The Ghost in the Glass House (18 page)

“You're not—” Bridget's mother began.

But Bridget's father threw back the covers of the bed and laid her in it, still fully dressed. Sand sifted onto the sheets. He pulled the quilt up and tucked it under Bridget's chin.

In the doorway beside Clare, Clare's mother followed all his gestures.

Bridget turned her face to the wall.

“Would you like some warm milk?” Bridget's mother asked. Her eyes were still alert, but now they couldn't seem to fasten on anything. “I'll bring some milk,” she said, and left the room.

Clare sat down on Bridget's bed.

“Cynthia,” Bridget's father said. “Could I speak with you?”

Clare's mother followed him into the hall. He pulled the door closed behind them.

Clare found Bridget's hand under the blanket and covered it with her own.

Bridget stared at the wall as if it were a screen she could see things on. “He didn't know what to do,” she said.

“Denby?” Clare asked.

“He pulled my hair and pinched my arms,” said Bridget. “I told him to stop, and he threw me down. Then he took the light with him when he went.”

She turned to look at Clare. Her pupils had grown so big it seemed like some of the darkness of the cave must have crept into them.

“It was so dark,” she said. “I found the wall. I was going to follow it, but then I thought, What if I choose the wrong way, and I get lost inside the cliff? What if there's a pit, and I fall into it?”

The door opened. Teddy stood in it wearing only a pair of striped pajama bottoms. Bare, his chest was thin as a boy's.

“Bridge?” he said. His voice was still thick with drink, but it had lost its mocking edge. “What's wrong?”

Clare braced herself as he stepped into the room, but he didn't come near her. Instead, he took up a post at the foot of the bed.

“Is she all right?” he asked Clare.

Clare's mother appeared in the door behind him. “Clare,” she said. “It's time to go.”

“I'll drive you back,” Bridget's father said from the hall.

“It's not far,” Clare's mother said. “We can walk.”

“It's the middle of the night,” Bridget's father said. “Don't be ridiculous.”

Clare rose. Then, as her mother had done so many times before, she leaned down and kissed Bridget's forehead.

Bridget closed her eyes.

As Clare went out, Bridget's mother carried in a mug of milk. A faint plume of steam trailed from it as she passed. When Clare glanced back, Bridget's mother stood over her daughter's bed, looking down with the wide eyes and stiff face of a woman who has seen a ghost.

B
RIDGET'S FATHER PULLED AROUND
the kitchen drive and cut the engine off.

Clare fumbled for her door handle, found it, and hopped out. She had her mother's door open before Bridget's father could get there from the other side. He circled the back of the car just as her mother stepped out.

He had left the headlights on. They called the white curve of the drive up out of the dark, but where the light gave out, Clare couldn't find a single glint or shadow to prove the yard hadn't been swallowed up by the same black space that hung between the stars.

She stood stubbornly beside her mother. But to Clare's surprise, he didn't look at her mother, but at Clare.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Twelve,” Clare answered.

Bridget's father nodded, as if this were a sum he needed to work a complicated calculation. Then he looked at her mother. “Did she ever do anything like this?” he asked. He didn't wait for an answer. “I just don't understand,” he went on, “why she would do a thing like that.”

“Robert,” Clare's mother said. “Why did you do all the things you've done?”

He gazed at her with a look of dawning horror.

“This is very late for Clare,” her mother said. “I should take her in.”

“Of course, of course,” Bridget's father repeated.

Clare's mother turned her cheek for him to kiss. He tried to nod at Clare but his eyes couldn't find a place to rest, as if she were an apparition that kept changing shape around the edges. “Good night,” he said to something just over her head.

Inside, Tilda stood at the counter, fully dressed, her gray hair tucked up in its tidy bun. A pie shell stood beside her, filled with paper-thin slices of apple arranged in a precise spiral that wound round on itself like a staircase at the Vatican. From another sheet of dough, she was cutting delicate petals to create a flaky blossom that would cover the whole face of the pie.

