Last night I had spoken David’s name aloud in this place, questioning, seeking. Now I promised him silently that his death would not go unchallenged. Whatever he might have done, this was not deserved. Whatever I could do, I would do. This I owed him. I looked up at blue sky framed by blackened ruins and saw a speck that was a plane sailing over far above. An awareness stabbed through me because of this contrast between life in the sky and death on the earth, and I felt doubly shaken.
Ahead, Lori had paused with one foot upon a littered step. “Get your camera ready, Karen. You’re looking for unusual pictures, aren’t you? Pictures that come out of life—and death.”
I tried to stop her. “You said you wanted to push all of this away. But this isn’t the way to do it.”
She flung me a look that was both agonized and oddly excited, and ducked beneath the fallen timbers of what had been a door. Cinders and char crunched under her feet, and the stench grew even more sickening. Once inside the ruin, she turned about and rested an arm along the slanting beam that blocked the door opening, looking out at me.
“This is the picture,” she said. “Take me here, Karen.”
Sunlight fell across fair hair that lifted at her shoulders in a slight breeze. Her blue and white blouse and slacks made a screaming exclamation of life against the dead, blackened wreckage behind her.
“Don’t do this, Lori,” I pleaded. “Don’t torture yourself.”
Her eyes were wide and staring, as though she looked at something terrible that I couldn’t see, and I knew that she wouldn’t move from where she stood until I took the picture she demanded. Reluctantly, feeling more sickened by the moment, I set the stops, looked for her in the finder and clicked the shutter. But when I turned away she called after me.
“Wait, Karen! Come in here. Come inside. You were his wife, as I couldn’t be. Let me show you where he died.”
I wanted to cry out to her to stop tormenting us both, but already she had moved among the fallen timbers and broken walls of the interior.
“Come!” she repeated. “Come here, Karen,” and I heard the rising hysteria in her voice.
It was better to humor her for the moment, and then try to coax her away. I bent to crawl beneath the beam as she had done and felt the crunching beneath my shoes as I moved toward her. The terrible smell stirred afresh as Lori went on ahead of me like a sleepwalker, her white shoes blackening, her slacks smudged with charcoal. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe shallowly, choking back the sickness that rose in me. In my ears I could almost hear the roaring of flames, feel heat singeing my very skin. A man I had married, a man I once thought I’d loved, had died here. Terribly.
“Look!” Lori commanded.
It was almost a shock to open my eyes, not to the scarlet of flames that had seemed all too real, but to the ruin around me. Plaster and lath had been knocked outward by the explosion, but the roof had caved in and burned, and beams had fallen every which way, blocking and barring. I climbed over and under until I was as blackened by smudges as Lori. When I reached the place where she knelt poking with a sooty hand among the cinders, she looked up at me, still like a sleepwalker who had not yet awakened. I was suddenly afraid of what might happen if she realized too abruptly what she was doing.
“It was somewhere about here that he died,” she said. “He was alive—so excitingly alive. He held me in his arms. He loved me! And now he’s nothing—scattered bones and ashes. He held you too, didn’t he, Karen? Can you remember that?”
Her words rang in my ears. Yet they didn’t evoke the memory of love and loss she meant to stir in me. Without volition, memory presented me with a scene that had only been one of many. David flinging my schoolgirl love for Trevor scornfully in my face because he would teach me what love was all about. I could almost hear the cloth of my nightgown rip, feel the rough pressure of his mouth as he took pleasure in bruising me. Pain was something I’d learned to accept as almost commonplace. Yet I had never wanted pain in my loving. I had always yearned for tenderness.
“You think Trevor is different, don’t you?” he’d taunted me. “But he’s not. Karen, we’re brothers—we’re alike! So love me now as you wanted to love him!”
