The Dowry Page 3

  Everywhere he looked, Robert could see the 1850s charm that the owner had instilled in its original construction. He also noted tons of work that needed to be done. Not only had the house been neglected, it desperately needed updating. For example, while he might not want to restore the kitchen exactly as it had been built in 1858, lacking modern conveniences, he could make it resemble one built at that time.

  Taking him upstairs, Victoria led him through the maze of bedrooms, a couple of bathroom remodels from the 1940s and a private study. Entering the study, Robert was immediately drawn to the built-in cabinetry and shelving that lined most of the walls. The detail work and craftsmanship would have cost a fortune today. In one corner of the room was a three-quarter circular space that one associated with the Victorian style tower room. Windows lined the walls providing substantial light.

  “I think you will find this interesting,” Victoria commented as she approached one of the bookcases against the wall. Reaching up, Robert heard a faint click and the bookcase swung away, revealing a hidden stair.

  “Go see for yourself, I am far too old for those stairs,” Victoria commented as she waved Robert forward.

  Climbing the stairs, Robert found himself in the tower room directly above the study space he had just been standing in. He had seen the tower spire from outside, noting it was cleverly disguised to appear as part of the attic. He made a note to check the view from the back of the house, imagining the appearance intended to confuse the third floor with the study below.

  Three quarters of the walls here were windows, identical to the space below, providing a commanding view of the rear yard all the way to the river. Robert could just imagine the lady of the house sitting here watching her father’s ships as they loaded or unloaded their cargo.

  The only room he had seen so far with furniture, a lone desk sat in the middle of the space, facing the river, with matching bookcases built into one wall. A stark wooden chair stood behind the desk, but window seating wrapped around the room in the areas with glass. He stood quietly, admiring the view.

  On a whim, he pulled out the chair and sat himself behind the desk. He smiled as he realized the windows had been placed lower than usual to allow an unobstructed view of the river to a seated individual. In the center drawer, Robert found a stack of the parchment paper, identical to the material of his invitation.

  Opening the right-hand drawer, he was surprised to find a red feather quill, ink bottle still stoppered with liquid contents, and red sealing wax. Beside the wax was a stamp with the letter F and a candle. He pondered the possibility that his invitation had in fact been crafted at this very desk.

  Before long he remembered he had Victoria waiting below. Returning to the study, he found it empty. Robert then headed into the hallway, but his guide was not to be found on the second floor.

  “Mrs. Baines? Victoria?”

  “Out in back,” he heard from below.

  Heading downstairs, he passed through the door in the foyer that led to the appalling kitchen once more and then proceeded through a pair of double doors in the dining room that led out back. On the back porch, he found his guide, again resting on a chair of questionable integrity.

  “Isn’t it lovely?” she commented as she looked out over the river.

  “It is beautiful,” Robert replied as he mentally tallied up all the work that needed to be done to get the yard and dock before them back in shape.

  “Well Mr. Garrison, what do you think?” the woman asked without taking her eyes off the river rolling past.

  “You have a beautiful home, badly in need of some tender loving care. Someone needs to come in and do a ground-up restoration of this place,” he replied candidly.

  “Is that someone you?” Victoria asked, finally turning to face Robert.

  “To be honest ma’am, I’m not sure I can afford it. The value of the land alone makes this a very expensive proposition.”

  “Mr. Garrison, you strike me as a man who is passionate about what he does. Money aside, would you restore Foxworth House to its former glory, or are you like the others who believe it should be torn down and replaced with a modern structure?”

  “Were I able to do so, ma’am, I would give her back her glory while ensuring she lived on for future generations to enjoy,” he replied honestly.

  “And how would you go about doing that?” Victoria asked, the curiosity evident on her face.

  “You need to not just fix what is broken, you need to restore what is and add things like HVAC. You know, central heat and cooling, to provide the environmental controls necessary to preserve the interior once it’s finished. All the pipes and wiring need to be replaced outright to guarantee no future water or electrical damage. Finally, that kitchen must go,” Robert said with a sigh.

  “When can you start?” Victoria asked with a smile.

  Robert was completely caught off guard by Victoria’s question.

  “Mrs. Baines, as I said, I am not sure I can afford this place, much less cover the cost of all the work I need to do,” he replied somewhat urgently.

  “Victoria, please,” she answered gently.

  “And I am Robert. Victoria, this house needs a lot of work. Were it mine, I would put my heart and soul into restoring its former splendor. That effort takes both time and money.”

  “Robert, this house has always been in my family. I am the last direct descendant of the Jacob Foxworth line and cannot bear to think that this place will fall into the hands of someone less worthy. I fear, after I am gone, it will be sold away, only to be torn down and forgotten. I am prepared to sell it to you for $1…with the assurance that you will keep your word and restore the house and grounds to their original state. That or at least as close as possible to original, things like modern plumbing and appliances notwithstanding.”

