Secrets 01 Secrets in the Attic (11 page)

"I'll catch up on some of my studying and do
some reading and rest," I said.
"Good. I've got to do some shopping before I
return to the hospital today, so I'm going to leave in
about an hour. I'd take you with me, only I don't think
it would look so good, your not going to school but
shopping instead."
"It's all right. I want to stay here."
"Fine. You call Daddy if you don't feel well or
anything," she said. "Call him especially if Karen gets
in touch with you, Zipporah. If she does, tell her to go
to her mother immediately."
"I will." I had already told her that I held my
breath. Would my mother see through me? I could see
she believed my being on the verge of tears was solely
because of what Karen had done and had nothing to
do with my raging conscience.
"And we'll hold your father to his promise to
take us to see a show in the city this weekend, okay?"
"Yes," I said, smiling.
I helped clean up the kitchen and then went up
to my room to wait. She stopped by again to tell me
she was going and again told me to stay in touch with
my father. I knew they were both expecting Karen
would be in touch with me, and they both feared I
wouldn't do the right thing.
As soon as I looked out the window and saw
her drive off, I headed up to the attic. Karen was
standing by the window facing the front, too, and
knew my mother was gone. She was dressed in one of
the antique dresses we put on when we sat up in the
attic and pretended. For a moment, seeing her like that
took me by such surprise I couldn't move or speak. It
was as if she had turned back time to a point when we
were up there amusing ourselves and nothing more. "What are you doing home?" she asked quickly.
She looked angry about it instead of happy. "You
could give it all away."
"I thought you'd be alone too long, so I got my
parents to let me stay. I didn't want to face all those
petite bourgeoisie,
anyway."
"You should have gone to school," she said,
instead of showing appreciation and gratitude. "The
faster you get rid of their suspicions, the better. The
police might even be watching this house now. The trick is not to do anything that detours from your normal routine. Every detective story we've read
teaches us that."
"I don't think the police are watching the house.
I've already spoken to them. You were right. My
father had to take me to the police last night:' "What?" She went to the sofa. "What
happened? Tell me everything."
I described my session with the detectives,
relating their questions and my answers as accurately
as I could. She listened attentively, her eyes narrow
and cold. Then she nodded.
"Good. I like that part about the headaches.
They'll think I went nuts or something."
"What will the school nurse tell them?" "That she couldn't find any reason for my
having a headache, no fever. She thought I was
behaving strangely, especially when I pleaded not to
be sent home. I kept promising I would be better soon,
and she got busy with other students and forgot all
about me."
"I'm pretty sure your mother told them she
didn't know why you would have done what you did."
"Didn't I say she would?" she asked, and rose. She
paced, her arms extended firmly, her hands clenched into fists. "She'll never admit to anything now. She'll
just wring her hands and cry."
"Why are you so sure?"
She stopped and turned on me. "Don't you see?
Don't you get it? Stop being so thick. I gave her a perfect way out of everything. She'll collect on some life
insurance or something. Or she'll sell the drugstore
and move away to live like a wealthy woman and find
herself another well-to-do man. I did what she
couldn't get herself to do."
"But I thought you said she didn't care about
being married to Harry. You said she didn't even mind
making love to him "
"That was earlier. She was getting disgusted,
too. Why do you think she spent so much time away,
shopping, meeting other women? She wanted to avoid
being home, even though she was leaving me with
him." She laughed. "She didn't know why I would do
it? That's just the beginning. You wait and see. She'll
start talking about the strange things I did and how
she couldn't talk to me or how I wouldn't let her get
close. She'll make up tons of stuff until I look like . . .
like some Lizzie Borden or something. Forget her.
She'll never help me. We've only got each other," She
said.
"Les oiseaux d'une plume.
So where did you go with your father? I was afraid to go downstairs. I thought you'd be back any moment, but you stayed
out so long."
"He took me for pizza."
"Pizza? Oh, when will I have pizza again?" she
cried.
"We can have it today. My parents are both
gone. You and I will make our special homemade
pizza, just like we've done many times."
