The Ghost in the Glass House (4 page)

Mack's eyes traveled over his brutalized sweet peas and lilies with the harried resignation of a farmer evaluating storm damage. He didn't contradict her.

For the rest of the meal, whenever Mack found himself forced by politeness to meet Clare's mother's eyes, she gave him a nonsensically bright smile. By this, Clare knew that her mother was unhappy. A few years before, Clare might have spent the whole meal inventing compliments to make up for the ones Mack hadn't made, or offered her mother bits of toast dragged in marmalade or bacon grease. When this failed, Clare would have used up the rest of the morning imagining more clever things she might have said, or better temptations she might have offered: all for nothing. The campaigns she had waged in the past to ease her mother's sorrows had all been a waste, if they hadn't made things worse. By now she knew the best thing to do was leave her mother be.

As soon as the meal was done, Clare's mother carried the bouquet back up to her own room, where she refused to allow Tilda to cull or freshen it for a week.

“They don't have to be perfect to keep,” she told Tilda, at Tilda's first attempt to remove several spent lilies on her morning patrol of the room. “Leave them for a day.”

When Tilda returned the next morning, determination shining on her face, Clare's mother again stopped her with a word. “Oh, you'd better leave them, Tilda,” she said. “I like to see how they change when they fade.”

Thwarted for the second time, Tilda obeyed with a vengeance: over the following days, as the stems drooped and the water in the vase turned to thick milk, she ignored the bouquet completely. She even neglected to wipe up the gold pollen that fell on the slick wood of the bedside table where the vase stood.

By the end of the week, the leaves of the trailing rose branches had turned gray-green and brittle. The small pink roses had folded, and their petals dropped to the floor in clouds at the vibration from any step. Half the color had drained from the splayed petals of the tulips, and the blue delphinium had gone almost black. The smell of sweet rot filled the room even when the windows were wide open.

“Do you want me to take care of them?” Clare finally asked. She had come to see if her mother was ready to go down for breakfast, but stopped in the doorway at the strong scent.

Her mother, arrayed in the seemingly infinite folds of a white chiffon dressing gown, her blond hair unbound and gleaming in the early sun, looked up from the wing chair by the window, where she was curled up with a history of Rome. She had discovered it on the bookshelf and had been terrifying her conversational partners with it all week, introducing crucifixions and regicide to the conversation with barely concealed glee whenever the topic turned to the popular novels or sentimental poetry her friends liked to read. Her friends, of course, were both fascinated and appalled. They couldn't work up any indignation against a diseased imagination, since the events had actually happened, and they could hardly dismiss the history of the empire as a tawdry scandal, so after a few false starts they had begun to object to her comments on the basis of good taste: the world was full of true stories, they agreed, but simple truth hardly made a thing worth repeating. This charge allowed them to retell the gory tales, as evidence in the case against Clare's mother, both endlessly and with impunity.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Clare's mother said. “Does it bother you? I'll take care of them right now.”

In a rush of chiffon, she rose, swept up the amber vase and its contents, and carried it into her bathroom. A trail of pollen mixed with dropped petals marked her way. Clare knelt and collected the stray petals from the carpet, then followed.

Her mother had already shoved the remains of the bouquet face-down into the starched white case that lined the wicker wastebasket. Gray-green stains spread into the crisp fabric like watercolor blooming on rag paper. Foul water poured from the lip of the vase into the sink in a steady stream.

Then, as the stream subsided, something clinked inside the amber glass.

“What's that?” Clare asked.

Clare's mother turned the faucet on, ran clean water into the vase, and swirled it around. Then she turned the entire vase upside down.

A small key fell out, bleeding rust into the white sink.

“What do you suppose this is for?” Clare's mother asked, and retrieved it.

Clare knew instantly. The handle of the key was a filigree leaf, its veins described by mottled green metal. The oxidized copper matched the bones of the glass house, and the veins of the leaf followed the same weird patterns as the etching on its door. She didn't answer.