“Oh, Tilda,” Clare's mother said. “You didn't need to wait up for us.”

Tilda's fierce expression made it clear that she hadn't stayed up to wait on them.

“We found Bridget,” Clare told her. “We took her back home.”

Tilda managed to drop her gaze before relief unmanned her.

Clare's mother gave Tilda a searching glance. “Did you know Bridget?” she asked.

“She tried to take a fifth of whiskey home in her skirt tonight,” Tilda said. “But I caught her before she left.”

She tossed a puff of flour at the round of dough that would become the top crust. “It's a terrible thing to lose a child,” she added, and lifted the dough over the sugared fruit.

“But your apples,” Clare's mother protested. “No one will see them.”

When Tilda glanced up this time, her expression was simply startled, as if she couldn't understand why a fact so obvious bore mentioning. Then she dropped the crust over the intricate spiral, fluted the edge with her fingertips, and distributed the dough petals into a sunburst that nodded at the end of a delicate stem.

She folded her arms across her wiry frame. “I guess you've seen better than this,” she said. “In London or Paris.”

“No,” Clare's mother said. “I haven't.”

Clare and her mother climbed the stairs to their rooms in silence. At the landing, her mother kissed the top of Clare's head. Then she slipped into her own room and Clare went on to hers.

Without turning on a lamp, Clare kicked away her damp, gritty shoes, peeled off her stockings, and traded her ruined dress for a clean nightgown. She slipped the chain of the pearl under her collar.

When she turned to crawl into her bed, her mother's shadow filled the open door.

Clare shuddered.

Her mother gave a low laugh. “Ah, honey,” she said. “I didn't mean to scare you.”

She folded back the covers and Clare got into bed. Her mother sat down beside her, pulled the covers back up, and laid her hand on Clare's face.

“You've grown so much,” she said.

A stubborn knot formed in Clare's chest, just under Jack's pearl: the same knot that always formed when anyone made the threat that she could not remain a child. But her mother's words called something up out of the knot, like one of the vines that grew over the glass house, blind but determined to climb.

Clare gave a single nod.

“I was thinking,” her mother said, “that we should go home. How would you feel about that?”

Clare had held her own all night against the dark and fear, but at the mention of home, her eyes filled with tears.

“But what about,” she began, to test the hope against the biggest obstacle she could imagine. “What about Robert?”

In the shadows, her mother's brow furrowed. Then she began to laugh. She leaned over and kissed Clare's cheek, still laughing. “Oh, honey,” she said. “Oh no. No, no. He's been fraternizing with Amanda Bradburn all season. Didn't you see her at the party? How she came to sit between us?”

“But you're always—” Clare said.

Her mother bowed to nuzzle Clare's cheek. “Dear God,” she said. “No. He talks with me because I'm the least likely woman on this whole coast to fall in bed with him, and his wife knows it. She never gives him trouble about me, and nobody bothers me when I'm with him. Honey,” she said, and the amusement in her voice faded to remorse. “I can't believe you've been worried about this.”

Clare linked her fingers with her mother's in the dark.

“So do you think you'd like it?” her mother asked. “If we went home?”

Clare felt the pull of the glass house in the yard below, but it had already started to grow faint, the way even the loudest sounds faded down to the whisper of the tracks as you pulled away from them on a train.

“Yes,” she said.

S
O MUCH SUN POURED
through Clare's windows the next morning that at first she thought the whole wall of her room must have turned to glass. She pushed the covers away and went over to the blinds, which she'd forgotten to pull the night before. Faint mist rose from the garden into the cool air below. The panes of the glass house were hazy with it. According to the clock beside her bed, it was even earlier than she usually woke.

She traded her cotton gown for the first simple dress she found in her closet.

In Jack's room, she crossed quickly to his desk. The little glass of tin soldiers was in the drawer where she had found it last.

But the key was gone.

Clare poured the tin men out on the desk. She sifted through the entire company, just to be sure. Then she settled them back in the glass, one by one.

