The Ghost in the Glass House (2 page)

T
HAT MORNING, AT THE
train station, Clare's mother had hired four cabs and filled their unoccupied seats and the gaping maws of their trunks with the various pieces of her three sets of luggage: the rich brown cordovan; the alligators Mr. Pedersen had shot himself, gotten made into a set of valises and hatboxes, and shipped to her from Florida as a gift; and the light blue Italian silk that bore faint traces of every raindrop that had ever fallen on it. All four cabs had pulled into the drive that wound along the side of their new summer place just as their new houseman emerged from the kitchen door, squinting against the afternoon sun.

“That must be Mack,” Clare's mother had told her. “He's the one who sent all the wires.”

Clare had watched him as the car rolled to a stop and her mother fished a knot of bills out of her clutch. His graying hair was cropped close, but not close enough to disguise a stubborn curl. His stance was solid. A gold ring glinted on his left hand.

Their cabbie opened the rear door for Clare's mother. Clare scrambled out after her.

With eerie precision, the other three cabbies emerged from their vehicles and leaned back against them to indicate that, in their opinion, their job was now done. With a curt nod at Clare's mother, Mack folded his arms and stepped aside from the kitchen door to indicate that, in his opinion, their job had only just begun. The first cabbie, who had only ferried his passengers and their personal bags, smelled trouble. His fare and tip already in hand, he darted back to his car, spun it around the circle drive, and headed for the open road.

Clare's mother had broken the impasse by beginning to thank everyone involved before they had actually done anything. Her pretty square heels wobbling on the drive's shifting sand, she'd pulled open the back door of the next cab and gamely begun to yank at a cordovan trunk that was big enough to hold two of her.

“Thank you so much,” she told the cab's owner breathlessly. “I don't know what we would have done without you. Nobody ought to have this much luggage. Every time they push it up a gangplank I ask them to please throw half of it into the sea, but no one ever listens to me. Clare?” she said. She stepped back and nodded at the shining blood-red trunk, which, despite the considerable dramatic effect of her efforts, hadn't budged. Familiar with the game, Clare rushed up, caught the silver handle with both hands, and leaned back with all her might. To both her and her mother's surprise, the trunk slid about a foot along the rough upholstery of the back seat, knocking Clare off balance. She crashed into her mother. The two of them gazed at each other in shock.

But their charade had already proven too much for the cabbie. “Well, no, ma'am,” he said, ducking his head to Clare's mother and swatting Clare out of the way. “Let me get these for you.”

When his will broke, the general strike collapsed. Down the line, the other cabbies popped their doors and filled their arms with suitcases and twine-wrapped boxes. Mack gave up his high ground on the kitchen step, swung a baby-blue trunk onto his own shoulder, and led them inside. When they all emerged from the house again, their faces red and glossy with sweat, a woman had joined the little parade. Almost a whole head taller than Mack, she wore a blue and white striped dress with a crisp white apron, her gray hair pulled back matter-of-factly from her smooth face, her frame thin but sturdy, like an old trellis that has outlasted the brief lives of countless roses.

At the sight of her, Clare's mother broke into the delighted, inviting smile that had won them entry to so many parties, swept them up so many gangplanks, and opened the doors of so many fine homes. “You must be Tilda,” she said. “I'm Cynthia.”

Tilda looked at Clare's mother as if she were a spill on the floor that she would worry about after she put out a fire on the stove, seized a giant trunk, and vanished into the kitchen.

As Clare's mother struggled to recover from this rough treatment, Clare had seen her opening. She dove into the cavernous back seat of the nearest cab, retrieved a hatbox and a jewelry case from the package tray, and scampered after the servants.

Inside, the kitchen was deserted, and flooded with noon light. Someone had propped open the door to the dining room with a metal bucket of dirty potatoes. Clare darted through. Since she no longer needed the jewelry case and hatbox as props to make her escape, she abandoned them temporarily under the dining room table. Then she glanced around. Down a long hall, she caught a glimpse of blue sky through a tall oval window in the front door.

