Echoes of Dollanganger Read online

  “He didn’t come right out and say it, but I’m sure he worked in the clinic Corrine Foxworth was taken to after the fire here,” he said.

  “Corrine was his patient?”

  “My guess is that’s how Arthur Johnson and his wife know so much about the interior of Foxworth Hall. Dr. West knew it all from what she told him during whatever they call that treatment psychiatrists do. You know, patient on a couch or something, babbling.”

  “So Arthur Johnson works for this psychiatrist?”

  “Not exactly. I mean, he’s not on the title document. As I’ve told you, it’s a trust, and the owners or partners, or whatever they call them, aren’t mentioned.”

  “But the doctor is a wealthy man?”

  “I don’t know if he’s the one who’s wealthy. Although he didn’t say it, I had the feeling he was working for someone else, someone who’s a major investor in Johnson’s hedge fund. That’s all I can tell you. My head’s spinning with all the intrigue. I’m going to sleep,” he said.

  “Are you upset about it?” I asked quickly.

  “Upset?” He thought a moment. “I’m not sure if ‘upset’ is the right word. I’m more . . . confused about it, but maybe, if I just stick to what I have to do to build this turkey, I’ll be fine. Which reminds me. Mrs. Osterhouse is going to pick up the turkey I ordered. I’ve given her a list of what I need to prepare it. When does your holiday start?”

  “Next Wednesday. We usually pick it up and do the extra shopping.”

  “I know, but she wanted to do something. Sometimes being generous means letting someone do something for you. It doesn’t sound like it makes sense, but it does. You and I will get the rest of it on Sunday along with our weekly food, okay?”

  “Yes. I understand,” I said. I didn’t want to elaborate and reveal that I knew Mrs. Osterhouse was working so hard to become a member of our family, but it was one of those times when my father knew what I was thinking. He left it dangling in the air.

  “Right.” He started to turn away and then stopped. “Oh. So how was your dinner?”

  “Pretty tip-top,” I told him, which finally brought a smile to his face.

  “I bet,” he said. “You’re a chip off the old block. Get to sleep.”

  I watched him walk to his room, and I hated how old he suddenly looked, his shoulders slumped now with the fatigue of work, along with the weight of the deep and enduring sorrow he carried plus the weight of worrying that he was doing what he could and should do for me.

  * * *

  Seeing how upset my father was, I realized that I had another reason to get through Christopher’s diary: to solve the puzzles for him. Who wanted this large home on the Foxworth property, and why? I hoped that the clues were somewhere in the diary. Of course, I would say nothing of this to Kane. I had no idea what it all meant or even if it meant anything that concerned the Dollanganger children, and the one thing I didn’t want to do was start a conversation about it in school.

  Talk among our group of friends was centered on Tina Kennedy’s upcoming party, anyway. Kane knew how I felt about going. Nevertheless, he enjoyed teasing her by saying we still weren’t sure of our schedule. “We hope to be there, but there are a few things in the works.”

  “In the works? What does that mean?” she asked him, and he just looked at me and then gave her a smile and a slight shrug, leaving her gaping after us.

  “Why do you tease her, Kane? Don’t you know that especially for a girl like Tina, any attention breeds hope?”

  “I’m not teasing. It’s the truth, isn’t it? We have things in the works. Maybe we’ll go, or maybe we’ll be up in your attic.”

  “Not when my father is home,” I said. “And if he sees us spending so much time in my room, especially on a weekend, he’s going to get suspicious.”

  He gave me the oddest look, his head a little tilted to the right, his eyes smaller. “Sure you’re not exaggerating his attitude about the diary?” he asked.

  “I’m sure. He’s made it crystal-clear a number of times.”

  He still looked skeptical, which annoyed me. In fact, I was irritable for the rest of the day. I know I didn’t seem myself to my girlfriends. I had nothing funny or flattering to say about Suzette’s new shade of lipstick, which she was proudly demonstrating on her perky little sexy mouth. She had used that description of herself, the girl with the perky little sexy mouth, ever since her older brother’s college buddy described her that way and set her eyelids fluttering for a week.

