Secrets of Foxworth Read Online Free

time with Missy Meyer, 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.
    â€œHow 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.
    â€œFar as I know, only two, the old lady and her son-in-law.”
    â€œThat 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.
    â€œThat’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.”
    â€œDid you really believe that the children’s grandmother wanted her own grandchildren dead and was somehow responsible for the little boy dying?”
    â€œNo one as far as I know proved anything like that,” he said. “It’s a nasty story, Kristin. Why harp on it?”
    â€œI know, but probably not much nastier than what they’re showing at the movie theater.”
    He nodded. “I’ll give you that.”
    â€œThere are lots of stories like it on the news today also, Dad.”
    â€œLook, 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.”
    â€œDo you think the little boy’s body is buried somewhere on the property? You must have some thought about that.”
    â€œNot 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.”
    â€œHow did it burn the second time? I heard an electric wire problem.”
    â€œThat’s it,” he said. “It was abandoned, so no one noticed until it was too late.”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œThe 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.
    â€œDid Mom ever talk about what happened, Dad?”
    â€œYou mean the first fire?”
    â€œNo, all of it, especially the children in the attic.”
    â€œHer 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