The Glass Flame

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  Gwen darted from room to room around the outer rim, looking into one after another.

  “I just want to make sure you didn’t bring anyone else in here,” she told me, but fortunately she didn’t look again into the foyer we had passed through. My fear was growing. It wasn’t possible to sort out and digest all the bits of information she had given me. My mind felt muddled with words that might or might not be true. I had no time for all that now—monstrous as it was. I could only focus upon whatever it might be that waited for me upstairs. No matter how afraid, I was here.

  Gwen paused at the foot of the steps and nodded to me. “Wait here for a minute. I just want to make sure everything is ready up there. There’s a room I want you to see. Now don’t go running off, Mrs. Hallam. That’s a bad storm out there and the causeway won’t be easy to get across.”

  There was nothing to say. I no longer felt like a missile shot from a catapult. All the forces that had driven me seemed to have been used up, dissipated. I could only stand helpless and numb—waiting.

  Gwen ran up the stairs lightly to the second floor. Above me she paused, and called a name softly.

  “Joe?” she said. “Joe, are you there?”

  So that was it? That was the trap. Yet I stayed where I was, listening.

  There was no answer and she disappeared from the landing, following the circle of an upper corridor. I looked around for Maggie and saw her standing at the door of the foyer, watching me. When I turned she beckoned to me frantically.

  “There’s someone upstairs, Karen. I’ve heard footsteps. Don’t go up there. We’ve got to leave now.”

  “But we have to know,” I said. “We have to know.”

  Her look was a little wild. “I don’t want to know. I’m leaving—right now. Come with me, Karen. While we can still get away.”

  “And while you still don’t know the whole truth—is that it, Maggie?”

  “I don’t want to know!” she whispered.

  “Then give me the gun and I’ll stay,” I told her.

  “No! You aren’t going to do any shooting.”

  “I have to stay. It’s already too late to get away. Don’t you know that, Maggie?”

  “Not for me it isn’t. Give me your car keys and let me go. Maybe you’ll be all right. Nona told me that on the phone. She said she wouldn’t let anyone hurt you.”

  “Nona wouldn’t let—” I began, and then paused because I could hear Gwen’s footsteps in the bare corridor above. She was approaching the stairs.

  Maggie came to me quickly, and before I knew what she intended, she snatched my handbag from my arm and ran out the door of the house. After it banged shut, storm sounds hid her going. In my handbag were the keys to my car.

  Gwen clung to the railing above me, looking down. Apparently she hadn’t heard the door under the sounds of drumming rain. “You can come up now, Karen. Everything’s ready. Now you’ll know. I’ve been telling you the truth about everything.”

  My mind said, Run! Get away from the house. There’s safety out in the storm. But my feet walked toward the stairs and started me up. I climbed without any will of my own. Because I had to climb. Because something in me had to know.

  Gwen waited for me and her excitement was a little like that which had driven Giff last night. She held out her hand and when I halted she bent to grasp mine and pulled me up the last steps, impatient with my slowness.

  “Have you ever seen old Vinnie Fromberg’s bedroom?” she asked. “It’s like a room out of a museum. I want to show it to you. I want to show you what’s in it.”

  Was this the way a man condemned to be shot might feel? I wondered. Was this the last mile—for me—that I was walking? What had Maggie meant—that Nona had said I wouldn’t be harmed? I had no faith now in promises I didn’t understand, nor any faith in my ability to escape from whatever fate awaited me in that room along the circular corridor.

  The door was closed, and she tapped lightly before opening it. “I’ve brought her,” she said.

  There was no answer and she thrust the door wide, stepping back to push me into the room.

  The draperies were long and dark and had been pulled across all but one of the nearly ceiling-high windows. There was no light except for gray storm light that fell through that one tall, open window. Rain pounded against the other side of the house, but nothing came in to dampen the rough clothes of the gray-haired man who stood before the window.

  I had seen him before. I had seen that curly gray head and the rough green lumberjack shirt. It was the man I had glimpsed in the theater that day, watching Lori dance.

