The Glass Flame

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  But David had not died by fire alone, nor by the devastating explosion. I was convinced of that. The question of his death was a legacy he had left me and I understood very well that it was not something I could turn from lightly. Not when it might have been—murder.

  My turnoff up the mountain should be near now, and I mustn’t miss the sign. All sunset traces had gone as clouds moved in and the rain had started. I turned on my windshield wipers and slowed the car still more, peering ahead. In a moment my brights illuminated the curving arrow and I turned left off the highway onto a rough gravel road that climbed through the woods.

  It was very dark and a little misty under the trees and I drove carefully, aware of a drop-off on my left and a road that turned perilously as it climbed. As my beams swung, lighting swathes of tall trees around the turns, I began to feel confused. Trevor had written that his house was on the crest of the mountain—so surely I couldn’t miss it. Yet I seemed to have been turning back and forth around the curves for too long a while. There were only trees around me and the rainy mists below, with never a house in view. Not that there were many houses on this mountainside, as Trevor had said—only two of his design, and perhaps three others on the lower slopes.

  Suddenly the woods parted ahead of me, and I drove into an open space before a house. The road ended here and in this high place there was a little more light. In relief I switched off the motor, and a moment later I was out of the car on a blacktop expanse. From this spot the trees stopped rising up the mountain, and the earth seemed to drop away into invisibility around the clearing.

  Rain was coming down harder than I’d realized. I wore only a light coat, with no covering for my head, and my face and hair were wet by the time I’d dashed for the nearest door of the house. I could just glimpse a low, winged structure cantilevered out over the mountainside.

  Ahead of me shone a lighted window, and as I ran a door opened, flinging further warmth and light across my path. Trevor came out beneath the overhang, dressed in jeans and gray turtleneck, and for an instant of shock I thought, “David!” Then he had an arm around me, drawing me into a vast kitchen with polished, wide-board floor, walls of wormy chestnut, and the welcome odor of brewing coffee.

  “Get out of that wet coat,” he ordered, and helped to pull it from me. There was no time to examine the flood of emotion that swept through me, or even know what it meant. Except that it frightened me. No barrier built with years of effort should go down so suddenly. In chagrin I recalled my thoughts of burned-out ashes of only a little while before. Had there been a remaining spark all along to light a conflagration?

  But no—I wouldn’t allow that. Not ever.

  “I’ll get your bags from the car,” he said. “Sit here by the fire and get warm. Here’s a towel for your hair.” His words were peremptory, but not unkind.

  A kitchen with an old-fashioned hearth and a welcome fire to warm me! I pulled up a cherry wood chair and bent over so heat would dry my hair as I toweled it, glad for its short straight cut that nothing could muss for long. David had disapproved when I cut my hair—but then, David had disapproved of so much. It was difficult to realize that he was dead and no longer to be fought or resented. I still moved in that limbo which the living experience for a time after a death. Life goes on in an ordinary manner, ordinary things are done, everyday conversation indulged in—because one is marking time, and reality hasn’t yet cut through. Perhaps when the funeral was over I could think more clearly, know better what to do. I would then recognize myself in the new role of widow—free to be my own woman. Yet in a sense not free because of the terrible legacy David had left me.

  Trevor returned in a few moments, having parked my car out of the way. He set my bags down in the wide hall and came into the kitchen to busy himself setting out mugs on a table of cherry wood rubbed to a dull glow. Now, for the first time, I was able to observe him. His greeting, his arm about me as he rushed me out of the rain, had seemed warm and welcoming, and he had taken charge. But already there had been a withdrawal from old friendship, a coolness I didn’t understand. It was better that way—better for me.

  He looked the same, only a little older. Thirty-eight to my twenty-eight. And perhaps thinner than I remembered. Tall, with wide shoulders, physically strong, as David had been, his thick, straight hair like David’s as darkly brown as my own. My heart was doing a sick thumping that I could feel at the base of my throat, and I was swept by waves of mindless emotion that I didn’t want to feel. I was not that sixteen-year-old who was imprisoned in the past and trying to assert herself now. All she stood for belonged to long ago, and had no right to seize me now. Yet the senses have a memory of their own, and I had never dreamed that seeing Trevor again would shake me like this. Had I never stopped loving him?

  Again I denied. That was a thought I couldn’t, wouldn’t accept. I must think only of David—dead.

  “Lori and Chris are away in Asheville,” he told me. “They’ll probably be home tomorrow.” There was a note in his voice that I didn’t remember—something not as clear and strong and joyous as I’d known in the past. Clearly I couldn’t help thinking of the living as well as the dead.

  Trevor had always been enormously, vitally sure of himself, sure of what he wanted to do. Not with David’s arrogant assurance—a front he put up to impress others, but a true certainty, a confidence growing out of his creative talent and his enjoyment of it, out of his own knowledge of who he was and what space in life he meant to occupy. Yet into the voice whose timbre I remembered so well there had crept a note that I didn’t like or understand. Something in Trevor had hardened, something had changed him. I’d never met Lori, though I’d often wondered about her. Now I wondered again, fleetingly.

