Echoes of Dollanganger (36 page)

“I'd like to hand this back to Christopher Jr., her son,” I said, as if he had said nothing. “I think you can help me do that.”

He shook his head. “I have no idea where he is. I'm afraid you've wasted your time.” He glanced at his watch. “I'm sorry, but I have a patient coming in fifteen minutes. I have some work to prepare.” He stood up and put his rocking chair back where it had been.

I looked at Kane. It was written in his face. We had failed. We should go home. We stood up. Dr. West
went behind his desk, and Kane went to the door. Just as he opened it, I turned back to Dr. West.

“I'd like to give this to William Anderson, then,” I said. “You and I know he would want it. Once I give it to him, as you say, all the misery and unhappiness will be buried, if that is what he wants. Otherwise, all that these children went through will be for nothing.”

Dr. West stared at me a moment. I held my breath. “Does your father know you're here?”

“No, sir.”

“This was something we did together,” Kane said quickly. “It means a lot to us now.”

He nodded slowly. “Close the door,” he said.

*  *  *

Neither of us said a word until we were in Kane's car and on our way. What we said to each other only had to do with directions to the address. Neither of us was prepared to hear the sort of details Dr. West decided to relate. He understood we had something special in our hands, and I thought that weakened any reluctance he had to share what he knew. He saw how important it was to put it all in perspective. We had only Christopher's viewpoint of events. We knew nothing of Corrine after the first fire. I never intended to feel a bit sorry for her, but learning how her mother tormented her, hated her in a sense, truly upset me.

The doctor had described how her mother had gotten a replica of a child's skeleton and put it in a trunk, suggesting that it was her poisoned child. Dr. West said it was one of the things that sent her over the edge of sanity. Now it made more sense to us.

When we pulled up to the curb, Kane turned off the engine, and we sat there looking at the house. There was a ramp in front for wheelchair access. From my father's work and my own study of houses, I knew this was a classic Colonial Revival, with its gabled roof, entry porch with slender columns and double-hung sash windows with multipane glass. It had a stone veneer. This particular home wasn't the largest on the residential street, but it wasn't the smallest, either. It had a lawn that looked too small for the house, however. There was a dark green van in the driveway. All the curtains in all the windows in the house were drawn open, obviously to gather in the remaining afternoon sunshine.

I knew why Kane was full of hesitation. Dr. West had made it clear to us that William Anderson didn't know ninety percent of what we knew.

“Considering the journey he has made, the pain he has gone through, and the difficulties he has had to understand himself and what had happened to him, and especially how his brother and his sisters felt, it would not be right for me to deny him what you have to give,” he continued. “So I will tell you where you will find him. The final decision will be yours to make. You've become part of this now. Whatever you decide to do, I hope you will respect his need for anonymity.”

We both swore to that.

“Strange,” he said, smiling, “but the thing that most drew him to want to return to that property is the image printed on his mind of that view from the attic window. I can't tell you how many times he's described it to me.”

“Which was why it was so important for my father to have a bedroom window that offered that view,” I said.

“Yes.”

I didn't want to disagree with a psychiatrist, but I had a different reason in my mind for him being drawn back to the Foxworth property.

I confessed that my father did not know that Kane and I had read the diary together, nor did he know we had finished reading it. I revealed that I had broken a promise I had made to my father.

“I want to tell him everything in my own way at the proper moment,” I explained.

Dr. West thought a moment and then shrugged. “Normally, there's something about this office that prevents me from revealing what I have heard in it,” he said. “I made an exception to that rule today for what I think were justifiable reasons. As for what has gone on between us, however, you can depend on me to keep it within these walls.”

I was grateful for that.

But there was no question in my mind what Dr. West meant by “justifiable reasons.” What Dr. West had learned treating Corrine Foxworth had caused him to go beyond the patient-doctor relationship and in the end do what he was doing for William Anderson.

“You two are quite extraordinary,” he told us in his doorway just before we left his office.

“She's the extraordinary one,” Kane said. “I'm just along for the ride.”

Dr. West laughed. “Any man who knows how
to compliment his woman will do real well in this world,” he told him.

Kane's smile was big and bright enough to light the whole state of Virginia.

“It's still not too late to turn around and drive home,” Kane said as we sat in his car in front of William Anderson's home.

“Yes, it is,” I said. “It became too late as soon as I disobeyed my father and turned the first few pages.”

“Your father is going to hate me,” he said.

“He'll be angry in the beginning, but after this, after I tell him all of it, he will understand. He and I love each other too much. Don't worry. He won't hate you. My father will always love everything I love.”

I opened the door.

Although Dr. West had not called ahead to tell William Anderson what we were bringing, he had called ahead while we were still in his office to tell him it was all right to see us. Kane stepped up beside me, and we started down the stone sidewalk. We were halfway to the front porch when the front door opened, and William Anderson's wife pushed him in the wheelchair to the entrance. He was thin and fragile-looking. Damage had been done to his nerves and his legs, but he had a full head of beautiful graying flaxen hair and startling cerulean-blue eyes. Even in his early sixties, he was as handsome as I had imagined he might be.

