The Glass House People (8 page)

"And I also had a little sister. No big deal, no beauty. Only seventeen and skinny, with mousy hair and a nothing body. But she had feet—and legs that worked properly. And you know what she did with those legs, don't you, Elisabeth?"

Beth just stared at her.

"She walked in and took him! She took my Clifton! She forced herself on him, and made him betray me—betray our love. Oh, my God, I remember it all so well!" Big, round tears were trickling down Aunt Iris's sharp cheekbones.

"Oh, Aunt Iris." Beth reached out a tentative hand and touched the woman's shoulder. Aunt Iris flinched away.

"She stole him! But in the end, she couldn't have him, either. And do you know why? Because he still wanted to marry
me.
He begged me to forgive him for letting that worthless sister of mine seduce him. And I would have done it, married him anyway. But she—she couldn't stand the thought that I'd get something she wanted! She had to ruin it all for me. If she couldn't have him, she wanted to make damn sure I couldn't, either!"

Aunt Iris moved to the bed, sobbing, and fell onto it. She dragged her fingers through her scraggly hair. When she raised her head she stared at Beth as if surprised to see her still standing there.

But Beth felt rooted to the spot. Her voice came out weak and shaky, but she had to ask. "So, what happened?"

Aunt Iris sat up and hugged her arms around her skeletal body. She was sobbing. "She killed him, Elisabeth! She pushed him right down the stairs. She swore at the time she'd kill both of us—but she hasn't managed to get me. Not yet."

Beth closed her eyes for a second as panic welled in her throat. The memory of her dream about Hannah and the car and the cliff pressed behind her eyes. Then she spun for the door, yanked it open, and ran for the hall—a sound like crashing waves pounding in her head.
Not Mom! No!
Aunt Iris was wrong! Aunt Iris was lying—

"Elisabeth." Aunt Iris's hoarse rasp called her back, and Beth stopped, heart hammering, just outside the door to her own bedroom. "Here are your socks."

Finally Beth lay in bed. She had not even brushed her teeth or performed any of her usual bedtime rituals. No zit medicine. No leg lifts, no diary writing. She huddled under the sheet, strangely cold in the summer heat. Tears stung behind her closed lids, but she fought them back. Her eyes flew open at the sound of Tom's connecting door opening, and she hastily shut them again and tried to breathe regularly so he would think she was sleeping. She didn't want to talk. She could feel him standing at the head of her bed, even with her eyes closed.

"Beth? I know you're not sleeping."

She remained silent, willing him to go away so she could cry in privacy.

"Look, if you were sleeping, your eyelids wouldn't be twitching like that. Eyelids only twitch like that if you're awake or if you're in very deep sleep. I did a report at school last year, all about sleep. You know? Sleep patterns. There's this thing called Rapid Eye Movement. REM, it's called, and it means that your eyes move rapidly when you're deeply asleep and dreaming. But you can't get to that stage till you've already been asleep for about twenty minutes, which you haven't, so why don't you just sit up and tell me about it?"

Beth sat up, tears spilling. "Leave me alone."

"No." His voice was surprisingly firm, and Beth peered at him from her curtain of hair. "I heard everything."

"Everything?"

"Everything she was saying to you. Aunt Iris. She was drunk, you know, Beth. Don't forget that."

"I—I know." Beth sniffed and reached for a tissue from the box on her bedside table. She blew her nose noisily. "So, were you listening at the door or what?"

"Didn't need to." Tom sat on the edge of the bed. "The windows of her room are open and so are the windows on the sunporch. It's right next door! I couldn't
not
hear. I was going to rush in and save you if she turned, you know, violent."

His voice was firm and sounded grown-up. Beth peered at her brother and thought he might turn into someone she could lean on, someday. She blew her nose again and tucked the tissue under her pillow. "Well, she didn't touch me. But what do you think about what she said? Do you think Mom
could
have done it—pushed that man?"

"Of course not! Don't ever think such a thing! She isn't the murderous type."

"And Aunt Iris is?"

"Probably."