Downstairs at breakfast, Clare's mother laid the key beside her plate as Tilda set a glass of orange juice down at her place.

“Where did you get that?” Tilda asked, her voice sharp with surprise.

“We found it,” Clare's mother said. “At the bottom of a vase.”

Her satisfaction at having rattled Tilda was cut short by Tilda's confiscation of the key. One moment it lay on the table. The next it had disappeared into one of the capacious pockets of Tilda's apron.

Now it was Clare's mother's voice that rose in surprise. “Does it go to something, then?” she asked.

“The glass house,” Tilda told her.

“The glass house?” Clare's mother repeated. “Is it locked?”

Tilda gave a resolute nod.

Clare's mother held her hand out, palm up. “Well, I'm sure we'd love to have the key to it. It looks like a perfect little jewel.”

“We don't use the glass house,” Tilda told her. “Not for years.”

Clare's mother lifted her hand higher. “I'm sure we would.”

In answer, Tilda walked to a drawer in the far corner of the kitchen, opened it, and dropped the key in.

Before lunch, Clare had stolen it.

S
TEALING THE KEY WAS
child's play.

Every morning after breakfast, Tilda made her rounds of the house with a bark basket of cleaning supplies: lemon oil, bleached rags, and a duster that appeared to be handmade from the green and black feathers of several fancy local chickens.

After Clare's mother retreated to her own room, where she usually spent the morning with some book, Clare took up a sentry position at the top of the stairs. She waited until Tilda crossed the dining room below and listened as her footsteps faded into the far reaches of the house. Then Clare slipped down to the kitchen. The key was just where Tilda had left it, nestled on a pile of striped dishtowels. An instant later, Clare had hidden it snugly in the sash of her dress.

The whole operation had gone so fast and been so simple that she actually felt a little disappointed. But to get to the glass house without attracting attention was a different challenge.

Clare surveyed the yard through the windows over the garden. The glade of maples around the glass house and the vines that grew over it made the interior invisible from the big house. Once she reached it, she'd be hidden. But if she approached it directly, down the slope of the back lawn, anybody could see her from any of the back windows. The only concealed approach was through the forest that bounded the backyard and made a sloppy triangle with the road that ran away from the property. The glass house sat in the crook of this triangle. If she cut through the woods, they would screen her until she reached it.

Clare slipped out the kitchen door onto the pebble drive. She loitered along it, feigning interest in the cracked shells among the small gray stones, until it brought her within a few feet of the forest. Then she darted into the trees.

She was surprised by the sudden chill under the canopy. The early-summer sun had warmed the broad lawn but not the green shadows of the forest. She was used to the manicured shade and well-behaved trees of city gardens, but here thick underbrush grew between the big trunks. She couldn't take a single step without stopping to think where to put her foot next. And the place was haunted by sounds. Unseen creatures lurked in the brambles until she was almost upon them, then exploded, still invisible, through the brush. Startled birds swooped from their perches, cawing alarms. Before she reached the glass house she was as jumpy as a fawn, and when she finally caught sight of it, she lunged out of the woods like an animal breaking cover.

On the mossy flagstone by the door, the fright began to drain from her. She pulled the key from her sash. It settled cleanly into the lock. She turned it, stepped inside, replaced the key at her waist, and pulled the door shut behind her.

A book dropped to the floor with the unmistakable rattle of pages falling together.

Clare caught her breath and scanned the room.

A few dozen titles were stacked in crooked piles on the buffet, between the mismatched candelabras. But the sound hadn't come from there.

It had come from the center of the room, near the divan.

The divan, sea-foam green, formed a half moon along with a pair of mulberry wing chairs that stood at opposite ends of a low table with a single shallow drawer. Clare slipped past the hulk of the piano and stepped by one of the wing chairs, into the ring. A book had fallen to the richly patterned rug beside the divan, face-down, its boards splayed, its gilt-edged pages curled.

