The Ghost in the Glass House Read online

  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.

  Three

  CLARE 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.

  “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.

  Four

  CLARE’S FRIEND BRIDGET 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.”