“I know, but I like to hedge my bets,” he joked, or maybe didn’t. “Let me show you a little more of the house.”
He took my hand and led me through the hallway to look at the formal living room, the dining room, and a smaller den with a pool table and walls lined with shelves and shelves of books.
“It rivals the school library,” I said.
“Believe it or not, my father can tell when one is missing. Many of these books are first editions. My mother is into art; Dad is into antiques. There’s too much to show you in one day, and besides, I don’t want to share your attention with too much more. C’mon. We still have a good hour before our guests arrive.”
“Our guests?”
“They’re your guests now, too,” he insisted.
He led me to the winding stairway, with its polished mahogany balustrade and dark brown carpeted steps. All the bedrooms were upstairs. His was off to the right, and his sister’s was just down from his.
“This is embarrassing,” he said the moment we stepped into his bedroom. “My mother designed it for a prince.”
“No kidding,” I said. “Though a prince might not have as nice a bedroom.”
If I were to measure it against anything we had, I’d say his bedroom was as large as our living room and dining room combined. On the left was an entirely separate area for his computer desk, shelves, and some electronics, including speakers for his own music. The floors were done in a dark blue tile with area rugs. All of the lights were recessed. On the right was the doorway to his en suite bathroom. Through the open door, I could see a shower probably three times the size of mine with multiple shower heads. I imagined that the door down from the bathroom doorway was his closet.
His king-size dark maple bed had a headboard embossed with trees and birds, some in flight, some settled on branches.
“Quite a headboard.”
“My mother had that custom-made. It’s an illustration from a children’s book I loved when I was about four. She said I always told her I wanted to sleep in the forest depicted in the book. Now I do. Over the top, wouldn’t you say?”
“Everything about this house is over the top, Kane, but your father worked for it. I’m sure he’s proud of what he’s accomplished.”
“You have a lot of compassion in you, Kristin, even for the rich.”
“Why do the rich need our compassion?”
“I remember what you said when we were at the Foxworth lake.”
“What did I say?”
“You asked if I thought money made people happy when I said they should have been happy there because of how much they had.”
“That was different. They didn’t use their wealth to help each other.”
He cocked his head to one side and looked at me, half joking, half serious. “Why do I get the feeling you know a lot more about them then you let on?”
I didn’t answer.
“I want to show you something,” he said, and led me deeper into his room. There were two large windows, one on each side of his bed. He took me to the right window and opened the curtain wider. “We’re looking west,” he said.
I gazed at the acres of trees, spotted here and there with homes and a highway that snaked along and disappeared over a small rise. It had grown much darker, so windows were lit in the homes and car headlights looked like the eyes of robotic creatures slithering through the darkness. “So? What am I looking at?”
“I don’t remember it, of course, but we could see Foxworth Hall from here before the last fire. The trees weren’t as grown up. There were many fewer houses between it and here, and the mansion loomed above everything. I was just five and a half when the place burned down, so I don’t have any memory of the fire, but my sister does. She told me she came into my room back then to watch it all from this window.”
“Darlena would have been about eleven.”
“I know. I understand it was practically an inferno. They thought that the woods might catch fire back then and maybe even spread over so many acres that it would threaten other homes. She said the sky was lit up so brightly the stars disappeared.”
“That would be impressive,” I said.
“Probably as impressive as the first fire, maybe more because of the added trees and stuff.”
I knew it was a strange feeling to have, but suddenly, Kane was more important to me because of what he was saying, what his sister remembered, and what could once be seen from his bedroom window.