Secrets 01 Secrets in the Attic by V. C. Andrews Read Free Book Online

really didn't see much of a change after she had her stroke and died," Karen had told me. "It was as if she wasn't there before, anyway. Harry still hasn't gotten rid of all her things. My mother tells him to give them to the Angel View Thrift Store that sells stuff for charity. He says he will, but he hasn't. He hasn't done much with the apartment, either, even though he said he would fix it up and rent it out someday."
The Pearson house was one of the few brickfronted homes in Sandburg. It had a pretty lawn with waist- high hedges and a sidewalk that curved up to the stone steps in front and the veranda. Druggists, it seemed, were only a few levels down from doctors when it came to making money. Pearson's Pharmacy was the only drugstore in the village, and people who lived in the outlying areas came to it rather than travel another five miles or so to another drugstore. They also sold toys, candy, and ice cream, but they didn't have as big a fountain as George's, and the ice cream was prepackaged and not nearly as good.
Like me, Karen had her own room upstairs. From the way she talked, once she got home, if she didn't have any chores to do, she went to her room and remained there. Unlike me, she didn't spend much time with her mother and stepfather watching television or even just talking, and she had no brother or sister to talk to or write to. She was alone much more than I was or would ever be, I thought.
Her mother had continued to work at the drugstore after she married Harry and was gone most of the day. Harry was the only pharmacist, so he had to be there almost all the time. They rarely had dinner together, because Harry always had to stay behind to close up or do inventory or prepare prescriptions for the morning. Because her mother waited for him, Karen usually ate by herself. Sometimes she even ate in her room. I felt sorry for her and wished Harry were more considerate.
Karen told me he was strict about the hours the store opened and closed. If someone needed a prescription after seven p.m., he or she would have to travel twenty miles. Occasionally, Karen said, the doctors would plead with Harry to go back and prepare a prescription, but he was never happy about it and always made it clear he was doing someone a big favor. That surprised me, because in his drugstore, Mr. Pearson was always quite pleasant and seemingly concerned about the illnesses his customers had. At least to the public, he was a jovial man with a soft round face my mother said looked like a bowl of vanilla pudding with two plums for eyes, a walnut for a nose, and a banana for a mouth. He was stout, with all of his weight going to his upper torso. Karen revealed that his legs were bony and hairy.
"They look like they had stopped growing years before the rest of him," she told me once after we had left the drugstore together.
Later, in the attic, when I asked her why her mother had married him, she told me her mother had decided to choose security over romance :
"Besides," she added, "my mother said she made love only in the dark so she could imagine him to be anyone she wanted."
"Made love in the dark? Don't you have to see a little to know what you're doing?" I asked, and she laughed, thinking I was joking. I wasn't. Karen knew much more about it all than I did, but I didn't think that was because she had the same sort of conversations with her mother that I had with mine. "Then she didn't fall in love with him?"
"No. When I asked her about that once, she said we couldn't afford it."
"Huh? What a funny thing to say."
"No, it wasn't," Karen said. Almost overnight, she had become so much older and more serious. "When you're younger and you don't have children or responsibilities, you can be carefree and adventurous. You can have twenty dollars in your pocket and elope and worry about everything else later. But my mother had me, a teenager, and she was barely making enough to give us food and shelter. We didn't have health insurance. We had