  The statement shocked Robert, and it took him a moment to comprehend the implications. Putting his hand up in a halting motion, a sign of pausing the conversation, he turned and walked away from Victoria. As he did so, he ran all the numbers through his head, estimating costs, evaluating options and predicting timelines. With what he expected to clear from the sale of the house in California, he felt sure he would have more than the funds necessary to do everything he wanted.

  As it was, he already had an equal amount saved, all protected by a prenup that his attorney had thankfully forced down his throat. A romantic at heart, he had been prepared to go all-in when he and Heather decided to wed. It had been both their attorneys that presented the prenups, one for her and one for him, to cover their assets from their earlier lives. Both had small businesses to protect, hers a publicity firm with a substantially affluent client list.

  Finally, he turned and strode back to where the woman sat patiently waiting.

  “It’s going to cost a bundle to do it right, but I can do it,” he replied with a smile.

  Chapter 3

  Foxworth Landing, 1857

  Standing off to one side as the ship was being loaded, Charlotte was processing the latest purchases from the local farmers. While a necessary task, she chafed at anything that took her away from the work on the house. Though they were still in the process of preparing the building site, she wanted to be involved with every step of its construction.

  Her property was on the west bank of the river and smack in the middle of farming country. Here, growers for miles around could come and ship their produce to town and save days of travel. Once it was all shipped to Jacksonville, her father and sister would see it sold in the markets, at a reasonable profit.

  The brokering of goods for others was the latest offering her family business provided, their growing reputation for fairness and reliability providing the foundation. This load was a mixture of purchased and consigned goods, so, it was very important for her to record everything she bought versus those items she shipped for others.

  Off to one side of the pier was a large pile of timber, waiting to make its way down river to the sawmill. They had worked
from sun up to sunset, clearing the land for the house, leaving only a few select trees intended to provide shade in the hottest summer months. Charlotte knew that once this ship departed, another was waiting nearby to take on the load that was to be her home.

  With everything loaded and tallied, she waved to the captain as they released the mooring lines and backed away from the pier. Once clear, they pointed the bow northward and soon disappeared beyond the bend in the river, the black smoke over the trees the only thing betraying their presence.

  With the first boat clear of the pier, the second smaller steamboat tied up to the dock and several men came ashore.

  “Them the logs?” one of the men asked as he approached Charlotte.

  “Yes sir,” she replied softly, adding a smile as she watched the foreman wave the others forward. Since these men didn’t work directly for her father, she was more cautious in how she handled them. Not wanting to appear weak, she also remembered you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

  Charlotte watched as the men moved the cut timber, one piece at a time, to the water’s edge where they began to form a raft. With felled trees of this size, she knew they would not be able to load them aboard ships. Rather, the intent was to raft the logs together and float them as a single entity downstream to the sawmills in Jacksonville.

  She watched in fascination as the men worked all afternoon preparing not one, but two rafts for the trip north. The foreman explained that with so many trees another boat would be arriving before nightfall and the two would depart at sunrise to float the rafts away.

  While she had seen the timber rafts float by many times before, without giving them much thought, this particular event represented her future. As such, she was determined to guarantee as many of the trees as possible would make the trip. She was well aware that more than one timber raft had broken apart and the valuable trees ended up as someone else’s treasure.

  “Sir, if you please, can you sharp-chute these to ensure their safe arrival? My entire future is in your hands,” she asked with as angelic a face as she could muster.

  She knew well that the V shaped bow of sharp-chuted rafts held together better and were less likely to hang up or come apart than the square bowed rafts.

  “Yes, Miss. I was just about to order such,” the foreman replied hesitantly.

  From the look in his eye, Charlotte doubted the truth of that statement, but beamed at the man nonetheless. One of the many lessons she had learned in her short life was that sometimes you needed to appear weak to be strong.

  As she watched the men work, standing far off to one side to avoid getting in their way, she carefully recorded each log as it went into the water. While she expected some loss on the trip to the mill, she intended to hold them accountable for excessive losses. Her dream home was dependent on the timber being floated before her.

  Foxworth Landing, Present day

  “I will have my attorney draw up the papers. Please be aware, however, there will be some…. unusual conditions on the deal, but I suspect none you will find unreasonable.”

  With that, Victoria rose from the chair and gave Robert a warm hug.

  “Welcome to the family Robert. Please make her come alive again,” she whispered, and then turned and walked back inside the house.

  Robert followed her through the house and escorted her out to her car. Before she left, he asked one last question.

  “May I stay awhile longer? I’d like to make a list of things I will need.”

  “Feel free, it is now yours. However, I would not stay too long as there is no power here and it gets quite dark past sunset,” she replied before starting her car and backing away.

  Robert gave her a smile and a wave as he watched her drive off.

  “Robert, what have you gotten yourself into?” he said absently as he turned and started mentally ticking off all the things he noted needing work.

  Heading back inside and up the stairs, he wandered from room to room, taking pictures with his phone and scribbling on the notepad app. As he did so, he began to wonder about the woman who had built this house. Charlotte Foxworth must have been hell on wheels as an 18-year-old, supervising the construction of her own house in the 1850s.

