The Ghost in the Glass House (10 page)

“They were so heavy,” Jack said. “Do you like them?”

“Yes,” she answered. The softness of her own voice startled her. It was the voice she might have used to answer her father when he tucked her in at night. She hadn't sounded like that since she was a little girl.

The realization she had dropped her guard turned her mind suspicious.

“Where did you go?” she asked. “When I went up to the house?”

“I was with you,” Jack said. But his voice turned up at the end, like a question.

Clare hated to be told something she knew wasn't true. Adults did it to children all the time. But when children did it to each other, it had a special flavor of betrayal. If children didn't tell each other the truth, how would any of them ever understand the world? With Jack, it was even worse. She couldn't see his hands to tell if he was rich or poor, his clothes to guess if he came from Boston or New York, his face to see if he was interested or bored. She couldn't know anything about him except what he told her. The thought that he could be making everything up, like an older kid telling a little one that chewing gum grew on trees, made her feel foolish, and furious.

“Where did I get the bucket?” she demanded.

“Mack's bench,” Jack tried: another question.

Clare gave her head a single hard shake. “It was by the door,” she said, and drew her feet under her to get up.

“Wait,” Jack said.

Clare waited, her eyebrows raised. Now he was the one who sounded like a confused kid.

“I tried to come with you,” Jack said. “I couldn't.”

The defeat in his voice gave Clare the uncomfortable feeling that somehow she was the bully, not him.

“Why not?” she asked.

The silence lasted so long that Clare glanced around the glass house, wondering if he'd disappeared again.

But when he spoke, his voice came from exactly where it had been, on the floor beside her. “I can see the big house from here,” he said quietly. “But when I try to get close, there's only mist.”

“Mist?” Clare said.

“Like fog, before the sun burns it off,” Jack said. “Did you ever stand inside a bank while it rolls out to sea?”

Clare shook her head, no.

“It's so bright, it hurts your eyes,” Jack said. “But you can't see anything.”

Clare looked up to the house on the hill. Vines obscured the view and dust clouded the panes. But there was no sign of mist anywhere in the yard.

“I tried to go with you,” Jack went on. “But you disappeared, and I got lost in the mist.”

“It's all around the big house?” Clare asked. Her imagination blanketed the red peaks and white brick in thick clouds.

“No,” Jack said. “It's all around this one.”

The phantom fog in her mind rolled down the hill and curled around the glass house, blotting out the lawn, the oaks, the occasional gardens, the lilacs, and the forest beyond. Clare pulled her knees up. “Right up to the glass?” she asked, her voice low, as if to keep the fog from overhearing.

“You see the redbud tree?” Jack asked.

Clare nodded. The delicate trunk divided into slim, trailing branches near the foot of the hill, maybe twenty paces from the glass house.

“It starts there,” he said. “And just past the oak tree. And a ways into the forest.”

The landmarks he chose described a large, clumsy circle, perhaps fifty paces in diameter, around the glass house.

“It's like a ring,” Clare said.

“That's right,” Jack said, with a teacher's pleasure at a quick student.

“But you don't see it all the time.”

“Only if I go over there,” Jack said. “I don't like to.”

“It's always by the redbud tree?” Clare asked. “It never moves?”

“No,” Jack said. “It doesn't.”

When Jack spoke next, his voice came from halfway across the glass house, drifting toward the door.

“But I can climb all the trees, as high as I want,” he said. “There's no mist up there.”

Clare scrambled to her feet. By the time she followed him out into the glade, the vines that covered the sides of the house had already started to sag and twitch under Jack's invisible weight. When he reached the top of the house, which crested just below the lowest branches of the young maples that surrounded it, glass rattled faintly and the topmost vines shivered. Then a single rose seemed to leap from the roof of the glass house into the branches of the maple tree.

The maple branches swayed, and sprang back into place. For a long moment, Clare lost track of Jack. Then, from the topmost branches of the tree, the tiny petals of the unlucky rose began to rain down into the glade.