She already knew what had happened to the key. Tilda must have used it to open the glass house for the party.

The kitchen, when Clare reached it, was deserted. All the platters for the party, the dozens of glasses, the pits and stems of fruit, the soiled napkins, had vanished. The only evidence of the previous night was Tilda's pie, which stood on the high counter in the center of the room, now baked flaky gold.

Clare checked for the key in the drawer of towels. When she didn't find it there, she went on to the next drawer. She pushed aside ladles, basters, and table utensils. She peered into the depths of saucepans and griddles on their dark shelves. She stuck a butter knife into the bowl of salt by the stove in case the key was buried at the bottom.

Then she left the knife in the sink and padded down to Mack's workshop. Just as Jack had said, she found a second door at the foot of the stairs. Like everything else in the shop, it was covered with a film of dust. But beneath that, the wood was finer than the other rough furnishings of the shop, with the same insets and inlay as the doors inside the house. It had a solid brass knob with a simple lock. A thin band of light streamed through the keyhole.

Clare bent to put her eye to it.

As she did, she heard the low rumble of thunder. A shadow fell beyond the door.

Clare scrambled back in time to avoid a black eye, but not soon enough to escape or hide.

At the sight of Clare, Tilda stopped on the last step, in the open door. “What do you think you're doing?” she demanded.

Clare stared up, speechless. An entire summer of observation had left her with no more clue how to manage Tilda than she had when she first arrived.

Tilda's eyes narrowed. “Where did you get that?” she asked, and nodded at Clare's throat.

Clare's hand rose. She remembered that she still wore the pearl necklace Jack had given her at the same moment her fingers closed on it.

Distractions and excuses spun through her mind: curtseys, jokes, trivia, compliments. But the only thing she could find words for was the truth. And the truth didn't spin un- tethered in her mind. It weighed so heavy on it that any thought to disarm Tilda was lost in Clare's yearning to lay her burden down.

Tilda crossed her arms.

Clare struggled against it, but the temptation to confess was irresistible. “Jack gave it to me,” she said.

“Jack?” Tilda repeated.

“He found it in the yard,” Clare said, carried along by the relief of sharing a secret. “By the glass house.”

Tilda's eyes remained narrow until Clare mentioned the glass house. Then they lit with understanding. She let out a breath she seemed as if she might have held for years. “His name isn't Jack,” she said.

A jolt like the first step from warm sand to cold water went through Clare.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I told you not to go down there,” said Tilda. “The day you got here.”

“He doesn't know who he is,” Clare said. “He can't remember his own name.”

This fact seemed to bow Tilda's head. She turned back on the narrow stairs. “Come with me,” she said.

Clare scrambled up after her.

The room was sparsely furnished with a simple bed, dresser, and stuffed chair. The bed and chest of drawers were both painted white, and a white sheet had been thrown over the chair. The gold grain of the wood floor, a small braided rug, and a bed quilt pieced from jewel-box tints provided the only color.

Tilda knelt on the rug to pull a round hatbox from under the bed. She settled on the mattress, the box balanced on her knees, and began to rummage through a sea of loose cards and photographs.

From these, she fished a case a little smaller than a deck of cards, with an embossed leather cover. A tap of her finger undid the catch to reveal wine-colored velvet on one side and the flash of a mirror on the next. The mirror was clouded with something.

Tilda handed it to Clare.

When Clare held it in her hands, the image of a boy appeared on the mirror, his features captured in silver. He was older than her, perhaps Teddy's age, with pale hair and gray eyes. Clare tried to find an answer in them: the trace of a smile, or the shadow of a thought, but his eyes just searched hers, asking his own questions.

“What happened to him?” Clare asked.

“The fever came on a ship,” Tilda said. Something in her tone gave Clare the idea that the truth came as a relief to her as well. “The port doctor put them on quarantine, but they were afraid to turn back the owner's son when he wanted to board. He went all over it. Up in the rigging. Down in the hold. He was fine the next day. But that night, it came on.