Secrets of Foxworth Read online

  “Heard your alarm go off,” my father said as soon as I set foot in the kitchen. He turned to give me a scornful look. “How late did you stay up?”

  “Not that late,” I said, and dropped like a sack of potatoes into my chair.

  He pulled the corners of his mouth in tightly and gave me his best look of disappointment. He had squeezed fresh oranges for my juice and was at the stove preparing French toast for both of us. The aroma helped me become more alert.

  I stretched, drank my juice, and smiled. “You usually wait until the weekend to make that.”

  “Had a craving and thought you might, too.”

  “Maybe you should return to being a short-order cook, Dad. You’re so good at it.”

  “Thank you, but no thank you. This Masterwood is not going to work for anyone else.”

  “Open your own diner. I’ll be hostess, waitress. We’ll call it Burt’s Eats or something.”

  “How I wish I was young enough to have fantasies again,” he said. “I wish I was eighteen again.” He brought me a plate of French toast. He put the maple syrup next to it and the jar of Mrs. Wheeler’s homemade jam. Mrs. Wheeler was a widow who lived five miles or so down the road and made jams, sour pickles and sour tomatoes, pies, and birthday cakes to supplement her income. My father was always drumming up more business for her. He said she reminded him of his mother, “who treated her kitchen the way most people treat a church.”

  He wished he was young enough to have fantasies? I thought. Corrine Dollanganger, a married women with four children, clung to them, and Christopher instinctively knew that without them, he and his brother and sisters wouldn’t survive. Maybe fantasies were as important to our lives as bread. I wondered now about my own.

  Since reading the last page I had read in the diary, all my dreams rang with more hope than reality to me. Just recently, I had been imagining myself becoming a super doctor who not only treated patients but on the side performed miraculous research and found cures for cancer and other serious illnesses. Had I let everyone fill me with so much hot air about myself and my brilliance that I would explode with the shock of reality someday, maybe sooner than I thought?

  “What made you want to get into construction? And don’t tell me your name again,” I said, taking my first bites of the French toast. As usual, it was better than any we had out at any restaurant, including Charley’s Diner. He had some secret in making it that he wouldn’t even tell me.

  He stood there looking down at me. “You’re asking many more questions these days.”

  “Maybe I need more answers as I get older, even though parents supposedly say their young children never stop asking questions.”

  “That was you. You were born with question marks in your eyes.”

  “I’m regressing,” I said, smiling. “This is so good, Dad.”

  “I’m glad,” he said, and went to serve himself. “She makes really good jam,” he told me as he smeared some of it on his toast. “Everyone has some talent hidden in themselves. It just takes the right combination of events to bring it out, I guess.”

  “You’re giving me an answer?”

  He ate and looked past me for a few moments. Then he nodded. “The moment I met your mother, I became more ambitious. When you care a great deal about someone else besides yourself, you want to do more. Short-order cooking for a living was okay when I had no one but myself. I even put up with the dumb things my boss would do that made my work harder, but once I was with your mother, the world began to change, open up. She inspired me.” He paused and waved his right forefinger at me. “You wait until you find the right person to inspire you, Kristin. It makes all the difference when you have someone besides yourself to be responsible for, someone you love and who loves you.”

  I nodded, but I wasn’t thinking about myself. I was thinking about Christopher and how all that was happening was forcing him to be more mature. He didn’t appear to me to be someone who ever pumped up balloons of false hope. He was simply too realistic about everything, even when he was much younger, but I had the sense that he knew the chances of him enjoying his youth were slipping away.

  Was I really enjoying my youth? How much had my mother’s death taken from me? After my mother died, all I wanted to do was escape from sadness, and the quickest way to do it seemed to be just get older, almost overnight. All teenagers wanted to rush their lives along, wanted to be on their own faster. It drove us to resist rules, take chances, and lie to ourselves. How many times, in how many different ways, did my friends tell their parents, “You’re treating me like a child”? I never had to. My father sensed I was unfortunately taking on a seriousness born out of my mother’s unexpected passing. She had slipped away like a shadow helpless against the morning sun.

  “What do you have on for today?” Dad asked.

  “Nothing special. I’m going to Kane’s party tonight. You remember?”

  “Driving yourself, or what?”

  “Kane’s picking me up.”

  He nodded. He looked thoughtful. I imagined he was thinking about me growing up so fast, but he surprised me. That wasn’t in his thoughts right now. “I didn’t want to mention this,” he said after he sipped his coffee. “Don’t want to encourage any thinking about it, but I know you’d want to know.”

  “What?”

  “When we were going through a shed to retrieve anything worth saving before we knocked it down, we found a child’s rocking horse. I’m guessing that it survived the first fire. Probably the way it fell under some metal, whatever.”

  “Really. Where is it?”

  “Todd took it to refurbish it. He thinks it might sell as an antique. Was it mentioned in the diary?”

  For a moment, I couldn’t answer. Was he interested, or was he just testing to see what was in the diary? “Yes,” I said. “The first day after they had been brought there.”

  He thought and nodded.