"That's right." She smiled. "Let's pretend none
of this happened. Let's pretend it's a weekend, and
we're together, and we're just doing what we want.
C'mon," she said, heading for the attic door. "I'll find
something of yours I can wear and get out of this old
dress. We'll go into your father's office and play
Parcheesi, just as we've done a hundred times. But I
want to shower first and wash my hair and put on
some makeup and perfume. I want to feel normal and
happy again."
She charged down the stairs ahead of me. If she
could get herself to forget it all, I should be able to, I
thought, and quickly followed. I waited for her to
shower. We talked while she dried her hair with a
towel. She wanted to know everything I had said to
my father and mother and all the questions they had asked. I explained how I answered everything so
carefully.
"You were great," she said. "I couldn't have
done any better if the roles were reversed."
Roles reversed? I would have a better chance
walking on the moon. There was no way the roles
could have ever been reversed. I wanted to tell her
that, to be sure she understood that we were birds of a
feather only in some ways. No matter how many halftruths or clever answers I came up with, I was not
standing in the same shoes and never would. As I watched her brush her hair and do her
makeup, I thought how weird it was that she could
still be so beautiful and care so much about her looks
under these circumstances and after what had
happened. It was truly as if she could step out of the
person she had been the day before and become
someone else today. Did that come from inner
strength or inner madness?
She chatted on, planning our days and nights as
if she believed we would go on like this for months
and months, maybe even years.
"After a while, the police will stop running all
over the place looking for me," she said. "People will
forget or want to forget, especially after my mother
moves away."
"How can you be so sure she will?"
She smiled. "I know my mother. Believe me,
she's not going to be happy wallowing in this too
long. She's very aware of how people, especially men,
look at her. What available unmarried man is going to
want to get seriously involved with a woman whose
daughter is being hunted by the police for killing her
husband? Someday, years and years from now, I'll
ring her doorbell wherever she is and give her a heart
attack," she said.
"You mean it?"
"Not really a heart attack. She'll be so shocked
she might faint, but that's all. She'll have to take me
in, give me money, do whatever I want her to do to
help me, or I'll tell her new husband everything. I'm
sure whomever she meets will not know the story. My
mother is an expert when it comes to hiding the truth.
You know that."
"I don't know that."
"What do you mean, you don't?" she snapped at
me. "I've told you everything, how she's buried her
head in the sand, how she did the same thing with my
real father. I've told you."
"Oh, yes, you have," I said.
She relaxed, looked at herself in the mirror, and
then glanced at me. "You know, if we had gone
through with our plan exactly as you suggested, you
might have been in that room, too. Did you ever think
of that?"
I felt my jaw weaken and my mouth fall open.
She laughed.
"I can't even imagine how you would have
acted. You probably would have frozen, and I would
have done everything, anyway. Maybe we would have
buried his body in the backyard," she said.
I shook my head. "I couldn't have done that." "Don't worry. You could have if you had to, but
you didn't have to. I've done it all now, done it all for
both of us. You sure you have enough cheese for our
pizza?" she asked, almost in the same breath. "Yes, I'm sure."
"Good. Well, how do I look?" she asked,
spinning around and smiling.
"Great," I said. She really did.
"You have to do better with your own makeup
now, Zipporah. I'm going to show you stuff I learned
from my mother. After all," she cried, as if she had
just made a tremendous discovery, "for a while,
you've got to have all the romance for both of us!"

" l romance for both of us?"
"Sure. While I'm trapped up here, I'll live vicariously through you, through every kiss you get, every touch, everything. So don't hold back on a single juicy detail when I ask you to tell me exactly what happened."
She played with my hair, pushing my bangs this way and that, just as my mother often did. What she suggested made me think about myself and recall the conversation I had had with my mother in the sitting room.
"Actually," she continued, "I've planted some seeds for you already."
"What does that mean?"
"You'll see," she said. "Stop looking at me that way. What are friends supposed to do for friends? They look after each other, Zipporah. You're looking after me right now, aren't you?"
