Andre turned and as he did, a knock came at the door. “Come in,” he called. He expected the girl, Cerise, to have returned. Perhaps she’d forgotten something, an instruction. Instead a dark-skinned woman entered, her ankle-length black gown sweeping the wooden floorboards. Must be Yolanda.
“Mistah Garner,” the woman said. “Miss Delacroix asked me to bring you these.” She opened her palm.
He strolled across the room and lifted the offered stack of photographs.
“She says you can keep them.”
He nodded, and she left. Finding a seat in an armchair, he crossed his ankle over his knee, and flipped through the stack. A fist pummeled him in the gut. The circle that was life tightened, and for a moment, his vision blurred. He blinked back the haze and raised an image closer.
There, staring up at him was the same face he’d seen in the glass only minutes ago. That of his father.
CHAPTER 2
Cerise collapsed in a chair, a tiny flowered throw pillow forming itself to the small of her back. She reclined her head on the seat back, the winged arms providing shelter for her face, and her breath at last splintered. Hands shaking, she gave into the fevered rush racing through her limbs. Her heart skipped, stealing what little breath she had left.
He was fabulous. Not a more handsome man existed on this planet. Not one more pleasant to the eye. The eyes. His eyes were mesmerizing, eyes you looked into for minutes at a time. No, not looked. That was too tame. Dived, you dived in headlong never to surface.
She pulled her head up.
He was also angry, and that was as much her fault as her grandmother’s. She should have guessed what was afoot. He was right, her grandmother had planned this. She’d brought him here for the glass, yes, but she’d also brought him here for something else. However, what that was stayed sealed inside the old woman’s head.
She hadn’t known anything was amiss until dawn, and they’d argued over it. She’d insisted it was wrong to deceive him, and her grandmother had acted like the aristocrat she was. He’ll be fine. This is no big deal. As always, her grandmother had won.
The single photograph held between Cerise’s fingers slipped from place, and she looked down at it. Two young men about her age wrapped muscled arms around each other’s necks. Her father and his best friend, Levi, come for yet another weekend.
Before. Before the bad things happened.
A voice shook her from her thoughts. “Cerise?”
Her hands trembled yet again. It was him, Andre Garner. She’d known who he was the minute he’d turned around in the parlor. There was no mistaking the image. He was as striking as his father was in the photographs, more so because he was living and breathing. It had been all she could do to retain her bearing and not fold.
“Cerise?” he called again.
She inhaled and cracked the door. The brilliant blue of his eyes flooded in, and a tremor sent her hand clutching the wall. “Yes, Mr. Garner?”
“The photos.” He waved them before her. “I have questions.”
She nodded and reversed, throwing the door wider. “Please have a seat.”
There was only one seat in the room, a room decidedly feminine. Pink walls speckled with tiny magenta flowers papered the space. Airy white draperies tied back with a twisted yellow cord spread the little available light. Then there was the bed, a fantastic creation of ruffles and lace all but defying description.
He looked out of place inside the space and conscious of it. Nonetheless, he sat, the photographs balanced in his lap.
“Ask what you wish,” she said.
He selected one and held it up. “This one. Where was it taken?”
She stared at the image. His father, bare-chested, perched on the edge of the water.
“By the pool. Would you like to go there?”
“There’s a pool?”
She smiled. “Yes, downstairs. Grandmother insists on keeping it filled and cleaned.”
He returned to his feet. “I’d like to see it.”
She motioned him out the door and into the hall. However, instead of heading toward the front stairs, she turned her footsteps in the opposite direction. It was a five minute hike to the back stairwell. Hidden from view, the narrow, steep risers descended into a nook in the wall.
“Please,” she said. “You first.”
Again, he made no effort to argue, but entered the space, the aged wood creaking beneath his feet. He inhaled sharply at the bottom, and she knew why.
“It’s … magnificent,” he said.
Indeed it was. An open space with the pool stretching from wall to wall and a series of dressing rooms lining the corridor. Potted ferns growing in wicker stands sat at each corner, and overhead, wrapped around the space was a fantastic stained glass mural.
“Dutch, isn’t it?” he asked. “Achterberg.”
“You have a good eye.”
But then his eye for glass was what her grandmother had brought him here for.
“How much did it cost?” He wandered around the shallow end of the pool and stood beneath the windows, his head thrown back.
“Too much, according to grandmother, but my grandfather insisted.”
“And it’s stood all this time?” he asked. “Not been broken or cracked?”
“Once.” She moved to his side. “Grandfather brought in the original artist to repair it.”
That boggled the mind, even to her. That had also been before her day, sometime in the fifties.
He dropped his gaze and turned slowly, ending his scrutiny with a crooked smile aimed at her face. The steady heartbeat she’d tried to regain pranced again in her chest.
“You’d like to swim?” she asked.
One eyebrow shot up. “In this weather?”
“Why not? There’s no weather in here. Plus, the water’s warm. There’s swim trunks in any of the dressing rooms.”
He knelt and trailed one hand in the sparkling liquid. “Heated?” He glanced up at her. “How?”
