“The ride?”
I nodded at the wreckage. “I just want to see it all close up,” I told him, and he nodded and looked back at what was left of the mansion.
“Hard to believe it was once the place people describe, with a ballroom and all, magnificent chandeliers, elaborate woodwork, and stained-glass windows. People who live in houses like this usually don’t get burned out. The rich don’t die in fires.”
“Hogwash. Fire and water don’t discriminate,” Dad said. “Besides, that’s how the world will end if we don’t find a better way, and goodness knows, we’re working on it.”
“Thanks for the cheery news, Burt,” Todd said. “Where do you want to start?”
“We’ll begin on the east end here.” He stared at it all a moment and then nodded. “They don’t build foundations like this anymore. It’s the original one. Who’d build one like it now? It’s the instant gratification generation, including instant house slapped together with spit and polish.”
“Amen to that,” Todd said.
He’d say amen to anything Dad uttered, I thought. He didn’t have much of a mentor in his own father, who Dad said was as useless as a screw without a head. He spent most of his time nursing like a baby on a bottle of beer and was one of the fixtures at Hymie’s Bar and Grill just southeast of the city.
Dad looked at me with those expectant eyes. Now that I was here, he was anticipating my disappointment. There was nothing sensational to see, no clues to what had happened here either the first or the second time. There was no way to understand how elaborate the mansion had once been. I saw legs of tables and chairs and crumbled elaborate stonework, but remnants of beautiful pictures, statues, curtains, and chandeliers were burned up or so charred that they were unrecognizable. There was certainly not much for me to do.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’ll take that walk to the lake.”
“You be careful,” he said.
“Watch out for ghosts,” Todd called.
“Mind yourself,” Dad told him, and Todd laughed.
They started toward the foundation, and I walked around it all first. I kept looking up, trying to imagine the way the mansion stood, how high it really was, and where exactly the attic loft in which the children spent most of three years would be. Would they have had any view? Maybe they could have seen the lake. And if they had, would that have made things easier or harder, looking at places they couldn’t go to and enjoy? The surrounding forest was thick, the trees so tall that from my position, I could barely make out some of the hills in the distance, and only the very tops of them at that. But it had been decades since they had been here. The trees weren’t so high back then.
I saw Dad and Todd begin measuring parts of the remaining structure, moving charred wood, and inspecting the walls of the foundation carefully, as if they anticipated something grotesque jumping out at them. Right now, it was difficult to imagine anything frightening about Foxworth. It looked like one of the structures devastated in bombings during the Second World War that we saw in films in history class. However, I knew there were even adults who believed that if they stood inside the wreckage at night, they could hear screams and cries, even laughter and whispers.
Do all houses keep the sounds of those who have lived in them, absorb them into their walls like a sponge would absorb water, and then, in the quiet of the night after they are deserted or left waiting for the wrecking ball, free the memories to wander about the rooms, resurrecting happy times and sad ones?
I started to make my way to the forest and then walked slowly through the cool woods. Most of the leaves were gone because of the recent wind and rain, but some had clung determinedly to their branches and flooded the forest with their bright yellow, brown, and amber colors. Where there were thick pine trees, there were shadows. I saw rabbits and thought I saw a fox, but I wasn’t sure, as it moved so quickly out of sight. About fifteen minutes later, I reached the edge of the lake my father had described. The ducks had already gone south. There were few birds, in fact, not even the crows I had seen. The lake was still, desolate, and silvery with clouds reflected in the surface and small circles here and there created by water flies.
Almost halfway around the lake, I saw what looked like a collapsed dock, most of it underwater. I drew closer, looking for signs of fish or turtles in the water as I walked, and then suddenly, I stopped and shuddered. The rocks and grass beneath the surface of the pond in one spot had somehow taken the shape of a small child. I knew it wasn’t real, but it looked so much like a skull and skeleton that I gasped and backed away.
A dead little boy very well could be in the lake.
Why not?
A lake would be a perfect place to hide a dead child, weigh him down, and let him sink to the darkness below. When I closed my eyes, I imagined him staring up from the bottom with his glassy eyes. I was suddenly much colder than I had been. I thought I heard an owl, but that was unusual in the daytime. What was it? I hugged myself, turned, and started back, moving more quickly now, actually trotting and then slowing down.
When I stepped out of the forest, I could see that Dad and Todd had moved around three-quarters of the property, making their evaluation. Dad looked up, saw me, and beckoned.
“Did you find the lake?” he called as I approached.
“Yes, but it looks so cold and deserted with so much overgrown around it. I’m sure it was once very pretty.” I didn’t want to mention the strange sound I had heard. Todd might start teasing me again.
“Probably good duck hunting in the spring,” Todd said. “But the land’s been posted for years.”
“We found something,” Dad said when I reached them. “From the looks of it, we think it was part of the original house. When the second Foxworth Hall was built, they didn’t do much about the original basement.”
“No one can read what happened to a house like your father can,” Todd said. “You know he’s been called in to evaluate some properties that burned down where there might have been a murder or somethin’.”
“All right. Enough of that,” my father said.
I didn’t know about those things, but right now, I wasn’t as curious about other houses or stories as I was about this one. “What did you find?” Had they found the remains of the child? Probably not. He wouldn’t sound so casual about that.
“Todd moved some boards that had to have been in the original basement and shifted a few things, and that appeared.” Dad nodded at a dark brown metal box about seven or eight inches long and six inches wide. “It’s locked,” he continued. “Might mean something valuable is inside it.”