Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews

half-supporting each other. Strong disapproval glinted in her gray-stone eyes. She wore a fixed, piercing scowl that Momma seemed to understand, although I did not. Momma’s face flushed as the grandmother said, “Your two older children cannot sleep in one bed!”
    “They’re only children,” Momma flared back with unusual fire. “Mother, you haven’t changed one bit, have you? You still have a nasty, suspicious mind! Christopher and Cathy are innocent!”
    “Innocent?” she snapped back, her mean look so sharp itcould cut and draw blood. “That is exactly what your father and I always presumed about you and your half-uncle!”
    I looked from one to the other, my eyes wide. I glanced at my brother. Years seemed to melt from him, and he stood there vulnerable, helpless, as a child of six or seven, no more comprehending than I.
    A tempest of hot anger made our mother’s ruddy color depart. “If you think like that, then give them separate rooms, and separate beds! Lord knows this house has enough of them!”
    “That is impossible,” the grandmother said in her fire ice voice. “This is the only bedroom with its own adjoining bath, and where my husband won’t hear them walking overhead, or flushing the toilet. If they are separated, and scattered about all over upstairs, he will hear their voices, or their noise, or the servants will. Now, I have given this arrangement a great deal of thought. This is the only safe room.”
    Safe room? We were going to sleep, all of us, in only one room? In a grand, rich house with twenty, thirty, forty rooms, we were going to stay in one room? Even so, now that I gave it more thought, I didn’t want to be in a room alone in this mammoth house.
    “Put the two girls in one bed, and the two boys in the other,” the grandmother ordered.
    Momma lifted Cory and put him in the remaining double bed, thus, casually establishing the way it was to be from then on. The boys in the bed nearest the bathroom door, and Carrie and I in the bed nearest the windows.
    The old woman turned her hard gaze on me, then on Christopher. “Now hear this,” she began like a drill sergeant, “it will be up to you two older children to keep the younger ones quiet, and you two will be responsible if they break even one of the rules I lay down. Keep this always in your minds: if your grandfather learns too soon you are up here, then he will throw all of you out without one red penny— after he has severely punished you for being alive! And you will keep this room clean,neat, tidy, and the bathroom, too, just as if no one lived here. And you will be quiet; you will not yell, or cry, or run about to pound on the ceilings below. When your mother and I leave this room tonight, I will close and lock the door behind me. For I will not have you roaming from room to room, and into the other sections of this house. Until the day your grandfather dies, you are here, but you don’t really exist.”
    Oh, God! My eyes flashed to Momma. This couldn’t be true! She was lying, wasn’t she? Saying mean things just to scare us. I drew closer to Christopher, pressing against his side, gone cold and shaky. The grandmother scowled, and quickly I stepped away. I tried to look at Momma, but she had turned her back, and her head was lowered, but her shoulders sagged and quivered as if she were crying.
    Panic filled me, and I would have screamed out something if Momma hadn’t turned then and sat down on a bed, and stretched out her arms to Christopher and me. We ran to her, grateful for her arms that drew us close, and her hands that stroked our hair and backs, and smoothed down our wind-rumpled hair. “It’s all right,” she whispered. “Trust me. One night only will you be in here, and my father will welcome you into his home, to use it as you would your own—all of it, every room, and the gardens, too.”
    Then she glared up at her mother so tall, so stern, so forbidding. “Mother, have some pity and compassion for