“We are self-sufficient here, Mr. Garner. My grandmother might insist on keeping everything as it once was, but she’s also willing to embrace modern convenience.” She pointed a finger upward. “Solar panels on the roof store energy in a small building out back. We have whatever electricity we need no matter the situation.”
“But surely, the pool wasn’t heated originally.”
She shook her head. “No, it wasn’t. That was my father’s doing. But as I’ve said, you’re welcome to take a swim.”
“What about you?” he asked.
Blood pulsing in her ears, she took in his question, briefly shaken. “What about me?”
He stood to his feet and narrowed the space between them. “You.” He raised his fingers and brushed the tips down her cheek. “Do you ever let your hair down, Cerise? Or are you a fixture like this house?”
He returned his hand to his side, but the spark of his touch tingled on her skin.
“Swimming is good exercise.”
The quirk of his smile increased. “Always so practiced,” he said. “Every answer laid out for you, as if you picked it from a list. No hint of emotion. No feeling.” He crossed his arms. “I’ll make you a deal.”
She waited, butterflies flitting in her gut.
“I’ll swim if you will.”
The butterflies erupted into flight, and her mouth dry, she attempted to swallow.
“Besides, you promised me entertainment.”
She found her voice, albeit thin. “I hardly think that’s proper. Is it?”
“Proper?” He waved his hands wide. “This is a state-of-the-art society. Everything man wants, man can have. There are no rules to break because they can all be bent at will. Like glass when heated. You shape it this way or that to your pleasing.”
“I am not made of glass, Mr. Garner.”
“Andre,” he corrected. “Call me by my first name, as I have used yours.”
She nodded sharp. “Very well.”
“But back to m
y question,” he stated.
“About rules?” She turned away from him, resting her gaze on the water. “There is something to be said for the old-fashioned, I think. For not treating rules as if they were pliable, but instead firm lines made to hold us back.”
“Not hold us back,” he said. He’d stepped closer, and his breath puffed warm on her neck. “Guide us. Teach us right from wrong. But never prevent us from living. You are not living here in this place, and I don’t believe a girl as lovely as you is meant to be left on a shelf.”
“You flatter me toward your own end,” she said.
He laughed, the sound echoing across the room. “I’ve simply asked you to come for a swim. Me and you, a man and a woman, enjoying each other’s company in a perfectly allowable atmosphere.”
“You enjoy my company?” The question slipped out unheeded. She would call it back, but it was too late. Why did it matter what he enjoyed? He was here for a day at most, then the weather would clear and he’d return to wherever he’d come from. She’d be left here, as always, a watchdog for her grandmother’s moods.
“A swim,” he said. “And a story.”
She turned on her heel. Their faces were only inches apart. “A story?”
“Mmm. Tell me about my father, and I’ll tell you about yours.”
She returned his gaze. “What do you know of my father?”
He reached into his pocket and took out the photographs. Selecting one, he turned it around. “This picture. I know where it was taken and why. I’m thinking you don’t.”
She plucked it from his hand and taking a step back, turned it toward the light. He was right. She had no idea, nor had she noticed her father was in the picture. But there he was, he and Levi and another boy, unnamed.
“If I make this deal, then what?”
He placed his knuckles on her cheek and drew them downward. “Then you take your hair down, and let me see you for the glorious creature you really are.”
***
He’d pressed her on purpose to see if she cracked, and she hadn’t, not really. He wasn’t too surprised by that. What he was surprised by was his own desire to see her in the pool, to see her smile or laugh or act even the tiniest bit human. At least, that was the motive he told himself.
Her pulsed raced, based on the throb at the base of her throat; she was nervous. However, she hid it very well. She also, avoided his question. Maybe he was crossing the line. Probably he was. It wouldn’t be good for him to seduce the old woman’s granddaughter. On the other hand, nothing in this house was as it seemed. He hadn’t expected to come here and learn about his dad and had the distinct impression that was part of his reason for coming, though no one had said so.
“So how about it?” he asked. He left his hand on her cheek, more because of its effect on her than anything else. “I promise to behave myself.”
“Do you?” she asked. “You ask me to swim, to ‘let my hair down’ as it were, with the condition you only want to admire me?”
“You are worth admiration.”
She smiled then. “You are smooth with your words, Andre.”
He dropped his hand to his side. “Do I get that from my father?”
She blinked at last, the tiniest flick of her eyelids. Why now? Why after all the other things he’d said did the mention of his father make her uncomfortable?
“I didn’t know your father,” she said.
Of course not. But she obviously had knowledge of him. She’d given him the photographs. He raised the photo he’d held before her earlier. “This one was taken at the annual regatta.”
A sign of good faith. He’d share what he knew first.
“I recognize the setting because I’ve attended it in recent years. This is my father, obviously, and from the photo you had earlier, this would be yours.” He tapped the golden-haired youth in the center. “This young person is none other than Marvin Fitzgibbons.”
She made a short gasp. “The Marvin Fitzgibbons?”
He grinned and nodded. “The very same. What were your father and mine doing with such a wild youth?”
She hesitated to speak. “They were young. Maybe this was before.”
