Читать книгу Betrayal In Blood - Michael Benson - Страница 21

CHAPTER 14

Tackle Frisbee

Letchworth State Park, “the Grand Canyon of the East,” is thirty-five miles south of Rochester. It is certainly one of the most scenic places in New York State. The park lies beside the Genesee River Gorge, which is more than six hundred feet deep in some places, overlooking the river as it courses past three major waterfalls between cliffs. Picnicking, camping, hiking, and horseback riding are some of the preferred activities.

When Essie Bassett heard that Ginny was coming for a visit and bringing Chris, she knew where they should go: Letchworth. And so, it was at this park that the Winebrenners and Bassetts, two families with Ginny in common, decided to hold their 2001 reunion.

During July 2001, the Winebrenners—Cleo, Ginny, and Chris (Cyril stayed in Iowa with his wife and son)—came to New York State to celebrate Chris’s eighteenth birthday. Ginny took Chris to visit his sisters in New York. The Winebrenners stayed at Kevin and Tabby’s house in Penfield and drove down to meet Samantha at the park.

Only on one occasion, that Ginny can remember, did all four of her children get together in one place. The girls were visiting Graceland University for a church event and Cyril and Chris visited them there.

Samantha admitted a few years later she had not really known her brothers very well. She, for one, was not disappointed that Cyril hadn’t come. She described Cyril as “not my favorite person. He was arrogant, even when I first knew him when he was younger. He was kind of a know-it-all, and I usually don’t like people like that.”

For the visit to New York during summer 2001, the focus was on Chris, the birthday boy. Both of the girls brought Chris a birthday present, wrapped and festooned with bows.

“For his birthday we bought him a new outfit and took him to New York [State]. It was Chris’s vacation and part birthday present,” Ginny said. “Sammy bought him a little jeweled knife. Tabby bought him a shirt with a dragon on it. He had such a blast.”

At Letchworth, alongside the Genesee River Gorge, they had a cookout and a picnic. But the thing that everyone remembered best and most fondly about the day was when the Bassett girls and Chris, along with Tabby and Kevin’s son K.C., played a rollicking game of what they called “tackle Frisbee.” It started out as normal frisbee, the girls and Chris just throwing the disc around, playing catch. Then Chris began to intercept throws that were supposed to go from Tabby to Sam or from Sam to Tabby. Tackle frisbee, as it turned out, had no rules. Most of the action involved both girls and K.C. ganging up on Chris to get him off his feet.

“He was so much taller than the girls that he could just reach up and grab the frisbee. After a while of that, the girls decided that they were going to get even, and they tackled him to get the Frisbee away from him,” Ginny recalled. “Then little K.C. would jump in the middle and pretty soon everybody was tackling everybody—gently, of course. They were having one heck of a good time.”

The next day they all went to Niagara Falls and crossed over into Canada, where they visited Marineland Park.

“We visited flea markets that day,” Ginny recalled. “It was a little bit of here, there, and everywhere.”

Sammy’s boyfriend at the time was a stock car driver at Woodhull Raceway, a small Southern Tier dirt track. One evening they went to the track to see him race. That visit would turn out to be the last time that the Bassett girls would get to play and interact with their brother Chris.