The Ghost in the Glass House

by Carey Wallace

  “I tried to go with you,” Jack went on. “But you disappeared, and I got lost in the mist.”

  “It’s all around the big house?” Clare asked. Her imagination blanketed the red peaks and white brick in thick clouds.

  “No,” Jack said. “It’s all around this one.”

  The phantom fog in her mind rolled down the hill and curled around the glass house, blotting out the lawn, the oaks, the occasional gardens, the lilacs, and the forest beyond. Clare pulled her knees up. “Right up to the glass?” she asked, her voice low, as if to keep the fog from overhearing.

  “You see the redbud tree?” Jack asked.

  Clare nodded. The delicate trunk divided into slim, trailing branches near the foot of the hill, maybe twenty paces from the glass house.

  “It starts there,” he said. “And just past the oak tree. And a ways into the forest.”

  The landmarks he chose described a large, clumsy circle, perhaps fifty paces in diameter, around the glass house.

  “It’s like a ring,” Clare said.

  “That’s right,” Jack said, with a teacher’s pleasure at a quick student.

  “But you don’t see it all the time.”

  “Only if I go over there,” Jack said. “I don’t like to.”

  “It’s always by the redbud tree?” Clare asked. “It never moves?”

  “No,” Jack said. “It doesn’t.”

  When Jack spoke next, his voice came from halfway across the glass house, drifting toward the door.

  “But I can climb all the trees, as high as I want,” he said. “There’s no mist up there.”

  Clare scrambled to her feet. By the time she followed him out into the glade, the vines that covered the sides of the house had already started to sag and twitch under Jack’s invisible weight. When he reached the top of the house, which crested just below the lowest branches of the young maples that surrounded it, glass rattled faintly and the topmost vines shivered. Then a single rose seemed to leap from the roof of the glass house into the branches of the maple tree.

  The maple branches swayed, and sprang back into place. For a long moment, Clare lost track of Jack. Then, from the topmost branches of the tree, the tiny petals of the unlucky rose began to rain down into the glade.

  Thirteen

  “CAREFUL,” DENBY SAID SHARPLY. “If you get yourself killed, they’ll never let the rest of us come back.”

  Bridget wobbled on an outcrop of black rock with considerable flair, caught his hand, and swooned against him. Denby’s body stiffened at the contact, as if steeling himself against a blow. But when he glanced at her, his eyes were bright with something like hunger.

  “I’m sorry,” Bridget said, her voice full of promise, not remorse. She righted herself, shook her shoulders, and began to pick her way nimbly down the cliff.

  Denby watched her go.

  He and Bram had arrived at Bridget and Teddy’s early that afternoon and insisted that Bridget, Teddy, and Clare follow them to the beach. Teddy had demanded an explanation as to why he should leave the wicker couch he was sprawled on, but Denby had flatly refused, which created a mystery far more potent than any promises Denby could have made.

  So they had all walked up the white shell road to Denby’s rented house, where the set of half-ruined stone steps led down the cliff to the beach, just a few yards from the mouth of the cave.

  By day, sun lit the water in the cave a rich turquoise and reflected up on the rough walls in pale strands that shifted and rocked with each pulse of the tide. Bram darted in first. Shoes in hand, Denby and Bridget clambered easily over the rocks. But now that Clare could see everything, she could hardly believe she’d ever gotten to the other side.

  The rocks were the size of suitcases or traveling trunks, their spines sharp, their faces slick. Water hissed and fizzed between them. Everyone else leapt from stone to stone. But Clare stood with both bare feet on a single rock, surveyed for another likely spot, then took up a firm position before choosing the next.

  “Hurry up,” Bridget called. “Someone’s going to see you.”

  “You’re holding up the whole caravan,” Teddy echoed from a few rocks behind Clare.

  Rattled, Clare stepped blindly from one rock to the next, where the sharp edge she landed on opened a long, shallow cut from the ball of her foot to the arch. She jerked back from the sting of salt, and turned the sole up to find a thin line of bright red. Where the blood met water on her skin, it blossomed and faded to rose.