He shook his head. “No. From what I’ve heard, he started his wildness in college, the same college our fathers attended.”
“So they met there.” She stated it rather than asked.
“Yes. I know only a couple stories about my dad, and this is one of them. How your father fits into it was not an issue until now. My uncle, the only person in my family willing to talk about my father, once told me they’d went on a weekend to Atlantic City – my dad, Marvin, and a couple friends. They took their tuition money, thinking they’d double it, and instead blew it all gambling. Poker, I believe. Broke afterward, they had to figure out how to buy enough gas to get home. But then someone approached them, looking for people to sail in the regatta.”
“Sail? How would anyone know they could even sail? That’s a learned skill.”
“True. But didn’t your father know how?”
She gave a soft laugh. “Yes. But this man couldn’t have known that.”
“Oh, sure, he did. He’d have recognized him from newspapers, magazines, society pages. The Delacroixs were all over the rags then.”
“So a complete stranger recognizes them and asks them to sail?”
He raised and lowered his shoulders. “Why not? My uncle said they accepted. I simply never knew your father was involved, but it makes sense now. Here’s your proof.” He waved the photo again. “Look at their shirts.”
She took the picture from him and turned it toward the light. “Matching.” She squinted harder. “‘Thirtieth Regatta.’” She read this, her tone displaying her astonishment. “I’d never noticed.” She motioned toward the picture. “So you’ve explained the story, but not why they’d be friends with Marvin Fitzgibbons.”
“Youth makes for strange bedfellows, I think,” he replied. “My father is dead, as is yours, and Marvin, last I heard, was in a home. I think he drank himself into a stupor.”
“So his wild ways caught up with him.” She said this as if it sealed the story. “Three men who should be alive and living out their years in happiness are all gone.” She turned away from him. “You know, they say there’s a curse.”
“A curse?”
She nodded and waved an arm toward the walls. “On this house. It all began after that image.” She slanted herself sideways and dipped her head toward the photo still held in his palm. “I think you need to see something else.”
There wasn’t anything he could do but follow. They reentered the tiny stairwell, exiting on the second floor and taking a wandering course in yet another direction. Andre had the distinct impression it would be easy to get lost in this house and never be found.
This wing was obviously not used anymore. It was clean though, and dust free, as was everything in the house, yet the neglect was still obvious. She moved to a door, which swung open on creaking hinges, and motioned him inside. He stopped cold two feet in.
“What? How?”
It was a time capsule. If he closed his eyes, laughing, joshing boys would appear from around the corner and toss themselves down on the bed or the settee. The décor here was less nineteenth century and more from the Golden Age. Art deco, plaster moldings, and a fantastic crystal chandelier gave it light, but it was the clothing hanging here and there that made it otherworldly.
“It belonged to your father and mine,” she said.
He took up a shirt stretched into a permanent crease on one of the bedposts. Dust motes flew from it in a swirl. “I recognize this.” Scrambling in his pocket, he pulled out a picture and laid it upside the fabric. “Why?” he whirled. “Why is all this here?”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, my grandmother prefers it that way.”
He made to speak, but she silenced him with a wave of her hand. “They had a falling out.”
“A falling out over what?” Andre turned the sh
irt over in his hands. Plus, what did their argument have to do with a curse?
“A girl, of course. There was a fist fight.” She passed where he stood in the room and laid her hand inside an indentation in the wall. “Your father swung and missed.”
Andre dropped the shirt on the bed and returned the photo to his pocket. Stepping to her side, he curled his fist and pressed it into the space. A perfect fit. Goosepimples rose on his skin.
“And your father?”
“Told him to get out. They never spoke again, and your dad never returned.”
He lowered his hand and turned sideways, facing her. “Who was the woman that she was so special she’d come between two friends?”
Cerise smiled, a trained expression meant to put him at ease, yet he was anything but. “The curse came about,” she said, not answering his question. “Because after that my father fell ill. The servants were greatly superstitious and rumors began to float around that your father had brought it.”
“Brought a curse? What did my dad know about casting curses?”
“It wasn’t so much that he’d cast it on purpose as that he’d fulfilled something the house needed.”
Andre felt the wrinkles grow on his forehead and rubbed on hand over them, but it didn’t help the pressure now pounding in his skull. “I can believe this house is a living being,” he said. It seemed to be. “But you’ll still have to explain that.”
She crossed one arm over the other at her waist. “The house was built by Ignatius Delacroix the First. My uncle was Ignatius the Third. Ignatius the First built it here despite all that had been said about the sacredness of the island. It had been an Indian burial ground and place of worship. He didn’t care, wasn’t afraid at all, and so ignored all the talk. He was an eccentric, like so many others in the family.”
A rumble of thunder drowned out their talk for a moment, and she paused. She leaned one shoulder on the wall. “He wanted to live alone and study,” she continued. “He was a writer, or so the family has been told. He brought his wife and children, sealed them off from the world, and never ventured into the city proper for anything. His odd lifestyle only fueled the stories about the place, that he’d disturbed the spirits of dead Indians who were unhappy with what he’d done.”
Glass Page 2