Foxy's Tale

  Foxy’s Tale

  By

  Karen Cantwell and L B Gschwandtner

  *****

  This book is a work of fiction. With the exception of Washington, D.C., DuPont Circle, Palm Beach and West Palm Beach, Florida, Dulles Airport, and Gdansk, Prussia, the names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners. Any use of the above is entirely the product of the authors’ twisted imaginations. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, persons or vampires, living, dead, or un-dead is purely coincidental.

  Copyright 2011 by Karen Fraunfelder Cantwell and LB Gschwandtner

  *****

  Acknowledgements

  The authors wish to thank many people . . . actually a few people . . . for their help with Foxy’s Tale. We’ll start with the obvious.

  Our families, for their forbearance during the times we were writing and not cooking dinner. The pizza delivery guys for keeping their cars in tip-top shape so our families didn’t starve while we wrote Foxy’s Tale.

  Our beta readers for their spot-on suggestions and opinions and, in case you don’t remember who you are, we list you here in alphabetical order: Beth Balbercek, Misha Crews, L. C. Evans, Colleen Thompkins, Kim Wright Wiley.

  Our copy editor, Sally Dunning, for her eagle eye and good judgment.

  Our graphic designer, Katerina Vamvasaki, for her excellent work on the cover (both front and back for those who buy the print version).

  And, finally, we’d like to thank Bela Lugosi for his fine work on the silver screen and Anne Rice for giving the vampire genre a kick-start just as everyone in the world had thoroughly digested Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

  Now where did that vial of blood we stored at the back of the fridge get to?

  Chapter One

  Gdansk, Prussia, 1851

  The snow started to fall harder and faster as the little man scrambled up a small embankment. The air was so quiet that the sound of his heavy breathing seemed magnified. Enormous white flakes collected on his eyebrows, but didn’t melt. He had to brush them away constantly just to see what was ahead. A thick wool coat was wrapped tightly around his small body. Heavy, brown, leather shoes protected his feet and a knitted cap covered his head. Despite that, he was so cold the snow stuck hard to his skin and clothing, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  Once he reached the top of the embankment on the edge of the dirt road, he stopped. He listened intently. Wolves howled far off in the woods and their call echoed momentarily until receding again to silence. The man was beginning to give up hope. And then – there! He heard the faintest sound of wooden wheels crunching the hard earth. Elated that he hadn’t lost the trail, he looked ahead. He knew this road – it led directly to the port at Gdansk. He trudged on, following the tracks that were quickly disappearing under the heavy blanket of snow. There was no doubt in his mind that, if he didn’t move quickly, the trunk he was tracking would be placed on a boat to God only knew where. Not again, the man thought. Not again.

  An hour later, tired, freezing, and desperate, the little man limped into the busy port town, past the fish shops, and to the edge of a dock. One lone fisherman’s rig was tied up at the end of the pier, but that was not what he came to see. He watched the ship that had left its pier as it sailed into the stormy night, too far away for him to reach. The trunk was on that ship and he wondered what he would do now.

  A voice rang in his head. He knew this voice. His father. A man with gifts greater – far greater – than his own. Was the voice really that of his father or just his own memory of it, berating him for failing on this important mission?

  It didn’t matter.

  The message was simple.

  “Myron. You are such a putz.”

  Chapter Two

  “Higher,” said Foxy.

  She pointed to the brick front of the old building, just above the storefront windows. “Just a little higher.”

  Two men grunted as they hoisted up a wide sign that said, “Second Chances,” in elegant, raised, gold letters.

  Foxy nodded and smiled. “Perfect. Right there.”

  One of the men started to fasten it down with a cord-free drill.

  Foxy held her arms up as if to stop them. “No! Wait! Drop it just a bit, please.” They sighed, but did what she asked. “How’s that?” yelled down the bearded man.