  But I wasn’t ignoring just Suzette. Kyra’s father had given her a black and gold pyramid stud wrap watch this morning, because her birthday was falling on Thanksgiving this year, and he wanted her to feel the impact of a special day. He and her mother would give her gifts every day until Thanksgiving and probably the day after, too. All of us had expressed interest in such a watch, so I knew I should have been happier for her when she showed it to us.

  I was having moments like this ever since Kane first proposed reading the diary together. Without reason, I would find myself trembling and slinking away from contact with my girlfriends. The moments passed quickly enough. They were like tiny puffs of black smoke after a match was struck. Kane always seemed to be able to bring me back with his jokes and offbeat smile.

  However, he knew he had annoyed me by doubting that my father was so against my reading the diary. He apologized at lunch and broke his rule that we shouldn’t talk about the diary outside of my attic, or at least outside of my house.

  “It’s a very sad, even at times brutal story, but after some of the stories lately concerning people locked away for years, it’s not full of black magic or anything for me. That’s all I meant.”

  “We haven’t reached the end, Kane. You might change your mind.”

  He nodded. “I might,” he admitted. “But that’s more reason for us to do it like we’re doing it. We can comfort each other, right?”

  “Comfort?”

  “Just like Cathy and Christopher did,” he said. “Everything unpleasant is more unpleasant when you’re the only one feeling or experiencing it. That’s why as soon as something bad happens to us, we like to share it. We need the empathy and sympathy to help us get through it.”

  “Apparently, they didn’t have anyone to do that for them, even their own mother,” I said bitterly.

  “Looks like it,” he said.

  “What is making you two look like you lost your best friends?” Serena Mota asked us as she was passing our table.

  Kane looked at me and quickly said, “We’re upset because we might have to miss Tina Kennedy’s party this weekend.”

  Serena looked at us, dumbfounded for a moment, and then shrugged. “I might miss it, too.”

  As she walked off, we both laughed, but the lesson was learned. We looked at each other and repeated it word for word. “Don’t talk about the diary in school!”

  I was afraid that Kane’s obvious anticipation of my meeting him at the end of the day and our usual rather quick departure from the building, both of us avoiding contact or conversation with any of our friends who might delay us even for a few minutes, would attract even more attention and interest in how we were spending our afternoons together. Of course, as with most things, he didn’t worry about it and just smiled and shrugged when I mentioned it on our way to my house.

  It had been a while since my closer girlfriends had called me, too. I knew they were all getting a little upset with me, probably telling each other that I was getting snobby because I was going with Kane.

  However, I noticed that he was acting a little different this time. As usual, he brought his book bag in to leave in my room so that later we could employ the cover activity we had been using, doing our homework together. But then he suggested that I get us a snack of some sort, since by now the Dollangangers would have something like that, too, perhaps leftovers from the holidays. While I was doing that, he said he would go up to the attic and arrange things. I knew it was silly to feel it at
this point, but I couldn’t help being a little reluctant to give him the diary to take up with him without me. It was a ridiculous anxiety. After all, he had been alone in my room reading it, hadn’t he? It was just something about it being up in the attic without me that made me uneasy. I was like the Keeper of the Book or something in a science-fiction movie. As if he could read my thoughts, before I could say anything, he told me to bring the diary up with everything else and then charged up the stairs.

  I went into the kitchen, cut up cheese for some crackers, got some cups and lemonade, put it all on a tray, and walked up, stopping in my room to get the diary and put it on the tray. I could hear him moving things around above. I stood there for a moment thinking about it. Corrine had given the children a television. When they were in the attic, they were playing games. The twins weren’t big, but their constant scuffling about and all the other sounds surely must have been heard by someone, some servant below. What did their grandmother tell anyone who commented about it? That maybe it was mice or rats or raccoons that had gotten into the attic? Kane’s insistence that they weren’t as big a secret as both Corrine and Grandmother Olivia told them they were was beginning to sound more credible to me. It could even have something to do with the mystery my father was discovering.

