The Umbrella Lady Read online

  I’m really not that young, I wanted to tell him. Your real age is inside you because of what life has done to you. But I didn’t want to get into any deep discussions. I was still trembling.

  “I have the last shift, so I see what goes on. Kids no older than you, and girls especially, are wanderin’ the streets in the early mornin’ hours. Who knows where they came from or where they’re goin’? Who’s checkin’ ta see if they ever came home? For a lot of ’em, I bet no one.

  “I’m not married and don’t have no children, but it doesn’t take much ta realize that’s bad. So where ya been, missy?”

  “Away,” I said, looking anxiously at the houses we were passing. They were bigger than the ones in Hurley, with more elaborate landscaping. The streets were wider, too. There were pruned medians and modernized, stronger lights, making the macadam glitter as if there was a thin layer of ice over them. Here and there were wooden benches.

  It was still early enough in the evening for windows in all the homes to be well lit. Traffic was light in both directions. I saw people walking dogs and talking in the early evening. The taxi driver was right. Girls as young as I, if not younger, walked with older kids who poked and teased each other playfully. Others about my age were walking with their parents. It looked like a dream world, the idyllic community Mazy would describe as a Norman Rockwell painting. He was her favorite artist. People were laughing and looked friendly in many of his pictures that captured rural scenes. Was this that world? Could there really be one? Was I too desperate to believe a place like this existed? I was afraid of hope. I knew too much disappointment.

  “Ya live here in Sandburg Creek, right?” the driver asked. “Or are ya visitin’ someone?”

  “I’m coming home,” I said. It was noncommittal enough for him to look at me in his rearview mirror.

  “How long have ya been away?”

  Was he writing a book? This was my first taxi ride. Were all taxi drivers this talkative and nosy? The silence in my hesitation was uncomfortable, even for me.

  “A while,” I said. “I am in a private school,” I added to hopefully shut him up. In a true sense, I had been in a private school with Mazy, not that it mattered too much to me that I might lie to a taxi driver.

  “Oh. Well, welcome home,” he said, turning onto a new block.

  I caught the house numbers. This was my father’s neighborhood. All the homes had good-size plots of land, so they weren’t on top of each other. They weren’t modern in style. Most of them were Queen Anne, more reason to believe I was in a Norman Rockwell painting. It felt as if I had dropped through time to a place where people might still leave their houses and cars unlocked. Strangers were people to be curious about and not to be suspected of some evil intention. Lights that looked like candles flickered in windows. Maybe mothers and fathers were with their children watching television, the way Mazy and I had done. Perhaps that was what my father was doing right at this moment, never dreaming he would be seeing me in his doorway.

  Now that I was really going to ring his doorbell, what made me tremble inside was the idea of not only confronting him but of meeting his new wife and his new children. I finally faced the thought, the frightening thought, that I had a new family. What would they see when they looked at me? How much did they know? I wasn’t just carrying some of my clothes in a small bag; I was bringing along a horrific past. The flames would be snapping and crackling right beside me. Maybe he had told them that I had died in the fire, too. When he and his family saw me, they might all chant it together: “You can’t come here; you don’t belong here. You’re dead; you’re gone, forgotten.” They would probably be more frightened of me than I of them.

  If so, where did I belong now? Would I join the homeless whom Mazy and I had seen on television news? Would I live in shadows, covered in the filth of the street? Would I die in some alley like a scrawny cat, scratching at the approaching image of death with its smile full of sharp, yellow teeth and its eyes swimming in cold glee? In a few more minutes, my whole life would be decided. Dare I breathe?

  As the taxi began slowing down, I wondered if I ever could be more terrified and my body ever more frozen in fear than it was at this moment.

  We stopped in front of one of the larger houses. It was a brick three-story with a veranda and an octagonal extension on the right and a three-story octagonal tower on the left. A half dozen matching brick steps led up to the front entrance at the center of the house’s wide veranda. My father’s home was easily almost three times the size of Mazy’s house. Even though there was no one on the veranda, it was well lit. The lawn looked more like a rich, dark pool of green soaking in the light. Well-pruned roses grew close to the veranda, hugging its shadows. On the right was a dark-pewter fountain with a sculptured little boy and girl under an umbrella, off which the water flowed back into the bowl.