  She put her hands on her hips and tilted her head back. She just couldn’t decide. Higher or lower? She’d been at this sign-raising for over thirty minutes, and she knew these kind men were becoming very annoyed with her. If only opening a business were as easy as buying a new pair of Jimmy Choos. “Ah, sugar!” she shouted, stamping a foot and looking around for guidance. “Where is Amanda? She said she would help me with this.”

  “Lady,” called down the bearded man, “We got another job to do today.”

  “Fine.” She looked defeated. “Leave it there. Thank you! You two gentlemen have been so kind.” They set the screws, released the ropes from a pulley, and climbed down from their scaffolding.

  She was open for business. Foxy Anders, owner of Second Chances, the newest shop in the second oldest building smack in the middle of the chic district of DuPont Circle, Washington, D.C.

  “What’re ya’ll gonna sell in there, lady?” asked the other workman, a scruffy Southern boy with wild red hair and rosy cheeks.

  “Dreams of better days,” said Foxy. She flashed a bright smile. She was pretty and she knew it, had always known it. Until four months ago she’d never had any reason to question the power of that beauty. Then all hell broke loose. It was in the newspapers, on the TV, everywhere she went. Her former football-star-turned-sportscaster husband had been caught with a twenty-something “hostess” (the media loved to put quotes around the word “hostess”) from L.A. Not only caught, but caught naked, the two of them going at it like swine in the fountain at the Bellagio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. To Broadway show tunes the hotel piped in, for God’s sake. Handsome, charming Pete Anders – Foxy’s second mistake.

  “Yeah,” the workman told her. “I guess everyone dreams of better days.” He looked beyond Foxy and asked, “What do you think, Buzz?”

  A stranger standing just behind Foxy said, “Looks good,” and Foxy turned to see a tall, sandy-haired man in jeans and a dress shirt open at the neck. He was grinning and about to shake Foxy’s hand. And he was too good-looking for Foxy to deny this to him.

  “Oh,” she said. “Foxy Anders, new to the neighborhood.”

  “Buzz Vance,” he said, and shook her hand for a moment longer than necessary. “I see you’re using some of my subs. Hope they’re treating you okay.”

  “Oh, they’ve been just terrific. And I need all the help I can get. This is new to me. I’ve never had to fix up a store before.”

  “Well, if there’s anything you need help with, just give me a holler. I’m working on a house down the block right now.”

  “Are you a contractor?”

  “Well, contractor, architect, builder, a little of anything you might need.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card. Foxy liked the sound of that, but …

  The two men packed up their tools and hauled them into the back of a battered, dusty pickup. They’d be around for another few weeks until all of the inside work was finished. But that was it for today, and Foxy stood at the door to her new store.

  Above them, a teenage girl stared dow
n from the far left of three second-floor windows that faced the street. She watched the men prepare to leave. Her big gray eyes appeared half their size, weighed down by a heavy dose of black eyeliner. She carelessly slid a slender silver hoop earring into one earlobe hole. Above it she had already placed a series of studs into piercings that followed the curve of her ear like a crescent. Surrounding her were half-opened, unpacked boxes, clothes strewn here and there, shoes piled in one corner. The rumpled bed was unmade, the closet door opened to a mass of hangers and tangles of more clothes. Books dotted the room like fallen leaves, scattered in random patterns as if blown in from outside.

  She shrugged and moved away from the window to sit at a small desk cluttered with the detritus of her teenaged life. She stared at a computer screen and tapped her fingers absently on a book called Daughter of Darkness. She jiggled the mouse and the screen lit up on the blog she’d just that morning created. A field of black behind a gray page mottled like some river stone and, at the top, the header said Amanda’s Life in Hell. She thought this was heartfelt and heavy, a fitting title for the place where she could pour out all her complaints against the world as she saw it. Her slender, young fingers, with rings on almost every one, nails coated shiny black, rested lightly on the keyboard.

  Day One (she typed)

  Blogging is so lame. That’s why no one from school will ever see this. Except me, of course. At school I’m sort of no one anyway.

