The Ghost in the Glass House (12 page)

“Well, I remember how Tilda loves delphiniums,” the other Jack said. “And that you could never make them grow for love or money after I left.”

“I'm not sure I'd put it that way,” Mack said.

“Then you've got some this year?” the other Jack said. “Let's see them.”

“Not every garden needs delphiniums,” Mack retorted.

Clare studied the other Jack's face, listening for any echo of the Jack she knew. Aside from the slight coastal lilt in both their voices, she didn't hear one. Did turning into a man completely erase a boy? And if the man stood here in front of her, what was the boy doing in the glass house?

“Jack
Cunningham?
” Clare asked.

The question was uncalculated, a graceless attempt to cut through her own confusion. But it had an immediate effect.

The other Jack glanced at her in surprise.

Mack's eyebrows drew together. “Clare,” he said, still with a servant's deference but a note of warning in his voice. “How do you happen to know Mr. Cunningham?”

“Tilda told me you were in the yard,” Clare said. Before either of them could realize that this didn't really answer the question, she pressed on with one of her own.

“You used to work here?” she asked.

The other Jack nodded. “When I was a boy,” he said.

“Did you help Mack plant the roses down by the glass house?”

The other Jack laughed. “Afraid not,” he said, looking at Mack. “You had those in years before I came on the place.”

Mack nodded.

“You see, Mack here is
much older
than me,” the other Jack said, in a tone clearly meant not to teach her, but to tease Mack. “He was a grown man when I was only fifteen.”

Mack stifled a grin and took a friendly swipe at him.

The other Jack eluded him with a step. “But I can't take any credit for the gardens,” the other Jack went on. “Unless you find a delphinium Mack hasn't managed to kill. I was only here one summer, until—” A glance passed between the two men. Clare wouldn't have recognized it if she hadn't seen it so often after her father's death: a silent agreement between men not to talk about something that had hurt them. “Until summer's end,” the other Jack finished.

The ground under her feet seemed to roll gently, like the deck of a ship. Clare kept her balance, with effort. “Well,” she said. “I was just going out to take a walk.”

“Careful on the east side of the house,” Mack called as she started down the hill. “All my tools are still lying out.”

Clare nodded to show she'd heard. Then, without making any attempt at concealment, she cut across the lawn into the grove of young maples that shaded the glass house. When she reached it she looked back. Both of the men were gone.

On the mossy flagstone, she stared so hard through the door of the glass house that the vines and reflections blurred with the furniture in the room, and all of them began to reel. As she glared, the glass rattled: a sound that might have been a finger tap, or might have been the wind.

Then she turned on her heel and strode back up the hill.

N
O ONE ELSE HAD
arrived yet at the switchback steps that led down to the beach.

Clare checked up the cliff, toward Bram's and Denby's houses, and down the coast, toward Bridget and Teddy's, but the shell road that ran along the bluff was deserted. No one else had arrived yet at the switchback steps that led down to the beach. So she started down the shifting sand of the hairpin path alone, with lurches and long slides she would never have allowed herself if anyone else were there to see. On the last turn, the sand gave way beneath her heels and carried her in a sifting flume several yards toward the shoreline.

“Hey!” someone said behind her, his voice loud with alarm. “Careful!”

Clare turned, still unsteady from the descent.

Bram sat in the narrow strip of shade at the foot of the cliff, on a small rug. He had risen up on his haunches, probably as she skidded onto the sand, but when she turned, he eased back. “You all right?” he said.

Clare nodded. The giddiness of the fall had faded, but the discovery that she was not alone left her off-balance. Despite the obvious explanations, Bram's sudden appearance, with the rug on the sand, had all the force of magic.

Bram patted the carpet beside him, where there was just room for one more person. “Come sit,” he said.

Clare climbed the slight rise into the shade and sat beside him. The rug was so small that their bare arms brushed.