  I walked up the stairs carefully, balancing everything on the tray. Kane had left the attic door open for me. I entered and stopped dead in my tracks. Kane had unfolded and set up the sofa bed, but that wasn’t what surprised me. It was what he was wearing, what he obviously had kept hidden in his book bag all day.

  He was wearing a wig with a shade of flaxen gold hair nearly identical to my hair color. I didn’t speak. I just gaped at him and had this eerie feeling shudder through my body.

  “Say something,” he said. “It’s pretty good, isn’t it? I stole some of the strands of your hair from your hair brush a few times and put them together to give the wig store guy a pretty accurate idea of the color I wanted. This was specially made for me. I’m assuming Christopher’s hair would be this long by now. I have the feeling he wore it this way, anyway,” he added. He kept talking, because I was making him nervous just standing and staring at him. “I mean, I don’t have your color eyes, but we can skip that one, or I might get color contacts of plain glass. So? Doesn’t this help you envision him—them?”

  “Yes, I guess it does. It was just such a shock seeing you there.”

  He smiled. “You thought Christopher might have appeared?”

  “Not quite that,” I said, putting the tray on a small table. “It was just a shock.”

  He nodded and picked up a cracker and some cheese. “I’m a little hungry,” he said, smiling.

  I looked at the bed. “Why did you do that?”

  “Before I closed the diary yesterday, I glanced at the next page. You’ll see,” he said. He poured himself some lemonade and ate another cracker and cheese. I took some and sat on the bed. We just stared at each other a moment. I was shaking my head. “What?”

  “That wig. Changes your whole look.”

  “That’s the idea. Actors don’t want the audience to see them; they want the audience to see and hear the character they’re playing. Let’s get started,” he said, swallowed some more lemonade, and then plucked the diary off the tray and opened it to where we had left off. I sat on the bed while he walked around reading, but it was taking me a little while to get used to him as a flaxen blond.

  During January, February, and most of March, we rarely went up to the attic. It was so cold, some days we could see our breath, and the twins were very uncomfortable, their misery level going up a few notches every time we attempted to go up there. So what we had to do was stay in our claustrophobic bedroom, huddled up in bed together, watching television. I understood why people in foreign countries liked to watch American television. They could learn English and much more. Suddenly, for us, too, the television Momma had brought wasn’t just a window on the outside world; it was a teaching device, because the twins, and even Cathy, had questions raised by what we saw.

  Kane paused, nodded at me, and then made himself comfortable beside me on the sofa bed. He looked so pleased with himself that I almost laughed.

  “Big shot,” I said.

  He blew on the tips of the fingers on his right hand, and I poked him. Then I lay back beside him, and he continued, his voice softening until he was almost whispering.

  It was inevitable that I would see Cathy’s body maturing right before my eyes. She was at that age when some girls advance in leaps and bounds. I always believed she would be one of them. I could see she wasn’t reacting well to it. I caught her trying to pluck her sprouting pubic hair and saw that she was self-conscious about her budding breasts. My maturing had become obvious, too. When she discovered the stains resulting from my seminal night losses, she thought I was peeing in bed and wanted me to tell Momma. I tried to explain it, and then I realized it was time Momma had a mother-daughter talk with her, not about me so much as about what was soon to happen to her. As Momma was leaving us one day, I caught her arm at the door and turned her toward me to whisper.

  “You’ve got to explain the facts of life to Cathy, Momma. She’s going to experience menarche,” I said.

  For a moment, I thought Momma didn’t know that word, which meant a girl’s first period. Then it suddenly dawned on her, and she nodded and told me she would handle it. I should take the twins up to the attic and let her have that conversation when she was ready to do it. I wonder if she would ever have done it if I hadn’t brought it to her attention. Like some parents, was she hoping her children would just suddenly, almost miraculously, know what they had to know about their own bodies? We weren’t in school, where Cathy or I could get the information in some health class or science class, either.

