House of Glass (8 page)

He laughed quietly. “I can’t figure you out, Reyna. How is it that you are innocent one moment, and a wanton the next?”

There was no explanation that I could put into words. How could I explain the effect of the glass house? The fact that it gave me a confidence, a relentlessness? What could I even attribute it to? “I think that I am one and the same,” I offered hesitantly, “but my bravery comes and goes, and sometimes I have a hesitation, almost as if I don’t know how to go about getting what I want most.”

“What is it that you want most?”

I took a deep breath. There were two answers to his question, one that I could reveal inside the glass house, and one that I was too tentative to say. “I don’t know,” I whispered. “Lots of things. What everyone wants, I suppose.”

He reflected on my words for a moment. “What? Love?” He laughed cynically. “Tell me, have you ever had a broken heart? Have you ever known despair?”

“I’ve known despair.” I spoke the words simply, quietly.

“Really?” Something had changed in him; I could feel the anger. “Have you known the pain of losing someone? To go day in and day out and not know if they are alive or dead? Or suffering?” He snorted. “You don’t know a damned thing about that.”

“Yes, I do know.” My voice was small and faraway and my throat was tight to even have to say those words. I swallowed. Once. Twice. “My father was lost at sea. So I know the kind of loss you speak of. I know the pain of a loss that never resolves itself.” I peeked at him and found him standing still, holding a pencil in the air, listening to me. “No one can understand that pain, only someone who has been through it. Only we know the pain of never knowing the end. Of that loose end hanging.”

He put the pencil down and looked at me. For the first time I saw a flicker of something—what was it? Hope? Understanding? Attraction perhaps? “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought—I didn’t know—”

“You couldn’t have known.”

“What happened?”

“My father was a fisherman and one evening he didn’t return home. There wasn’t a storm or anything. I stayed awake for three days waiting for him. The other fishermen took me in their boats and we roamed the waters for any sign of him or his boat. When they couldn’t look me in the eye anymore, I knew it was hopeless.”

“That’s a terrible thing.” He looked at me, briefly, a glance above the paper, and again I saw that flicker of emotion in his eyes.

“It is a terrible thing,” I agreed. “I sat and wondered if his boat was floating in the ocean, broken, and that he was alive, clinging to life, waiting for help that never came. It is the worst thing to wonder about.”

He sighed and his body shrank away from me, just slightly, but I noticed it. He rubbed his eyes and his face. I could see how tired he was. “I’ve been trying for so damned long. I know she’s dead, of course, but the guilt, all these years the guilt has plagued me. Sometimes I think if I move fast enough and wild enough, it can’t keep up. That’s enough for tonight.”

“Fine, Mr. St. Claire,” I said, remembering how things would be in the morning.

“Don’t be foolish after all that has passed between us,” he said. “Call me Lucas.”

“Okay. Lucas.” His name was heaven to say out loud.

Chapter Five

He sought me out the next day, knocked on my door after lunch. “You’ll come tonight?”

I tried to hide my excitement. “I will.”

“I’ll wait for you in the garden.”

Later Annie approached that afternoon while we worked. “I saw you last night. I just want you to know. You are on your last days.”

I couldn’t tell if she was bluffing or not; her eyes didn’t quite glitter with the same triumph of information that she had possessed before.

“Prove it,” I said, taking a risk.

“I will. You’ll see. Soon.”

Anger welled inside me. If only she weren’t here there wouldn’t be any complications. I could meet Lucas and no one would ever know. But I wasn’t completely certain that she did know, and either way I was too far gone to stop.

After everyone had gone to bed, I slipped out again. Maxie found me before long and was at my side.

Lucas was waiting, as promised, and before he sketched my likeness we walked along the cliff until we came to the stone stairs, the torches burning like a necklace of fire. We watched the flames for a long time.

Finally, Lucas broke the silence. “Reyna, do you know why we light the fires at night?”

We began to move again, to amble back to the mansion.

I answered him in a whisper. “To show your wife a way home?”