“Denby wanted a rug,” Bram told her. “They've got half a dozen of them rolled up in the back room of his place, but he says the rugs in my house are actual Persian. He wanted me to take the one from the sunroom, but they'd miss it the second I did. I got this from the bar downstairs,” he said, patting the low nap. “He's just going to have to live with it.” But the defensive note in his voice betrayed him. He was already steeling himself against Denby's wrath.

Clare craned her neck to see up the hill. “Where's everyone else?”

Bram shrugged. “Maybe they got stuck at a séance.”

Clare felt herself flush, as if he'd just walked past a place where she had hidden something. She took a sideways glance at him, hoping to find he had been looking out to sea and missed it. But he watched her steadily.

“Have you ever been to one?” she asked in confusion, then frowned at herself. This would have been polite conversation at the captain's table, but somehow it didn't seem to fit here with Bram.

“A séance?” he said.

Clare nodded.

Bram scooped up dry sand with a nearby shell and let it pour in a veil over the shell's serrated edge. He gave an almost imperceptible nod.

“You have?” Clare said, surprised.

“My dad,” Bram said. “He wanted to talk with my mother.”

This struck Clare as a serious error in judgment. The spirits of Bridget's mother's séances, she knew, were only a new variety of entertainment: more animated than dolls, more absorbing than a carnival, but weaker and less menacing than actual people. But Clare's longing for her father cut so deep that she required a heaven to hide him, and a God to keep that heaven. The difference between the sham magic of a séance and the dark grave she'd seen her father's casket lowered into was so profound that they had never seemed to have anything to do with one another. But now an almost ungovernable hope stirred in the roots of her heart.

“What did she say?” she asked.

Bram shook his head. “It wasn't her,” he said.

“She didn't come?”

“Someone came,” Bram said. “It wasn't her.”

He ducked his head, obviously unwilling to continue this thread of the conversation. But Clare's hope made her greedy. “How do you know?” she pressed.

Bram stared out at the bright line of the horizon. “My father told me to put on a jacket and trousers,” he said. “But I wasn't wearing socks, and there was butter on the jacket. She never noticed. My mother would have.”

“Maybe,” Clare suggested, “she was thinking about something else. Something more important.”

Bram shook his head.

Clare's own jaw set. The hope of speaking with her father was too strong to let him dismiss.

“But did it sound like her?” she asked. “The things she did say?”

“It didn't sound like anything,” Bram said. “Just an old lady talking in a dark room.”

“Well, the Sensitive speaks,” Clare said, but even as she fell into Bridget's mother's familiar vocabulary, she realized that no Sensitive was required for Jack to speak to her. “But what did she
say
to you?”

“It wasn't my mother,” Bram said again, his voice as sharp as she'd ever heard it.

Stung, Clare snapped back. “I heard you before. But how do you know?” Her voice rose as she spoke, and broke high on the last word at something dangerously close to tears.

Instantly, Bram's face softened. “Hey,” he said, in the voice she knew. “I'm sorry.”

In return, Clare swallowed some of her own hope. “Maybe it wasn't her,” she admitted. “I just don't see how you can be so sure.”

Bram's blue eyes traveled over her face like a pilot checking the wind and the horizon.

“Because she came back,” he said.

“Came back?” she repeated. A storm broke in her heart: hope, that if Bram's mother had come to him, her father could come back too, and hurt, that Bram's mother had returned to him, but her father had never come for her.

But when she searched Bram's face for an answer, she only saw defiance and shame, as if he'd just confessed a dirty secret.

“Where did she find you?” Clare demanded. “When did she come?”

“She was just waiting outside the house,” Bram said. “One day when I came out.”

“You were by yourself?”

Bram nodded. “She told me she'd been waiting,” he said. “Until I was alone.”

“What did she tell you?” Clare asked.

“She said she didn't want to leave,” he said. “She said one day I'd understand.” At the thought of those words from her own father, comfort settled over Clare. But Bram's lip curled in anger, like a man's did when he'd been tricked.