  “Coffee?” Trevor asked.

  “Thank you. I’ll take it black.”

  He poured two mugs full from the bubbling percolator and brought me mine. I saw that the mug had been hand turned on a potter’s wheel, and was finished in a dull brown glaze with robin’s-egg blue on the inside.

  “It’s local, isn’t it?” I said. “Beautiful.”

  “Yes. The Highland crafts are good and I’ve used them through the house wherever I can.”

  He stood beside the stone hearth, looking down at me, the chill in his eyes lessening a little.

  “I’d have known you anywhere,” he said. “You always resembled your father. You’re slim like your mother, but you can thrust your chin out the way your father used to, and you have that same dark, searching look.”

  I dropped my gaze, unwilling to meet his eyes lest I tell too much. I was angry with myself because of this betrayal of my own senses. But at least I had sense enough to know that I must resist such inner treachery.

  “As you always looked like David,” I said pointedly.

  The chill returned and that was safer for me.

  “People used to tell me there was a likeness, though I could never see it,” he said. “What do you do with yourself these days, Karen?”

  There was no reason why he should have known. David certainly wouldn’t have told him, since he had always disliked my being successful at what I did. An unwanted memory flashed through my mind of David smashing a new and expensive camera because I’d angered him and he couldn’t endure even the small name I was making for myself. He had been as jealous of my work as he had always been of his brother’s. Until he had gone into fire insurance and investigation, he had failed at job after job, always believing that he deserved better. So that the successes of others—especially Trevor’s—diminished him. That was one reason I’d been glad of his expert work in the past few years, since there would be less tendency to fling out at me in resentment when I got a raise, or an especially good assignment.

  Trevor was waiting for my answer, and I caught my thoughts back from the past, grateful for small talk that would keep me for a little while from all that lay ahead. Perhaps Trevor understood this—if he was still as sensitive as I remembered.

  “I wo
rk on Country Home Magazine,” I said. “I started on layout, but somehow I fell into the photographing of houses.”

  “Aside from being your father’s daughter, why do you photograph houses?”

  No one had ever asked me that before, and I couldn’t answer him easily. “Both photography and architecture have always fascinated me. Once or twice on the magazine I was sent out to take pictures of a house, and the prints turned out well. After a while, I was doing it as a regular part of my work. Just modern houses—they send someone else to do the old mansions and period pieces. I’ve photographed a number of yours, as a matter of fact.”

  “So that’s all there was to it? An accident you fell into?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think it was altogether accidental. Not after all those hours I spent sitting in a corner of Dad’s library listening to him talk with you about architecture. After a while I began to see with my own eyes, and I wanted to record what I saw. I’ve always felt that houses have a life of their own once they’re off the drawing board. They can be beautiful or ugly, imaginative, ordinary. At different times of day, in different lights, they say different things. I suppose I try to get them to talk to me before I take their pictures.”

  This was the longest speech about houses and picture-taking I’d ever made. But now perhaps I could talk to Trevor—where I had been so terribly young and tongue-tied in the past.

  His expression had softened again and I knew he was remembering those days when he had come to our house. “You sound like your father’s daughter. What do houses tell you when they talk?”

  I considered that. “The exterior tells me about the designer, of course. Whether he’s bold and innovative. Whether he’s practical and remembers that people have to live in his houses. Whether he respects the landscape or is a tree killer. Whether he’s content to be stodgy and imitate what’s been done before. Or perhaps has an inventive flair.”

  “All that?” he said. “What have my houses told you?”

  The direct question made me suddenly self-conscious. Who was I to be talking to Trevor Andrews about houses? Especially about his houses.

  “Go ahead—tell me,” he urged. His heavy dark brows had lifted, not in disapproval, but questioning, as though my opinion interested him.

  I picked up my shreds of courage and stared into the fire. It was hard to concentrate on words when I looked directly into Trevor’s face.

  “Sometimes your houses frighten me a little. I’m not sure I would want to live in one. There’s a—a sort of defiance about them. As though you were daring the world to disagree with you. Yet at the same time they can be secret, private houses—hard to understand and photograph. I wonder what my father would have thought of them.”

  The dark eyebrows raised a fraction more. “Maybe you’re right. Though no one has ever put it just that way to me before.”

  Strangely, I began to feel more comfortable with him, more relaxed, sitting here in this kitchen. He hadn’t ridiculed my words, but seemed to respect them. And my idiot heart had stopped its wild thumping. I would be able to get used to Trevor again. After all, I was long accustomed to watching from a distance, and I’d never expected anything closer. I was safe because even if he might have suspected a crush, he’d never dreamed of how deeply I felt. Now he was married and had a son, and I could resist him safely.

  Silence grew between us as we sipped coffee, and into that silence the memory of David began to emerge from the shadows where we had been mutely holding him. Once long ago I had thought that David’s long-fingered hands were like Trevor’s. Now, as Trevor turned the mug in his fingers, I thought how like his hands were to David’s, and my resistance grew. This man was David’s brother, and that should be enough to put me on guard. I wasn’t sixteen now, and I didn’t know the man he might have become.