  “Here she is!” Gwen announced triumphantly and he turned and looked at me.

  He held Commodore in his arms and he stroked the white cat with tender affection as he came toward me gravely, limping just a little as he walked. He was David Hallam, my husband.

  This was what I had been moving toward from the beginning. This was why I had come up those stairs. This was what I’d had to know.

  A big armchair stood nearby and I found that my legs would actually move when I commanded them, so that I could take the few steps to the chair and sit down. I could only stare at him with the white cat purring in his arms, and that unfamiliar, but not at all incongruous, gray hairpiece on his head. He looked brown and fit, as well he might, but there was something different about his eyes, and I looked away because I couldn’t bear to see what was there.

  Behind me Gwen was doing a little jig of glee. “I did it, Davey!” she cried. “I told her everything—all the things you said she ought to know. And then I just put Joe’s name in all the rest, instead of yours—switching everything around, the way you told me. She swallowed the whole thing!”

  “That was fine, Gwen.” He spoke as if to a child. “Now then—if you’ll leave us alone for a little while.… Just go into the next room, Gwen, so I can talk to my wife. I haven’t seen her for a long time, you know.”

  Gwen Bruen, however, had no intention of leaving him alone with me. She was quite ready to exert her own claim.

  “Oh no you don’t, Davey boy! I’ll stay right here. There isn’t anything you can say to her that I can’t hear.”

  Davey boy! I knew by the look he gave her that her words and voice grated. David had never liked to be called anything but David.

  “All right,” he told her. “Stay, if you like. Listen, if you like. But don’t blame me if you don’t care for all you hear.”

  She grunted rebelliously and seated herself upon a moth-eaten ottoman near the window. David let the cat go and drew another chair opposite mine. I met his look now, met the burning intensity in his eyes. Outwardly he seemed calm and in control, but his eyes were a little mad.

  More than anything else, I felt stupefied. It was as though I had received a blow that had stunned me, so that I wasn’t able to rally.

  “Ask questions if you like, Karen.” He was smiling. That beautiful, angelic smile that I remembered, which had nothing angelic behind it. I remembered my childish comment at Trevor’s dinner table—about photographing good and evil. Now I knew that evil seldom looked like evil, and that a camera couldn’t capture a mind gone wrong.

  I shook my head. No questions occurred to me. My brain had turned into a cauliflower, and no one could think with a cauliflower.

  “Then perhaps I’d better fill in for you,” he went on. “Perhaps there are a few things Gwen left out. It was a good idea for me to come down here, you know. Joe was doing an expert job with the fires and I was paying him well. However, things were getting a little hot for me in New York. Don’t mind the pun—it fits in nicely, don’t you think?”

  I tried to breathe deeply again, recover my ability to think, to act. David, who had hated all firebugs, had turned into an arsonist himself. And he was a murderer twice over. Yet he could sit there calmly, making small jokes. This was more terrifying than if he had ranted.

  “I knew I’d have to get out of the country eventually, so I wrote you that letter after
I came down here. I didn’t know then how well things would work out, but I wanted to pave the way for my own disappearance—presumably by foul play. I had no idea that you’d take my supposed death so seriously, darling.”

  He nodded at me in bright approval and I closed my eyes as he went on in the same horribly conversational tone—as though what he said had no bearing on human life.

  “There were those who were onto what I’d been doing now and then. They had proof on that fire in the import store, and they were demanding an exorbitant cut. Which I certainly wasn’t going to pay. You thought I was strapped, didn’t you, Karen? In debt. I was in debt, all right, but I was just putting everything away for what I knew was coming. I’m a very rich man, and I can live abroad very comfortably now.”

  I managed to look at him again. “The Buddha. They sent you the little Buddha from that fire?”

  “Yes. I didn’t like being warned that way. Though it made me laugh to think of how that fire fooled the authorities. But sending me that burned-out figure as a threat put too much pressure on and I knew I had to get away soon. First, though, I wanted to finish paying off my brother. He was always so clever, so successful in everything he did. Until now. He hasn’t been able to stop the fires, though, has he? So the thing I wanted most is done, accomplished.”

