Whitefern

  “Sorry to bother you,” he told Sylvia, “but can you remember what happened to your . . .”

  “Brother-in-law,” I interjected quickly. “She’s not clear on relationships.”

  He nodded. “Sure. Can you remember anything, Sylvia?”

  “I remember things,” she said with what sounded like indignation.

  “On the stairway. What happened to him?”

  “He fell backward,” she said. “I tried to help him like I helped Papa, but I couldn’t reach him . . . I was right behind Papa. I didn’t have to reach him.”

  “She once kept my father from falling,” I explained. “We made a big deal of it. I’m sure you understand.”

  “Yeah, sure.” He looked at Sylvia again and realized she wasn’t going to be much of a witness. “Okay. There’ll be an autopsy, and we’ll be in touch. My deepest sympathies, Mrs. Lowe.”

  “Thank you.”

  He nodded at Sylvia.

  “Adelle is sleeping,” she told him, as if she expected he would want to ask the baby questions, too.

  He looked at me, his eyes like exclamation points.

  “It’s how she is,” I said.

  “Right. I’ll call you,” he told me, and left.

  The silence that followed after everyone had left was the deepest silence in Whitefern that I could remember. I didn’t imagine I would be able to fall asleep, so I didn’t go to our bedroom, and I didn’t lie beside Sylvia on her bed.

  Instead, I returned to Momma’s sofa, where I sat until the wee hours of the morning. Sometime before the sun rose, I did fall asleep. Sylvia woke me to tell me it was time for breakfast. She stood there holding the baby and looking at me.

  “Yes,” I said. I rose slowly, telling myself it was best to eat something. There would be so much to do now, so many people to talk to and repeat the same explanation.

  “Is Arden coming back for breakfast?” she asked.

  “No, Sylvia,” I said. “Arden’s never coming back.”

  She nodded, looking like she just wanted to hear it confirmed.

  “Arden has passed away, just like Papa did,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “Papa told me.”

  Epilogue

  It was a day without clouds when we buried Arden next to his mother, Billie, in the Whitefern Cemetery, exactly the wrong weather for a funeral. Everyone and everything looked too bright and alive. Arden’s and Billie’s graves weren’t far from my parents’ graves and those of Aunt Ellsbeth and Vera. Many of our company’s clients and all the employees attended the service. Mrs. Crown looked devastated, as devastated as a lover of the deceased might. She cried harder than I did and needed more comfort than I did.

  Sylvia stood beside me, clinging to Adelle. Onlookers thought it was one of the saddest and yet sweetest scenes they had ever witnessed. Afterward, as I had promised Sylvia many times, I took her over to Papa’s grave. She read the tombstone and looked at the grave and shook her head.

  “Papa’s not down there, Audrina,” she insisted.

  “Maybe he isn’t,” I said, keeping my eyes on the headstone.

  I had struggled through most of the day. I had barely slept during the previous nights. I hadn’t touched any of Arden’s things yet. I intended to donate as many of them as I could to charity. In fact, nothing at all looked different in our home. Whitefern was invulnerable. The shadows in every corner were still there; the whispers I heard on the stairs continued. Some of the old clocks had stopped ticking, but I didn’t remove them. The grandfather clocks in the halls still chimed, but I ignored them. Arden had hated them, along with the cuckoos in the wooden Swiss clocks. Now that I thought about it, he had hated anything and everything that related to my family. He had wanted to remake it all in his name.

  We didn’t have any sort of formal gathering after the funeral, the way we had for Papa’s. Some people stopped by during the following days, people like Mrs. Haider and a few of the employees I knew. Mrs. Crown did not visit. For now, I agreed with Mr. Johnson to permit Arden’s top assistant, Nick Masters, to run the firm. It took me a while to delve into real-world matters.

  Arden’s absence didn’t appear to bother Sylvia very much. She was far too occupied with Adelle and, along with me, caring for the house. Occasionally, she would pause and look like she was about to ask after him, but then she would shake her head slightly and nod as though she really was hearing Papa.

