“What’s up?” Dad asked. I think ever since my mother took ill and died, every time something or someone surprised him, his first reaction was always to tighten up and prepare himself for some sort of bad news. Running through his mind was surely that someone had called the house with some.
“I thought I’d come up to see if you’ve been working as hard as you’ve said or just jawin’ up a sweat,” I replied. It was his favorite way to kid fellow construction workers.
With relief, his face quickly softened into a broad smile. He looked past me at my car. “By yourself?” he asked, even though it was quite obvious. It was his way of asking where Kane Hill was.
“Yes. Kane has a meeting with his father, and I wanted to see what was already done up here.”
“Well, you must be bored,” Todd said.
“Don’t you think your work is exciting?” I fired back, and he shook his head and looked to my father to save him.
“Todd’s good at holding in his feelings,” my father said, and Todd laughed. My father studied me a moment and nodded to himself, thinking. “Come on,” he said. “Since you came here, I’ll show you something.”
He put his arm around my shoulders and walked me back toward the house. I was a little nervous. The last time he had brought me to the remains of the Hall, we’d discovered Christopher’s diary. Had he found something else to do with the Foxworths?
“Careful,” he said, as we stepped through the front door framing. There were loose wires threaded through boards and lots of nails and sawdust scattered about, which was nothing unusual and didn’t surprise me. I had been to many of his building sites, even as a little girl when my mother was alive. We paused in what I knew from the plans was to be the living room.
Two men from many other jobs my father had done were constructing the fieldstone hearth for the fireplace, working meticulously, as if they were creating an artistic masterpiece. It probably would be. The stones were taken from an old fieldstone wall on the property, which, like so many in our area, was constructed in the nineteenth century and had remarkably stood the test of time. From what I understood of Malcolm Foxworth, he wouldn’t have wanted those fieldstone walls destroyed. He would have had Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” mounted on his wall and chanted “Good fences make good neighbors.”
When I had first approached the rubble and the foundation of the burned-down restored Foxworth Hall on the day we found Christopher’s diary, I had seen where the fireplace was, but it was charred, covered with debris, and, although large, otherwise unremarkable standard brick seen in many houses. It was one of the things left from the original mansion. Now the stone floor within had been scrubbed clean. It was clear to me that the guts of the original fireplace were still there, but the fieldstone replaced the bricks, and its design ensured that it would be wider and more elaborate.
The men paused and turned to us.
“You remember my daughter, Kristin, don’t you, Butch?” my father asked the older of the two. I remembered now that Butch Wilson worked with his younger brother Tommy. They were master stone craftsmen, specializing in fireplaces, but did lots of other stonework around homes. I didn’t think my father had ever worked on a project that required stonework without them, as long as I could remember. Strangely, they both had that flaxen-blond hair that distinguished the Dollanganger children.
“Sure. Growing faster than a radish. She’s looking more and more like your wife,” Butch said.
“Lucky her,” Tommy added, smiling impishly.
My father laughed. “You won’t get any argument about that from me,” he said. He urged me on to approach the fireplace. “I wanted to show her what you found.”
The two stood up and moved back. Butch nodded at the stone floor of the fireplace.
“Check it out,” my father said. I knelt down and looked closely. At first, I saw nothing, but when I leaned in closer, I saw the initials CF, a heart, and then another CF, all a bit crudely engraved in the stone. I reached in and touched it and then looked up at my father. I was surprised that he wanted me to see it. He knew that I knew what it meant. It was obvious Butch and Tommy didn’t.
“So?” Tommy asked. “Your father says he can’t make head nor tail of it.”
“It’s got something to do with the nutty family who lived here,” Butch said.
I looked at my father. Did he want me to tell them? Was he testing me to see how much I really had learned from reading Christopher’s diary? He was stone-faced. After a moment, he stepped closer and nodded at the stone.
“Butch thinks the devil might have engraved it there,” he told me. “Butch’s grandfather worked on the construction of the original Foxworth Hall.”
“That’s right, and he never had a nice word to say about the Foxworths, either. The old man counted every minute my grandfather worked here and didn’t pay him a nickel over the hourly wage. He put in this hearthstone with the old man or his wife looking over his shoulder the whole time. Neither would have tolerated this defaming of it,” he said, nodding at the initials. “If he had seen it, he’d have had my grandfather back to grind it out, unless he was told to leave it.”
“Who wo
uld tell him that?” I asked, curious to hear what else he knew.
“Satan, who else?” Butch said, and Tommy nodded.
I looked at my father. He still wasn’t smiling. He nodded at me, turned, and started out. I glanced at Butch and Tommy and saw that they really believed what they were saying. Afterward, when they told friends what they had found here, they’d surely add to the Halloween image of what had gone on at Foxworth Hall years ago.
I caught up with my father. “Why didn’t they use a new hearthstone instead of the one from the original mansion, Dad?”
“The owner wanted it kept,” he said. He stood there watching my reaction. “At least, who I think is the owner.”
“But did he know what was carved into the stone?”