Petals on the Wind

  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 handcrocheted 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 haw 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 Deft 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 custommade 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.

  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 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 halfbrother'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--"