“What?”
“How could she want to leave us like this? What if there’s a fire? We’d have to tie sheets together and form a fire escape or something.”
“Brilliant,” I told her, and she brightened. “It’s good that you think ahead. Most girls your age don’t have any foresight.”
She beamed.
“If we both think of sensible things like that, we’ll get through it, Cathy Doll.”
The dread left her face.
Years ago, our father’s best friend, Jim Johnston, called us the “Dresden dolls,” because we were all flaxen-haired with fair complexions. We looked more like fancy porcelain people. The name stuck, and even neighbors began to refer to us as the Dresden dolls. I knew Cathy liked it, liked to be thought of as someone special, even though I wasn’t crazy about being called any kind of doll.
She nodded, hopeful again. “Okay, how about checkers?” she said. “I’m determined to beat you.”
For a few minutes, at least, it was as if we were back at home. Cathy and I were playing checkers. The twins were comfortably asleep. All was quiet and well with the world. Maybe we could get through this, I thought. No, not maybe; we would get through this. Momma knew what she was doing, I decided. I felt cheerful again, buoyed up.
And then the door was thrown open, and she came into the room.
And it was like in one moment faster than a blink, all the air was sucked out of it.
I could hear the now-frantic sound of the buzzer. Kane had his finger on it and wasn’t taking it off, so it kept ding-donging. At the same time, my phone began to ring.
“Oh, no!” I cried.
I had lost track of time. I could easily be late for school again!
“Where are you? I’ve been honking and pushing your doorbell. I even called your cell, but it went right to your voice mail. I wasn’t sure if you had forgotten and either gone with your father or driven yourself. What’s going on?”
“I’ll be right there!” I cried.
How could I be so absorbed that I wouldn’t hear all that noise?
I shoved the diary under my pillow, grabbed my books, and practically leaped over the bed to get out the door. I flew down the stairs, nearly twisting my ankle at the bottom, and came close to ripping the door off its hinges to get out.
Kane wore a smile of incredulity. “What’s happening?”
“Let’s just go,” I said, rushing past him. I turned because he was still standing there. “Hurry!”
I got into his car, and he moved quickly now to get in and start the engine.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Don’t tell me you overslept again.”
I didn’t answer. He looked at me and backed out.
I was grateful now that we lived on a practically dead street, because neither he nor I looked both ways. We just shot out onto the street, and he spun the tires. If my father had been home and seen this, I’d be as dead as one of his doornails.
“It’s going to be close,” Kane said. “Personally, I don’t care. It’ll be my first warning slip, but you . . .”
“Just don’t get a speeding ticket, and don’t go through any red lights,” I ordered.
If we got into an accident or Kane got a speeding ticket, I’d feel worse than Cathy in the attic. I’d probably be just as sick to my stomach when the principal informed my father about my second lateness in a row. I pushed the vision of my father’s face of disappointment out of my mind.
“So? What’s going on? Are you sick or something? What happened?”
“Something,” I said.
He looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “What?”
“Oh, no,” I said. We were making good time, but now my heart sank. There was one of those fender-bender accidents just at the road where we had to turn off to get to the school. Traffic was backed up. I knew there was a way around, but it would add a good five minutes and only that if we were lucky. Other people were probably doing the same thing by now. I started to tell him where to turn.
“I know, I know. Relax,” he said. “We’re not going to be the only ones going to school who were caught in this mess. It’s actually a bit of good luck. Mr. Market will have to take that into consideration.”
A little less than five minutes later, we turned into the school parking lot. I could hear the bell ringing.
“We’re late for homeroom.”
“Stop worrying. I’ll explain.”
“I don’t need anyone to explain for me,” I replied, a little too harshly, but I couldn’t help it. I was enraged at myself for putting myself in this position.
When we reached the front entrance, I looked back and felt some relief. Four more cars were pulling into the parking lot, with two more waiting to make the turn. Kane was right. There would be enough of us in the same situation.
In fact, at the principal’s office, there were three others ahead of us, all seniors. Mrs. Grant was writing out green slips, which indicated acceptable excuses. So the situation had already been explained and confirmed. Nevertheless, when it was my turn, she looked up at me with some disappointment in her face.
“I would have thought you would have left yourself lots of time, Kristin. You have to anticipate problems if you want to get ahead in life.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
She shook her head but wrote out the slip.
“Who’s she trying to be? Your second mother?” Kane asked after he got his green slip, too.
“I guess I need at least one,” I said, and he immediately looked sorry he had spoken.
I made it just as the bell to end homeroom was ringing, so at least I wouldn’t be late for my first class. Nevertheless, all my girlfriends, who didn’t know about the traffic jam, were surprised and curious. Lana had caught sight of Kane and me entering the school together.
“Kane picked you up for school?” she asked. “It’s out of his way.”
“Yes, and yes,” I said.
“And you were both late,” Suzette said. All the girls smiled. I knew they were thinking Kane and I had been dilly-dallying and that was why we were late.