  “Those children were told they had nothing after their father’s death, right? And that was why she brought them to Foxworth? Is that what he wrote in his diary?”

  “Yes. Corrine threw herself on the mercy of her parents. She sounds to me like someone very helpless. She was babied and spoiled, even though her parents were supposedly very cruel. I know now that her husband spoiled her.”

  He smirked and shook his head.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know what’s true or not true. We—your mother, I should say—understood differently.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “She wasn’t that desperate. She could have survived without her parents. But as I’ve been saying, who knows what really happened?” he added and rose.

  “What do you mean? There was a life insurance policy? She had some money?”

  “Like I said, who knows what was and wasn’t true? It was too long ago, and the people who knew her well enough are either dead or gone.”

  “Didn’t this Bart Foxworth who rebuilt the house ever talk to anyone about it?”

  “Talk about it? He chased people off that property at gunpoint if they came around with that intention. You heard them talking at Charley’s. He didn’t have much to do with local people. There was something about them that brought out the hermit in him. Maybe they were termites in a previous life. No, he and his cousins or whoever they were only fanned the wild stories with their weird ways. First, he rebuilt the place and left it standing for years and years without anyone living in it, and then he abandoned it like a rat fleeing a sinking ship.”

  “I don’t understand the second fire, then. No one was living there?”

  “Hobos discovered it or . . .”

  “Ghosts?” I said with a slight smile.

  He shook his head and then pointed his right forefinger at me like a pistol. “I don’t want to hear you say something like that outside of this house.”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t. I’ll get the dishes, Dad. I’ve got time this morning.”

  “Thanks to your alarm clock,” he
said. He looked at me and added, “Be careful.”

  “You, too,” I shot back, and he finally smiled.

  “Oh,” he said turning back. “I nearly forgot. Your uncle Tommy is going to spend a day and a night with us next week. He’s stopping by after some business meeting. Worked it into his schedule. Seems he wants to see how much you’ve grown or something.”

  “That’s great!”

  “Thought you’d be happy about it. Okay. If I’m not back before you leave, have a good time,” he said.

  Dad knew how much I liked Uncle Tommy. He had remained a bachelor, but he was not unattractive, and he did have a couple of very serious romantic relationships as far as I could remember. Dad claimed that was because he was in the mad Hollywood world. One of his relationships lasted about five years, and then his girlfriend broke off with him, probably frustrated with his lack of interest in a permanent relationship. Dad told me he once told him that he was afraid of commitment because he was afraid of being a disappointment. When I asked him what that meant exactly, Dad hesitated and then said, “He doesn’t sing that song.”

  “What song?”

  “ ‘I Only Have Eyes for You,’ ” Dad replied. “He’s certainly not the first who couldn’t be faithful to one woman, but he’s rare because he admits it. Maybe he just likes emotional good-byes.”

  I didn’t want to think of Uncle Tommy as weak or selfish. I certainly didn’t like thinking he was deceitful, but I couldn’t help comparing him with my father. There wasn’t all that much age difference. Uncle Tommy was three years younger, but he always seemed much younger to me. It went back to Dad’s point about wanting to be responsible for someone other than yourself, I thought. Uncle Tommy just wasn’t cut out to be that way. Oh, he took care of my grandmother, but taking care of your mother was not the same thing. That, whether you liked it or not, was built into your DNA. At least, that was what I thought.

  Was I cut out to be responsible for someone else? Many women were the primary wage earners in families these days. Or at least, they were on practically an equal basis. Did I want to have children sooner or later in my life? It was still harder for women to decide, even women who could afford nannies from day one. I didn’t see myself as a mother who would gladly relegate her motherhood role to an employee.

  It made me wonder again why Corrine wanted to have so many children. Was it more her husband’s desire? Did she go along expecting something more for herself? Maybe she had made a deal first: she’d have the children, but he had to get her help and not stop buying her things. Then he died, and she was left with empty promises. Just from the little I had read about her, I could see she would regret having had four children, especially when it came to looking for a new husband. The man would have to be committed not only to her but to four children who weren’t his own. She was smart enough to know that wouldn’t be an easy task. On the other hand, if she inherited great wealth, none of it would matter. Was that always one of her goals? Had she discussed it with Christopher Sr.?

  Could that rumor Daddy mentioned be true, that she did have some money, enough to take care of the family until she found employment? How conniving and dishonest was Corrine Foxworth? I wondered. With Christopher Jr. so observant and intelligent, she would have had to put on quite a show of desperation. There was no question that he believed her, believed it was happening to them. Did he want to believe her? Although he said he knew his mother had weaknesses, did he deliberately avoid seeing them?

  Perhaps Dad was right. Perhaps she could have managed and not submitted to her parents’ insanity and punished her children so, but not only their futures were at stake. Hers was, too, and she was a woman who liked to be pampered. Only lots of money would make her happy.

  There were so many questions to answer. Could Christopher Jr. do that in his diary, or would he avoid not only the answers but the questions themselves? He said he was writing facts, but even he would admit that the facts were seen through his eyes and those eyes had their own prejudices and feelings. He could do nothing about it, no matter how hard he tried. I’d have to get better at reading between the lines, I thought.