We had learned that he had been given to someone basically to drop off at a hospital emergency room away from Charlottesville. The man had been paid well to do it and disappear.

The boy who would become William Anderson had been saved, but the serious damage had been done. However, there was someone else at that emergency room that day, someone who heard about this child left without anyone to claim him. He was a man of great means whose grandson had died in an accident shortly before and who couldn't get this beautiful sick child out of his mind. He would take him into his home and his heart, make him part of his business, and leave a share of a fortune to him.

That was nearly fifty-five years ago. He had gone through a great deal since, including therapy and eventually becoming a good enough businessman to continue to build on his inheritance.

How ironic that of the four, he would become the wealthiest, with a loving wife and later, as we would find out, a son who was married with two sons of his own. The new house would have someone to inherit it.

Now he raised his hand and smiled at us as if he knew what we were bringing, what his brother Christopher surely had wished with all his heart that, somehow, someone would.

We knew that because of what had happened at Foxworth Hall and what had been made of his family name, it was best for him to return as someone else, even though he would always answer in his heart to his lost brother and sisters when they called, “Cory.”

This was the reason I believed he was going back. He was hoping that someday he would hear them call him again.

Turn the page for a sneak peek at a new story in the Dollanganger family saga . . .

By V.C. Andrews
^®

Available in May 2015 from Pocket Books

I don't think I shall ever forget the exact time and what I was doing that second Saturday in October. It wasn't unusual for us to have Indian summer in Virginia, but this one promised to linger longer than the others we had enjoyed. Six days before, we'd had an early frost, so no one had expected this change in weather. Of course, I was only sixteen years old then and hadn't experienced many weather surprises compared with someone like my grandfather, who was fifty-eight, or our nanny, Myra Potter, who was sixty-three. The lush green leaves on the trees and bushes on our property and other estates nearby hadn't even begun to show a hint of the brown and yellow to come. People, especially young people like me, returned to wearing short skirts, short-sleeved blouses, and shorts on weekends
and after school. The day before, our grandfather had decided to reheat our pool for us to use on the weekend.

I remember the weather so well that day because it seemed out of place for what was to come. There should have been more clouds, even an overcast, dreary sky. If it had rained, what happened wouldn't have happened, because my nine-year-old brother, Willie, wouldn't have been out there. So that day, the nice weather was our bad luck.

I was up in my room, sitting at my desk and gazing out the windows that faced the front of my grandfather's estate. It was one of those lazy mornings when, instead of flying about, birds would rather sit on branches and doze to the point where they looked stuffed. Even clouds were reluctant to move. As usual by ten thirty on a Saturday, I was on the phone with my newest best friend, Lila Stewart, planning what we would do with our afternoon and evening. I was thinking of having a pool party.

The Stewarts had recently bought the property next to my grandfather's on the north side. Because our property and theirs were at least ten acres each, their house wasn't exactly close by. If either of us walked to the other's front gate, it
would take about fifteen minutes. Lila's house, like ours, had a long driveway with gates, so you had to buzz the house to get in and start up the drive. If we rode our bikes, we could do it in about five minutes.

Willie was very anxious to master riding his new bike on the street outside of our grandfather's estate. Grandpa Arnold had bought it for him on his last birthday, but he had been permitted to ride it off the property only twice before, both times short rides accompanied by me. There was an immaculately kept sidewalk outside our property on both sides of the street. Nevertheless, people hardly ever walked there, which made it all right for Willie to ride his bike safely on them. At least, that was what we had all believed.

I had my bedroom windows open to catch the cool breeze. Myra demanded that the maids air out the house at least twice a week, even in cooler weather, and Myra's orders were followed as if my grandfather himself had issued them. Lila was running through a list of boys and girls I should invite to a pool party, when suddenly, I heard what was clearly a man screaming for help. Jimmy Wilson, the head of Grandpa's maintenance staff, came out of nowhere and ran down the driveway to the front gate, where I could
now see a man in a dark blue suit and tie grasping the bars like someone locked in a prison cell, shaking them as he screamed. I remember he had cotton-white hair, the strands of which looked like they were dancing every time he shook the gate.

Jimmy opened the gate. The man spoke to him, gesturing wildly, and Jimmy turned and shouted to one of his staff to call the ambulance. Then he charged out with the stranger and turned right, disappearing behind the tall, thick evergreen hedges that lined Grandpa's estate. They were so thick they seemed as impenetrable as the Berlin Wall.

“Something's wrong,” I told Lila, interrupting her ramble. “Something bad just happened.”

“Where?”

“Right in front of our property. I'll call you back,” I said. I hung up before she could utter a syllable, threw on my sneakers, and rushed out of my room and down the stairs. I had no reason to suspect something involving any of us, but my heart was thumping so hard it felt like it might burst out of my back. Grandpa was outside charging down the driveway, too. I shouted to him, but if he heard me, he didn't want to pause to turn, so I started after him.