Glass House (25 page)

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He did talk as they reached the end of the
Alexander driveway. Megan was reading from a scrawl of directions.
The slip of paper was between the first two fingers of her left
hand, and she was driving with the butt of that hand and the grip
of her right, hunching over the wheel to peer at the uniformly
black numbers that were tacked on the uniformly pastel clapboards
of the small town’s homes. She was counting her progress –
1236, 1240, 1244 – when they found the one she was looking
for, 1248, and Garber spoke up.

“I don’t need to be here. I don’t need to go
in.”

The statements were observations, not
requests. It was as though Finn had woken up after a few hours’
nap, realized where he was, and was relieved to find he might be
able to squeeze in some more winks after all.

“You don’t need to be here,” Megan agreed,
nodding. She pulled the Chrysler into a driveway that was cracked
at its best and shedding chunks at its worst. She punched the
button shifter to park and shut the engine off. “You’re still
coming in.”

Finn didn’t protest. He followed Megan to
the door and stood almost dutifully behind her as she knocked and
they waited.

The woman who answered looked beautiful, old
and tired, and impossibly sad. They saw her through the screen door
first. The inside door opened and Lora Alexander’s mother was
there, hand already on the screen and pushing it open. Before she
managed that, the screen fuzzed away most of the worn aspects of
her features, hinting at something that was there before but that
vanished over the years and at the opening of that second door.

“Mrs. Alexander?” Megan said.

“Claire.” Hearing it, Megan was startled to
realize she’d never called this woman by her first name.

“Thank you for seeing us, Claire,” she said.
She glanced to Finn and introduced him as a law student who was
helping her out on the things she was looking into, which certainly
was true enough, and Claire Alexander led them both into her
house.

She offered them nothing. She was polite and
seemed open, but she didn’t suggest coffee or tea or water or
anything else. She simply moved through the house, the two people
trailing behind her, heading toward a small sitting room at the
back.

Megan glanced in the rooms they passed. The
house was deathly silent, with no sounds but their own footsteps,
and no sight of anyone else who might live in it.

The rooms were like Claire herself –
once young and fashionable but now older. The walls were papered a
purplish tan that maybe once was mauve. Tiny dust-colored spots
dotted the paper, and Megan thought they were abstracts until she
leaned closer at a corner and noticed they were roses. The
furniture was wooden and heavy, dark and shining with the glow of
things that were handled for decades, not just years. The floor
matched that, the wide and long boards reminding Megan of the floor
in her own house.

The walls were lined with display cases, the
cases filled with glassware. Cups and saucers, plates and platters,
glasses for water and wine and who knew what else. It was all
arranged in meticulous order, and it shone with a brightness that
revealed meticulous care. It was a giant collection of fragility
that couldn’t possibly have existed in a house that held
children.

And blankets. Everywhere, there were
blankets. Draped over chairs and couches. Folded and stacked on a
footstool in one corner. Even one hanging over Claire Alexander’s
shoulders.

They were all thick cable knit, in a yarn
the color of heavily creamed coffee. The details were hidden in
that color, but, like the roses on the wallpaper, Megan saw the
individual designs when she came closer. The blankets were all
different, and they were all intricate, knitted like snowflakes
with patterns of ribs and flowers and squares.

She touched one, running a hand over a
quarter-folded blanket on a dining room chair they passed. The yarn
was coarse, and Megan realized at touching it that she was in a
house occupied by an older, solitary woman, rooms loaded with glass
and antiques, and uncountable hand-knitted wool blankets, each of
which probably would have cost five hundred dollars at a store.
Claire Alexander was arranging and dusting and knitting what was
left of her life away.

When they reached the room, Claire offered a
couch, and Megan and Finn sat. “I’m still surprised you came,” she
said, finding a chair opposite them. “I didn’t think you’d have the
nerve to do it, even with your phone call.”

“It’s necessity, not nerve,” Megan told her.
“There’s another case.”