Instinctively, Clare bent down to pick it up and set it right. But before her outstretched hand touched the cover, the book rose from the rug, by the spine, until its boards and pages hung straight. Then it toppled over on its side.

Clare straightened up.

The book lay flat and still.

Clare stared fiercely. She knew the power of her imagination. It had created angel after angel to stand guard outside lonely hotel rooms. It had invented whole civilizations in the darkness beyond the windows of speeding night trains. But until this moment, she had never had any trouble telling the difference between the products of her imagination and the actual world.

Her mind called back the new memory of the falling book, to see if it worked differently than other memories. She remembered stepping through the door, the sudden sound, the book's slow rise from the floor. Then she played it back again. But the memory was too fresh for this kind of treatment. Each time she tried to go over it, the ceiling of the glass house in her mind grew higher and higher until it towered several stories overhead. The furniture multiplied and divided. The imaginary book changed color in her mind from simple brown, to green, to red.

Frustrated, Clare stooped to pick up the real book.
Hawthorne
was printed on the dull brown spine in gold letters. She flipped the cover open to the title page:
Mosses from an Old Manse
.

Beside her, someone sighed.

The sigh came from nearby, close enough that it sounded like the person who gave it could reach out and touch her. But no one stood where the sound had come from. And before her mind could work out this problem, she caught sight of Tilda not ten yards away, just beyond the glade, carrying an armful of peonies up to the big house as if they were a basket of unwashed laundry.

Clare dropped to her knees. An instant later, she was spread-eagled on the rug, out of the old woman's line of sight, the book under her belly.

She lay like that, her forehead pressed into the rough carpet, until her heart stopped pounding. Then she lay there a while longer. She had just started to calculate whether Tilda had made it back up to the big house or not when a light hand touched her shoulder.

“Are you all right?” a boy's voice asked.

Clare sprang upright. She scrambled back on the rug until her shoulders struck the divan.

No one was in sight.

Clare glanced outside. Tilda was gone. The lawn was empty.

As she scanned the glass house again, Clare's eyes narrowed. She hated to be the victim of a trick.

“Who's there?” she demanded.

Her skin tingled with fear, but her curiosity was stronger. Gingerly, she stood. She checked behind the divan, circled the wing chairs, peered under the lid of the piano.

“I'm sorry,” the voice said.

Clare froze in the shadow of the piano's wing.

“I didn't mean to scare you,” the voice added. It wasn't a child's voice, and it wasn't a man's. It belonged to a boy her age, or maybe a bit older. And it still came from the same spot near the divan, where no one stood.

“Who's there?” Clare repeated.

The silence lasted so long that Clare began to wonder again if the whole episode had been a trick of her own mind. Then the voice answered from the piano bench, just a few steps away: “Jack.”

“Jack who?” Clare asked.

Another silence. Then, “Cunningham.”

Seemingly of its own accord, the piano played the first few notes of a simple melody. Clare shuddered.

“Stop it!” she said.

The melody broke off.

“You don't like that song?” Jack asked, surprised.

“Who are you?” Clare demanded again.

In the silence that followed, she realized how much trouble she would have had answering that question once she'd already told someone her name. And something else: how little a name actually told you about anyone.

Jack seemed stymied by the same problem. “I live here,” he said finally.

“In the glass house?” Clare asked.

“And the lawn,” he said. “And the woods.”

“What about the big house?”

Jack fell silent again. The stillness broke the spell his voice had cast. Doubt crept over Clare again. Had she fallen asleep without realizing? Had her other daydreams ever been this vivid?

“Jack?” she asked.

“I don't go up there,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Where do you live?” he asked.

This was another question that should have a simple answer, and didn't. “I just came down from the house,” Clare said.

“I saw you come,” he said impatiently. “That's not what I meant.”

Clare named the town on the coast of France where she and her mother had spent the winter.