“It wasn’t our fault,” I said, even though I knew that it easily could have been mine. I rattled off a description of the car accident before anyone could ask anything else. Actually, I thought, it wasn’t my fault. It was Christopher Dollanganger’s.
I laughed to myself envisioning my meeting him someday and telling him.
I was sure he would say, “How I wish that was all I suffered in my teenage years, a late demerit in school.”
My girlfriends looked at me as we walked, all whispering.
“She’s just in love,” Suzette declared loudly enough for me to hear, and they all nodded.
I wished it was as simple as that. I was in quite a daze all morning. Besides feeling like I had run the four-minute mile, I was reeling with images and thoughts that Christopher had described in his diary. In two different morning classes, I was caught looking like I was daydreaming and not paying attention. I missed a question or something my teachers had said. I couldn’t help it. It was as if I was carrying Christopher along with me now wherever I went. Whatever I saw happening, whatever I heard said, I automatically wondered what Christopher would think of it.
“There’s something different about you,” Kane told me when we walked together to a table in the cafeteria at lunchtime. “I don’t only mean your almost being late twice in a row, although for you, that’s close to a capital crime and probably had you in a state of terror.”
“It is not,” I said, and tried to look sullen about his remark. He just smiled and slid in beside me.
“Okay. It’s not a capital crime. So what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” he asked as he started on his sandwich.
“I’m not going to tell you something that personal,” I replied, and he laughed.
“Sure. I bet it was something horrific, like drinking a beer at a girlfriend’s house when you were twelve.”
; I punched him a little more than just playfully in the shoulder.
“Hey.”
“Don’t make me out to be some Sandra Dee.”
“Who?”
“Didn’t you ever see Grease?”
He thought a moment and then smiled. “Oh, yeah, I remember. ‘Look at me, I’m Sandra Dee, lousy with virginity.’ Right?”
I gave him a good smirk, and he smiled.
“So what exactly does that mean?” he asked. “Lousy with virginity? Are you or aren’t you?”
“None of your business,” I said.
“Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” he kidded.
I turned away and thought about myself for a moment. Was I as virginal as Christopher and Cathy were? Did I reek of teen virtue because I was so devoted to my father and such a responsible and good student? Was I as responsible as Christopher had to be, both of us thrust into becoming older almost overnight?
I gazed around the cafeteria and wondered how my classmates really saw me. From what I had read so far, Christopher didn’t appear to have had many school friends. He mentioned no one in the early part of the diary, during the time before they were going to Foxworth to live. He certainly couldn’t have made new friends while he was there. I had friends. I wasn’t really like him, and for some reason, even though I was fascinated with him, that gave me relief.
Strangely, though, that relief made me feel guilty. I didn’t want to see him as in any way strange. The feelings and revelations about himself that I had read surely were normal. One day, he realized that his sister was becoming a woman. Unfortunately, it was happening under weird circumstances, but I imagined any boy would have had similar reactions when he found himself in the same sort of situation, seeing his younger sister’s body developing.
I glanced at Kane. He had an older sister who was in college. If anything, the roles might have been reversed. I certainly wasn’t about to ask him when his sister first realized he was a man. When did he realize it? I wondered. Do boys react to that differently? Maybe I was too cloistered, too naive and oblivious to things, looks, feelings I should know meant more than I thought. The diary, I thought, Christopher’s diary, might be more of an education about myself than anything else.
The rest of the day went smoothly. I forced myself to be more alert and pushed everything else out of my mind. I aced a math quiz, and I knew from her reaction to her grade that Theresa Flowman had not done that well. I participated in some idle chatter with my girlfriends. I was surprised that Kane hadn’t told anyone about us going to Foxworth after school. I was anticipating Lana or Suzette asking me about it. They knew I was leaving with him since he had brought me, but they both apparently assumed I was either taking him to my house or going to his. We had planned it all. I got the usual silly warnings, like “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, which means you can do it all.”
For more than one reason, I was happy to be spending more time alone with Kane. We had known each other for years, but it wasn’t until this year that he looked at me and showed some romantic interest. Once again, I thought about Christopher’s suddenly looking at Cathy and seeing more than simply a young girl. It made me wonder about myself. Could it be that I had blossomed in so subtle a way that I didn’t even realize it myself? My father treated me, and always would, as his little girl, despite the new responsibilities I fulfilled and my being old enough to drive and go on dates. Perhaps a father, or even a mother, for that matter, resisted accepting that a daughter was no longer a child. In a mother’s case, that umbilical cord was thinning out, and in the father’s case, there was the realization that soon his little girl would be looking to another man to love and protect her.
“So you’re really into this valedictorian thing?” Kane asked after we drove away from the school.
“I don’t live for it, no, but it won’t hurt.”
“You’ll have to make a speech at graduation.”
“My father says I do that daily.”