  Time closed wounds, but it couldn’t prevent scars. There were so many at Whitefern. I could say we had a garden of them. Fall was rushing in. When we took walks, now with the new carriage we had bought for Adelle, I could sense winter’s eagerness. Leaves were falling faster; birds were starting to head farther south. A darker shade of blue seeped into the afternoon skies, and nights were beginning to drop with heavier darkness around us.

  One evening after dinner, while Sylvia was looking after Adelle and playing some records on Momma’s old phonograph, which Arden had once tried to sell as an antique, I went out and walked far enough away from the front of the house that when I looked back, I could see the entire house silhouetted against the stars.

  I had been toying with the idea of selling Whitefern. We would sell the brokerage, and Sylvia, Adelle, and I would move away, to a place where no one knew us, the Whiteferns, the Adares, or the Lowes. It was a way to be reborn, I thought.

  Could I do this? Could I finally leave the past, or would the voices follow us no matter where we went? It was an enormous challenge for me, even to consider it. Once, years ago, when I had tried to leave with Sylvia, she had revolted against it, and I’d had to stay. Would she revolt again? If anything, she was probably even more attached to Whitefern. It was here that she was comforted by Papa’s voice.

  It was impossible, I thought. Whitefern had a grip on us that even death could not break. Slowly, I walked back to the house, feeling like I was being chastised for the very thought of leaving it.

  Sylvia was in the living room, cradling Adelle in her arms and dancing to one of Momma’s favorite tunes. She paused when she saw me. Adelle looked comfortable and happy in her arms.

  I walked to them slowly, smiling, and put my arms around Sylvia. Adelle was between us, looking up at both of us.

  And we three began to dance again.

  Now turn the page for a sneak peek of

  Book One in a startling new series

  By V.C. Andrews®

  Available Fall 2016 from Pocket Books

  Prologue

  Haylee always blamed our mother for everything that happened to us and everything terrible that we had done to each other—or I should say, everything terrible that she had done to me. Many times as we were growing up, she would tell me to my face that whatever hurtful thing she had done wasn’t her fault. It was because our mother wouldn’t let her be her own person. I suppose I should have been a little grateful. At least she was recognizing that whatever it was she had done was wrong.

  Don’t misunderstand me. It wasn’t that she was suffering the needle-prick pains of conscience. In fact, I now believe my twin sister might never have felt anything despite the agonizing look she could put on and take off like a mask. We were not a religious ­family. Mother never warned either of us that God was watching. She was watching, and she thought that was enough.

  I knew in my heart that Haylee was just trying to escape her own responsibility by blaming Mother for things she did herself. No one could shed her guilt like a snake sheds its skin as well as my identical twin. And afterward, she could look as innocent as a rabbit that had just devoured most of a vegetable garden. But that sweetness could turn into a flash of lightning rage when only I was looking at her, even when we were still infants.

  One time when we were eleven and our mother wasn’t home and couldn’t hear her, Haylee stood in front of me with her arms tight against her sides, her fingers cur
led like claws. She stamped her foot and screamed, “I am not you! I’ll never be you! And you will never be me! Whatever you like, I will hate. If I have to, I’ll scar my face just to be different. Or,” she added, thinking more about it, “I’ll attack you when you’re sleeping and I’ll scar yours.”

  The cruelty in her eyes stunned me so much I was speechless. She truly sounded as if she hated me enough to do just what she had said. Her threat kept me up at night, watching my bedroom doorway, and it set the foundation for nightmares in which she would slink into my room with a razor between her fingers. To this day, I am certain she did come in once or twice and stand by my bed, hovering over me and battling with the urge to act out her vicious promise.

  To drive home her point this particular time, she seized the photo of us at our tenth birthday party, the party held in our backyard, where Mother had Daddy arrange for a party tent and had dressed us in identical pink chiffon dresses with pink saddle shoes. Haylee tore the picture into a dozen pieces, which she flushed down the toilet, screaming, “Good riddance! If I never hear the word twin again, that will be too soon!” She stood there fuming. I could almost see the steam coming out of her ears. My heart was pounding, because in our house, saying something like that was like a nun declaring she never wanted to hear the word Jesus.