Why had I stayed with David? I wasn’t weak, I wasn’t without resources of my own. Perhaps it was partly because he always seemed so sorry afterward, when he’d hurt me. Perhaps because I sensed a weakness in him, a need, even a fear of himself that he would never admit. Perhaps because I kept him—to some extent—on a saner road than he might have followed alone. Yet in the end it had been too much and I’d taken the step I should have taken long before. No one—man or woman—should accept so self-punishing a responsibility for another life.
“Karen, what’s the matter?” Lori demanded. “Is it getting to you, Karen?”
I came back to my surroundings, and it was almost as though I could see David again, standing here where he had died, arrogant in his suede jacket with the embroidered flame on the pocket, and that broad-brimmed hat that he’d affected set jauntily on his head. In memory his eyes seemed to mock me from under its brim. How did I think I was going to help solve the riddle of his death, he seemed to be asking. My incompetence had always been a favorite theme of his, no matter what I might accomplish out in the world.
“Take a picture of me now!” Lori demanded. “This is the picture I want—here where he must have stood when the explosion came and everything went up in flames. At least he died quickly. At least there was no time for him to suffer.”
I knew that in a moment she would break. I was taller than she was and perhaps a little stronger, so I hung my camera by its strap around my neck and took hold of her arm, pulling her up. Somehow I managed to thrust her toward the side of the ruin, where there was no obstruction and only a brief drop to the ground. She took the step blindly and stumbled, and I jumped after her, steadying her as best I could.
“Let’s get back to the car,” I said.
Her tears held off until she was in the driver’s seat and then she did what I had done last night. She put her head on her arms against the wheel. Only I hadn’t wept as Lori did. I let her cry for a time, recognizing release, while my thoughts whirled on. Doggedly now, I had only one answer to offer David. Incompetent or not, I had to stay in the vicinity until I knew. And that might mean the exposure of a murderer. What David might have done to bring this on himself, I dared not question. I wouldn’t judge him now. Memory must be rejected. The blame was not all his, and a debt must be paid.
However, I couldn’t make that promise to David and know that I would be heard. I could only promise Lori, and I did so in words that must have spilled out with little coherence. At least I startled her enough to stop her tears, for she raised her head and stared at me.
“What good will that do—finding out who it was? It won’t bring him back!”
“David wrote me a letter before he died,” I told her. “He said that if anything happened to him it wouldn’t be an accident. He said I owed him something. I don’t know if that’s altogether true, but I think I’ll never rest until I pay. If you loved him, you can help me.”
“No! Leave it alone, Karen. There’s such wickedness here. I don’t want to know who’s behind it. David had begun to stir it up—so he had to die. I don’t want to die, Karen. And nothing will bring him back. What’s ahead for us now? That’s the only thing that matters. What do you want of life?”
The sudden questions surprised me. There was nothing childlike about her now, and once more the hysteria had passed. Now, however, I was learning caution, growing adept at raising barriers. I had already said too much, trusted her too far.
“I want my work, of course,” I told her. “It’s satisfying, and—”
“Safe?” she put in. “Is that all you want out of life, Karen—to be safe?”
“I thought you were making a plea for safety?”
She answered me airily. “Oh, I like high places, but only when I can see the edge.” She switched on the
engine and smiled with astonishing sweetness. “I have more pictures for you, Karen.”
Pictures were the last thing I wanted at the moment. More than anything else I wanted to escape from Lori’s company. I wanted to wash the stains and the odor from my hands and face. I wanted to bathe and change my clothes. We were both soot-streaked and carried the smell of stale smoke about us. But already she was driving on around the lake, and I knew it would do no good to protest.
We passed houses in various stages of construction, each one individual, though each faced upon the lake and the green island that floated near the far shore. I tried to shut everything else out of my mind and think only of this creation of Trevor’s.
These would be livable houses, using the land well, visually pleasing on the outside, as I knew they would be inside. I could imagine families sitting peacefully on their high decks for an evening meal in the summer and I tried not to remember the color of fire.