  “I cut my foot,” Clare called back.

  “So did I,” Denby retorted. “It’s salt water. They use it to clean wounds.”

  “You learn that in the war?” Teddy asked.

  The sting of the wound pushed Clare on toward the ledge. But it also made her clumsy. A few rocks before she reached the cave, her foot turned. She tried to right herself with another step, but only reeled. The sea and the sharp rocks swung sickeningly around her, and her mind filled with fear of the phantom pain of a fall on her shin, her knees, her side.

  A steady arm caught her around the waist. “You all right?” Bram asked.

  Clare listed against him, then straightened, surprised by the heat that seeped from his arm through her thin dress.

  She nodded.

  “Here,” Bram said, and pointed to the wide, flat plane of a nearby rock.

  Clare stepped where he pointed. He stepped along with her and found his footing on a narrower spot, his arm still around her waist.

  “Here,” he said again, and pointed to another rock. When they reached that one: “There.”

  A few steps later, they’d gained the ledge.

  “That’s one way to get a girl to hold your hand,” Teddy observed.

  Instantly, Bram released her. Bridget gave Clare a hard look. Up ahead, Denby’s voice rang out. “Come on,” he said. “We’re almost there.”

  “Thank you,” Clare told Bram.

  Bridget and Teddy disappeared after Denby, but Bram waited as Clare dropped her shoes on the stone. She made an attempt to wipe the blood from her sole, but it only smeared. After a minute, she gave up and slipped the shoes on.

  “Go ahead,” Bram said, nodding into the dark.

  Clare’s foot was ginger from the cut, but she stiffened her back against the pain. Around them, the sun flashed and twisted on the curved walls.

  This time, she didn’t falter when the passage narrowed and grew dim. But when the blind turns let them out into the hidden cavern, she stopped short.

  An entire suite of furniture had appeared on the waxy white rock in the center of the room: a baby-blue couch with flourishes of cherry wood, a leather armchair with tufts of horsehair spilling from a cut in one flank, a red loveseat with a high arched back, a green velvet ottoman with long gold fringe that fell all the way from the seat to the stone two feet below. There was even a low table in the center, bearing an assortment of mismatched oil lamps whose unsteady light turned strange among the fingers of rock in the high corners of the cave.

  Bridget had already taken up a corner of the red loveseat, pulled her feet up, leaned back into the curve, and arranged her skirt in a half-moon sweep. She glanced away pointedly when Clare appeared.

  Teddy, beside the loveseat, shook his head and laughed. “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  “What do you think?” Bram asked, beside Clare.

  The eagerness in his eyes made it hard for Clare to hold his gaze.

  “How did you get this all down here?” she asked.

  “You threw it all down the hill?” Teddy said.

  “Where did it come from?” Bridget broke in.

  “Our places,” Denby said, with an unconvincing attempt at nonchalance.

  “No one noticed?” Clare asked as she and Bram came up.

  “We carried it down,” Bram explained. “Except for the blue couch. Denby made a pulley for that.”

  “A pulley?” Bridget repeated.

  Denby nodded. “A simple one. I lashed it with rope and we
let it out around one of the boulders.”

  “I carried the red one down by myself,” Bram told Clare.

  “It’s so comfortable,” Bridget said, and gave a little wriggle.

  Clare sat in the corner of the blue couch. Bram took a seat on it too, splitting the difference: not beside her, but not on the other side, either. Teddy settled into the damaged armchair.

  Up close, it was clear that all the furniture had also suffered in its travels. One side of the ottoman’s gold fringe was shrunken and stiff, probably from a dip in salt water. A water stain spread over the blue cushion between Clare and Bram, and the velvet was smeared with tar and dusted by sand. The low table had sustained several gouges that cut through its deep varnish to the raw wood below. Only Bram’s loveseat seemed to have survived more or less intact.

  “What will we do about this?” Clare asked, wiping at a smear of tar. “Before we put it back?”

  Denby was the only one still standing. “We’re not putting it back,” he said.

  “We’re not?” Bram said, surprised.