  We’re here. The new home. If you can call it that. I have to walk up a flight of stairs just to get to our apartment. It’s not even our house, totally. She’s going to rent out apartments, and we’re right on a busy street in the middle of town, so you can hear the people and cars and buses all day and all night. It’s . . .

  She stopped for a moment and looked at what she had written. Then she backspaced, deleting everything.

  Day One (she wrote again)

  I hate my mom.

  Chapter Three

  At the back of the generous ground floor space Foxy struggled to disengage a rather cumbersome brass chandelier from its packing carton. It was not at all clear whether the fixture she planned to sell for thirty-eight hundred dollars was going to emerge from its cardboard enclosure or Foxy was going to join it inside. At the very moment of stalemate, the brass bell Foxy’s workmen had installed just that morning tinkled gaily and in walked an exceedingly handsome young man, nattily turned out in gray slacks and a pale pink dress shirt. His stylish black leather pumps cast off a high shine, the soles so soft they made not a sound on the wood floor as he waltzed casually around, taking in the current chaos of Second Chances.

  “Uh,” she grunted from inside the cow-sized carton, sounding as if possibly an ex-lax would be in order.

  “Excuse me,” the young man cleared his throat.

  “Come and help me please. I think I’m stuck.”

  “What are you trying to do?”

  “Get this damned light out of this damned box.”

  He shook his head in a ‘tsk-tsk-tsk sort of way. “You’re going about it all wrong. You need to get yourself out of there.” He clapped his hands twice. “Chop! Chop! Then we can turn the carton on its side and slide the thing out.”

  “Oh,” Foxy looked up. Even with her hair smooshed at odd angles and garnished with four packing peanuts, there was no denying that Foxy had the looks to bring most men (and a few women) to their knees.

  She let go the neck of the brass chandelier and pushed a wandering lock of blond hair from her green eyes. A packing peanut floated to the floor. She smiled up at the man.

  “Thanks.” She climbed out of the carton. Together they carefully turned it on its side and the man slid the chandelier free. Once emancipated from its enclosure onto the dusty floor, it looked more like a deformed squid than a lighting fixture.

  She moaned. “What was I thinking? I couldn’t sell this to Liberace if he were alive.”

  More head-shaking from the unknown visitor. “No, no, no. You’re not looking at it right. It just needs the right accent piece.” He glanced around the store. “Like that.” He pointed to a heavy round mahogany dining table with intricately carved legs. “Where ever did you find it?”

  He walked over and admiringly stroked one of its legs.

  “It’s perfect. Just wonderful.” He circled the table, touching it as if he might make love to it any minute. “I know a very stylish lady who would adore this for her new town house over in Adams Morgan.”

  “Could you send her my way – along with her wallet? I could use the business.” Foxy teased.

  “You’re kidding, but I could do that for you,” he tipped one shoulder up and tilted his head to the side.

  Foxy studied him more closely.

  “I came in about the ad,” said the man. “About the apartment?” He raised his eyebrows and looked back at Foxy.

  “Oh! Yes. And here I thought you were sent from heaven to save me and my store from certain failure.” She laughed a nervous laugh and brushed another packing peanut from her hair. “The apartment. Which one?”

  “The ad said a one-bedroom.” He took another quick visual scan of the store. “As for being a savior . . . trust me, I’ve been called a lot of things and that’s NOT one of them. But . . . let’s see that apartment first, and then maybe we’ll talk.”

  Foxy wasn’t sure what to make of the stylish man, but she thought she liked him. “Apartments. There are two. One is on the third floor in the back. The other is an English basement,” she told him. “It opens to the garden behind the house. Very nice. The rent on that one’s a bit higher because it’s bigger. But they’re both quite spacious.”

  This was all new to Foxy – actually having to make money. She had always been better at spending it. Now she had to rent out apartments, deal with contractors, hang weird chandeliers. She sighed again.

  “You look like you’ve been ridden quickly and put away damp,” the man said suddenly and with great gusto.

