The Ghost in the Glass House (3 page)

“It was a boy's room,” Mack offered by way of apology.

“Look,” Clare's mother said. She swept gracefully through the maze of luggage, caught Clare's hand, and pulled her across the landing to the closed door at the head of the stairs.

Clare's mother threw the door open to reveal a spacious room with a blue and green tartan on the bed, a dresser, and a desk. A small oval mirror hung over the dresser, cinder gray with age. Its twin hung on the opposite wall, so the two mirrors reflected each other in endless dwindling replicas. A somewhat clumsily built model of a ship at full sail was becalmed below one mirror on the dresser's glassy mahogany. A few hand-colored illustrations had been pinned to the wall nearby: an ocean battle with several proud ships in flames, and a tiger, reared back on his hind legs like a charging stallion, who bore so little resemblance to the actual tigers Clare had seen that she wondered if the artist had ever seen one himself, or worked only from stories or dreams.

Clare's mother shivered expressively. “So you see,” she said. She closed that door, then crossed back to her own room, but didn't stop there. Instead, she followed a narrow band of the landing that ran from her room toward the rear of the house, and a third door. This one opened on a cozy room built into the slope of the roof.

“What do you think?” Clare's mother said. This was a real question, not for effect. Her voice was low and serious, as it was when Clare was sick.

Clare stepped inside. The wall behind the bed was papered with a life-size illustration of a birch forest in gold afternoon light. A pale yellow and green quilt covered the bed. A wicker swing stuffed with cushions hung at the window in the gable nook. Down in the yard, the irregular stands of iris were reduced to daubs of black and orange and blue. The panes of the glass house glinted through the maple leaves.

“I like it,” Clare said.

Clare's mother slipped a hand around Clare's waist and rested her cheek on the top of Clare's head.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

Clare nodded.

“I just got so tired of camping in places where no one really
lives
,” her mother said, her voice still low. “All the other summer houses here are out on the water, but this one was a real home once. You can tell, because the decorating is terrible. But that might be a relief, don't you think?”

Clare's skin prickled. Since the last time their cab had pulled away from the house she grew up in, almost three years ago, Clare had wanted to go home. But even then, she had known better than to ask. Pestering her mother to do anything only strengthened her resolve against it, so a campaign to go home would only delay their return. All Clare could do was wait for the mysterious winds in her mother's mind to shift. And in the last three years, this was the closest her mother had ever come to admitting that she might share Clare's homesickness.

Clare barely dared to move, seized by a gambler's hope. She knew the odds against her, but the chance to win swept all other thoughts away.

“We could go home,” Clare ventured. “If you're tired of hotels.”

Instantly, her mother's hand rose from Clare's shoulder.

“Oh, darling,” she said. “New York in the summer? Haven't the social reformers been trying to pass some kind of law against that?”

Clare searched her mother's face, but her features had already settled into a bright mask. Her mouth twisted faintly at her own joke. Her blond hair, waved around her face, glowed almost white, as it always did in sunlight. Her pale blue eyes were perfectly distant.

She kissed Clare's forehead and went out into the hall.

“Mack,” she called. “Clare has saved our lives.”

Still at the window, Clare stared down at the garden, warped and bent by the old glass.

She raised her hand and tapped three times, but no one answered.

C
LARE'S FRIEND
B
RIDGET ANSWERED
the door of the shingled mansion her parents had taken for the summer herself. She was wearing a sleeveless lavender party dress covered with vines picked out in silver sequins, despite the fact that it was eleven o'clock in the morning. The gown hung loose on her, a dead giveaway that she'd rescued another castoff of her mother's, although Clare knew better than to point this out.

“Clare,” Bridget said. “I was afraid you'd been taken by bandits on your way through the wilderness. How did your mother ever find a place that's not even on the shore?”

She stepped aside to let Clare pass into a wide entry hall dominated by a round wooden table inlaid with mother-of-pearl in the shape of a compass rose. On the far side of the room, two sets of French doors opened on a screened porch. Beyond the screen the ocean gleamed.