Most of the construction appeared to be along the road in the other direction from the way we were taking, and I could hear voices and hammering and the slamming of planks beside the water. But Lori was avoiding the work area.
The road curved toward the far shore as we neared the island. It was a good-sized island, I realized—a hundred acres or more. Most of it seemed heavily wooded, but in one place a strange-looking brown structure thrust above the treetop. Its roof was formed by shingled wedges that rose to a central tower with a balcony running around it.
“What on earth is that?” I asked.
Lori appeared to have recovered, her tears and unsettling words behind her. “It looks like an especially ugly water tower, doesn’t it? That’s my great-grandfather’s octagonal house. That’s where old Vinnie took both his brides. Only the second one wouldn’t live there.”
As we approached along the shore road, I saw that a narrow causeway reached out to the island.
“Great-grandfather Vinnie built that,” Lori said. “He wanted access without using boats—since he was going to live there with my great-grandmother. Cecily was his first wife—the one who died so tragically. I’ll show you where. Even with the causeway, though, she must have felt imprisoned—the way he wanted her to live. Their daughter was my grandmother—the one who married a Caton.”
“Did you know your great-grandfather well?”
“Well enough. By that time he didn’t like children. And when I grew up he was awfully old. An old lion. He outlived both his wives and moved back to the island for part of each year. But he let it grow wild and go to pieces. If Trevor takes that part over he’ll have a big job on his hands. Though with these fires he’ll probably never get that far.” She spoke Trevor’s name bitterly, as though she had little patience with his objectives.
We drove carefully along the narrow causeway, where the paving had crumbled and potholes prevailed, and she went on telling me about Belle Isle.
“The only time it’s really an island is when there are heavy rains and the streams feed the lake, so its level rises and the causeway gets washed over. But mostly you can drive across. The wonder is that Great-grandpa Vinnie didn’t put in a drawbridge to pull up after him in his last years.”
“Yet he let Trevor come in and start building houses?”
“Oh, he didn’t mind that, so long as Trevor didn’t touch the island. He used to sit up in that tower and watch everything through his binoculars. Nobody came across the causeway without his permission. My mother and I visited him a few times, but he didn’t really like me much until I married Trevor. Trevor was always his darling boy—like the son he never had. Oh, of course there was his grandson Eric, Giff’s father, and believe me Vinnie used him. But he didn’t like him the way he did Trevor. I don’t think Uncle Eric ever got over that.”
She braked the car near a grove of shaggy hemlocks that had been planted too close and were crowding each other in a dark thicket.
“It always made Uncle Eric wild,” she went on. “But what could he do? Vinnie was in charge. And Trevor is still the fair-haired boy according to the will, unless his Belle Isle project fails. The old man could never stand failure. So there are penalties written into the contracts. Come on. This is where we get out and walk. The driveway to the house isn’t impassable, but it’s not comfortable.”
We picked our way over thick vines that pried up the pavement in spots, stepped over cracks where weeds grew rampant, and eventually reached wooden steps that led to the octagonal veranda running around the house. Old Vinnie had built in wood, not stone or brick, and even though the rest of the island had not been cared for, the house obviously had. It had weathered to an ancient dark brown, but repairs had been made. The first-floor veranda that followed the octagonal structure around boasted a carved railing that was still intact, and there was intricate gingerbread around the supports of the veranda roof. Windows with drawn blinds looked out at us from seven of the wedges, and in the eighth a massive front door with a brass lion’s head knocker barred our way.
“It’s a creepy place, isn’t it?” Lori said. “As he grew old, Great-grandfather Vinnie came to look like that lion on the knocker. The house has always fascinated me, but it still gives me the shivers.”
“This I must have a picture of,” I told her. “It’s a change from my modern houses. Will you be part of it, Lori?”
This intrigued her and while I set my camera she flitted from one pose to another, enjoying herself as simply as though there had been no tears and near hysteria only a little while before. She was a creature of contrasts whose moods couldn’t be counted on from one moment to the next.