"Yes, but . ."
"No buts. I decided it's time we both had experiences we'll never forget. Little romances are important at our age. You don't just dive into a major love affair, you know. That always turns out to be a disaster. You need to get some battlefield experience. That's how my mother always referred to her early dating when she was our age--battlefield experience. She personifies that expression, all is fair in love and war."
"Whom would I go out with now?"
She shrugged and said, "You could go after Dana Martin?'
"What? When you mentioned him before, I reminded you he's a senior, and he's going with Lois Morris."
"Everyone's going to want to talk to you, even him, I bet. Play it up. Take advantage of the situation, silly. Don't be thick."
She sat back. "I don't like any of your bras. They're like training bras. Don't you have any that give you some more lift?"
"No. I'm not as big as you and don't have as much to lift."
"You can make it look that way. There's all sorts of little tricks. I'll show them to you, don't worry. I learned a lot from my mother just watching her prepare to go out with someone. Actresses don't prepare as much to walk out on a Broadway stage. You know what she calls it, the coiffeur, the makeup, the perfumes, dresses, bras, jewelry, all of it?"
"What?"
"JFD, justifiable feminine deception. In her way of thinking, women trap men. Harry's mother wasn't all wrong about her, but even if we don't think exactly the same way, why shouldn't we benefit from her knowledge? Most of the boys in our school are too thick to realize they've been deceived, not that you're all deception or I am. We're both pretty good-looking girls. Any boy in that school should be happy to be with either of us."
She smiled at herself in the mirror and then at me. "Remember when I told you that day that I had deeper cleavage?"
"Yes."
"I was really talking about a new bra."
How could we be talking about all this? I wondered. Less than forty-eight hours ago, she was attacked by and killed her stepfather. Was she in some form of shock? Was I?
"Stop looking at me as if I were crazy," she said. She sat back.
"Well, you're saying silly things. Dana Martin. Why would he even think about talking to me? When he looks my way, he makes me feel invisible."
"Okay, I'm going to tell you something, a secret I kept even from you."
"What?" I held my breath. What else could she have kept secret?
"I've had a crush on Dana Martin for a long time." "You have?"
She shrugged. "And every chance I had, I flirted with him so he would know."
"You did? Where was I?"
"You weren't with me every breathing moment, Zipporah. Don't be so thick." She paused and smiled.
"What?"
"He came down to Sandburg in his car some nights recently, and I met him."
"Really?"
"We just sat in his car talking the first time. Then he came down again. He really isn't all that crazy about
Lois Morris anymore. He wanted me to be his girlfriend, but I wouldn't, so I'm sure he's going to come asking you questions about me."
I stared at her. "What did you do when he came to see you?"
"We took a ride to Echo Lake and parked."
"You did?" I couldn't believe all this had gone on without my knowing.
"Remember when I told you how hard it was for me even to think about having a relationship with a boy because Harry made me feel so dirty?"
"Yes."
"Well, that was part of the reason I agreed to see him like that. I wanted to see if I could be with a boy after what Harry was doing to me. I wanted to see if I could forget it."
"What happened?"
"I could," she said. "And I enjoyed it, too," she added quickly, and pressed her lips together as if she had just confessed to a priest.
"I don't believe you," I said.
"It's okay. I don't mind your doubting me."
"Why wouldn't you have told me after all this time?"
"I shouldn't have told you now. I see you're getting upset that I kept it so secret. Maybe you're not ready for all this yet."
"I'm not getting upset. I'm just so surprised. How could you keep such a secret from me?"
"I'm sure I don't know everything about you. I'm sure there are things about your brother you haven't told me, for example," she said with a note of annoyance.
"No, there aren't."
"There are things we both don't talk about, because they're so private, so much a part of us, it would be like betraying the people we love. It's not a terrible thing to keep some things to yourself. Anyway," she said, looking at her watch, "let's go work on the pizza for lunch. I want to watch
Heart of a Woman.