"But Tom—" Beth hesitated. It chilled her to know Aunt Iris was in the next room—it chilled the air she breathed. And yet there was something even more chilling. "You heard Mom. She herself said she doesn't remember exactly what happened—"

Tom sat on the edge of the bed, frowning fiercely. "No! Don't even think it! I don't believe it for one second. And you'd better not, either!"

She regarded him for a long moment, surprised at the tremble in his voice. Then she realized he was trying to mask a fear that left him dizzy. He changed again before her eyes—from the person she might be able to lean on back into old Mac, just her younger brother. She put on her most reassuring voice. "I never said I suspected Mom, did I? I'm just saying it's strange. I don't think Aunt Iris was lying tonight. I mean, I think she really
believes
Mom pushed that guy! There's something really weird about all this. We know Mom wouldn't have pushed him, right? But what if Aunt Iris didn't, either?"

Tom's eyes were round. "Then someone else did?"

"I don't know. I wonder how we can find out."

He scowled. "You've read too many detective books this summer. There's no way to find out what happened here so many years ago."

"Maybe not." But Beth suddenly felt cheered at the prospect of trying. An aggressive attempt to clear up the past and settle once and for all what had happened to the lodger might be better than living here with all the undercurrents. "Don't you want to uncover family skeletons, Tom?"

"She's uncovered already," muttered Tom. "Over in the next room. And remember, Mom said the other night that the subject was closed. Absolutely and forever. That's what she said."

Beth stared up at the crack on the ceiling. She'd thought earlier it looked like a man's head. But now it resembled a winged insect. "How do you solve a twenty-year-old mystery?" she mused to herself. "Oh, Tom—wouldn't you love to be able to turn yourself into a fly on the wall and go back in time to see what
really
happened here?"

Because the June heat drew such crowds, Clifton had been staying later and later each night to clean up before heading home from the zoo. There was so much garbage to pick up from the picnic areas, he couldn't believe it. People were such slobs. And it wasn't just kids, either. He couldn't count anymore the times he had watched adults toss cotton-candy cones, paper cups still half full of melting ice and orangeade, and hamburger wrappers into the bushes, onto the paths, or even right into the animals' pens. It was disgusting.

He took solace in the fact that evening would bring him back to the Savages, to their spotless home. He rode the train back from the zoo, then caught a bus. Normally the walk from the bus stop to the old house on Spring Street, where he had lodgings with the family, was his chance to daydream, to unwind after a long day. His daydreams generally focused on the novel he was writing—well, trying to write—at night up in his room. The plot was great—better than any of the science fiction junk he'd ever read. The classic writers had nothing on him. Even his favorite writers, Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov, paled beside him. When he sat down at his old typewriter out there on the little sunporch that came with the bedroom, he entered a world of time travel, space exploration, new planets discovered around new suns, and thrilling tales of war. Clara Savage, his landlady and soon-to-be mother-in-law, often had a very hard time pulling him out of that world when dinner was waiting on the table. Lately, of course, concentrating on that other world had become more and more difficult.

Who would have thought he would fall in love! And with such a beautiful, fascinating woman! He still couldn't get over it. He had once believed there could be only one person in the whole world who was truly right for him—his soul mate, his anima. And he believed he had met her while he was in college.

She'd been a waitress at the café near campus, not a student herself, but a seeming waif—a thin, pale beauty named Abby, who had few connections and lived, as he did, in a rooming house near the campus. He had been twenty. She swore she was eighteen, but she looked fifteen. He hadn't complained. They'd dated for two years, until he graduated and felt ready to marry her. But two years hadn't changed Abby a bit; she still looked fifteen, was still elusive and vague when he tried to pin her down to a date when they could be married. He had complained bitterly then. After all, he was quite a catch, wasn't he? Not rich, of course, but a great writer, which was nearly the same thing—he would be rich in a few years' time, once his books started to sell.

One evening two weeks before Christmas, after they'd finished dinner together in the café, Abby handed him a present. She made him promise not to open it until Christmas. He agreed to wait. Then, suddenly, she'd said she had to go and left him sitting there in the café. He finished his dinner, then went back to their rooming house. But Abby wasn't in her room. He figured she must have gone out for a walk—she didn't really have any other friends that he knew of—but, although he waited until quite late, she didn't return. He remembered the present she'd given him and decided to open it then and there.

