The Ghost in the Glass House (5 page)

“You're not French,” he said immediately, as if she'd just offered some absurd bluff in a game of cards.

“No,” Clare admitted.

His limited patience had thinned to exasperation. “You have a house somewhere, don't you?” he said. “Where is it?”

Clare folded her arms over her belly. “We haven't been there in three years,” she said.

“Three years?” he repeated. She didn't need to see his face to guess his thoughts. She could hear the disbelief in his voice.

Clare nodded.

A few days after Clare's father's funeral, Clare's mother had announced their first excursion. She had bought a pair of tickets for a private car on the transatlantic railroad between New York and California, to clear their heads, she said. But the miles of wild land and the sheer size of the mountains, which until then she had never seen, only intensified her sense that she and her daughter were now alone in a vast and perhaps unfriendly universe. Clare woke several times in the dead of night to find her mother still clothed, staring out the train window at the indecipherable stars. “I can't decide if they want to tell us something,” she said. “Or if we should know better than to ask just by looking at them.” In any case, Clare's mother concluded, the trip had hardly been a rest. So the day after they returned home she announced their next, this time to celebrate the Italian
carnevale
in Viareggio.

For several months after that, they hadn't spent more than two days home at a stretch. Every return was followed by the almost immediate discovery of another boat about to leave port, another treasure Clare had to see, another distant festival. And after all, her mother would observe brightly, their things were already packed. It was almost easier to go on another trip than it would be to put them all back.

Then, less than six months after Clare's father died, Clare's mother rented out the house where Clare had grown up on a permanent basis. This wasn't from financial necessity, but over an incident with a maid.

Clare and her mother had come into town that night on a nine o'clock train. It was late summer, fully two weeks before the great autumn migration would bring most of their friends back from the coast to the city. Her mother was already in a wild mood. She had packed all their things without warning the night before, then woken Clare at dawn to declare that they were leaving on the next train. Clare hadn't even bothered to search her memory for a reason for the rush. It could have been a slight from a friend or a shipwrecked flirtation, but more likely the impulse to escape came from a change in the secret weather of her mother's mind. Her mother could sail impervious through reversals and snubs that would have sunk another woman. But she was defenseless against her own thoughts. Sleepily, Clare had dressed in the clothes her mother had saved out for her, and submitted to the journey. At first it hadn't seemed like an emergency: they were constantly leaving places before the end of a season, and everyone else would follow them back to the city in a matter of weeks.

But the maid who answered their ring that evening made a serious tactical error. She told Clare's mother that getting their tower of luggage up the front steps was impossible.

“I'm the only one here, ma'am,” she explained. “Albert's already out to the bar, and he won't come back till two or three.”

“Impossible?” Clare's mother repeated, as if taking offense at some ugly word shouted at her in the street.

The maid nodded back at her with the faintest trace of defiance.

Clare's mother marched back down the steps. Using a bag of gold coins she traveled with solely for their dramatic effect at moments like this, she hired four porters in as many minutes: a pair of boys in short pants who were loitering by the gate to the park across the street, a young man she commandeered from a walk with his sweetheart, and an older gentleman who gave Clare's mother a long mooning glance each time he carried a trunk up the steps. Ten minutes later, all the trunks and boxes were stacked neatly inside the door of their front hall. When Clare's mother had released her temporary servants back to the four winds, she turned to the maid.

“I could have gotten better service than this,” Clare's mother told her, “at the worst hotel in town.” She picked up the phone by the door and placed a call. Five minutes later, a pair of drivers from the private force employed by one of the city's best hotels had carried all their luggage back down. It was the last time Clare set foot inside her own house.

“It's not as though we've really lived there for years,” her mother told her when she announced her decision to rent it out. “Now you can order peach flambé for breakfast every morning.”