  Stunned at first, Foxy took a beat, then laughed so hard she nearly fell over the empty chandelier box. “I think it’s ‘ridden HARD and put away WET.’” The laugh was deep and probably the best laugh she’d had in a long time, and he joined in.

  “And, while I don’t even know your name, that phrase doesn’t exactly seem . . . like you. It’s more . . .”

  “Hetero?” he giggled, then jumped into a weak, but recognizable John Wayne imitation. “Yup, little lady. I was bringin’ some humor to the occasion, like mah Uncle Bo used to in the day. Now how ’bout showin’ me that apartment with the garden, Ma’am? Sounds like I could grow me some corn and tobaccy back there.”

  “Tobaccy?” She’d laughed so hard she had to wipe tears from her eyes.

  The man took his fingers out of his belt loops and dropped the John Wayne. “Sorry – I should have done my Bette Midler. You’d give me a standing ovation, then,” he smiled.

  “No! The John Wayne made my day. I needed that laugh.” She rummaged around in a wooden box at the edge of a cluttered desk and pulled up a bunch of keys hanging from a metal ring as big as a bangle bracelet. “If you rent the apartment, I’ll take you up on the Bette Midler, how’s that?” Foxy fingered the keys for a moment.

  “They’re on here, I’m sure,” she said. “I just don’t know which ones go to what.”

  The keys jangled as she poked at first one and then the next around the big ring. The man stepped closer to look at the keys, his eyebrows arched, as if he was investigating a mystery. He reached out.

  “May I?” he asked and, with a shrug, Foxy willingly handed him the key ring. What was she going to do, after all? He couldn’t possibly know which key to select any more than she could.

  “We’ll just have to try them all,” Foxy told him and took a deep, it’s-all-too-much, breath. “Let’s go upstairs first.” And she turned to the shop’s front door. “The other outside door leads to the apartments.”

  “But this is amazing,” the man didn’t follow her. “Look at this ke
y ring. And some of these keys. Why, this ring is made from wrought iron. And look at this one key. Here.” He held it away from the others hanging from the big ring.

  The key was large, the bow, the part he held between his thumb and forefinger, was ornately carved like a big flat flower with cutouts. And the blade looked as if it was straight out of a scene from Macbeth.

  “This key alone has to weigh – well, if it were any heavier, I could bench press the thing. Lord knows I could use the workout.”

  Foxy leaned in to examine it more closely. “I doubt that key goes to anything in this house. Just a leftover. The house is very old after all. Perhaps it opened something back in the day, but now . . .” She shook her head.

  “What about the others on this ring?” The man held it out to Foxy and she took it back. As they went out the door, she locked it behind her.

  “Well, at least I know this one locks this door. And this one,” she jangled the ring again and found another key, “goes to this door. I had those special Medico keys made for it. You know, the security kind you have to be the registered owner to have a copy made? Just enough for every apartment to have one. And one for me, and one for my daughter. And if she lets any of her little pals get hold of it, I’ll strangle her.”

  The man chuckled, “She must be a teen.” He followed Foxy up the stairs to the top floor.

  *****

  Amanda sat on her bed, pillows shoved behind her as a backrest, laptop propped on her knees, her shiny black nails striking the keyboard in a clackety-clack.

  Day One – STILL (how time creeps when you’re miserable) (she wrote)

  I can hear them tromping up the stairs to look at that apartment. I knew it would be like this. Strangers living in my house. I hope he doesn’t take it. But she’ll do anything to make money now.

  Foxy. This is my mother’s name. Not something normal like Mary or Susan. Nope. Foxy. And she’s proud of it. Proud that ten thousand years ago she strutted on a stage in a bathing suit, parading her boobs around like trophies. Roxanne – Miss Georgia. Foxy Roxy, they called her. She could go by Roxanne, but does she? Of course not. That would be normal. No, she tells everyone she meets, “Call me Foxy.” And she bats her eye lashes and giggles and smiles flashing her perfectly white teeth. MAKES ME WANT TO HURL.