  I asked a direct question. “You killed Joe Bruen, of course?”

  Gwen burst in. “I told her he’d killed you! But I told her it was an accident. Like it really was when you hit Joe.”

  “Ah. But accident or not, he was dead. So the whole thing opened up for me and I knew exactly what I could do. David Hallam would disappear into bones and ashes, and I would become Joe Bruen. With my little accomplice here, Joe’s wife.”

  Gwen giggled and I could only think what a fool she was.

  David smiled at her almost benignly. I knew him so well. I had seen him smile like that just before he hit me with the flat of his hand.

  “You see,” he went on, enjoying his own narration, “I’d already had Joe set that house up with an explosive, and plenty of accelerant besides. So I knew it would go up with a bang in a blaze of destruction. Joe never knew it was to be his own funeral pyre.”

  He looked at Gwen, and for the first time her delight in all that was happening faltered a little.

  “Then you planned—? I mean, it wasn’t an accident like you told me, when Joe died? You meant to do it all along?”

  “Not really—it just grew as I got into it. He was getting too greedy. He had the nerve to threaten me. Besides, we wanted to be rid of him, didn’t we?”

  “I suppose so. He was getting suspicious about us. Sure—I can see now how it was.”

  She was trying to backtrack—a little too late. David had noted her hesitation. He had always been a loner. I had never amounted to anything more with him than a gesture against his brother. For David, women were to use.

  “It was easy enough to work out,” he went on. “I dressed him in my clothes and used the ones he kept in the cabin for me. Though I don’t care much for his style. I hid the body there in the cabin under the kudzu until it was dark. Then I took it over to the house that was already set to blow. The guard was on his rounds on the other side of the lake when I set things off. There wasn’t much left of him afterwards. Just enough to make them think it was me.”

  “There were teeth—” I began.

  He looked pleased, as though I’d given him marks for cleverness, and he nodded at Gwen. “Teeth?” he said, questioning.

  “Joe’s teeth were rotten when he was a kid,” she supplied. “He didn’t have any left of his own.”

  “So I made a little substitution,” David said gently. “Joe’s teeth didn’t have to go into the fire, and I left my own side bridge at the perimeter of where the damage was likely to be. So it wouldn’t be destroyed altogether. Good identification, wasn’t it?”

  I shivered, my horror growing. “But two people saw his body. They saw him in that cabin, lying there dead—and they believed it was you. Did you know that?”

  “Not at first. But it didn’t matter. Joe and I were around the same build. I put that ring Lori gave me on his finger, and my good watch on his wrist. As well as giving him my belt with the fancy buckle. All rather a sacrifice. But I knew there’d be enough scraps to identify as mine. Then I left him in the cabin and went up to Trevor’s and had a bang-up fight with him. I thought he might get picked up on suspicion of murder. That’s one thing that’s never worked out. I’d like to have seen Trevor blamed. But I couldn’t have everything.

  “That cabin was a real inspiration. Like Chris, I played there when I was a kid around here, and I remembered that it must be there under the kudzu. I showed it to Joe when I came down, as a place where he could hide. I can guess what must have happened there when Chris found Joe, and later the same day when Maggie found him too. That could have been bad. But with his head bashed in and all that blood, he didn’t look very pretty, so I’d dropped my Stetson over his head. He was wearing my clothes and he was dead. I was lucky that neither of them wanted to look under the hat with all the blood around. They just beat it. Lori told me all this later, when she found out.”

  “And Lori?” I said. “What about Lori?”

  His smile was rueful, almost regretful—and terribly chilling. I wondered why I’d ever thought that David resembled Trevor.

  “She got a bit too reckless,” he said. “For a while she was fun, but then she began to want too much.”

  Gwen snorted. “I told Karen about the liquid glue Lori brought down from the house, and the way you made everything look like another accident.”

  David nodded. “She used the business of fixing up Cecily’s dressing room to get down here often to see me. It made Gwen a little restive though, didn’t it?”