Clare loved the peach flambé they served at fine restaurants. She liked the salt air that blew through rented seaside rooms. She liked hotel vases full of tulips that changed like magic to daffodils while she was out. She liked the bellmen at the doors with their pockets full of mints. She liked the sound of rain on the roof of a cab, and the lavender they used to scent linens in Paris. She couldn't explain to her mother why she preferred her own room, which had only one window and was still furnished with the fading chintz of her childhood, to any of this. And because she couldn't find the words, she didn't say anything.

Now the boy's voice was incredulous. “Then where do you live?” he asked.

Automatically, Clare adopted the pose of world-weary sophistication that usually silenced other children who asked the same questions. “All over,” she said. “We get whatever rooms we want for the season.”

By the big house, Clare caught a flash of motion. She glanced up. Tilda strode across the lawn, her apron blazing in the sun. Her destination was unmistakable: the glass house.

Clare darted around the piano to the door.

“What's wrong?” Jack demanded.

“Tilda,” Clare whispered.

Jack laughed and Clare caught a hint of the horror that sound could conjure if it rang without explanation through the glass house. “She won't hurt you,” he said. “She comes to hear me play.”

“She comes here?” Clare repeated, at the door now. She pushed it open and stepped out onto the mossy flagstone.

“Wait!” Jack said. “Will you come back?”

Tilda had almost reached the glade.

Clare swung the door shut, locked it, and leapt over the small span of lawn into the shelter of the woods. She crashed through them for a few breathless moments, then emerged a good twenty feet from the glass house, waving.

Beside the glass house, Tilda drew up short.

“Hello!” Clare called. “I've been for a ramble!”

Tilda's eyes narrowed. She peered through the etching on the glass house door, then tried the handle. It held fast.

Clare tramped through the grass between them. “It's locked,” she said helpfully. “I tried it the other day.”

Tilda stared straight into Clare's eyes, measuring her not with the quick glance most adults gave to children, but closely, as if Clare were already a grown woman. Her steady gaze filled Clare with unease. But it also gave her a strange sense of satisfaction.

“The key is missing again,” Tilda said. “Do you have it?”

“T
HE KEY
?” C
LARE SAID
. “It's not in the drawer? Are you sure?”

Without waiting for Tilda's answer, she set off across the lawn.

Tilda followed, matching Clare's brisk pace step for step until they came around the side of the house to the kitchen door. Then Clare shot ahead, flying up the short flight of stairs into the house. Before Tilda had even reached the threshold, Clare had gotten the drawer open and dropped the key back in.

Behind her, paper rattled.

She whirled around.

Mack sat at the small table by the window, his smile wry over the top fold of a crisp newspaper.

Before Clare could decide whether he'd caught her or not, Tilda burst through the door.

“Look!” Clare said brightly. She pointed to the key, which had fallen on a worn white towel, underlined by a thin blue stripe. “I found it!”

Tilda glared at the key. Then she appealed to Mack. “That wasn't here before,” she said darkly.

“Maybe it got pushed to the back,” Clare said. “Or hidden under something.”

Mack gave a noncommittal shrug and took refuge behind his columns of newsprint.

Tilda gave Clare another measuring look. Then she picked the key up, dropped it in her pocket, and swatted the drawer shut.

In the week since they'd arrived, Clare had made no progress in cracking Tilda's stony façade. Clare's mother's skirmishes with the maid hadn't helped. And this was hardly how Clare would have chosen to advance her campaign to win her way into Tilda's good graces. But Clare had long practice in keeping her composure through emergencies far more troubling than this. She didn't bat an eye.

Tilda stalked over to the icebox. She pulled out a piece of beef and a small bowl of hard-boiled eggs and set them on the counter beside a loaf of bread and a bunch of greens.

With deft strokes, Tilda sawed off several thin, perfect slices of bread. “Can I make you something?” she asked Mack. “Egg sandwich? Beef with gravy?”

He shook his head and pushed his crumb-strewn plate forward. “I got something already,” he said.

