Why should I be? Everyone is interested in his or her family background. It’s only natural. I’d been in many of my girlfriends’ homes for dinner when their parents brought up memories of their grandfathers and their uncles and aunts and cousins. Pictures of relatives were hanging on walls. I couldn’t imagine my mother ever putting up a picture of Malcolm Foxworth or Olivia Foxworth, not that she’d had any. She had some very old photographs of relatives, but to this day, I didn’t know who was who, and if I asked Dad about any of them, he would claim he couldn’t remember. Maybe he was telling the truth, or maybe he was just avoiding it.
Everyone’s family had black sheep, but also relatives they were proud to mention. My family background on my mother’s side had this big, gaping black hole full of terror and horror. Was it a good idea to try to fill it, or was it better just to cover it up and forget? Forgetting about it was just not very easy, at least not for me.
It was like everyone knew that your cousin many times removed was Jack the Ripper. Despite the distance in relationship, they were always looking for some sign, some indication that you carried the germ of evil. Instead of Typhoid Mary, I was Madness Kristin. Get too close to me, and you might become a blabbering idiot.
Dad was already outside checking something on his truck engine. The truck was practically a member of our family. I couldn’t remember him not driving it. When I asked him why he didn’t buy a new one instead of constantly tinkering with it, replacing parts, and filling in rust spots, he replied in one word, “Loyalty.” When I looked confused, he continued, reciting one of his favorite lectures. “Problem with the world today is everything in people’s lives is temporary. It spreads from their possessions to their relationships. They throw away their marriages as easily as they dump their appliances. This truck’s never let me down. Yes, it’s old, and it ain’t pretty, but it’s used to me, and I’m used to it.”
Fortunately, once I got my driver’s license, he had decided that I should have a modern car with all the safety bells and whistles. However, when he had to trade in my mother’s car to get mine, he was almost as upset as he was the day she died. To this day, he refused to give away her clothes and shoes. They were all stored in our attic with some of her other things like hairbrushes, curlers, and perfume. It was almost as if he hoped she would turn up at the door, smile, and say, “My death was a terrible mistake. I wasn’t supposed to be taken yet, so I’m back.” That was why he loved watching the movie Heaven Can Wait.
More than once, I caught him staring at an empty doorway or listening keenly for the sound of her footsteps on the stairway.
People never really die until you forget them, I thought.
I couldn’t ever blame him for believing she might return somehow. From what I remember and from what people tell me, no one expected my mother to die like that. She was a very healthy-looking thirty-four-year-old woman. They called it a cranial aneurysm. Something just exploded in her head, and she keeled over one day at work. She didn’t die right away. Dad had a very difficult time talking about it for years, but when he did talk to me about it, I could see he was always amazed at how well she had looked in the hospital bed.
“It’s why I couldn’t believe the doctors,” he told me. “I sat there thinking any moment she would wake up and bawl me out for putting her into the hospital to start with. That was your mother,” he would add. He would add that to almost anything he told me about her, “That was your mother,” signifying in his mind and mine that she was a very special person.
I had good memories of her, but a girl of almost five and a half certainly hadn’t experienced her mother long enough to know her as well as she should. Without her now, I could hear nothing much about her side of the family. She was an only child. My maternal grandfather died very young from heart failure, and my maternal grandmother, who also had health problems, died when I was only seven, so I didn’t get to know them that well, either.
The only uncle and aunt I had were on my father’s side. My father’s younger brother, my uncle Tommy, lived in California, where he worked as an agent in a talent agency. He never married or had children. Dad had a younger sister, Barbara, who was also unmarried and worked at a bank in New York. Dad’s father had been killed in a car accident. He was only in his early fifties at the time. My paternal grandmother had lived with Dad’s younger sister, Barbara. She eventually succumbed to emphysema and then pneumonia. She had been a heavy smoker, as was Dad’s father. Dad wouldn’t permit anyone who worked for him to smoke in his office or on any of his jobs. He actually made them sign an agreement and did fire a young man who smoked on a site.
I spoke to my aunt Barbara occasionally and visited with her in New York City last summer, which was one of my best trips without Dad. She was constantly inviting me to return so she could take me to shows and wonderful restaurants. Of course, she invited Dad, too, but he hated big cities.
“I’m just a small-town boy,” he would say. “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.” I kidded him often about being stuck in his ways. He never denied it. “I am who I am,” he would say. “One size Burt Masterwood fits all. Besides, you’ll do all the traveling and discoveries in this family, Kristin. I did enough when I was in the navy.”
Would I travel and make discoveries? I would go to college, but I still had no definite idea what I wanted to become. For a while, I thought about being a teacher. Lately, I considered going into medicine, maybe research. Perhaps it was because I had lost my mother when I was so young, or maybe it was because of the Foxworth legend that hovered over me, but sometimes I felt I was lost in a fog, the most difficult thing to know being my future. I dreamed of marrying someday and having my own children, but that also seemed more like a vague dream, something coming sometime, somehow, like a handsome prince riding in from some mysterious place.