  “They don’t know it’s gone now,” Denby said. “No one will realize until after we’ve left—if they even do then. And who would think of looking here?”

  Bram frowned. Clare’s heart tugged at the lonely fate of the furniture Denby had just consigned forever to the dark cave.

  Denby took his seat on the green and gold ottoman like a king giving the signal that court was now open.

  Bridget sat up. “What should we do now?” she asked.

  Denby’s glance at her carried clear contempt at the suggestion that the small miracle he’d already accomplished demanded any embellishment.

  Bridget was undeterred. “We could play post office,” she said.

  Clare had never played post office, but Bridget had learned it last summer in Nice. The game didn’t have any clear rules, or a winner or loser. One player, the postman, had to leave the group. When the postman returned, the rest of the party announced who among them had to go out to receive their “letter”—a kiss.

  “Post office is for kids,” Teddy said.

  “No, it isn’t,” said Bridget.

  “It’s for kids who can’t get anyone to kiss them,” Teddy amended.

  “That’s not true,” Bridget said.

  “Sure it is,” Teddy said. “How many people have you kissed?”

  “Plenty,” Bridget answered. But then her face flickered, uncertain. Clare knew Bridget wasn’t lying. She was wondering if she should have told the truth.

  “When you weren’t playing post office?” Teddy pressed.

  “That’s none of your business,” Bridget said.

  Clare didn’t know what adventure Denby had had in mind when he dragged the furniture down the cliff, but this clearly wasn’t it. He looked from Bridget to Teddy with unconcealed fury. “I don’t think any of us really care how many boys Bridget has kissed,” he said.

  The triumph that flared in Bridget’s eyes at this was replaced almost instantly by a wounded look.

  Teddy raised his hands in mock surrender. “All right, all right,” he said.

  It only took a moment for his gaze to wander from Bridget to Clare. “What about you, Clare?” Teddy asked. “How many people have you kissed?”

  Beside her on the couch, Clare could feel Bram shift.

  She stared at Teddy, her gaze steady, with the unblinking silence that sometimes worked with adults: made them forget unpleasant questions, or replace old questions with new ones.

  Teddy just laughed. “You haven’t kissed anyone,” he said. “Have you?”

  Heat rushed to Clare’s cheeks, but she quickly calculated that it was probably too dark for the others to see. Teddy was right. Until now, she’d never cared if she ever kissed anyone. But neither had anyone else.

  “She didn’t say that,” Bridget snapped.

  Teddy didn’t even glance at his sister. “Tell me I’m wrong, Clare,” he said, his gaze still fixed on Clare. “Tell us all the boys you’ve kissed.”

  Even Denby watched Clare now with something approaching interest.

  “Come on,” Teddy said. “Tell us what you’ve done with them.” He leaned forward, his legs spread wide, his elbows on his knees.

  Suddenly, Bram was on his feet. “Leave her alone,” he said.

  Bridget looked up at Bram, stricken.

  Teddy eased back in his chair, his eyebrows high, his grin twisted.

  “Sit down,” Denby ordered.

  Bram watched Teddy for a long moment. Then he sat back down again.

  Bridget’s gaze shifted to Clare, where it hardened.

  Fourteen

  CLARE’S MOTHER UNHOOKED THE thread of tiny freshwater pearls from the back of her neck and hung it on one of the red lilies Tilda had brought up to her that morning. The strand hung down over her dressing table like a piece of loose rigging.

  Clare shifted from one foot to the other in the doorway.

  Her mother turned back with a smile. “Hello, love,” she said.

  Clare took up a perch at the foot of her mother’s bed.

  “Adeline Lewis is hosting a bridge party on the beach,” her mother told her. “I doubt she was expecting children, but I also doubt the conversation will rise beyond a child’s comprehension. Would you like to come along?”

  Clare shook her head. “I just came home,” she said.

  “Did you have a good time with Bridget?” her mother asked.

  Clare hesitated.

  Her mother rummaged through the velvet chambers of her jewelry case and pulled another necklace out. This one was an old-fashioned setting, blue topaz petals and emerald leaves on a white gold vine.