Even if Mack had seen her with the key, Clare calculated, he would have given her up by now if he was going to. And she wasn't about to leave the kitchen without discovering where the key was laid to rest next. She took the seat at the window opposite Mack.

“Have you worked here a long time?” she asked. This was another reliable question with servants: if they liked their place, they could go on about their history. And if they didn't, it was a chance for them to talk about anyplace else they'd ever been, or anywhere else they dreamed of going.

Mack let his paper drop just low enough that she could see his eyes. He gave an amiable nod. Then he raised the paper again.

But Clare knew she was still young enough to be permitted a child's steady stream of questions. “How long?” she pressed.

“Fifty years,” Mack said, from beyond the paper.

“Forty-eight,” said Tilda.

Clare glanced at Tilda, trying to mask her own surprise. All her other attempts to draw Tilda out since they arrived had failed. Clare hadn't expected to lure her into this conversation at all, especially not over a detail so small.

Mack let his paper drop again. His brow furrowed as he calculated. “I guess so,” he said.

“They hired us both the summer they built the place,” Tilda said, with a note of reproach, like a woman who has to remind a man of some promise he made.

“Who?” Clare asked.

It wasn't a hard question, or an impolite one, but it seemed to surprise Tilda. She looked at Mack.

“They're gone now,” Mack said. “God rest.”

Clare's eyebrows rose. It wasn't unusual for servants to welcome guests to a rented house. But she'd never heard of them staying at a place past the owner's death.

“Then who do we rent from?” she asked.

Mack finally capitulated. He folded his paper and laid it beside his plate. “The new man,” he said. “It was too much trouble for him to find other help when he bought the house, so he just kept us on.” His eyes crinkled in a smile. “Which was good for us. Because after forty-eight years, I'm not sure we're much good for anything else.”

Mack's smile made Clare bold.

“What about the boy,” she tried, “who lived in the room upstairs?”

Tilda's knife rattled on the counter.

Mack's smile flickered. Then it turned teasing. “Wouldn't you rather hear about the boys who live around here now?” he asked.

Now it was Clare's turn to descend into confusion. She'd spent years studying the people she met, learning their habits, sorting them by type. But now that she was an expert at being a child, they wanted her to become something else. And suddenly, that was all anyone wanted to talk with her about.

“There's time enough for that,” Tilda said, her voice sharp.

Clare turned to her, startled. She'd never heard a hint of harshness in Tilda's voice when she spoke to Mack before. And she didn't know if Tilda had meant to defend her or not. But she felt a wave of gratitude.

Tilda sliced decisively through the sandwich she had made, lifted the pieces onto a plate with the flat of her knife, and put the plate on a painted tray. Then she picked up the tray and carried it out the door, the key still in her pocket.

Clare scrambled down from her chair, nodded a hasty goodbye to Mack, and followed.

Tilda had already left the dining room when Clare reached it. She couldn't have had time to dispose of the key there. Careful to keep out of sight, Clare darted to the hall, listened as Tilda mounted the stairs, then crept halfway up them herself.

Overhead, Tilda crossed the landing. Clare's mother's voice drifted down from above. “Oh, Tilda, thank you,” she said. “You're just like an angel from heaven. All you need is a flaming sword to complete the effect.”

Tilda didn't dignify this greeting with a response. Dishes and silver clinked. Linen sighed. Tilda lingered in Clare's mother's room so long that Clare began to worry that she had chosen a new hiding spot for the key there. Then Clare came to her senses: Tilda would never risk leaving it anyplace where it might fall into Clare's mother's clutches again.

Silently, Clare ascended the rest of the flight. At the top, the door to the boy's room stood open. She ducked inside and slipped behind it. Through the crack at the hinge she commanded a view of the entire landing and a glimpse of her mother's room. When Tilda emerged, Clare would be able to see her every move.

But when Tilda came out onto the landing a few minutes later, she was empty-handed. She paused for a breath or two. Then she made straight for the boy's room.