  “I want to hear about what happened,” I said into the waiting stillness. “I want to know everything about David’s death.”

  There was a change in my voice, and again I sensed withdrawal and a chilling of the atmosphere between us. Trevor had indeed changed. He had always been generous to David, offering friendship and affection, even when David rejected him. But now the mere mention of his brother’s name seemed to make him stiffen.

  “Let’s leave it for tomorrow,” he said. “You must be tired from your trip and the drive. Talking will be painful, and if we talk now you may not sleep.”

  “A little while ago I stopped at Belle Isle,” I told him.

  The sound his mug made as he thumped it down on the cherry wood table broke the quiet of the room, but he did not speak. In the fireplace charred wood fell into embers and I stared at blackened ashes, shivering, remembering. When Trevor bent above the hearth and poked at the fire, putting on another log, I knew he was waiting for me to continue.

  “I saw the Belle Isle sign,” I said. “I had to follow that road. I couldn’t help myself. When I reached the house. I got out of my car and went close enough—to see—” I broke off and closed my eyes.

  Behind me Trevor moved restlessly about the room, offering no sympathy, no comforting words.

  I made an effort to go on. “Your watchman found me. He spoke to me and helped me back to the car. I don’t think what had happened to David really hit me until then. I suppose I’ve been numb with shock. Now I’m beginning to feel. I’m trying to accept the awful way he died. If you’ll tell me about it, perhaps that will help.”

  “All right,” Trevor said abruptly. He pulled a straight chair across the hearth from me. “Perhaps it’s better if you know exactly what happened. How much did David tell you about our affairs down here?”

  “Not very much. He wasn’t very good at writing letters.” Not until that last one, I thought. But I didn’t want to mention that letter yet.

  “Belle Isle was a dream I had,” Trevor went on. “It still is. I don’t mean to be defeated because of all that has happened. I won’t go into the ramifications now, but it was coming along well. Some of the houses were finished and people were interested. I was encouraged by the way everything was shaping up. I’ve been completely in charge, and there has been some resentment over that—another long story. I have four years to make it work. And two are gone already. A few months ago fires began to be set in the place. One was in a completed house down by the lake, and three were on the near side. The first was only a small fire, and we caught it in time.” He appeared to hesitate, as though remembering something disturbing, then went on. “We thought it might have been started by—children. The later fires did more damage, and were expertly set.

  “The police couldn’t find out anything in the beginning, and I thought of David. We’ve been in touch now and then over the years, as you may know, and he was the best man in the country for the job. So I asked him to come. I didn’t know whether he would agree or not. I was even a little surprised when he turned up.”

  “He stayed much longer than he usually does on an investigation,” I put in.

  Trevor too had been staring into the fire as he talked, but now he turned his head and looked at me sharply. His expression startled me, and with sudden clarity I recognized that here was a man in whom a shattering anger was being suppressed. Yet in the time when I had known him, Trevor had never been an angry man.

  “Yes, David stayed,” he told me shortly, the words clipped, the anger barely hidden.

  “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” I said. “Something’s terribly wrong. Something besides the fires.”

  He held back whatever rage had seethed to the surface and forced himself to speak quietly. “David stayed. He appeared to be onto something. But he wouldn’t tell anyone until he was sure. This last fire wasn’t like the others. This time an explosive was used.”

  “The watchman said you were there soon after it happened.”

  “I was. David had told me he had a feeling that one particular house would go next. The fires were always set in one that was nearly finished. So he was going down to spend the night there.
I offered to come with him, but he said that with two of us it would be harder to hide. And he was fully confident that he could handle anything that came up.”

  Yes—that was David. How well I remembered his swaggering confidence—a confidence that had not always been justified, until recently.

  Trevor continued. “I was uneasy that night, and. I kept a watch here at our house. I heard the explosion from our deck and I saw the flames. As soon as I’d called the fire department I drove down. The house was an inferno, with blown-out bits of debris burning all around. David was in there and I knew there was no way to save him. We tried, but the heat was too fierce and we couldn’t investigate properly until the flames were out and the smoke had cleared a bit. I was with them when the police and the firemen found—what was left of him.”

  I listened, sickened, my eyes never leaving Trevor’s face. I saw him tighten one fist and ram it hard against the palm of the other hand. After a long silence he seemed to remember me.

  “I’m sorry to be brutal. But since you wanted the truth, it had to be told the way it happened. The sheriff has found out nothing except that a trap must have been prepared. The house was probably set to blow up and burn. But what sprang the trap and who was supposed to walk into it, there’s no way to tell. Probably David—because he was getting close to something dangerous. Perhaps even me, because there are those who don’t like what I’m doing at Belle Isle.”

  “It was meant for David,” I said.

  Trevor had started pacing the room and he stopped at my chair looking down at me. “Why do you say that?”

  “David wrote me a letter. He said that if anything happened to him here I could be sure it was not an accident.”

  “I’d like to see that letter.”

  I shook my head, knowing that I could never show it to anyone, least of all to Trevor. There had been too much spite in David’s words against me, even to the point of threatening me if I tried to break up our marriage.