  If I had any doubt that Haylee could get into a great rage without thinking of the consequences, tearing up our picture should have convinced me, for how would we explain it not being there in our room, prominently displayed on our dresser? She knew I could never tell Mother what she had done. And she could never blame it on me. It was an unwritten rule or, rather, a rule Mother had carved into our very souls: we must never blame each other for anything, for that was like blaming ourselves.

  Even if I did tell, it wouldn’t help. Haylee was better than I was when it came to winning sympathy and compassion for herself and justification for any evil or mean act she would commit. I could easily picture her on the witness stand in a courtroom, wringing her hands, tears streaming down her face as she wailed about how much she hadn’t wanted to do what she had done to me. She would look so distraught that she might even have me feeling sorry for her.

  After she had calmed herself, she would quietly explain to the jury why our mother should be the one accused, certainly not her. She wasn’t all wrong. Now that I’m older, I have no doubt that Haylee would be able to find a psychiatrist eager and willing to testify on her behalf. Even back then, I wasn’t going to disagree with her about what our mother had done to us. I wanted to be my own person, too, but I didn’t want to have to hate Haylee the way she felt she had to hate me.

  Yes, I would blame our mother, too, for what eventually happened to me, just as Daddy would. And I have no doubt that anyone reading this would surely agree, but despite it all, I still loved our mother very much. I knew how hurt she would be over what Haylee had done and the things she had said. Her heart would suffer spidery cracks like the face of the porcelain doll her father had given her when she was five. I would hold her hand and I would put my arm around her. I would lean my head against her shoulder, and I would cry with her, almost tear for tear, as she moaned, “What have I done to my precious twins? What have I done?”

  1

  There was nothing Mother worked harder at than keeping either of us from differing from the other, even in the smallest ways. From the day we were born, she made sure that we owned the exact same things, whether clothes, shoes, toys, books, even the same color toothbrushes. Everything had to be bought in twos. Even our names had to be an equal number of letters, and that went for our middle names as well, which were exactly the same. I was Kaylee Blossom Fitzgerald, and my sister was Haylee Blossom Fitzgerald. That was something Mother insisted on. Daddy told us he didn’t think it was very significant at the time, so he had put up little argument. I’m sure he regretted it later, as he came to regret so much he had failed to do.

  Although neither of us had the courage to complain about our names, we both wished they were different. By the time she was a senior in high school, Haylee had gone so far as to tell people she had no middle name. When anyone looked to me for confirmation, I agreed. That was one of those little ways Haylee gradually got me to oppose things Mother had done. I was the reluctantly rebellious twin, practically dragged by my hair into the fiery ring of defiance.

  Actually, when I think about it, we were lucky to have two different first names. We couldn’t be Haylee One and Haylee Two or Kaylee One and Kaylee Two based on who was born first, either. Mother would never tell us who was first, and Daddy hadn’t been in the delivery room when we were born. He’d been on a business trip. I don’t know if he ever asked her which one of us was born first, but I doubt she would have told him anyway. She’d pretend not to know, or maybe she really believed we were born together, hugging and clinging to each other with our tiny pink hands and arms as we were cast out of her womb and into the world, both of us harmonizing a cry of fear. Whenever Mother described our birth, she always said that the doctor practically had to pry us apart.

  “I thought there was only one of you at first. That’s how in sync your cries were. One voice,” she would say, and she’d look starry-eyed, with that soft smile of wonder that fascinated both Haylee and me when we would sit on the floor in front of her and listen to the story of ourselves. As we grew older, she wove the magical fabric in which we would be dressed, wove it into a fantasy about the perfect twins. There was one rule that if broken would bring about disaster: we had to be loved equally, or some dragonlike monster would destroy our enchantment.