  “It sure did. But you fixed all that.”

  Gwen was like a small, feral animal, I thought. She had no more conscience than Commodore would have about killing a mouse.

  No one said anything for a little while, and David seemed perfectly comfortable waiting. The thought of what he might be waiting for terrified me. Outside the open window the storm still raged and the rush and roar of it filled the room as gusts increased their force. I wondered where Maggie was. Had she escaped across the causeway? Had she abandoned me entirely? Perhaps she would find Eric and Giff at home and know that she needn’t be afraid anymore of her husband’s involvement. But it didn’t matter now. It was too late to help me. No one could get here in time.

  “What are you going to do with her?” Gwen asked, nodding toward me.

  “Just listen,” David told her, his irritation showing.

  He left his chair and came to draw me from mine. He held my two hands in his and I knew it would do me no good to struggle in their clasp. I knew very well how powerful he was.

  “Will you come away with me now, Karen?” he asked. “This is what I’ve stayed around for. As I’ve told you, I’m a rich man, with a great deal of wealth abroad. I’ve always wanted you as my wife.”

  Gwen squealed her outrage. “Davey—you’re crazy! You know she’s in love with that brother of yours! She’s always been—just like you said. Only he’s in love with her now too. Lori told you that.”

  He paid no attention to her outburst, but held my hands tightly, while his gaze never left my face, its intensity frightening. “You’ll come away with me, Karen? We’ll have a good life together abroad. We’ll—”

  It was unbelievable that he could be so blind, so wrapped in his own conceit. But knowing him, I knew it was so, and that I had to stop his words.

  “Because you want to take one more thing away from Trevor?” I cried. “That’s it, isn’t it? Our marriage was never anything else but your need to pay Trevor off for being all that you aren’t.”

  “Maybe that’s why I value you so highly, darling.”

  “What about me?” Gwen wailed.

  He glanced at her coolly. “I have plans for you. Just relax and I’ll get
to you soon.”

  I could see the dawning of fear in her eyes. Much too late.

  “Don’t worry,” I told her. “You can go with him, Gwen. Because I shan’t.”

  He had dropped my hands and now he moved quickly, crossing to the bedroom door. Just as he reached it the door was pulled open and he stood staring at the small figure in yellow oilskins framed in the opening. In equal astonishment Chris stared back at David Hallam.

  I heard my own voice before I even framed the words in my mind. “Run, Chris! Go for help! Run!”

  But it was already too late. David reached out with a rough hand, jerked Chris into the room and locked the door. When he had pocketed the key he stepped back to regard his captive.

  “How did you get here?” he asked, his tone deceptively pleasant and mild.

  Chris still gaped at his uncle as though he beheld a ghost. Always, in his effort to stay far away from the man on the island, he must have been too far off to recognize him. To say nothing of the fact that the clothes and hairpiece, and Chris’s own mind, would automatically have furnished him with a mistaken picture.

  Somehow he found his voice in the face of David’s question. “Aunt Nona said Karen was going to the island. But she wouldn’t let me come. So I took my bike and rode down here anyway. I was scared that Karen might be over here alone.”

  He glanced at me, and I tried to smile an encouragement I didn’t feel. It broke my heart that Chris had come here on my account. This made the entire situation more frightful than ever. It was dreadful to think of Trevor’s son walking into David’s hands. I knew how little the blood relationship between David and Chris would mean.

  “Go on,” David said to Chris.

  “Well—I just rowed across to the beach. The water wasn’t too rough in the lee of the island. You—you aren’t dead, Uncle David.”

  “As you can see, I’m not,” David said. “I’m sorry there’s no time for explanations now, but I’m glad you’re here, Chris. You can be useful.” He swung back to me, and though his tone continued calm, I sensed deep rage in him. “I suspected you wouldn’t come with me, Karen, so I’ve made other plans. You and Trevor both owe me something, don’t you think? Would you like to see the arrangements I’ve made? You too, Chris. You’ll fit into them nicely.”