“There,” I said, “that’s the one! Hold it.”
She stood beside a tall window to the right of the door, looking through the glass.
“But my face won’t show,” she objected.
“It’s not your face I want. It’s an attitude. Something you see through that window terrifies you. Make your body show it.”
She caught the idea at once. With one hand she shaded her eyes from outside light as she peered through the glass. The other arm was stretched behind her, palm raised, as though she stopped someone who had followed. The very tensing of her shoulders, the frantic warning of the upraised hand gave an impression of alarm. She turned her head just as I clicked the picture.
“I think someone’s in there,” she said softly. “Something moved and then was still.”
So her sudden tension and the hand warning had been real.
For a moment we stared at each other, perhaps each questioning the other’s courage. I was suddenly and intensely aware of the small forest of hemlocks and oak trees that crowded around the house, undoubtedly darkening the windows when the sun was at a slant, cutting off daylight and any view of the lake. Only now, when it was late morning, did the sun reach down to the house.
Lori began to search her bag for a key, and I knew we were going in. That was what I wanted, wasn’t it? No more vague questions, but a direct course of action whenever it was possible. An assault upon anything that needed to be answered about Belle Isle. Yet I was uneasy.
“I must have left the key in my other bag,” Lori said. “It doesn’t matter. Chris has shown me the way he gets in.” In fact, it may be Chris who is in there now. My son’s an explorer!”
She started toward the steps to join me below, and then, on second thought, reached for the brass doorknob. It turned easily so that the great door swung open ahead of us, the lion’s head giving way.
“That’s funny,” Lori said. “Trevor sends Lu-Ellen over to clean once in a while, but she’s always supposed to lock up when she leaves.”
She pushed the door back and stepped across the threshold. I followed on her heels, and we stood together in a foyer shaped like a blunt pie wedge. A somewhat shabby red carpet covered the floor, and there were several pieces of dark, overly carved furniture that might have come out of medieval Germany. The room was empty and dust free.
Across the narrow part of the wedge another door stood ajar
and Lori pushed it open upon a vast central room built around the steep flight of stairs that zigzagged back, and forth. Sunlight from the high tower at the top flooded down upon the central room, but the outer rooms beyond the balcony rails that circled the stairs were lost in gloom. There was an airless odor of mustiness and disuse.
“Chris?” Lori called. “Chris, are you there?” Her voice echoed and returned to us from the stairs, but there was no other sound. And no movement until I caught something from the corner of my eye and turned sharply.
“Look!” I said.
The largest and most commanding white cat I had ever seen was stepping toward us out of the shadows.
“Commodore!” Lori cried. “I might have known. Come here and meet Karen. Karen, this is Commodore Vanderbilt. Great-grandpa Vinnie was fond of cats, so long as they weren’t thoroughbreds. Not being one himself, he didn’t hold much with pure breeding. Aunt Maggie gave him this cat as a foundling when it was a kitten. She said its queer eyes and that black patch over one of them made him look like a pirate. He does look like one, don’t you think?”
Commodore came toward us, at first challenging and defiant, though he deigned to recognize Lori. Then he mewed with an unexpectedly plaintive sound. I wouldn’t have expected such a cat to plead. I saw that he had one blue eye and one yellow one, and that he carried this oddity off with confidence and dignity. He was not ready to accept me, and I made no quick overtures, even though I liked cats. David had liked them too, and we’d had one in the early years of our marriage. That was one of the few things we’d been in accord about.
“Why is he here in an empty house?” I asked.
“Because he lives here. It’s his ship, I suppose, and he’s unhappy anywhere else. Someone from the project brings over milk and food for him nearly every day and leaves it on the veranda, but he forages for himself pretty well, I imagine. He was reasonably fond of Vinnie—since they were two of a kind—but he’s never cared much for anyone else. Usually he stays outside, not in the house. I suppose, like Chris, he knows various ways in if he chooses to use them.”
The Glass Flame Page 8