“Do you have any Visitors?” Clare asked, to take revenge for Bridget's slight to Clare's mother.
Visitors
was what Bridget's mother called the spirits, intimations, and presences that had shared the homes Bridget's family had occupied over the years. Clare's intense interest in these Visitors was a source of gratification to Bridget's mother and a point of contention with Bridget, who thought about ghosts very much the same way that most people thought about God: despite the fact that they were probably real, it was unforgivably impolite to talk about them.

Bridget turned on her heel and headed for the porch. “The house is free,” she said over her shoulder, meaning that her mother's current Sensitive hadn't detected any spirits yet this season.

The porch was furnished with white wicker stuffed with yellow cushions and pillows. A bouquet of sea-garden flowers, also white and yellow, stood on a low table, the foot of its vase filled with wet sand against the gusts of ocean wind.

Bridget's brother Teddy was slouched in one of the low-backed chairs. He and Bridget had both inherited the same elements of their parents' remarkable beauty: their mother's dark blue eyes, framed by their father's thick chestnut hair, which spilled over Bridget's shoulders in waves and hung over Teddy's brow in lush curls. Bridget complained frequently that Teddy's eyelashes were longer than hers, and his face was so pretty it sometimes seemed misplaced on a boy's shoulders. His long legs in their light summer flannels jutted out in front of him like the off-kilter framing beams of a half-finished building.

He took Clare in with a measuring glance that flickered over her face, dropped to her white cotton dress, and lingered on her bare arms.

Heat rushed into Clare's cheeks.

Bridget was thirteen, just a few months older than Clare. But Teddy was fifteen. In the men who orbited her mother, Clare sometimes caught glimpses of the boys they had once been: a child's excitement when they reported the speed of a new car, a boy's shyness when they tried to find the words to give a compliment. With Teddy, it was the opposite. She had met royalty who weren't as self-assured as him. But it wasn't the certainty of command. Teddy had no interest in getting anyone else to do anything, or much interest in what anyone else did at all, so long as it didn't interfere with him. So Clare knew that his long glance wasn't a greeting, or even a sign of curiosity: he was simply looking her over to see if he wanted anything.

Then he looked back at the ladies' magazine that lay open in his lap. Clare scanned the pages, upside down, as if they might tell her something. She was used to being invisible to Teddy. She didn't know what had caught his eye today. And she didn't know whether she liked it, or not.

The magazine contained a spread of flowers drawn in pen and ink, labeled according to their meaning.

“I don't know how you girls keep track of all this,” he said. “It's more complicated than military code.” He read down the list: “Roses, love. Mint, suspicion. Poppy, oblivion. Did you know all this, Bridget?”

“Aren't you going to sit down?” Bridget asked Clare.

Clare took the seat nearest to the door, on a low wicker couch opposite Teddy. Bridget sat beside her and wriggled down into the cushions with all the luxurious indolence of a favorite cat. “I'm so glad you're here,” she told Clare. “Last week it felt like we were lost at sea.”

Bridget and her family almost always arrived in a new town several days before anyone else. Bridget's mother liked to come ahead so that she could have the spiritual properties of their home inspected without attracting ignorant comment. And Bridget's father had frequently gotten involved in a misunderstanding with a young lady that made leaving their previous place expedient. But Bridget hated to be alone. She had told Clare once that if she sat too long in a room by herself, she began to worry if she even existed at all. For her, the long, quiet days before the rest of the crowd followed them to a new town were almost unendurable trials.

“Time moves so slow here, I keep wondering if it's stopped,” she went on. “Sometimes I think we're caught in a temporal anomaly.”

“What's a temporal anomaly?” Clare asked.

Bridget loved to take the tone of an exasperated tutor, and she fell into it instantly now. “It's like a run in the fabric of time,” she said. “And if you fall into it, you get left behind.”

Clare had met several old women who still piled their hair in grotesque arrangements of braids and curls that her mother said had been the fashion in their youth, but this didn't seem to be exactly what Bridget meant. She tilted her head to think.