  An umbrella, I thought, remembering the first time I had seen Mazy with hers and how she wouldn’t walk out of the house without it, rain or shine. I would never look at one, even in a picture, without thinking of her immediately.

  “Wow. Nice house,” the driver said. “Yer family live here long? What’s yer father do? Is he a doctor or somethin’?”

  “How much?” I replied, as if I hadn’t heard a word.

  “Nine-fifty will do it.”

  I gave him a ten and opened the door slowly.

  “Say,” he said. “Really. How come nobody met ya at the station?”

  “I’m not supposed to be here yet,” I said, smiling. Lies as tools, I thought, remembering how Daddy once had explained why sometimes a lie was okay. “It’s a surprise.”

  “Oh. Gotcha.”

  I closed the door before he could ask anything else. He watched me in his rearview mirror until I walked around and started down the cobblestone walkway to the stairs. He didn’t drive off until I was nearly there. I could hear the television in the house, some comedy show with its usual canned laughter. Visions of Mazy smiling when she and I had sat together to watch television gave me some courage.

  You’re his daughter, I thought. You’re his daughter, I chanted. He can’t turn you away.

  But what would he do? a little voice inside whispered. He turned you away once, didn’t he?

  More from the Author

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  Shadows of Foxworth

  Out of the Attic

  Beneath the Attic

  The Silhouette Girl

  Spindrift

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  One of the most popular authors of all time, V.C. ANDREWS® has been a bestselling phenomenon since the publication of Flowers in the Attic, first in the renowned Dollanganger family series, which includes Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday, and Garden of Shadows. The family saga continues with Christopher’s Diary: Secrets of Foxworth, Christopher’s Diary: Echoes of Dollanganger, and Secret Brother, as well as Beneath the Attic, Out of the Attic, and Shadows of Foxworth as part of the fortieth anniversary celebration. There are more than eighty V.C. Andrews novels, which have sold over 107 million copies worldwide and have been translated into more than twenty-five foreign languages.

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  V.C. Andrews® Books

  The Dollanganger Family

  Flowers in the Attic

  Petals on the Wind

  If There Be Thorns

  Seeds of Yesterday

  Garden of Shadows

  Christopher’s Diary: Secrets of Foxworth

  Christopher’s Diary: Echoes of Dollanganger

  Secret Brother

  Beneath the Attic

  Out of the Attic

  Shadows of Foxworth

  The Audrina Series

  My Sweet Audrina

  Whi
tefern

  The Casteel Family

  Heaven

  Dark Angel

  Fallen Hearts

  Gates of Paradise

  Web of Dreams

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  Into the Garden

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  The Unwelcomed Child

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  Gallery Books

  An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Following the death of Virginia Andrews, the Andrews family worked with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Virginia Andrews’s stories and to create additional novels, of which this is one, inspired by her storytelling genius.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Vanda Productions, LLC

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Gallery Books trade paperback edition February 2021

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  Interior design by Erika R. Genova

  Cover design by Anna Dorfman

  Cover photographs © Pete Saloutos/Image Source/Getty Images (lady); Kho/123RF (girl); Lanto/Shutterstock (train station); Depositphotos/Depositphotos (bench)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Andrews, V. C. (Virginia C.), author.

  Title: The umbrella lady : a novel / V.C. Andrews.

  Description: First Gallery Books trade paperback edition. | New York : Gallery Books, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020020003 (print) | LCCN 2020020004 (ebook) | ISBN 9781982114473 (paperback) | ISBN 9781982114480 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781982114497 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Domestic fiction. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3551.N454 U47 2021 (print) | LCC PS3551.N454 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020003

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020004

  ISBN 978-1-9821-1448-0

  ISBN 978-1-9821-1447-3 (pbk)

  ISBN 978-1-9821-1449-7 (ebook)