The Ghost in the Glass House (6 page)

Behind the door, Clare shrank back. Her mind filled with excuses, all of them absurd: she'd thought she heard someone singing back there, she'd forgotten which room was hers. But Tilda strode right past the door that concealed Clare, into the room.

Very slowly, as if afraid her head might creak on her neck, Clare turned to see what Tilda was doing.

Tilda stood with her back to Clare, one hand closed on something in her apron pocket. She looked over the tidy bed, the dresser, the pair of mirrors that multiplied without end. Then she went to the desk, pulled open a drawer, and dropped something in.

Clare held her breath, still hidden behind the door as Tilda passed by for the second time. But the old woman stepped back out into the hall without detecting Clare.

She remained stock-still as Tilda retreated down the stairs. When she heard her turn for the kitchen, Clare slipped from behind the door and went to the desk.

The first drawer she opened was filled with feathers: white, downy gray, brown on a yellow stalk, blue jay. She pushed them aside to reveal a dozen loose green marbles and a large clear red shooter. The shallow center drawer contained school papers of some kind: several thin notebooks, a speller, and a book of figures, along with a handful of rock-hard caramels wrapped in yellowed wax paper. In the next drawer she found a short blue cut-glass tumbler with a chipped lip in which someone had collected iron nails along with a small battalion of toy soldiers. When Clare looked closer, she realized that all of the figures had been marred as they were poured. Each of them was missing an arm, or a leg, or some feature: a hollow where their eyes should have been, a smooth metal plane instead of lips. The key had fallen among them so that a bayonet protruded through its filigree handle.

Clare pulled the key free and dropped it into her own pocket. Then she set off in search of a candle and a bar of soap.

This was another technique gleaned from the ship's detective. Soap, he had told her mother, would take the impression of a simple key, and the impression could then serve as a mold to make a duplicate key of molten wax.

Clare found the soap in the bathroom she shared with her mother, and discovered a supply of candles in a clandestine search of the dining room buffet.

But like many of the criminal techniques the ship's detective had learned about in books, this one presented a number of real-life challenges that the authors had apparently failed to mention. When Clare made her first attempt, at the desk in her own room, the bar of stolen soap wouldn't take any impression at all. And when Clare pressed with all her strength, it just crumbled into flakes. A more expensive bar, with spikes of lavender suspended in glycerin, finally took the imprint of one side of the key. Then Clare had to go looking for another soap to complete the mold, depleting her mother's stash almost completely with the theft of a bar laced with orange and mint.

When she was satisfied that the mirror images in the soap would serve to make an accurate copy of the key, Clare turned to the candles. Her first attempt to dribble wax into the mold resulted in a singed lump shot through with traces of the pink dye that colored the candle. It looked more like some sea creature washed up on the beach than a key. But gradually she refined her technique until she could drop the hot wax evenly, first into the teeth of the key, then down the long stem, and finally into the handle. After a few more tries, she lifted the lavender soap away to reveal a piece of wax that was almost an exact match to its metal cousin on the desk. The filigree of the handle hadn't survived the transfer. The whorls and veins in the copper leaf had melted into one thick mass. But other than that, it was perfect. Clare blew gently on the wax as it turned from translucent to milky. Then she freed it from the mold with the tip of a sharp pencil. The wax was light, but pleasingly solid.

She slipped the new key into her pocket and regarded the evidence she'd created: the half-burnt tapers, the imprinted soap. The tapers were easily explained by a fear of the dark, but the soap was a dead giveaway. And it was impossible to hide things in a house with a maid. She pushed the desk aside so she could get to the window, opened it, and looked down. Below, a thick cover of narcissus grew right up to the whitewashed brick of the exterior wall. Clare did a quick check to be sure no one was in the yard, then let the bars of soap drop past the dining room window into the long leaves of the paper whites. A few of the blooms trembled from the impact. Then the garden was still.

Clare closed the window and laid the tapers in a drawer. She trailed silently around the landing to the boy's room, where she settled the original key back among the tin men. Then she went out, her hand closed around the new key in her pocket.

