Free Possessed by Kathryn Casey Page A

“I want my own business,” she told Fox.
    When he considered it, he decided it could work well for his wife. “I thought she was a caring person, so I thought she’d be good at it. I wanted to support her.”
    That spring, Jim Fox rented an apartment near the new house, under construction on Baron Creek. They chose white brick for the exterior and inside a white-tile floor in the entry, all white walls and white carpeting. Meanwhile, they put the Bryan house up for sale, and Ana continued to live there while she attended the Healing Handz Massage Academy.
    The program at Healing Handz was just opening, and Ana enrolled for its first session. Housed on a horse ranch, the owners offered a three-hundred-hour curriculum that satisfied all the state licensing requirements. The owner, Susan Hartzog, would later describe Ana as friendly andwarm, always trying to help others. “I don’t remember all my students, but I remember Ana,” she said. “We have a disabled son, and Ana was kind to him.”
    Thursday and Friday evenings and every other Saturday, Ana arrived at the school immaculately dressed, her long hair pulled back in a ponytail, ready to work. Throughout the sessions, she talked about her family’s plans, excited to be moving to Houston. The house in Bryan remained on the market, but everything seemed to be falling into place. At the school, Ana wore scrubs, but when Susan happened upon her in town, she noticed how well dressed Ana was, nearly always wearing stylish high heels. “She looked like she came from money,” Hartzog would recall. “I always assumed that her parents were upper-class.”

    Ana training at massage school
    (Courtesy of Susan M. Hartzog)
    That May, Ana completed her course work, on everything from business practices to hydrotherapy, and she and the girls moved with Jim into the apartment, where they watched over the new house as it was built. One day walking the lot, looking at the house rising on its foundation, they met Jon Paul and Ruth Espinoza, an attractive and affable young couple expecting their first child building a one-story on the adjacent lot. Their Realtor had told them that the Foxes, their new neighbors, were “a nice family with two girls.”
    The Espinozas initially believed the Realtor’sassessment: that the couple living next door was an average, happy family, one without secrets. But before long, their opinions of Ana Trujillo Fox changed. “I got the impression there was something strange going on over there,” said Jon Paul. “Things just didn’t seem right.”

    Ana at her massage-school graduation party
    (Courtesy of Susan M. Hartzog)
    A s fall arrived, Jim and Ana and her two daughters, Siana and Arin, moved into the Baron Creek house. Unusual in suburban Houston where interiors tend toward the traditional or have more of a country Texas flare, Ana decorated the all-white insides—walls and floors—with contemporary black-and-white furniture: in the living room, black-leather couches with a white-marble table, black bookcases, and black-granite kitchen countertops. One room in the four-bedroom house was Ana’s art room, and she stacked her paintings against the walls in Jim’s office.
    By then, Ana’s mother and stepdad ran a secondhand furniture store in Waco. At times, they bought better pieces in good condition. Once Ana and Jim moved in, Trina and Gene brought two bedroom sets from the shop for their granddaughters’ bedrooms.
    Baron Creek was larger and more affluent than any house Ana had ever lived in, and she seemed happy, at least at first. “Ana saw what money could buy. With her second husband, she lived a life she hadn’t known before,” a relative said.
    A t first, all seemed well on Baron Creek Lane.
    Jon Paul Espinoza, an insurance salesman, and Jim became friends, stopping to chat outside, sometimes cutting each other’s lawns when one