“C
AREFUL
,” D
ENBY SAID SHARPLY
. “If you get yourself killed, they'll never let the rest of us come back.”

Bridget wobbled on an outcrop of black rock with considerable flair, caught his hand, and swooned against him. Denby's body stiffened at the contact, as if steeling himself against a blow. But when he glanced at her, his eyes were bright with something like hunger.

“I'm sorry,” Bridget said, her voice full of promise, not remorse. She righted herself, shook her shoulders, and began to pick her way nimbly down the cliff.

Denby watched her go.

He and Bram had arrived at Bridget and Teddy's early that afternoon and insisted that Bridget, Teddy, and Clare follow them to the beach. Teddy had demanded an explanation as to why he should leave the wicker couch he was sprawled on, but Denby had flatly refused, which created a mystery far more potent than any promises Denby could have made.

So they had all walked up the white shell road to Denby's rented house, where the set of half-ruined stone steps led down the cliff to the beach, just a few yards from the mouth of the cave.

By day, sun lit the water in the cave a rich turquoise and reflected up on the rough walls in pale strands that shifted and rocked with each pulse of the tide. Bram darted in first. Shoes in hand, Denby and Bridget clambered easily over the rocks. But now that Clare could see everything, she could hardly believe she'd ever gotten to the other side.

The rocks were the size of suitcases or traveling trunks, their spines sharp, their faces slick. Water hissed and fizzed between them. Everyone else leapt from stone to stone. But Clare stood with both bare feet on a single rock, surveyed for another likely spot, then took up a firm position before choosing the next.

“Hurry up,” Bridget called. “Someone's going to see you.”

“You're holding up the whole caravan,” Teddy echoed from a few rocks behind Clare.

Rattled, Clare stepped blindly from one rock to the next, where the sharp edge she landed on opened a long, shallow cut from the ball of her foot to the arch. She jerked back from the sting of salt, and turned the sole up to find a thin line of bright red. Where the blood met water on her skin, it blossomed and faded to rose.

“I cut my foot,” Clare called back.

“So did I,” Denby retorted. “It's salt water. They use it to clean wounds.”

“You learn that in the war?” Teddy asked.

The sting of the wound pushed Clare on toward the ledge. But it also made her clumsy. A few rocks before she reached the cave, her foot turned. She tried to right herself with another step, but only reeled. The sea and the sharp rocks swung sickeningly around her, and her mind filled with fear of the phantom pain of a fall on her shin, her knees, her side.

A steady arm caught her around the waist. “You all right?” Bram asked.

Clare listed against him, then straightened, surprised by the heat that seeped from his arm through her thin dress.

She nodded.

“Here,” Bram said, and pointed to the wide, flat plane of a nearby rock.

Clare stepped where he pointed. He stepped along with her and found his footing on a narrower spot, his arm still around her waist.

“Here,” he said again, and pointed to another rock. When they reached that one: “There.”

A few steps later, they'd gained the ledge.

“That's one way to get a girl to hold your hand,” Teddy observed.

Instantly, Bram released her. Bridget gave Clare a hard look. Up ahead, Denby's voice rang out. “Come on,” he said. “We're almost there.”

“Thank you,” Clare told Bram.

Bridget and Teddy disappeared after Denby, but Bram waited as Clare dropped her shoes on the stone. She made an attempt to wipe the blood from her sole, but it only smeared. After a minute, she gave up and slipped the shoes on.

“Go ahead,” Bram said, nodding into the dark.

Clare's foot was ginger from the cut, but she stiffened her back against the pain. Around them, the sun flashed and twisted on the curved walls.

This time, she didn't falter when the passage narrowed and grew dim. But when the blind turns let them out into the hidden cavern, she stopped short.

An entire suite of furniture had appeared on the waxy white rock in the center of the room: a baby-blue couch with flourishes of cherry wood, a leather armchair with tufts of horsehair spilling from a cut in one flank, a red loveseat with a high arched back, a green velvet ottoman with long gold fringe that fell all the way from the seat to the stone two feet below. There was even a low table in the center, bearing an assortment of mismatched oil lamps whose unsteady light turned strange among the fingers of rock in the high corners of the cave.