“T
HE OCEAN NEVER STOPS
,” Bridget complained, staring out at the dark surf beyond the circle of light from the fire they'd built on the beach. “Not even when the sun goes down. It's like some awful machine that works all night and doesn't make anything.”

“You've suffered so much,” Teddy said. “I don't know how you bear it.”

Bridget kicked sand in his direction, but her aim was compromised by her extreme slouch in the wooden chair. The sand landed in the fire between them. The flames guttered, then blazed up again. Clare glanced at the dark sea. All along the water's edge, paper lanterns hung between poles anchored in the wet sand. The poles were about the height of a man, so the party guests had to duck under them to reach the surf, where colored light reflected on the water between washes of white foam.

A few guests lingered at the shoreline. Most of them milled around linen-covered buffet tables surrounded by another lazy square of lanterns a safe distance from the tide. But the five young people had dragged their chairs down the beach and lit a fire of their own.

This had been Denby's idea. He and Bram had only arrived that afternoon, but as usual Denby had already taken charge of everything. For her part, Clare had been glad to leave the general party. Bridget's father had taken a marked interest in Clare's mother that evening, and instead of putting him off, Clare's mother had embarked with him on an intense conversation. When Clare noticed the glances cast in their direction she had begun to loiter nearby, but her presence hadn't interrupted the discussion, which at that point centered on sea monsters. Her mother played the skeptic, but Bridget's father insisted there must be creatures so rare or shy that they'd escaped mankind. He was also unwilling to concede the possibility of mermaids. In fact, he said, he'd rather not live in a world where it could be proved that they did not exist. When Bridget had come to collect Clare, Clare hadn't objected.

On the other side of the fire, Bram glanced at Denby.

“We could take them to the cave,” he said.

Denby raised his eyebrows, considering.

“What cave?” Bridget asked.

Bram and Denby's eyes locked in a silence that conveyed the strong impression that they had learned somewhere to communicate using only their minds. From the time they could walk, the two boys, born less than a month apart, had been almost inseparable, a situation that had become permanent after Bram's mother died the summer he turned seven. By the time Bram's father emerged from his fog of grief, he discovered that Denby had established a cot for Bram in his room and claimed a sailor's hammock in Bram's room for himself. These arrangements were only minor tactical moves in pursuit of Denby's main object, which was that the two boys should spend no waking hour apart. Denby's father, a universally feared sugar magnate whose far-flung business concerns kept him on a seemingly endless circuit of the globe, offered no objection. Neither did Denby's mother, who smiled so rarely that it was a topic of discussion whether she didn't think the jokes she heard were funny or didn't realize they were jokes. And after his wife's death, Bram's father found it almost impossible to refuse his son anything.

From that point on, Bram and Denby were the terror and pride of their set. They smeared cats with jam and tied jewelry to the tails of patient dogs. They eluded their maids on outings and returned home hours later, their faces black with soot, their hair adorned with goose feathers. Because everyone was secretly pleased to see that good blood hadn't run too thin to boil yet, they became a favorite topic of conversation, their exploits inflated over countless retellings. A stray dog they'd tamed became a lion cub. A tutor who had fallen victim to their pranks was promoted to ambassador from France.

The boys were both fourteen this summer, two years older than Clare, a year older than Bridget, but a year younger than Teddy. Denby, tall, pale, with angular features and a mop of straight brown hair, was the clear leader. He conceived the plans, but Bram made them happen. Handsome, with clear blue eyes and sandy curls, Bram was always the first to scale a tree or hop a fence, then reached back to pull the others up. He had been Bridget's crush since the previous summer, but so far her determined flirting had yielded inconclusive results.

“There's a cave on the water,” Denby announced. “Under the bluff.”

Most of the summer homes were built on the rise above the beach. But north along the shore a few of the homes, including the one Denby's family had taken that summer, sat on a stone cliff that dropped directly into the sea.

