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!"