Bridget had already taken up a corner of the red loveseat, pulled her feet up, leaned back into the curve, and arranged her skirt in a half-moon sweep. She glanced away pointedly when Clare appeared.

Teddy, beside the loveseat, shook his head and laughed. “I'll be damned,” he said.

“What do you think?” Bram asked, beside Clare.

The eagerness in his eyes made it hard for Clare to hold his gaze.

“How did you get this all down here?” she asked.

“You threw it all down the hill?” Teddy said.

“Where did it come from?” Bridget broke in.

“Our places,” Denby said, with an unconvincing attempt at nonchalance.

“No one noticed?” Clare asked as she and Bram came up.

“We carried it down,” Bram explained. “Except for the blue couch. Denby made a pulley for that.”

“A pulley?” Bridget repeated.

Denby nodded. “A simple one. I lashed it with rope and we let it out around one of the boulders.”

“I carried the red one down by myself,” Bram told Clare.

“It's so
comfortable
,” Bridget said, and gave a little wriggle.

Clare sat in the corner of the blue couch. Bram took a seat on it too, splitting the difference: not beside her, but not on the other side, either. Teddy settled into the damaged armchair.

Up close, it was clear that all the furniture had also suffered in its travels. One side of the ottoman's gold fringe was shrunken and stiff, probably from a dip in salt water. A water stain spread over the blue cushion between Clare and Bram, and the velvet was smeared with tar and dusted by sand. The low table had sustained several gouges that cut through its deep varnish to the raw wood below. Only Bram's loveseat seemed to have survived more or less intact.

“What will we do about this?” Clare asked, wiping at a smear of tar. “Before we put it back?”

Denby was the only one still standing. “We're not putting it back,” he said.

“We're not?” Bram said, surprised.

“They don't know it's gone now,” Denby said. “No one will realize until after we've left—if they even do then. And who would think of looking here?”

Bram frowned. Clare's heart tugged at the lonely fate of the furniture Denby had just consigned forever to the dark cave.

Denby took his seat on the green and gold ottoman like a king giving the signal that court was now open.

Bridget sat up. “What should we do now?” she asked.

Denby's glance at her carried clear contempt at the suggestion that the small miracle he'd already accomplished demanded any embellishment.

Bridget was undeterred. “We could play post office,” she said.

Clare had never played post office, but Bridget had learned it last summer in Nice. The game didn't have any clear rules, or a winner or loser. One player, the postman, had to leave the group. When the postman returned, the rest of the party announced who among them had to go out to receive their “letter”—a kiss.

“Post office is for kids,” Teddy said.

“No, it isn't,” said Bridget.

“It's for kids who can't get anyone to kiss them,” Teddy amended.

“That's not true,” Bridget said.

“Sure it is,” Teddy said. “How many people have you kissed?”

“Plenty,” Bridget answered. But then her face flickered, uncertain. Clare knew Bridget wasn't lying. She was wondering if she should have told the truth.

“When you weren't playing post office?” Teddy pressed.

“That's none of your business,” Bridget said.

Clare didn't know what adventure Denby had had in mind when he dragged the furniture down the cliff, but this clearly wasn't it. He looked from Bridget to Teddy with unconcealed fury. “I don't think any of us really care how many boys Bridget has kissed,” he said.

The triumph that flared in Bridget's eyes at this was replaced almost instantly by a wounded look.

Teddy raised his hands in mock surrender. “All right, all right,” he said.

It only took a moment for his gaze to wander from Bridget to Clare. “What about you, Clare?” Teddy asked. “How many people have you kissed?”

Beside her on the couch, Clare could feel Bram shift.

She stared at Teddy, her gaze steady, with the unblinking silence that sometimes worked with adults: made them forget unpleasant questions, or replace old questions with new ones.

Teddy just laughed. “You haven't kissed anyone,” he said. “Have you?”