  Clare knew immediately where it must have come from. Her mother’s girlhood bangles were all paste, carved wood, hand-painted glass over butterfly wings. And the vine was too ornate to date from the past few years, when all the jewelry was made to look like airplanes or skyscrapers.

  Her mother lifted her chin to show off the gems. “What do you think?” she asked.

  Her mother’s reflection was strange in the glass: her eyes familiar, but traded, the wrong side of her smile crooked, the wrong eyebrow arched.

  It might have been this strangeness that gave Clare the courage to ask, “Did Daddy give you that?”

  Her mother’s hands froze above her head, like a dancer listening for the strains of the next movement. Then she turned around. Her eyes hadn’t filled with tears, as Clare had feared. In fact, they seemed to have a kind of question in them. “He did,” she said.

  “When?” Clare asked.

  Her mother touched the jewels at her throat.

  “The day we got married,” she said. To Clare’s surprise, her mother’s lips twisted as if she’d just heard a joke. “He told me he’d had it for weeks, but he waited until the deal was sealed so I couldn’t raise enough money to run off before the wedding.”

  Her smile broke into a grin at the memory.

  Then she stood and gathered Clare into the sheer layers of fabric at her waist. Clare’s hands found hiding spots in her mother’s skirts. Her mother smoothed Clare’s hair.

  “He loved you so much,” her mother said.

  This was a benediction her mother had said over Clare a hundred times since her father’s death. It might even have been what Clare had come in search of. But for the first time since his death, the familiar words didn’t settle her heart.

  Her own memories of her father had long since worn thin, like faces in a photograph that faded a bit more each time she touched her finger down to point at them. And they had only ever been a child’s memories. She had never been old enough to study him the way she now studied everyone she met. Even when her memories had been whole, they had never been enough to tell her what kind of man he’d been.

  But the more Clare learned about other men and boys, the more she wished she knew about him. And despite the story her mother had just told her, Clare knew she couldn’t learn what she wanted to know by
asking. She needed to know things you could only learn if you watched and listened. But she would never see him again.

  She breathed in the scent of talc and perfume from her mother’s dress. Her mother kissed the top of Clare’s head and pulled free.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to come to Adeline’s?” she asked. “She’s promising chilled grapefruit with bowls of sugar to dip it in. Apparently Walter’s workmen just uprooted an entire orchard to make way for another one of his Florida hotels. He had them send up a dozen crates, and now it’s up to us to dispose of them.”

  Clare shook her head.

  “Once again, you’re absolutely right,” her mother said. “I wouldn’t go either if I still had the privileges of a child.” She gathered up a chiffon wrap, kissed Clare again, and went out. Her skirts whispered down the stairs with a shush like the end of a lullaby.

  Clare found Tilda in the kitchen, surrounded by a queen’s ransom of silver. The counter overlooking the circle drive was crowded with flatware, stacks of serving trays, pitchers, carving knives and ladles, the scrambled elements of several tea services, and a small army of bud vases massed at the foot of a gravy boat shaped like a goose. Most of these were arrayed to the right of the sink, their features shadowed by tarnish, but a small contingent stood to the left at high shine.

  With white paste from a small mixing bowl, Tilda cut a gleaming path down the center of a broad oval platter. This one hadn’t turned a uniform black: the delicate scrollwork was clouded with purple and copper, almost like the stains flame made on the stones of a hearth. In fact, all the tarnished silver looked as if it were coated in soot. It was hard to believe that all it had passed through was time, not some great blaze.

  Clare padded over to the table by the window and sat down. At the scrape of the chair on tile, Tilda turned around.

  By now, anywhere else, Clare would have heard the history of the house so many times she’d already be tired of it. Servants loved to talk about the families they served, and their stories were even better than serials in magazines, because each servant knew a different piece. This one had seen the young master bury something in the garden. This one had discovered the old mistress dressed up in a parade uniform from the last war. And then they could argue for hours about whether he’d been burying a gun or a book, or if the uniform belonged to her father or lover—and how all this fit with the other family secrets they’d collected over the years along with the soiled laundry and dirty plates.