“Next time she’s home, I’ll ask her to tell you what she remembers,” he said. “She’s got one of those photographic memories. She can recall the details of every doll she ever had and especially movie scenes, even the ones she saw at an early age. She’s already been accepted into the NYU graduate school film-study program, you know.”
“Oh. How exciting. I would enjoy talking to her, I’m sure.”
“Didn’t your father ever tell you about the last fire?”
“Not really. He just says it was big. Of course, we don’t have this view.”
“Right.”
“However, I know that for our community, Foxworth Hall’s second demise, with all its mystique, was something historic. It was like having witnessed a famous earthquake or a volcano erupt again, I guess.”
“Exactly.”
“What were you told about the first fire?” I asked him. “I mean, it must have come up from time to time. I’m sure your father knows a lot about it.”
“Nothing firsthand. That was more than forty years ago. He talks more about the second fire. He said it seemed to burn forever. My mother said it was like the burning of Atlanta in Gone with the Wind. She’s prone to exaggeration, but the fire department could do little to save it, just like the first time. No one died in that fire because the house had been abandoned, and as you know, the bank got stuck with the property. Once in a while, I look out here and try to imagine what the fires were like. I do remember overheari
ng my parents and some friends talking about the first fire one night and someone saying, ‘Imagine if it had happened years before, when those poor children were locked in that attic.’ It gave me nightmares when I was younger.”
“It seems it gave lots of people nightmares and still does, even after all these years,” I muttered.
“Right. But I used to worry about being up here. I couldn’t exactly just jump out this window. Kinda high up. My father assured me we had the most sophisticated fire protection and warnings any home could have. You know . . .”
“Sprinkler system and smoke detectors,” I said. I looked up at his ceiling and pointed to two nozzles.
“Exactly.”
“How come you didn’t mention all this when we went up to the Foxworth property, especially what it was like seeing the mansion burn a second time?”
“I didn’t want you to think I had a weird interest in it like so many in this town do. I wasn’t sure how you felt about it. I know you’re sensitive about being asked questions and talking about being related, even though you’re a distant relative.”
“A very distant relative,” I said.
“Are you upset about me telling you all this?”
“No,” I said. “Actually, I appreciate it.”
“Good. I didn’t want to do anything to spoil the evening, but . . .”
“You didn’t. Stop worrying about it.”
He nodded and then widened his eyes. “Oh heck, I forgot to keep the gate open. We’ll have them buzzing us like crazy.”
He went to his phone and punched in a code. “Now we can relax,” he said. “Come on. Let’s organize the music for the night. We have a full media room that coordinates what is heard and seen throughout the house. The house has internal video security.”
We started out. I paused in the doorway and looked back at the window from which his sister had witnessed the second fire at Foxworth. He paused, too. “How old is this place?” I asked.
“It wasn’t here when the children were supposedly up there, if that’s what you want to know,” he replied. “If you believe the stories, they were there about 1957, ’58. That’s more than fifty years ago. That’s probably why so much of it is confusing and distorted. Anyone around who was our age then is in his or her seventies now. Anyway, this house is only twenty years old, and it’s been remodeled, expanded in some way, almost every year after it was first built. My father built it. There was no other house on the property. No one lived here and witnessed the first fire from here, so there was no other property owner who told my father firsthand stuff. He and my mother know only the junk everyone else seems to know. And neither of them thinks about you inheriting Foxworth madness just because your mother was a distant cousin or something. Our children won’t be weird,” he added.
“Our children? Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself? There’s a proposal and a honeymoon in my story,” I said.
He laughed, took my hand, and walked me back to the stairway. “My mother imagines she’s Scarlett O’Hara going down those stairs some days. I’ve caught her fantasizing, and she was embarrassed and confessed that was exactly what she was doing as she descended the stairway. She’s infatuated with that novel and movie. That’s why our house was built to look a little like Tara. Everyone wants to step out of their life and be someone else, at least for a day. My mother would like to be someone else forever.”
“Why? She has so much now.”
“She never has enough,” he said dryly.
“What about you? Do you want to be someone else, too?’