He stopped walking. “Is that what you think?” He gave a sound that was close to a laugh, but angrier. “We have always lit fires on the cliff. Long ago the St. Claires did it to draw boats off course. It’s very treacherous at night, you know. When the boats would wreck on the shoals, we headed out.”

“To pirate them?” I asked.

He chuckled. “No. Not pirate. Negotiate. They negotiated with them for a portion of the cargo. The cost of saving them. The St. Claires had an advantageous position and pressed it for all it was worth. It wasn’t a nice thing to do, but it did make us very wealthy. Nowadays, we have turned the corner to legitimate trade, but now you know our sordid history, and why we light the fires every night. In a way, it’s because it has always been done.”

He turned and took me by the shoulders. “And my wife is dead. Have no doubt about that.” He seemed utterly, bitterly certain about that fact.

“Then why do you walk the grounds?” I couldn’t help but persist.

“Because I have nightmares. Only the wind from the ocean can chase them away.”

“What are your nightmares?”

“They’re too horrible for your ears.”

“I want to hear.”

“Do you want to know what happened?” he asked.

I looked at him and nodded, too nervous to trust my voice.

“We had a fight. No. We had many fights. On that night we had an unbelievable row. She accused me of not loving her enough. Of not giving her the things she needed. I screamed at her about the glass house. She had an obsession with it.”

An image of Celeste rose in my mind, on that fateful morning when I met her. She appeared to me as a blur of beauty under a pink parasol and then either carelessly or thoughtlessly, bumped against me, pushing me toward that awful water… I pulled back my memory and focused on Lucas again.

He continued on, a grim expression on his face. “The fight lasted through dinner and she called me horrible things. Said terrible lies about me. I told her that she was possessed, that she had lost her sanity, I said that I should have her sent away.” A bitter, harsh laugh escaped him. “And you know what her first words to me were? She laughed and said, ‘I’ll leave you and live in the house of glass.’”

His story was a shock of cold water over me. I glanced briefly over the cliff, at the glass house, but it was shrouded in darkness. “What happened then?” I asked. There was such a deep trepidation in my voice that he reached out and touched me gently with his hand.

“She stood up from the dinner table and walked out of the front door. I thought she was only going to the cottage. But, later, when I went to find her, she wasn’t there. She simply vanished. The only reason I wasn’t hauled off to jail is that Mrs. Amber and Annie witnessed the whole thing, and were with me every second as we looked for her. They were my alibis.”

Later that night, when we returned to his house, I sat in the chair beneath the window and he sketched me again.

When he left to get more pencils, I stood and looked at the sketching.

It made me feel funny to see myself the way Lucas did. My hair a tangle of dark curls, my eyes, wide and seeking, looking out, needing something. Lucas came and stood just behind me.

“Is that how you see me?”

“One part of you. Yes.”

“I’m not so innocent as that.”

“Oh yes you are.”

“I have had…experiences,” she lied.

He sighed. “Reyna, you should be wary of me—I could corrupt you in a thousand different ways.”

I was silent.

He reached over me, and traced his hand along the drawing, around my eyes. “See here, the way you raise your brow? Your eyes do all the talking. When you see something new or surprising or different or even that scares you—your eyes give it all away. Your whole body slows down and every part of you betrays your curiosity. It’s like you’ve never seen the world.”

I turned to him.

He lifted his hand from the paper and put it to my face. He traced his finger along the ridge of my cheek. “Just like now. Innocent. Thirsty.” He leaned close and whispered in my ear. “And I think to myself that you should run far away from me. But, when I see you in the house of glass, you are very a very different woman.”

At that moment, I barely knew the other woman, couldn’t imagine that she even existed.

After a bit, I stood and stretched my legs, wandering about the room. There was a pile of boxes, loosely draped in a white sheet. I went and lifted the sheet. Jewels and silver glinted back at me. The wealth of this man was beyond me, beyond measure. I dipped my hand into a box and came up with a diamond necklace dangling from my fingers.

“Look what I caught,” I said, laughing. I took a few steps in wonder, thinking of all the riches buried and forgotten. “All this treasure you have, just casually lying around.”

“All from the terrible St. Claires,” he said in a mock-serious voice.