  Daddy wasn’t anywhere nearly as obsessed about treating us equally in every way. There was never a doubt in my mind that it was something he believed Mother would grow out of as we grew older. He humored her with his smiles and nods and especially with his favorite response to what she demanded be done: “Whatever you say, Keri.”

  He admitted that he was excited about having twins, but at first, he didn’t see any additional burdens or responsibilities that other parents of more than one child had. Even as infants, we could see that he was nowhere as uptight about it, which only infuriated Mother more. During our early years, if he forgot and bought something for me and not for Haylee, or vice versa, our mother would become so upset that, in a violent rage during which I would swear I felt a whirlwind around us, she would tear up or throw out whatever he had bought. Haylee felt the whirlwind, too, and, watching Mother, we would cling to each other as tightly as we supposedly had the day we were born.

  There was simply no excuse Daddy could use for what he had done that would satisfy her. For example, like someone else’s father, he couldn’t say one of us liked a certain color more or was more interested in something and he had just happened to come upon it during his travels. Oh, no. Mother would look as if she had accidentally put her finger in an electric socket and would tell him he was wrong and had done a ­terrible thing.

  In his defense he pleaded, “For God’s sake, Keri, this isn’t a capital crime.”

  “Not a capital crime?” she fired back, her voice shrill. “How can you not see them for what they are?”

  “They’re little girls,” he declared.

  “No, no, no, these are not just two little girls. These are perfect twins. They see the world through the same eyes, hear it through the same ears, and smell it through the same nose.”

  He shook his head, smiling but concerned. I looked at Haylee. Was Mother right? To anyone watching us, it did look as if we liked the same foods, the same flavor ice cream, the same candy. It was true that when we were very young, anything one of us liked, the other did, too, and anything one of us hated, the other hated. Maybe we felt we were supposed to or we would lose our mystical powers. Nevertheless, Mother was shocked Daddy didn’t realize that.

  “I think you’re exaggerating,” Daddy told her.

  “Exaggerating? Are you in the same house, Mason? Do you see
your own children?” she asked him in what, even as a young girl, I thought was a terribly condescending tone. She sounded more like she did when she chastised us.

  Mother also had a habit of smacking her right fist against her right thigh when she started her responses to things that upset her this much. Sometimes she did it so hard that both Haylee and I would flinch as if we felt the blows. After one of her more dramatic outbursts, I saw her thigh when she was getting ready to take a shower. It had a bright red circle where she had pounded it. Later it turned black-and-blue, and when Daddy mentioned it, she said, “It’s your fault, Mason. You might as well have struck me there yourself.”

  Finally, Daddy always managed to stammer an excuse, but he still couldn’t ever get away with “I’ll buy the other one something tomorrow.” Whatever it was that he had bought one of us and not the other, it was gone that day, no matter what he had promised. Sometimes he would take it back and have his secretary return it to the store, but most times, after Mother had destroyed it or thrown it out, he would go back when he could and buy two this time, so he could give both of us whatever it was he thought one of us had wanted. He never looked happy about it. That satisfied Mother, though, and brought what Daddy called “a fragile armistice where we tiptoed on a floor of eggshells.” We were all smiles again. Our pounding hearts relaxed, and the electric sizzle in the air disappeared, for a while anyway.

  In our house, stings, burns, and aches ran around just behind the walls and just under the floors like termites. Haylee and I were in the center of continuous little tornadoes. Sometimes I thought Haylee did things deliberately so she could see these storms brew between Daddy and Mother. It was one of the differences I sensed early about us. Haylee had an impish delight in causing little explosions between our parents.

  But she was far from the main cause of it all in the beginning. It wasn’t difficult to understand why this turmoil was happening around Haylee and me. In our mother’s mind, a minute after we were born, all thoughts about one of us had to be about the two of us simultaneously. She claimed it was practically blasphemous to do otherwise, because the biggest danger for any parent of identical twins was that somehow, some way, he or she would favor one over the other and literally destroy the confidence of the one not favored.