“It's the biggest cave I've ever seen,” Denby went on. “We could only go so far without a torch. But we didn't find the end of it.”

Clare wondered what artifacts the local gossip would furnish the cave with by the end of the summer: a trove of pirate treasure, a set of human bones.

“You couldn't have found it under the bluff,” Teddy objected. “The surf would break you up on the rocks.”

“Not when the tide goes out,” Denby countered.

“The tide's out now,” said Teddy.

Suddenly, all three boys were on their feet. Bram gave a whoop and sprinted away across the sand. Teddy stooped to retrieve the box of matches and a branch of driftwood. Denby looked down at Bridget.

“Well?” he said. “Are you coming?”

The five of them straggled north along the beach. The back of Clare's neck prickled, but she didn't know if it was from fear of the dark ahead, or from fear they'd be caught before they escaped into it. But all five of them passed through the swirl of the party and back into the night without attracting a single comment.

When they passed the last light, Clare put her hand in her pocket. It closed on the stem of the key she had copied that afternoon. The handle was a clumsy blob, but the key itself was blunt and perfect.

“There's no cave,” Teddy called through the darkness. “You've brought us out here to sell us to pirates.”

“They wouldn't take you,” Denby retorted. “Your father isn't rich enough.”

The stripe of beach narrowed. Overhead, the grassy rise gave way to the soaring stone of the bluff. Then the sand ran out at a jumble of large black rocks, still shining with seawater from the tide that had gone out. The surf lapped at the damp sand a dozen feet off.

Ahead of them, on the last slip of dry beach, Bram kicked off his shoes and socks. Then he struck out across the wet sand, leaving deep prints that filled immediately with dark water, until the bluff seemed to swallow him up.

When the rest of them reached the spot where Bram had stopped, Teddy and Denby shed their shoes and socks as well. Teddy bent to roll up his trousers while Bridget and Clare fumbled with the clasps of their sandals. Then, single file, they followed in Bram's tracks across the sand.

As they came around the curve of the bluff, the dark mouth of a cave yawned in the sheer rock. A long finger of the tide cut a channel into its hidden depths. The dimensions were hard to make out in the dark, but to Clare the cave looked to be about as wide as a three-car garage and high enough for a small sailboat to pass into without dropping its mast. Bram was already clambering over chunks of the bluff that had fallen into the sea, which were so jagged and slick that as the rest of them ventured after Bram, even Teddy hesitated, looking for the next sure step. Clare and Bridget clung together, steadying each other as they crept barefoot from rock to rock. But finally the four of them clustered at the lip of the cave on a narrow ledge that ran along the black water back into darkness.

“Hang on,” Teddy said as Denby took his first step into the cave. Wood rattled inside cardboard. Then Teddy struck a match to reveal one of his argyle socks wrapped around the stick of driftwood he'd carried down the beach. He held the flame to the blue and white knit. When it caught and flared, a terrible keening wail split the darkness.

Denby staggered back into the girls. Bridget clutched Clare's arm. Teddy thrust his torch forward.

Laughter echoed through the cave. A minute later, Bram emerged from the shadows, his face red with torchlight. “Denby,” he said, breathless with glee. “You should see your face.”

“You sounded just like a ghost,” Bridget said, and touched Bram's arm. “I was so scared.”

“Ghosts aren't real,” Denby snapped.

“Yes, they are,” Teddy said. Then he added, with a victor's scorn: “But they're dead.”

To reclaim his authority, Denby snatched the torch from Teddy and set off along the ledge, leaving the rest of them in deepening shadow. Bram sprang after him. Bridget trailed after Bram. Clare followed Bridget, with Teddy bringing up the rear.

As they pressed deeper into the cave, the low ceiling rose and the channel from the sea opened into a black pond that rocked gently against its stone banks with each pull of the tide. Over it, the rough walls leapt up to a domed ceiling several stories high, like the atrium of a fine hotel. When they reached the far bank of the pond, the ledge gave out onto uneven gray stones.

Denby hesitated.

“Go ahead,” Bram said. “We got farther than this before.”