He tossed his head to the side the way he usually did when something pleased him, along with that small, soft smile that could burrow its way into the hardest of hearts. Even though I believed he knew what a charmer he was, I didn’t sense him conniving to use those dazzling eyes and nearly perfect facial features to work his way in with any girl or get some favor from a teacher. His popularity came so easily that he didn’t obsess about it.
“So tell me,” he said as we turned toward Foxworth, “what do you really know about this place and what happened there originally? Your mother was related. You should know as much as, if not more than, anyone else about the history.”
“She never talked about them, with me at least, and my father hates talking about them. He’s not just clearing land and getting it all ready for rebuilding. He’s attacking it as if he was General George Patton going after Hitler.”
Kane laughed aloud. “That’s what my father said your father would do. I guess he’s made his feelings about it pretty clear to anyone who gets him talking about it.”
“My father isn’t afraid of expressing his opinion about anything,” I told him. “Not just Foxworth.”
“So I should watch myself around him,” he countered. “Right?”
“Well, I’m not afraid of expressing my opinion, either.”
He shook his head. “Where have you been all my life, Kristin Masterwood?”
“Either in the room across the hall, the room behind, or the room ahead.”
We drove on. His smile was becoming deeper, his eyes drinking me in like some bon vivant tasting cherished wine.
I felt myself blush.
Where would this journey take me?
Maybe I should be keeping my own diary, I thought, and then I felt my body grow tense, much tenser than before when my father and I had approached the ruins of Foxworth Hall. Christopher’s diary had put me inside it in a way I never imagined. For a few moments, as we drew closer, I didn’t see the ruins of a great fire. I saw the mansion standing high, the windows dimly lit, and high above, two little children, Carrie and Cory, being held up by their brother and sister to look out at a world that had suddenly become forbidden to them. It was like going to the site of a massacre or a prison and still being able to hear the cries and screams.
During all the time they had been kept here, had anyone driven up and caught sight of them in a window? If they had, did they keep it to themselves? From what everyone had known of the Foxworths, they didn’t just invite anyone to their mansion, and they certainly didn’t spend time in the city talking with people unless it was strictly business. I doubted Olivia Foxworth had any friends her own age by the time the children were locked up in the small bedroom and attic.
We pulled up next to my father’s truck and got out. He had all the machinery going full steam. The area around the rubble had been cleared, and a good portion of the charred boards, pipes, shattered fixtures, and other contents were piled into three large trucks to be hauled away. Two large brush cutters were clearing the property to the south, and two men were surveying the property on the east end.
“I’ll say your father is out to get this done fast,” Kane commented. “He’s wiping out all traces of the whole clan.”
Dad paused and looked up from a clipboard when Todd Winston nodded in our direction. I waved, and he indicated how we should approach safely.
“Hello, Mr. Masterwood,” Kane said quickly. “This is some job.”
“A lot to do. It was a big place, and there was a great deal of destruction,” my father said. He looked at me as if he wanted to study my reaction to it all, waiting for my comment.
“I thought I’d show Kane the lake,” I said, ignoring everything else.
“Good. You two watch yourselves. There are boards with nails sticking out all over the place.”
“Looks like it was more like an explosion than another fire,” Kane said.
“A fire is an explosion,” Todd told him. Kane gave him his usual shrug. “We haven’t found anything
else of any value, Kristin,” Todd told me.
My father spun on him, and he looked away quickly.
“See you in a little while,” I said, and started away.
Kane followed but looked back at my father and Todd. “What was that about? What did they find that was worth anything?”
“Nothing, really,” I said. “Todd is hoping to find buried treasure.”
Kane nodded, but his eyes were full of new curiosity. I wondered why my father hadn’t told Todd not to mention the metal box. Now I had to lie my way around it, and I could see that Kane had already figured out how to tell when I was avoiding telling him something. I had one of those faces that would make a detective’s job a piece of cake.
I walked faster.
“This place must have been something,” Kane said, catching up. “So much property and a lake. They were very rich people.”
“Supposedly.”
“You’d think they’d have had happy lives.”
I paused and turned to him. I knew, just like everyone else, that Kane’s family was one of the wealthiest in Charlottesville. “Is that what makes your family happy, money?”
He laughed. “Not according to my father. He keeps telling us he’s not made of money, but we love him anyway.”
“Obviously, these people were miserable here,” I said, and continued to walk.
“Then why did that woman bring her children here and keep them in a small bedroom and an attic for years?”
“She was bankrupt. Her husband was killed, and he didn’t have life insurance, and they were in debt when he was alive.”
“So you do know more about all this than you’re admitting.” He pounced.
“That’s all I know,” I said. “Most everyone knows that much,” I added, and pounded ahead, my arms folded across my breasts.
When we reached the lake, I stopped, and he came up beside me. “You look annoyed. Maybe coming here wasn’t such a good idea. The place is cursed.”
“Maybe it is,” I said, and sat on a big rock to look out over the water.