It was a collection of science fiction time-travel stories he had been eyeing in a bookstore the previous week. And there was a letter enclosed:

Clifton,

I really do care about you, but I
don't
want to marry you. I'm leaving Philadelphia. Don't worry about me. Good luck. I will look for your books.

Abby

His first thought was that she hadn't even signed the note "Love, Abby"—just "Abby." His second thought was that she clearly was not his soul mate after all. Soul mates just didn't run off like that. So he never thought of trying to find her. As Christmas drew nearer, he half-expected a card from her, but none came, and after that he rarely thought of her. He immersed himself in his writing, working at odd jobs to support himself. A few years later his rooming house began to seem crowded, full of students much younger than himself, and he decided it was time to find a new place. He'd moved into the house on Spring Street and met Iris. And thoughts of Abby never crossed his mind again.

Talk about soul mates! He was drawn to her from the start, but his first Christmas with the family had been the turning point. As the holidays approached, he noticed he was spending less and less time at his writing and more time sitting with her over coffee after dinner. Iris was eager to hear about all the new plot twists, and eventually he began reading her each chapter as he finished it. Yet he found it hard to concern himself with the good people (or villains either, for that matter) of the Planet Notfilc—"Clifton" spelled backwards, but he doubted anyone would notice—when he could sit by the fire and watch the twinkle of tree lights with lovely Iris Savage. What a great name, he'd told her. A savage flower. It sounded like it should be in lights somewhere or, at the very least, on the cover of some stormy gothic romance. He told her he'd decided to work in a princess modeled on Iris as a tribute to her. She laughed—that soft, sweet laugh that caused a curious, sensual prickle along the back of his neck. (Abby had never caused him to feel such a thing!) And he began to think he'd found his true soul mate at last.

On Christmas Day he kissed her for the first time—and learned that it was her first kiss. He wasn't surprised; she had led a very sheltered life. Her parents were too protective by far, he felt. And Mrs. Savage, maybe as a reaction to Iris's childhood bout with polio, was extra-indulgent and lavished attention on the girl. Mr. Savage, on the other hand, balanced his wife's excesses by favoring the little sister.

Clifton and Iris had fallen in love at the very moment they opened their gifts: she'd given him a ream of thick, top-quality typing paper, new typewriter ribbons, and, best of all, an original oil painting—her interpretation of Notfilc. She had used him already to pose for several portrait sketches, one of which she later did in watercolor, but he liked the landscape best of all. In it she'd brought out more of the real Clifton than the portraits showed. The colors in the painting were glorious and clear. Bright blues and purples in the sky, with silvery stars and shimmery spacecraft. The planet itself was a series of red-rock lava islands dotting a stormy green-and-blue sea. The details on the islands were amazing: On each one some chapter of the novel unfolded. There was a laser-beam sword fight between the hero and villain on one, a sumptuous feast to celebrate the capture of the Evil Overlord on another, the dark castle where the lovely Princess Siri was held captive on a third, the lairs of the Notfilckian Beasts on the fourth. The painting was signed down in the left-hand corner with a single delicate blue flower—an iris. She told him she had been working on it for weeks, every day, while he was at the zoo. He told her he hoped the Christmas painting would someday become the cover of his novel. Then they would both be famous.

He had given her an expensive jasmine perfume and—more intimate—bath oil of the same fragrance. (Although he searched everywhere for an iris fragrance, he'd found only rose and lemon and jasmine. The jasmine had seemed the most sexy. He hoped she got the message.)

Funny how her leg didn't bother him. She was so ashamed of it, and he believed her mother did more harm than good by insisting Iris be treated specially because of her handicap. Not much more of a handicap than his own weak eyesight, really—Iris could move around as well as anyone; maybe she went just a little more slowly. But she told him about her childhood, how she'd been coddled because of her limp and how she was always made to feel different. She had already decided she would never marry because of it—Who could possibly want her? she'd asked him.