Into the Woods by V. C. Andrews

Author:V. C. Andrews [V. C. Andrews]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror
Published: 2011-06-12T17:17:35+00:00

16

None So Blind

.

I didn't want to wallow in self-pity after

Winston's death. It seemed to me a selfish way to be. but I was more convinced than ever that everyone I cared for or who cared for me suffered some cruel fate. Surely this proved it was some sort of curse I brought along into every relationship. I was a Typhoid Mary. I carried the disease. but I didn't get it.

There was still my mother, of course, but that didn't mean she was exempt. In time I couldn't help believing that something terrible would happen to her, too, and all because of me. I didn't tell anyone about these thoughts. They came to me again and again, especially during Winston's funeral. In church. when I looked around at the people in attendance. I was sure I saw the accusations in their granite faces. They were staring at me too hard and too angrily: and nodding at me. I imagined a wave of long, sharp forefingers pointed in my direction.

Maybe they believed I had taken up too much of his time, had given him too much to worry about. or had exhausted him. Why else would a man who had been so fit and such a great athlete have a fatal heart attack when men fifteen, twenty years older were still active and alive and not half as healthylooking?

The mourners looked at Mommy in a different way, too. Almost no one but Dallas and Warren gazed at her with any sympathy. Most had wry smiles writhing over their lips.

Everyone knew that as Winston's wife Mommy had inherited a considerable fortune. She was just another jeweled fruit ripe for plucking. I overheard comments to that effect at Joya del Mar after the funeral when most of these people came to pay their respects. Some unmarried men and widowers even stood around adding up the value of everything as if they were deciding whether she was worth the trouble. They were nothing more than a different form of buzzard disguised as eagles with gilded wings, especially the lawyers and financial managers who descended with their plastic smiles and air kisses, clicking their lips around her face and around each other so much it sounded like an invasion of crickets.

I was glad when it all ended. Like some very young girl I harbored the hope that it had all been a dream, that I would walk out onto the rear loggia the next morning and find Winston sitting there, comfortably reading his Wall Street Journal. He would look up at me and smile warmly, and we'd have coffee and talk about the condition of the sea and the winds while the sailboat bobbed invitingly at the dock.

Now I felt I could never sail again. The very thought of doing it and then returning to a house without Winston to share in my excitement and enjoyment sickened me. The deep emptiness in my stomach was much like the emptiness I had felt after Daddy's death, and just as I avoided looking at anything even remotely connected to or reminiscent of the Navy.

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