Free House of Glass by Jen Christie Page A

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