I stood before the iron stairs that curled into the ceiling. They reminded me of a strand of seaweed dangling from the ocean’s surface. “What’s up there?” I asked.

He took me by the hand, and the diamond necklace scraped between us. He pulled on me gently. “Heaven,” he said. “Come and see.”

He led the way up the stairs, and each fall of his step rang out in the dusty, dark attic. At the top he gave a heave and with a groan a board swung wide open and landed with a thud. Stars twinkled down at us. Lucas stepped up and over the roof and disappeared into the night sky.

I followed.

We were on the roof of the old fortress and the night was blue-black beneath the moon. The smell of salt carried on the wind and the stars were so thick it seemed that I could gather them in my hands.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Lucas asked.

“It’s marvelous.” I walked to the edge, to the rise in the stone that formed a barrier. Parapets were cut into the stone every few feet, and I leaned through one of them, and saw the gardens below. The wind rushed through my hair. There was a strange object attached to the railing, it was oblong like a cannon, but much, much smaller, about the size of my arm. “What is this?”

“It’s a spyglass. An old one, from one of my ships. Now, I just I use it to watch the horizon. I installed it the night Celeste disappeared. I thought it might give some clue.”

I looked through the peephole and swung the spyglass across the ocean and then up toward the sky. Each star was a bright surprise as it flashed before my gaze. I swung the spyglass farther, and I saw the dark outline of the perfectly manicured lawn. There against the edge of it, I saw a ghostly outline of a dog, running across it. “I see Maxie,” I said. Realization dawned on me. Of course. That was how he knew I went there. He could see me cross the lawn and gardens.

When he spoke, he almost sounded apologetic. “The first time I saw you cross the gardens, it was a shock. I thought for a moment you were a ghost. But I realized who you were, I just couldn’t believe where you were headed. No one goes there.” He was quiet. “Except for me, now and then.” He put his hand on the spyglass, swinging it away from me. “I should smash that house into a thousand pieces.”

“Don’t you dare,” I replied. “Don’t you dare.” More than ever, at that moment I wanted to run to the house, to protect it in some way from him.

“I should have done it long ago. I kept it for her. In case she returned. To help return.”

“She won’t return,” I insisted. “She can’t have the house. Not anymore.” The bitterness in my tone surprised me.

“Funny how you sound like her right now.”

“I don’t know. It has a pull. It has a presence. When I’m inside it, I’m certain of things, everything else seems so far away. I don’t think about the things that cause me pain.”

“Like your father.”

“Yes.”

From where I stood next to Lucas, I could see the whole island, where it curved like a scythe, dark hills rising, blotting out the sky with their inky forms. There were small points of light where each house was. “Do you see all those lights?” I asked him, pointing. “There, see?”

“I see.”

“I used to be one of those twinkling lights. My father and I. We had a simple life. Nothing to speak of, except for the two of us, and now that is gone.”

“I’m sorry,” he said and he reached for me, but I pulled away. “And you are here, with me.” He was persistent and pulled at me again, bringing me to him. He lifted his hand and touched it to my temple. “That light burns here, in your memory, and it will never go out.”

He folded me into his arms and I melted there. He smelled of the sea, of the tropical wind and a hint of the garden. He blotted out the entire world, and the only thing I knew was him, his slow, even breathing and the strong embrace of his arms.

I could not say how long I clung to him, but it seemed like hours. I brought my hand up to trace the line of his jaw, and the diamonds that I had forgotten about flashed between us.

I held the necklace to the sky. The diamonds glittered and winked, twinned to the stars above. A hand covered mine, entwined the rope of jewels and reached even higher, so that the diamonds dripped from the moon.

I could feel his body against mine, and when he spoke, it was a whisper in my ear. “Are you coveting these diamonds?” he asked, almost indulgently.

I answered hotly. “No. I would rather have the stars in the sky.”

He laughed. “I would give you the stars. I would even give you the sun.”

“I don’t believe you.”

I lowered my arm and turned around, and the necklace tangled between our hands.

Then, I gave in to my passion and pressed against him. Every time I took a breath, my breasts touched against his body.