Secrets in the Shadows

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Book: Read Secrets in the Shadows for Free Online
Authors: V. C. Andrews
Tags: Horror
window.
    "When I see you standing there by that window, Alice, with the afternoon light playing around you like that, you really do remind me of her. There is a remarkable resemblance. I used to think that was lucky for me. No one would look at you and think there's Jesse Stein's daughter. I could continue to pretend I wasn't responsible. I was very immature then."
    "I'm about the same age she was when she was up here, right?"
"Yes, but of course, I knew her before all that. The truth is, and your aunt Zipporah doesn't even know the true extent of this to this day, I had seen your mother secretly a few times before she was up here. I knew how close your aunt and your mother were, and I thought your aunt would be quite upset about it."
"Then you didn't think she was crazy all the time or else you wouldn't have been seeing her, right?"
"No, I didn't think that," he said and smiled. "She was pretty unusual, unpredictable, however. You'd never know what she would do or say. She could change moods in an instant and loved doing and saying things that had shock value. I had never met another girl like her and haven't since. She was like a wild mare you wanted to corral but never could. She couldn't stand any sort of confinement, whether it was physical or mental or emotional, which was why I'm sure she hated being up here."
He laughed.
"Why is that funny?"
"That isn't, but she once told me she'd never fall in love because falling in love turned you into a slave, took away your independence. She said she'd rather fall in and out of love continuously, even with the same person, which is what I think she did with me."
"Why did you want to help her? Why did you keep her secretly up here after you learned what she had done?"
He looked away, and he was quiet so long, I thought that was that. He had told me as much as he ever would or could. I gazed out the window, then looked at him again.
"It was selfish," he finally said.
"Selfish? How?"
"I had found a way to control her, to keep her under my power. She needed me, depended on me. The short time we had up here before it all fell apart was ironically the happiest time I had with her. We pretended we were married and in our own home.
Actually, pretending anything made her comfortable.
"It was very wrong and later, it was very painful I had betrayed the people who loved, trusted and believed in me the most. For that reason alone, nobody wanted Karen to be telling the truth about what had been going on in her home more than I did. It wouldn't completely excuse what I had done, but it would help explain it and in some ways rationalize it. No one was more disappointed than I was the night your aunt and I discovered that the story your mother was spinning was a total fabrication."
"Total?"
"It was just too fantastic, bizarre. She had depicted her stepfather to be some Norman Bates character from Psycho. She told both Zipporah and me some things going on at her house that we found not to be true. All the stories about a separate apartment for Harry Pearson's mother proved false, for example, and therefore all the things she claimed had gone on in there were obviously just as false."
"But why would she do something so terrible to her stepfather then?"
"As I said, she was a very complicated person. Something just cracked inside her, I suppose. That's something people trained and educated in psychology will have to answer or maybe have already."
"You don't know?"
He shook his head, a look of shame washing over his face.
"No, I didn't keep up with her situation."
"Did you ever tell her that you knew what she had told you and Aunt Zipporah was all untrue?"
"Yes, of course. Right in this attic," he said, looking around. "Matter of fact, she stood by that window when we told her."
"What did she say?"
"She said her mother was lying, the police were lying, everyone was lying but her."
"Then what did she do?"
"She just walked out and went home, or tried to. Your aunt and I called your grandfather, and he

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