She stopped for a moment on the threshold of the hall to listen. Voices drifted down the staircase that led up to the second floor, still faint enough that the fragments she heard only added up to nonsense.

“Look at this cinnamon island!” one of them ordered.

“But I don't like dancing in the snow,” the other complained.

In a flash, Clare had flown down the hall, out the new door, and across the lawn. She'd caught sight of the glass house as soon as she rounded the corner.

But now, when she ran back up the hill and circled the house to the drive, all three cabs were gone. The only hint that they had ever been there at all was a few faint clouds of yellow dust that still hung over the drive's gray pebbles. The kitchen door was shut.

Clare went in without knocking.

She had hoped that all the adults would still be upstairs, locked in combat with the contents of her mother's trunks, which could take even the most seasoned maid a week to sort out. But when Clare stepped into the kitchen again, Tilda stood at a high worktable in the center of the room, trimming a handful of yellow roses.

Clare's sudden appearance didn't slow her busy fingers even for a moment.

“I see you've had a tour of the yard,” Tilda said.

Clare nodded, watching for a sign of what tack to take with this new maid. A friendly porter could make the most cramped quarters feel like home, and an unhappy maid could make a lavish apartment unlivable. So Clare's first project on arriving in any new place was to size up the servants and adopt whatever pose would disarm them. Some people liked to meet a girl with an air of wondering innocence. Others, she had learned, preferred a clever young lady. And there were a number of useful shades in between.

Tilda made a quick cut at the base of each rose and dropped the yellow blossoms into a jet vase, where they quivered from the shock as she turned her attention to a bundle of white phlox. Her plain face gave nothing away.

Beginning with a compliment was almost always safe. “The grounds are beautiful,” Clare ventured. “I don't know when we've been in a place this pretty.” This wasn't true. Charm was her mother's primary condition for picking the establishments where they stayed, whether or not the pipes worked, or the fireplaces choked, or the roof still had enough spirit to keep the rain out. Clare had lived in a suite of rooms where blue sky had been hand-painted on every ceiling by a visiting Italian; in an apartment overlooking the Seine where their extraordinary view had almost made up for the stench of the river; and in a hut with sheer mosquito- net walls built on stilts a dozen feet above the warm waters of the Mediterranean. That particular complex of scarves and twigs had been connected to land only by rickety rope-and-board breezeways lit at night by torches whose flames, reflected on the dark water, made the whole surf seem molten. One morning they'd woken to discover that a stray spark had reduced the fragile bridge that connected them with the mainland to a few scraps of charred wreckage floating in the turquoise shallows below. Her mother had laughed, used the scrap of wood that remained as a diving board, and swum to land, where she'd ordered her breakfast served on the restaurant's patio so her wet hair could dry in the sun. But Clare, afraid to dive from that height despite her mother's entreaties, had waited alone in the windy hut all morning until the men from the hotel constructed a makeshift ramp sturdy enough to lure her back to land. Every place Clare had ever lived had been at least as pretty as this. Still, the compliment was a reliable one.

Tilda raised her eyebrows, selected one long stem of phlox from among the rest, circled her finger around it just under the blooms, and with a single deft stroke denuded it of all its tender leaves.

Once Clare established what kind of person she was dealing with, most people were no harder to unlock than a traveling trunk. The key had to be carefully chosen, though. A compliment that might charm a person who wanted to be liked could insult a person who wanted respect. Showing too much respect to a person who wanted to be liked might make them wonder whether you liked them at all. And Tilda, so far, had given no hint as to which category she belonged in.

Unable to settle on a strategy, Clare gave in to curiosity. “I saw the glass house,” she said. “But it's locked.”

Tilda cleaned another stem of phlox. “Yes,” she said. “Last year's girl was in the habit of meeting her young man there. She hid the key so they wouldn't be surprised, and since she left, no one can find it.”