“Are you sure it was her?” Clare asked. “How did you know?”

“She's my mother,” Bram said, with faint surprise that this required explanation.

If Bram could see his mother, Clare wondered, why couldn't she see Jack? “She looked just like anyone on the street?” she said. In that case, she thought, ghosts might walk among them all the time, and nobody could ever tell the difference.

“She looked the same as she always did,” Bram said. “But she was wearing a new dress.” Anger rose in his voice at this.

Clare had felt the same anger since her father's death. But even though she still wasn't sure who deserved it, she'd learned enough to know it wasn't him. “It's not their fault,” she said gently. “No one can help when they die.”

Bram glanced up, his eyes wary and confused. Then understanding dawned in them. “No,” he told her. “She's not dead. She never died.”

The death of Bram's mother was such an established fact in Clare's world that she couldn't take this in at once. To accept it meant all the other facts she knew had to strain and shift, and all other truths suddenly became precarious. It took a long, dizzy moment for her to even form a question.

“Does your father know?” she asked.

Bram nodded. “He didn't want to tell me she left,” he said. “I guess he didn't know where she went. He might have thought she really died. Or maybe he wished she did. We were in Italy. It wouldn't be hard to get papers.”

“Did you tell him?” Clare asked. “When she came back?”

Bram shook his head.

“Never?” Clare said. “But what if she comes back again?”

“She never did,” Bram said.

Dread filled Clare's heart at the weight of the secret he had carried so long on his own.

“Does Denby know?” she asked.

“I never told him,” Bram said.

He'd shifted on the carpet as they talked, so that instead of looking out to sea, he seemed to be trying to shoulder the ocean out of the conversation.

She had forgotten her hands on the sandy rug until he reached for one. When he took it, the skin on her shoulders and arms and shins woke up, as if they were all waiting for their own touch.

Overhead, somebody laughed, followed by a shriek of false alarm from Bridget.

Clare snatched her hand back. She scooted away from Bram on the rug, then scrambled to her feet. Bridget, Teddy, and Denby were halfway down the path, close enough that they might have seen everything, but far enough up that they could have missed it all.

As Clare watched, Denby lunged after Bridget, who led the procession, and caught her in an awkward hold. Bridget gave another lusty scream, broke free, and darted down the next turn in the path. Teddy loped along behind them, taking occasional swigs from a flask.

Clare let out a long breath. Bridget was a good actress, but not that good. If she'd caught sight of Bram as he held Clare's hand, she would never have been able to play her role with Denby so well.

“Clare,” Bram said. He stood now too, barefoot on the rug.

Bridget skidded around the last rocky turn and slid onto the beach.

Clare had been right. The sight of Bram and Clare broke Bridget's concentration completely. Her smile vanished. Her chin came up and she crossed her arms.

But to Clare's surprise, the same expression also appeared on Denby's face when he caught sight of the two of them. He didn't give Bridget another glance. Instead, his eyes flicked between Bram and Clare, measuring and calculating with all the same jealousy as Bridget. But while Bridget's transformation from shock to rage had been complete, Denby pressed his lips together to hold back an unmistakable hurt that Clare had never seen cross his face before.

“That's not the one I told you to get,” Denby said, nodding at the rug like a prince presented with a gift so small it insulted his high rank.

“I told you,” Bram said. “Someone would miss the one from the sunroom. And then they'd miss everything.”

Without a word, Bridget stalked down to the water and started out over the rocks, alone.

“I guess it's better than nothing,” Denby said, and started after her.

Teddy slid down onto the beach as Denby left. “Bram! Clare!” Teddy exclaimed. The cynical twist that usually marked his face was gone, replaced by the eerie eagerness of a slow child. His voice was urgent and loud.

It took Clare a minute to place what had happened to him. She knew the symptoms well enough among her mother's friends. She'd just never seen them in someone her own age. When Teddy grasped her in a clumsy hug, his fingers groping her waist, the whiskey on his breath confirmed it.