  As he wandered, he began to wonder if she had selected the detailed moldings in the bedrooms or the ornate stonework around the fireplaces. He was positive she was spinning in her grave as he made his way back downstairs and into the kitchen once more. Assuming that they had done the best they could at the time in the 1940s, this was the one room he couldn’t wait to completely gut.

  Just the kitchen and two upstairs bathrooms alone were going to cost him a fortune. His biggest concern, however, was how to replace the plumbing and electrical without stripping the interior walls and floors. He couldn’t be sure about the amount of work needed until they started pulling it out. He wanted to keep the rip and tear to a minimum or risk damaging the irreplaceable woodwork. As it was, he intended to redo the lath and plaster here in the kitchen once all the work in the walls was complete.

  He was well aware that installing the horizontal wooden lath strips and then plastering over them was an expensive and time-consuming process. A traditional building technique for interior walls since before America was settled, he had seen far too many remodelers rip it out only to replace the wall covering with modern drywall. He felt drywall lacked the character of the original plaster, with the subtle imperfections that plastering left behind.

  While he roamed the house, making his list, he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that he was being followed. Several times he stopped and turned, expecting to see someone standing nearby, only to find himself alone. He never got an uneasy feeling of foreboding, more a calm sense of curiosity.

  In his line of work, he had heard a million stories of haunted houses. Every historic structure had lore about the departed that roamed their halls. In all his efforts, not once had he ever encountered an apparition or even experienced something unexplainable. Every now and then a place would leave him with a feeling of discomfort, like a reminder that something bad had happened in the past, but nothing more.

  Those times he simply described as a place having bad energy, instances that he chalked up to knowing the history of a building before arriving there. This house didn’t have that feeling at all. Here, he actually felt a sense of home, a place where he could relax. This house had better energy than either of the old buildings he had seen the day he arrived, and they were delightful old structures.

  That thought gave him an idea. Flipping through the contacts on his phone, Robert found the one he was looking for and dialed the number. As he listened to it ring, he watched the sun setting out the front windows in the parlor.

  “Hello, this is RD,” he heard after the fifth ring.

  Roger Dean Bowen, or RD as he preferred, was the contractor Robert planned to use on the two restorations in town. They had done other work together in the past, all across the country, but this happened to be RD’s home town. RD had been the one to recommend Robert for these particular projects in the first place.

  “RD, this is Robert. I got the two bids, thanks.”

  “I heard you got both of the jobs! Way to go,” he replied with enthusiasm.

  “I expect you to be the GC,” Robert said, referring to the General Contractor Robert used for every project.

  “You know it, buddy,” RD replied with a laugh.

  “I have another gig for you here as well, south of town,” Robert explained.

  “Another place? Man, are you a glutton for punishment or what? Three at one time,” RD replied with a laugh.

  “Do me a favor and hit city hall tomorrow morning and find out all you can about Foxworth House. I’ll text you the address,” Robert asked.

  “Foxworth House. Why does that name sound familiar?”

  “It’s well over an hour south of town as the crow flies, on the St. Johns. I just bought the place and I am looking to restore it for me. I need as much of
the original plans and documentation as you can dig up.”

  “Will do, text me the address,” RD replied before hanging up.

  By now the sun had set and Robert was in almost complete darkness, the illumination from his phone the only source of light.

  “Wow, Victoria was right,” Robert said aloud as he triggered a flashlight app on his phone. Moving cautiously in the limited light, he made his way out of the parlor. First checking the back door, he made sure the lock was set before moving to the front of the house.

  Without a key, he could do no more than guarantee the door was closed securely.

  “Well, here’s to starting over,” he said as he ran his hand over the closed door in affection.

  He returned to his Jeep, heading up the drive and back out to the road. Stopping long enough to close the gates behind him, his mind awhirl with all he had to do, he jumped back in the Jeep and headed home.

  ----*----

  The following morning Robert found another larger parcel on his doorstep. This one contained the documentation outlining the sale of the property and the conditions of title transfer. Scanning through the instructions, Robert had to admit these were the strangest set of conditions he had ever seen. The fact that they were handwritten was surreal.

  The first item that caught his eye was the plan approval process. It was very common for him to have a plan approval meeting with cities, Historic Societies, and property owners. These all, however, tended to be convened as in-person reviews.

  Here, he was instructed to have his designs drafted up and left onsite, where a representative of the Foxworth family would review and sign off on the drawings. The documents went on to explain that due to their irregular schedules, they could only commit to completing the review by the following morning.

  Robert took the morning and read through the entire stack of paperwork while he ate his breakfast, and then made several calls afterward. He worked on extending both his car and room rentals as well as arranging to have his truck shipped from San Francisco. His final call was to his realtor’s voice mail in California, it still being very early there. The house there was very low maintenance, so he had little concern, he just requested she maintain it in his absence until the sale.