This was quite a bit more than Clare was used to being told. Servants, as a rule, were excellent sources of information, but you could almost never find out anything by asking outright. The trick was to hang around the pantry or the sewing room long enough that they forgot she was there and began to speak freely. This principle held true, actually, for all adults, although Clare was perpetually surprised by how quickly they lost track of the fact that she was a thinking person just like them and not another piece of furniture or an interesting plant.

She watched Tilda closely, unsure if the moment of frankness was some freak phenomenon or the first plume of smoke that signaled a spectacular geyser buried deep within.

Tilda laid the stems of cleaned phlox side by side, brought the ends even, trimmed them, and distributed the white blooms among the yellow roses.

In her mind, Clare turned the locked glass house over like a puzzle box, while all the furniture inside tumbled this way and that.

The only flowers that remained on the high table were a half dozen pale blue Dutch iris. Tilda sliced their stems, lifted them as a bunch, and gave them a good shake. Then, as if she were doing nothing more than throwing down the second-best silverware for a weekday dinner, she dropped the blue blossoms among the roses and phlox and scattered the sword blades of the iris leaves between them.

The effect, despite Clare's long acquaintance with beauty, was breathtaking.

The light that flared in Tilda's eyes only betrayed her for an instant. Then she steadied her expression with the air of a practiced liar, picked up the vase, and carried the jostling stems out of the kitchen.

C
LARE TRAILED AFTER HER
only seconds later, but when she reached the dining room, Tilda had already set the bouquet on the buffet and disappeared. Clare checked under the broad oval table. The hatbox and jewelry case were still safely hidden between the varnished wooden legs. She retrieved them, stepped into the hall, and listened again. Voices still drifted from the rooms above.

This time, she followed them up the stairs. Sunshine poured onto the wide landing through three tall windows that overlooked the front yard. Two doors led off the landing. One, immediately to Clare's right at the top of the stairs, was shut. The other, on the opposite side of the landing, stood open.

“Clare, thank God,” her mother said when Clare crossed the landing and appeared in the open door. “I'm driving poor Mr. Burlingham crazy. You've got to help him.”

“Just Mack,” Mack said, with a note of pleading in his voice that suggested this wasn't the first time he'd made the request.

Clare's mother stood in the middle of a sunny room, surrounded by towers of mismatched luggage and an assortment of items which, for mysterious reasons, had already found their way out of the various trunks. A small porcelain elephant marched solemnly across a cloud of red tissue on the nightstand. Mack held a hat trimmed with peacock feathers gingerly in both hands, as if it had already made one attempt at flight and he wasn't sure it could be trusted again. A heap of party dresses in Easter-egg colors seemed to be recovering from a dead faint on the bed.

Like so many rooms in seaside resorts, this one was done in white and blue: a white seahorse woven in relief on the white crewel bedspread, pert blue sailboats frozen at merry angles on the upholstered chair by the window. But stubborn traces of earlier residents remained. A small bookshelf in the corner was crammed with what could only be a personal collection: dozens of volumes shoved together, some missing covers, some upside down, in no discernible order. On the far side of the room, a pair of wooden wardrobes stood open, one already half full of dresses too dark and unfashionable to be her mother's.

“We brought everything in here,” Clare's mother told her. “And I thought, of course Clare will be next door.” She paused for effect. “But there
is
no next door.”

Clare was accustomed to taking her mother's impossible dilemmas in stride, but this was actually news. The two of them always slept in communicating rooms: it was one of the excuses her mother used to keep her more importunate suitors at bay, and it allowed Clare to pad into her mother's room anytime she wanted. Even though Clare rarely did, the nearness of her mother's room was one of the only shreds of home she still had.

Surprised, Clare frowned.

“You see?” Clare's mother exclaimed to Mack. He looked at her in confusion, then made an attempt at a sympathetic nod, an expression somewhat marred by the unmistakable traces of his true feeling, which came closer to the uneasiness of a scientist becoming acquainted with the surprising volatility of a new compound.

Clare's mother turned back to Clare. “There are two rooms across the hall,” she said. “One of them's lovely. It looks over the back garden. But the other one . . .” She trailed off, apparently unable to find the words.