for he did love Carrie. In his own way he loved her. "Alex, I'm sorry if I sounded harsh; forgive me for that. But did Carrie confess anything to you?"

  Again his eyes clouded. "I called and asked to see her a week ago and her voice sounded strange, as if something terrible had happened and she couldn't speak about it. I drove as fast as I could to be with her, but she wouldn't let me in. Cathy, I love her! She's told me she's too small and her head is too large, but in my eyes her proportions are just right. To me she was a dainty doll who didn't know she was beautiful. And if God lets her die I will never in this life find my credence again!" That's when he buried his face in his hands and began to cry.

  It was the fourth night after Chris arrived. I dozed beside Carrie. The others were trying to catch a catnap before they too were ill and Alex was napping in the hall on a cot when I heard Carrie call my name. I ran to her bed and knelt beside it, then reached for her small hand under the covers. It was only a bony hand now, with skin so translucent her veins and arteries could be seen.

  "Darling, I've been waiting for you to wake up," I whispered in a hoarse voice. "Alex is in the hall and Chris and Paul are napping in the doctor's quarters-- shall I call them in?"

  "No," she whispered. "I want to talk only to you. I'm gonna die, Cathy." She said it so calmly, as if it didn't matter, as if she accepted it and was glad.

  "No!" I objected strongly. "You are not going to die! I'm not going to let you die! I love you as my own child. Many people love and need you, Carrie! Alex loves you so much and he wants to marry you, and he won't be a minister now, Carrie; I've told him it makes you uncomfortable. He doesn't really care what his career is, as long as you stay alive and love him He doesn't care if you are small or if you have children. Let me call him in so he can tell you all . . ."

  "N000," she whispered thinly "I've got something secret to tell you. Her voice was so faint it seemed to come from over hundreds of soft, rounded, little hills far, far away. "I saw a lady on the street." Her voice was so low I had to lean to hear. "She looked so much like Momma I had to run up. I caught hold of her hand. She snatched hers away and turned cold hard eyes on me. 'I don't know you' she said. Cathy, that was our mother! She looks like she used to almost, only a little older. She even had on the pearl necklace with the diamond butterfly clasp that I remember. And, Cathy, when your own mother doesn't want you--don't that mean nobody can want you? She looked at me and she knew who I was; I saw it in her eyes, and still she didn't want me because she knows I'm bad. That's why she said what she did--that she didn't have any children. She doesn't want you or Chris either, Cathy, and all mothers love and want their children unless they're evil, unholy children . . like us."

  "Oh, Carrie! Don't let her do this to you! It's the love of money that made her deny you . . . not that you are bad or wicked or unholy. You haven't done anything evil! It's money that matters to her, Carrie, not us. But we don't need her. Not when you have Alex and Chris, Paul and me. . . and Jory too, and Henny. . . . Don't break our hearts, Carrie, hang on long enough to let the doctors help you. Don't give up. Jory wants his aunt back; every day he asks where you are. What am I going to tell him--that you didn't care enough to live?"

  "Jory don't need me," she said in the manner she'd spoken when she was a child. "Jory's got lots of people besides me to love and care for him but Cory, he's waiting for me, Cathy. I can see him right now. Look over there behind your shoulder; he's standing next to Daddy and they want me more than anyone here."

  "Carrie, don't!"

  "It's nice where I'm going, Cathy, flowers everywhere, and beautiful birds, and I can feel myself growing taller. . . Look, I'm almost as tall as Momma, like I always wanted to be. And when I get there nobody's ever gonna say again I got eyes big and scary as an owl's. Nobody will ever call me 'dwarf again, and tell me to use a stretching machine .. . 'cause I'm just as tall as I want to be."

  Her weak and trembling voice faded away. Her eyes rolled heavenward and stayed open without blinking. Her lips stayed parted, as if she had something else to tell me. Dear God, she was dead!

  Momma had started all of this. Momma who got out of everything scot-free! Scar-free! And rich, rich, rich! All she had to do was shed a few tears of selfpity after she went home. That's when I screamed! I know I screamed. I wailed and wanted to rip the hair from my head and tear the skin from my face--for I looked too much like that woman who had to pay, pay, pay .. . and then pay some more!

  On a hot August day we buried Carrie in the Sheffield family plot, a few miles outside the city limits of Clairmont. No rain this time. No snow on the ground. Now death had claimed every season but winter and left only that cold, blustery weather for me to rejoice in. We covered Carrie over with the crimson flowers she so loved, and purple ones too. The sun above was a rich saffron color, almost orange before it turned to vermilion as it sank to the horizon and turned the heavens rosy-red.

  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!

  PART FIVE The Time for Vengeance

  . The 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 on 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! 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 cliche, 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 cafe 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 attache 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 attache 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. 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 dogeared 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 he
rs 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.