Dissatisfied with Clare's reaction, Bridget elaborated: “They eat boats.”

Teddy slapped the magazine down on the table, still open to the article on the secret language of flowers. “Come on, Bridget,” he said. “How do you tell a temporal anomaly from a shipwreck?”

Bridget sat up straight, her eyes glittering, not with true belief, but with delight at the prospect of battle.

“Does anyone ever escape from these temporal anomalies? To tell the tale?” Teddy prodded.

“Rip Van Winkle,” Bridget retorted.

“Rip Van Winkle is a character in a book,” Teddy said. “Not scientific evidence.”

“But where do you learn all your science?” Bridget asked. Her face twisted in triumph. “Oh, that's right!” she said.
“In a book.”

Teddy stood.

“Where are you going?” Bridget demanded. “We're about to play truth or consequences.”

Teddy shook his head. “The tide's almost out,” he said. “I'm going down to the water.”

He glanced at Clare, consulted the magazine on the table, then pulled a stem out of the arrangement: a waxy yellow bloom that Clare recognized as a buttercup. He presented it to her without comment, then straightened up, watching her like a boy who has just poked a frog and wants to see if it will jump.

Clare glared at him.

Teddy smiled faintly—to himself, not at her. Then he strode out of the room.

In an instant, Bridget had pounced on the magazine, her finger running down the names of the flowers. “What does it mean?” she said. “Which kind is it?”

“How should I know?” Clare said, and shoved it back among the rest.

C
LARE'S MOTHER WAS THE
one who found the key.

The day after she and Clare arrived, Clare's mother had risen before dawn: an involuntary habit which she lied about energetically, telling long rueful stories about her incurable laziness, complete with vivid descriptions of the way her dreams changed when she slept during daylight. If anyone insisted that he had caught a glimpse of her up on deck or disappearing down a country road in the early-morning hours, she insisted that he must be mistaken, or even imagining things. But every day, she continued to wake before sunrise, to the chime of some unknown clock.

That morning, dressed by dawn, she had walked out to the back garden, where she hadn't been able to resist cutting an armful of flowers with the pearl-handled knife she kept hidden in her pocket. She'd shaken the sleepy ants carefully from each blossom, then carried the bundle back up to the house. In Tilda's kitchen, she found the shelves arranged according to a system that was at once highly sophisticated and impossible to penetrate. Clare's mother hadn't been able to locate any suitable vases, and she was leery of Tilda's reaction if she simply dunked the stems in a cooking pot and left them in one of the pristine white sinks. At a loss, she had tiptoed back upstairs to her room, the bouquet still cradled in the crook of her arm.

There, to her delight, she had discovered a tall amber vase on top of the bookshelf. She filled it with water from her washroom sink and carefully arranged her conquests in it, creating a truly extraordinary bouquet in which almost every stem boasted a different bloom or shade, set off by half a dozen fronds of climbing rose, each fully three or four feet long, which arced over it all like the branches of a weeping willow. By this time, Clare was padding around her own room and the servants had begun to stir in the kitchen, so Clare's mother carried the arrangement back down the stairs to present to them at breakfast.

Tilda's eyes grew wide at the first sight of the heavy vase. Then she went mute with indignation. She served the breakfast with fierce efficiency, refusing to look at either Clare or her mother but occasionally taking furtive, anxious glances at Mack, like a nurse struggling to restrain her unbecoming concern for a favorite patient. Mack, already uneasy over Clare's mother's insistence that he share his breakfast with his employer and her daughter, tried gamely to make the appropriate compliments. But he couldn't refrain from stealing agonized glimpses at his plundered garden out the kitchen window.

“I can always cut a bouquet for you, Mrs. Fitzgerald,” he told Clare's mother. “There's no need for you to bother.”

This, of course, was not the reaction Clare's mother had in mind. But as always, her grasp of the situation was quick, and so were her adjustments. “Oh, I'd love that, Mack,” she said. “You can see what a mess I've made here. I'm afraid I'm something of a savage.”