Christopher's Diary: Echoes of Dollanganger

“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 y

ours 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 . . .