“ ’Bout time,” Dad said when I popped out of the house and closed the door. “Let’s go.”
He closed the truck hood with the same gentleness he employed whenever he did anything on his truck. He did treat it like some revered old friend, full of mechanical arthritis but still ambulatory. Sometimes I would catch him just looking at it and stroking it affectionately, lost in some memory or maybe just thinking about my mother sitting beside him.
“What’s wrong with Black Beauty today?” I asked as I opened the door to get in. The black leather seats were creased and faded, but there wasn’t a tear in either of them, and the carpeting on the floor was always kept up or replaced.
“Got to change her spark plugs. She reminds me every morning. Just like a woman, nag, nag, nag,” he said, and started the engine. He listened to it and nodded. “Spark plugs,” he repeated, and then backed out of our driveway.
We had a modest two-story Queen Anne–style home with recently renovated aluminum siding, black shutters, and panel windows in the bay Dad had built in the living room. All the bedrooms were upstairs, the wall paneling redone. Recently, Dad replaced the balustrade on the stairway with a rich dark mahogany, saying that it was something my mother would have liked. He was still doing things he knew would have pleased her. I was so used to him being able to fix and refurbish everything in our home that I grew up thinking every man could do that. I would smile incredulously when my girlfriends’ fathers had to call a repairman to repair a window casing or a plumber to fix a toilet. Besides being a licensed general contractor, Dad was a licensed plumber and electrician.
“I’m a hands-on man,” he would tell me proudly. “Your mother wasn’t above bragging to her friends about me, making me out to be Mr. Fix-It. But that’s how she was.”
Our house was on a side road next to a working horse and cattle farm. We were nearly twelve miles outside the city of Charlottesville in the eastern foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. All of my friends were within what Dad called “striking distance,” so I never felt any more isolated than anyone else, although I did especially enjoy spending time with Missy Mey
er, whose father, Justin Anthony Meyer, was an important attorney and who lived in a classic 1900s brick Victorian home in the Belmont neighborhood of Charlottesville. It was only a block away from the Pedestrian Mall. Dad had done some renovation work for Mr. Meyer, laying down new pine floors and later redoing a bathroom.
“How many people died in the first Foxworth fire, Dad?” I asked once we were on our way, hoping to get him to start talking more about it.
“Far as I know, only two, the old lady and her son-in-law.”
“That attorney who had an affair with one of the granddaughters?”
He looked at me. I could see he was making a decision. Until now, it was clear that he didn’t want to contribute any more to the dark details that surrounded my mother’s cousins and the events that had occurred in that grand old mansion. He had scared me when he’d said that just thinking about them could poison my mind, but now that I was older, maybe it wasn’t as dangerous.
“That’s what I was told,” he said, “but I don’t consider anyone I know to be anything of an authority on it. The Foxworths were very private people, and when people are that private, the only way you get to know anything about them is second- or thirdhand. Worthless.”
“Did you really believe that the children’s grandmother wanted her own grandchildren dead and was somehow responsible for the little boy dying?”
“No one as far as I know proved anything like that,” he said. “It’s a nasty story, Kristin. Why harp on it?”
“I know, but probably not much nastier than what they’re showing at the movie theater.”
He nodded. “I’ll give you that.”
“There are lots of stories like it on the news today also, Dad.”
“Look, I’m like most people around here, Kristin. What I know about the Foxworth tragedies I know from little more than gossip, and gossip is just an empty head looking to exercise a fat tongue.”
“Do you think the little boy’s body is buried somewhere on the property? You must have some thought about that.”
“Not going to venture a guess on that, and I’m not going to be one to spread that story, Kristin. You know how hard it is to sell a house in which someone died? People get spooked. Look how long it’s taken to move this property, and there’s no reason for that, even though the house on it burned down twice. It’s prime land.”
“How did it burn the second time? I heard an electric wire problem.”
“That’s it,” he said. “It was abandoned, so no one noticed until it was too late.”
“I also heard the man who lived in it burned it because he believed it had the devil inside it.”
Dad smirked. “There was no proof of arson. All that just adds to the rumor mill.”
“The same house burns down twice?” I said.
He looked at me and then looked ahead and said, “Lightning can strike twice in the same place. No big mystery.”
He made a turn and started us on the now-infamous road to Foxworth, passing cow farms along the way. There had been a number of times when I was tempted to use my new driver’s license and take myself and one or two of my friends out to Foxworth, but somehow the aura of dark terror hovered ahead of me when I considered it, even in broad daylight. And I didn’t want any of my friends to know I had an interest in the Foxworth legends. That would only encourage their insinuations that I might have inherited madness.
“Did Mom ever talk about what happened, Dad?”
“You mean the first fire?”
“No, all of it, especially the children in the attic.”
“Her girlfriends were always trying to bring it up, I know, but she would say something like, ‘It’s not right to talk about the dead,’ as if it was some Grimms’ fairy tale or something, and that would usually end it. But that didn’t mean they didn’t keep trying. A busybody has got to keep busy.”
“Did she talk about it with you?”