It's my favorite soap opera to watch whenever I'm home. I'll bet you anything my mother's watching it today, too. She used to talk about it as if they were real people, and she was spying on their love lives."
"I can't even imagine how she could be sitting and watching a soap opera today, Karen." I really meant her, as well.
"When it comes to my mother, I can. C' mon," she said, getting up, grabbing my hand, and leading me out of my bathroom. "Afterward, we'll play some Parcheesi and talk more about the boys at school. I know more about many of them, thanks to Dana." She stopped on the stairway and turned to me. "We've got to live as if nothing's happened, Zipporah. Otherwise, we'll go mad."
She continued down.
Maybe we had gone mad already, I thought.
Our chatter in the kitchen was built around the same topics we had discussed before the Harry thing. We were doing it so well that at one point, when we were laughing and giggling, I had to stop to ask myself again if any of it had really happened. Then the phone rang, and reality came crashing back. It was my father, asking if I was all right.
"I could come home for lunch," he said. "It's not a problem."
"I'm fine, Daddy. You don't have to come home to have lunch with me," I said, looking at Karen as I spoke.
"All right. Call if you need anything." He paused and then added, "You haven't had any other calls, have you, Zipporah?"
"No, Daddy. No one else has called."
"Good. There's still no sign of her," he told me. "Apparently, from what I've learned from a friend of mine over at the district attorney's office, there is no proof she got on a bus, either. Of course, she could have hitchhiked her way out of here, or," he said, "she could be hiding somewhere here."
I couldn't speak or even swallow to let me grunt an answer. I felt terrible letting him go on and on about her while she was standing right in front of me in his own house.
"Whatever," he said, realizing I wasn't going to say anything. "Talk to you later. Oh, I have bought our tickets for the New York show, and we'll be staying overnight at a hotel."
"Great."
"Bye. See you soon," he said.
"Bye."
"What?" Karen asked immediately. "Well? What did he say about me? I know he said
something."
"They know you didn't get on a bus. They think you might have hitched a ride out of here, but he said you could also still be hiding somewhere."
She lowered herself to a kitchen chair and looked very thoughtful and unhappy.
"My father said he bought the New York show tickets. We'll be going to the city on Saturday and staying overnight, so you'll have lots of freedom here. Just be very, very careful not to leave any clues or be seen outside."
She nodded, and then she looked up, smiling. "I have a great idea."
"What?"
"Come on," she said, rising and reaching for my hand. She tugged me along and led me back up the stairs to my room. We had spent so much time in my room together that she knew as much about my things as I did. She opened the closet, knelt down, and took out my tape recorder. It was very small and ran on batteries.
"What are we going to do with that?"
She tried it, and it didn't work.
"Oh, no. The batteries are dead."
"So?"
"Do you have any others?"
"Maybe in the pantry. Why?"
"Let's get them first, and I'll show you," she said.
We returned to the kitchen and went into the pantry, where I did find two unused batteries. After she installed them and tested the tape recorder, she sat at the kitchen table.
"Okay, I'm going to record something on here. You're going to put this in your suitcase, and when you are able to get away for a few minutes in New York, you're going to go to a pay phone and call my mother collect, using my name Then you'll play what I record now and immediately hang up."
"Why?"
"She'll tell the police I called, and they'll be able to find out I called from New York City when they check with the phone company. That's why I want you to call her collect. They'll stop looking for me here."
"What if I can't get away? I've never been by myself in New York City."
"You've got to get away. You've got to do this. It's too good an opportunity for us, Zipporah. Be creative. Tell them you're going to the magazine store or something. Don't fail," she warned. Then she gestured for me to be quiet.
She sat forward, her expression slowly turning angrier, and angrier as if she could work herself up into any mood she wanted just like a good actress. Finally, she pressed the record button.