“I knew that already, as you must know. And
you mentioned it in your call besides.” Claire was sitting like her
house was arranged, with perfect position and stillness. Her legs
were crossed at the ankles, demurely, if demurely were the right
term for an older woman in a forgotten house and a small Kansas
farm town. Her hands, one on the other, rested in the middle of her
lap. She looked almost forcibly controlled.

“You also said you needed to know some
things about Waldoch,” she said. “You needed to, I think you told
me,
check some things
about him. What is it you’re checking,
Ms. Davis?”

Megan gave her a brief overview of the
Landry case. The basic allegations, the issues with Waldoch. When
she was through it, she hesitated, her mouth threatening to open,
to offer a question she wasn’t sure of and couldn’t form.

“You want to know what you did,” Claire
offered in Megan’s silence. “Ms. Landry’s case is making you wonder
if the verdict against Lora was right.”

Megan wasn’t certain herself if that was the
question in her mind. “Was it right?” she asked anyway.

“Of course not. But you know that, or you
wouldn’t be here.”

“I trust the verdict.”

“Just not your client?”

“I have some concerns.” Megan was nodding,
but she was also looking at the floor, the wall, anywhere but at
this woman’s face. “Independent of your daughter’s case, actually.
Independent of Kathy Landry’s case, even.”

“But you’re here because of both those
cases,” Claire said. “Whatever concerns you have about Mr. Waldoch,
you’re sitting in my house because something, maybe what happened
to Lora, finally raised your eyebrows about him.”

“That may be unfair.”

“He got tired of her, though, right? Of
Kathy Landry? He got tired of her?”

Finn looked up at that. “Tired of her?” he
asked.

Claire’s exacting position didn’t change as
she turned to him. “He has a certain view of women,” she said. “He
enjoys them while they’re enjoyable. When they stop being that, he
doesn’t need them anymore. That’s when –” She caught on the word,
the sound of it drowning in her throat for a moment. “That’s when
he moves on,” she finished, composing herself. “He finds something
else, and by something else I mean some
one
else.”

Her attention went back to Megan. “We told
her that would happen, you know,” she said. “Lora’s father was
still alive, and he loved her so much. He’d spend hours on the
phone with her, listening to her talk about that man Waldoch. About
how much she loved him, and how he cared for her. But the
conversations changed over the months. Not in duration, mind you. I
don’t mean that. Lora and her father could talk together like no
two people I’ve seen – every couple days at least, and for
forever, it seemed, when the subject hit their fancies.”

“A subject like Waldoch?” Megan asked.

“Yes, like that. At least with Lora. But it
changed, as I said. Over that time she went from excited to worried
to hurt. And then he was gone.”

“He broke it off?” Finn asked.

“He’d had enough of Lora and what she
offered him, so he didn’t have a use for her anymore.”

“You say he was gone,” Finn said. “For
good?”

“Do you mean until the other day?” Claire
asked, watching as Megan shifted uncomfortably. “We didn’t hear
much from him after he ended the relationship. Not in any way that
was meaningful. She tried to contact him, I know. I’m sure of that.
She’d have wanted to patch things up. But nothing ever
happened.”

Megan was examining the room again. She
scanned the shelves, reading the titles of books, looking over the
knickknacks that accumulate in people’s homes. She stopped when she
saw a collection of framed photos, and she stood and went to
them.

She pointed at one. “When was this?” she
asked. It was a picture of Lora, the kind you pay to have taken in
a sitting at Sears at Christmas time, but Lora was an adult in it,
and the photo was good enough to remind Megan how pretty the woman
was.

It was the only picture Megan could see of
Lora in the set on the shelf, apart from a family photo of the
three of them – Lora, her mother, and her father. Lora looked
to be about twelve in that one, smiling and happy and meringued up
in a white and pink dress and bonnet that screamed Easter.

Claire stood and took the first picture off
the shelf. “I don’t like this one myself that much,” she said. “It
reminds me of things I don’t like. But I keep it because it was her
favorite. And her father’s. He had a smaller copy, a wallet size
that he carried with him.”

She handed the photo to Megan, who studied
it before passing the picture to Finn. He looked closely, searching
the image with a thief’s eye. He tapped at the glass before Megan
could ask anything else.