He gave me that look again, the expression that told me he was considering my age and what he should say. “I told you, Kristin, it’s all hearsay, even what your mother knew and what we were told years later.”
“I’m all ears,” I replied.
He shook his head. “I’m going to regret this conversation.”
“No, you won’t, Dad. I won’t be the one to tell stories out of school,” I added, which was another one of his favorite expressions. I knew he loved that I used them, remembered them.
“Your uncle Tommy once claimed he had met someone who said he had known one of the servants in the original house at the time the children were supposedly locked in the attic. He went out to Hollywood to pitch the story for a movie, and Tommy heard it. He called us immediately afterward.”
“What did he say?”
“He said the man claimed it was true that they were up there for more than three years, a girl who was about twelve when they were first locked up, a boy who was about fourteen, and the twin boy and girl about four. Their father was killed in a car accident and supposedly didn’t leave them enough money to fix the heels on their shoes. Malcolm Foxworth was pretty sick by then, but he hung on for a few years more. The story was that he wouldn’t put his daughter back in his will if she had children with her husband.”
“Do you know why? Did he say?”
“He was vague about it. Tommy, who hears lots of stories, said he was sure the man was making most of it up as he went along just to season his story enough to sell it for a movie.”
“Did it fit with anything you had heard or knew already?”
“I told you, I never really knew what was true and what wasn’t. What I do know from what the old-timers tell me is that Malcolm Foxworth was a real Bible thumper, one of those who believed Satan was everywhere, and so he was very strict. Whatever his daughter did to anger him, forgiveness was a part of his Christianity that he neglected. That’s what your mother would say. She didn’t even like being known as a distant relative, and to tell you the truth, she would cringe whenever anyone brought that up. She’d be angry at me for telling you this much hearsay.”
“So?” I asked, ignoring him. “At least tell me what else Uncle Tommy told you.” Despite his reluctance, I thought I had him on a roll. He had already said ten times as much as he had ever said before about the Foxworth family story.
“According to the story the man pitched, the kids were hidden up there so Malcolm wouldn’t know they existed.”
“So that part is really true?”
“I told you. The guy was trying to sell a story for a movie.”
“But even in his story, why did that matter, not knowing they existed?”
“I guess Malcolm thought they were the devil’s children. Anyway, your uncle says that this servant who was the main source for the story swears the old man knew and enjoyed that they were suffering.”
“Their own grandfather? Ugh,” I said.
“Yeah, right, ugh. So let’s not talk about it anymore. It’s full of distortions, lies, and plenty of ugh.”
I was quiet. How did the truth get so twisted? Why was no one sure about any of it? “What a mess,” I finally muttered.
“Yeah, what a mess. So forget it.” He smiled. “You’re getting to look more like your mother every day, Kristin. You lucked out. I have a mug for a face.”
“You do not, Dad. Besides, if you did, would Mom have married you?”
He smiled. “Someday I’ll tell you how I got that woman to say ‘I do.’ ”
“I already know. She married you because she knew you could fix a leaky faucet. And that’s just the way she was.”
He laughed. If he could, he would have leaned over and kissed me, but he didn’t want to show me any poor driving habits, especially now that I was driving.
We rode on. It was right ahead of us now, and I could feel my breath quicken.
It was like opening a door locked for centuries.
Behind it lay the answers to all the secrets.
Or possibly . . . new curses.
&
nbsp; Somehow I sensed that I was finally on the edge of finding out.
I was disappointed as we approached what was left of the second Foxworth Hall, which supposedly was a duplicate of the first. It looked more like a pile of rubble than the skeleton of a once proud and impressive mansion full of mystery and secrets. There were weeds growing in and around the charred boards and stones. Shards of broken glass polished by rain, snow, and wind glittered. Anything of any color was faded and dull. Rusted pipes hung precariously, and the remains of one large fireplace looked like they were crumbling constantly, even now right before our eyes.
Most of the grounds were unkempt and overrun, bushes growing wild, weeds sprouting through the crumbled driveway, and the fading grass long ready to cut as hay. Four large crows were perched on the stone walls, looking as if they had laid claim to the place. They burst into a flurry of wings and, looking and sounding angry, flew off as we drew closer. They, along with rodents and insects, surely had staked title to all of it years ago. Otherwise, it looked as quiet and frozen in time as any rarely visited graveyard.
Another truck was already parked near the wrecked mansion. I recognized Todd Winston, one of the men who had been with Dad for years. Todd had married his high school sweetheart, Lisa Carson, after she had gotten her teaching certificate and begun to teach fifth grade. Three years later, they had their first child, a girl named Brandy, and two years later, they had Josh. Dad was only about ten years older than Todd, but Todd treated him more like a father than an older brother. He was always looking for Dad’s approval. He had a full strawberry-blond beard and a matching head of hair that looked like it was allergic to a brush most of the time.
“The property has a lake on it fed from underground mountain streams,” Dad told me. “It’s off to the left there, about a fifteen-, twenty-minute walk, if you want to see it,” he said. “We’re going to be here a good two hours or so. No complaints about it,” he warned. “You wanted to come along.”