"Hi, Darlene," she began. "Don't say anything. Just listen. I guess you never expected to hear from me again or so soon, but I just wanted you to know I was all right and you didn't have to risk a wrinkle by worrying about me, not that you would. I'm not coming back to Sandburg. I'm off to see the big wide world. You know I hated that place and living in that house with that man. Everything that's happened is more your fault than mine, so when you sit down to write your confessions, be sure to include it. I can't say any more. I have a train to catch at Grand Central. Have a good new life without me."
She let the tape keep running without saying anything, clicked it off, rewound it, and played it back.
"Perfect," she said, clicking it off again. "You just put the receiver close to the little speaker, and be sure to hang up before it goes off, so she doesn't know it's a tape recording, okay?"
"I don't know if I can do that."
"Yes, you do!" she cried, her eyes wide. "You know you can do it, Zipporah. Don't act thick now. It's too good an opportunity for us. Well? We can't lose this chance. It means a great deal to me, to us."
"Okay, okay," I said.
She handed it to me gingerly.
"Let's go hide it in your suitcase now, so you don't forget it, and be sure you pad around it well, so it doesn't get broken or anything stupid, okay?"
"Yes," I said, and headed back upstairs. She followed to be sure I did everything she had suggested.
"Now," she said when I was finished, "let's have a game of Parcheesi. I need some fun."
We played until we were both hungry, and I made the pizza. While we ate, we talked about our plans, thinking of ways to ensure that Karen's living up in the attic would remain undetected by my family.
"My brother's coming home soon," I reminded her. "It's going to be harder and harder."
I brought that up because she sounded as if she had no intention of ever leaving.
"We'll cross that brother when we come to him," she replied, and laughed. Once again, I was amazed at how casual she could be about it all. If I were living upstairs in her home secretly, I would be on constant pins and needles.
"What are you planning on wearing to school tomorrow?" she suddenly asked.
"I don't know. Nothing special. Why?"
"You have to wear something special, silly. First, I want you to look bright and happy and more mature, somehow. You're going to be the center of attention. The worst thing you can do is look dreary and depressed. People, especially boys, will stay away from you. If you play your cards right, you can enjoy this." "You're making me so nervous about going to school again."
"You'll get over it."
"I don't see how I can enjoy this, Karen."
"You will. You have to think of it that way, or you'll do something stupid. Let's check your wardrobe and think about tomorrow," she said.
"Wait!" I cried. "The dishes, everything first. My father could walk in here and see all this and wonder why, if I was alone, I needed two plates, two sets of silverware .. ."
"Okay, okay. You are the worrywart. I wouldn't have forgotten."
We cleaned the kitchen and put everything away so well it looked unused. I caught every crumb.
^"I
don't know," Karen said, looking it over when we were finished. "It looks suspicious. It's too clean. It looks like a coverup."
"No, it doesn't. I clean it this well all the time when my mother's at work."
"Mama's goody girl. I forgot," she said, looking angry at me for being so. Then she smiled again. "Okay, to the closet," she cried, and we headed for the stairway.
While we were picking out something for me to wear to school, she chose a few things to wear herself while she was up in the attic. I gave her fresh panties and socks. She didn't mind not having a bra.
"I don't want to take too much. It could raise suspicion if your mother noticed so many things were missing, unless she's like my mother and has no idea what I have."
"She doesn't?"
"One of the privileges I was given when she went to work at Harry's drugstore was the right to take care of my own clothes and be responsible for them. Wasn't that wonderful?" she asked with a smirk. "Once in a while, I went shopping with her and bought some new things, but she was very conscious of what she spent on me so Harry wouldn't complain."
"He would complain about that?"
"Of course, he would. He was like his mother. He knew just how many matches there were at the stove. Believe me, he died with his first dollar still in his bottom dresser drawer. Well, not all of it. I took some before I left. Forgot to mention it."
"But he made so much money, and the house is so nice. Why would he be such a miser?"
"Some people make money to spend it and buy things, and some make it to accumulate it and stare at numbers in bank books. With what she'll inherit, my mother won't lack for anything for a while, but only for a while. Her taste has gotten considerably richer since she's been married to Harry. She never hesitated spending on herself."