  And what was up with my father, suddenly telling me something about the Foxworths willingly? Was he subtly trying to warn me that what I read in the diary might not be the truth? Did he want to prepare me for something more terrible and fill me with skepticism before I had read it? I was back to the question that haunted me. How much had he and my mother really known?

  I finished cleaning up our breakfast dishes and the frying pan he’d used and then headed upstairs to get my things and go. Because of his military experience, my father always made his bed before he left for work. When I was only five, I studied how carefully he did it and tried to do it for my own bed. Eventually, I became as good at it as he was. Keeping things clean and organized was also important to my mother. Dad was meticulous when it came to his tools at home. Anyone who saw our garage always commented on how neat it was. My father believed that how you treated your possessions said a great deal about how you treated yourself and others.

  When I made my bed, I tucked the diary in under the pillow as I had been doing, and I thought about the messy world in which Corrine had permitted her children to be placed. Rats and mice, insects and dust, stale air and poor ventilation were not ideal, especially for the twins. Most mothers would be very concerned about their children’s health, but from the way Christopher described her acceptance of it, she didn’t seem to worry the way a normal, caring mother should. Was this the first clue concerning what eventually happened?

  I was eating and sleeping this diary, I thought. Maybe if I thought of it the way I thought of any novel I had read, it would lose its grip on me. I hurried out, making sure I didn’t look back at my bed and that diary burning under my pillow, the covers closed but the voices not silent.

  When I arrived at school, my girlfriends practically attacked me with their questions about Kane’s party. It was happening tonight. Suddenly, I felt like I was moving in a spotlight. Everyone was more interested in my opinion. What was I going to wear? What should they wear? What did I think of this blouse, this skirt, these shoes? What about lipstick? Eye shadow? How should they wear their hair? What would I suggest?

  Girls who really couldn’t care less about my opinions about their hair and clothes before were suddenly intent on hearing what I had to say.

  “We don’t know what kind of a party it is,” Lana exclaimed when I didn’t give them any specific answers. “Is he having it catered?”

  “Catered?”

  “Well, they’re so rich. His parents would let him do that,” Missy Meyer said. “He might even have people serving.”

  I just shrugged. My mind was still on the Dollanganger children and their being locked away in that mansion. Neither Cathy nor Christopher was going to go to any parties for years. For years, how Cathy wore her hair wasn’t going to be important. For years, Christopher would not experience a girl flirting with him, nor would he be able to meet a girl and have a conversation with someone his own age. For years, they would never know what music was popular with their friends, what movie was exciting everyone in their class, what television show was being talked about at school, or even what was happening in the news that kids their age would be interested in. If they would complain that they were half alive, they wouldn’t be wrong, I thought.

  “I don’t know any more about his party than you do,” I told them.

  “Well, you were with him yesterday after school,” Lana said.

  “You’ve been spending most of your time with him, haven’t you?” Suzette asked. “So?”

  I thought about it for a moment and laughed.

  “What?”

  “We never really talked about his party,” I said, and went to my desk as class began.

  Whenever Kane was close enough after his classes, he was waiting for me to walk me to my next class.

  “The girls are driving me crazy asking me for details about
your party,” I told him.

  “Let’s have it be a surprise. I’ll come for you around six thirty, okay?” he said the first time.

  “Six thirty? So early?”

  “We have a lot to do to prepare for the party. I’m ordering in pizzas and salads,” he told me. “You can help me warm things up. Our housekeeper has been given the night off.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I had never been to Kane’s house, but everyone talked about it. It was a refurbished antebellum built of whitewashed brick and timber that people half-jokingly called Hill’s Tara, referring to the great house in Gone with the Wind. It was one of the largest estates in the area, about nine miles outside of Charlottesville.

  “And I thought it would be nice to have some private time before it all starts. Not that we won’t later,” he added. “Tell your father I’ll bring you home, too. It will be a good way to throw everyone else out.”

  “Is that your only reason?” I asked when we stopped at my next classroom.

  He just gave me that grin, tossed his head to the side, and sauntered off to join the boys who were waiting for him down the hall. I watched them close around him as if they could draw his energy into them and glow like he did. When I turned to go into the classroom, I found I had the same sort of thing awaiting me, my girlfriends gathering around me, still asking questions about the party and obviously trying to be my best friends.

  I knew all of this was coming at me because now it was even more obvious that Kane was very fond of me, and as far as most of the girls in high school were concerned, he was the most desirable boy. Who wouldn’t want to be his girlfriend, at least for a little while?

  Today there was something else going on, however. I think they could all sense that there was something different between us, and there was. This wasn’t just another little romance. Even I had to admit that I was feeling that was true. Perhaps it was because of the time we had spent at the Foxworth lake yesterday. Maybe he had felt something special there, too. Throughout the day, every moment he could be, he was with me. We were behaving as if we were oblivious to everyone and everything around us. I imagined that the contrast between how nonchalant I was about him before and how I was acting this day raised eyebrows and started a chorus of whispers.