“This is it,” he said.

“This is what?” Megan asked.

“He means the necklace,” Claire answered for
him. “She’s wearing it in the picture.”

“This is the necklace you described to me on
the drive,” Finn told Megan. “The one they asked about in the
deposition.”

“From Waldoch?”

“Gold chain, sixteen inches, diamonds
bezel-set in platinum. Pink diamonds every so often in the
chain?”

Megan nodded.

“This is that necklace. You can just make
out the pink stones.”

Megan took the photo and turned to Claire.
“Lora got this from Waldoch?” she said, pointing at the necklace,
but Claire was already nodding in response to Finn’s statement.

“Where is it now?” he asked.

“I’m not the person to ask, I’m afraid.”

“You don’t know?”

Claire took the photo and looked for
herself. “She wore it every day,” she said, her finger tracing the
small image. “Every day I can remember, right up until she left the
other day. She had it on then. That’s what I say anyway.”

“What you say? Is there some doubt about
it?”

“The necklace never showed up. Not here, and
not in her effects.”

“Who collected those?” Megan asked.

“Should have been the police. Highway
patrol. Sheriff. Somebody like that. I don’t recall which of them,
exactly, there were so many by the time I got there.”

“Should have been?”

“I believe someone else found it first.”

“Lora was going to testify for Kathy Landry,
wasn’t she,” Megan said then. She was thinking back to Waldoch’s
deposition. “She’d told Landry’s attorney everything that had
happened, and she was going to repeat that at a trial.”

“That’s true,” Claire said. “And no shame in
any of it.”

Claire replaced the picture. She returned to
her seat calmly, as if looking for some quiet and safe place, but
with no hurry in finding it.

“It was an auto accident?” Megan asked.

Claire breathed deeply. They could see her
do that, could see her wait to make sure she still was in control
before speaking.

“Single car.” Claire’s hands were back in
her lap, her ankles crossed once more. “Off the road, no skid marks
found. Into and out of a ditch, over onto the car’s top in a
shallow holding pond.”

“You think Waldoch’s involved,” Finn said,
finding his own seat again.

“Have you met him?” she asked. “I mean, I
know you have, Ms. Davis, but have you ever met Jeremy Waldoch, Mr.
Garber?”

Finn shook his head.

“I suppose you could be considered fortunate
and unfortunate both. Fortunate because you haven’t come across
him. Unfortunate because, if you had, you’d have the advantage in
life of having met someone whose existence lets you know what
people shouldn’t be.”

“Then we’ll leave it at fortunate, ma’am,”
Finn replied. “I’ve had the other lesson enough as it is.” He
didn’t explain more, and she didn’t ask.

“Why do you think it was Waldoch who did
it?” Megan said.

“Did what? Took the necklace? Or killed my
daughter.”

“Either,” Megan replied uncertainly.
“Both.”

“I don’t think it was him, I know it was
him. He was behind it at least. And I know he was because she
always wore that necklace, but it wasn’t with her after she was
killed. It vanished, and that tells me most of what I need to know.
It’s most of the reason I think the way I do.”

“And the rest?”

“The rest is just knowing who he is, and
what he is,” Claire said. She managed a forlorn smile. “I
think
he killed her. I know I can’t prove it in the end, but
that doesn’t change what I feel, which is that he’s the one, simply
because of the way he is and what Lora was going to do for Ms.
Landry.”

She paused. She sighed. Her eyes went to the
framed photo again, replaced on the dustless shelf where it had
sat. “I think you understand that,” she said to Megan, eyes not
leaving the picture. “After all, you showed up to ask me these
questions, and you had a reason for that.”

The smile faded, but Claire Alexander seemed
lighter somehow, even without it. Maybe it was remembering her
daughter, and getting the chance to report the story again. Or
maybe it was the audience she had and the chance to tell Megan, in
particular, these things. Or maybe, and maybe even most likely, it
was the fact that she got to tell Megan what she thought, and she
got to do it when Megan came to her herself, hat in hand. Whatever
it was, Claire was younger and brighter with the conversation. Only
a little, but noticeably nonetheless.