  One day soon after, Momma finally had the conversation with Cathy that I wanted her to have. Afterward, I assumed it had gone well, because Momma was so proud of me for alerting her. I was actually a little embarrassed by her over-the-top affectionate kisses and hugs. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the twins looking at us jealously, and I tried to get Momma to pay them more attention, but all she could do for now was smile and whisper, “My little doctor. Menarche.” She left laughing. When I glanced at Cathy, I saw a look of pure rage on her face. I realized she didn’t like the facts of life. None of us wanted to be dragged into adulthood this soon, but life at Foxworth Hall was making it impossible not to be. You could pretend it away just so long. Cold reality was there to greet us in the morning and especially at night when we went to bed.

  The warmth of spring made it possible for us to spend more time in the attic again. The twins needed the space more than Cathy and I, the chance to move their legs and arms and hopefully grow normally now. Momma continued to lavish gifts upon us, especially on Cathy’s birthday and then the twins’ birthday. They were now six. It was when Cory began to take to the musical toy accordion and piano that Momma finally sat and told us about her two dead brothers. She said Cory had probably inherited their penchant for music. Then she described the death of her older brother Mal, who, eerily like my father, had been killed in a car accident. What happened to her younger brother, Joel, was even stranger. She said he had run away from home the day of Mal’s funeral.

  “He didn’t want to become his father,” she said. “He didn’t want this life. My father didn’t appreciate Joel’s love of music.”

  “Where did he go? What happened to him?” I asked.

  “He went to Europe. He had taken a job with a traveling orchestra. I think he was always planning to do that. My father wouldn’t have permitted it, of course. He wouldn’t even hear of it. And then . . .”

  “Then what?” We were all glued to her, the dreadful expression on her face, the way she hesitated. Even the twins, who didn’t quite understand it all, were entranced.

  “We learned he had died in a skiing accident in Switzerland. We were told he went off into a ravine, and something of an avalanche
had followed. It was too high up to melt away enough for his body to be discovered. At night, I would wake up after having a nightmare in which he emerged from the snow, still frozen, still dead.”

  None of us spoke. Cathy’s eyes were big with fear. Momma realized it right away. She had gone too far.

  “But I haven’t had that dream for years and years, and when your father came into my life, he washed away the sadness,” she said quickly, with her beautiful smile born out of the memories she obviously cherished.

  Cathy’s face softened and then grew sad again. “He’s gone, too,” she whispered. I decided to pretend I didn’t hear her.

  Afterward, to lift the gloom and doom, I suggested to Cathy that we take on a big job: teaching the twins to read and write. At first, I didn’t think she would be interested, but she was, and she was good at finding ways to overcome their resistance and make learning fun. One night, I told her how proud of her I was. The twins were asleep, exhausted from their lessons and their playtime, which Cathy ran like a school monitor and then followed with more lessons. I slipped onto the bed beside her. She opened her eyes with surprise.

  “You were wonderful today,” I whispered. “I watched you. You were so into it.”

  “What else is there to do?” she replied bitterly.

  “It’s going to get better . . . soon,” I said.

  She put her fingers on my lips. “No more promises, Christopher. I’m tired of promises. It’s like waiting for rain in a drought.”

  “We’re going to get through it,” I said. “You’ll see. That’s not a promise. It’s a prediction.”

  She smiled. I was just realizing how cute a smile she had. It had something of Daddy in it but more Momma’s lips. I leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead. As I drew back to return to Cory’s and my bed, she grabbed my wrist and then, to my surprise, kissed me quickly on the lips the way Momma often did. The instant she had done it, she turned quickly. I lay there a few moments more. I could see the graceful turn in her neck to her shoulder. I wanted to touch it, but I retreated.