Free The Ghost in the Glass House by Carey Wallace

seen, the fountains and plazas, the circuses and cathedrals, had begun to glow with a strange new light, not because her own feelings for them had changed but because of how they might seem to Jack. It was something like the way she felt when she first saw how women eyed her mother’s jewels at parties, and realized that what Clare had thought of as playthings were actually treasures to be envied.
    Something struck the roof overhead. Clare glanced up. A few more raindrops rattled on the glass, then settled into a steady patter. If Clare waited for the rain to gather strength, she’d be soaked when she got to the house—which would lead to all kinds of uncomfortable questions about where she’d been.
    â€œI have to go,” she said. She crossed the room, which seemed half alive itself now with the blurred shadows of the water coursing over the glass.
    Then she stepped out into the cloudburst, and ran.

Ten
    A S C LARE HAD HOPED , Bridget’s mother answered the door.
    She had never bobbed her dark hair like some of the younger women in their set, and today it was swept back off her face in the style of an earlier decade. On her, the old style was still effective. It framed her dark eyes and set off her pale skin. Her day dress, as usual, was white, Battenberg lace over batiste. When she smiled in welcome, she focused on something just beyond Clare, as if she might be greeting a spirit who had followed her in.
    â€œIf I didn’t know better,” Clare’s mother had observed once, “I’d say she was a laudanum eater. It’s too bad she’s not. At least then she could stop taking it.”
    â€œClare,” Bridget’s mother said, and bent to give her an automatic kiss on the cheek. “Are you here to see Bridget?”
    Clare nodded. “But I wanted to ask you something,” she said. “About the other side.”
    For the first time, Bridget’s mother met her eyes. “Anything in particular?” she asked.
    Clare shrugged and held her tongue. Children, she had learned, enjoyed some of the same advantages that women did: people were prone to believe that their minds operated in some mysterious range outside the bounds of ordinary logic. Perhaps from worry that the strange logic would infect their own minds, or perhaps simply because women and children were both susceptible to tears, most people were loath to press a child for explanations, especially when a child didn’t seem inclined to give one and remained quiet and polite in every other respect.
    â€œWell,” Bridget’s mother said after a minute. “I was just making some lemonade. Would you like to help me with it?”
    The kitchen, Clare discovered when she followed Bridget’s mother, hung out over the water just like the sun porch did. Sun streamed through a wide strip of windows onto the slate floor. Beyond them, the ocean was a bright, hard blue gray, its surface troubled by thousands of small waves.
    Bridget’s mother took up the spot she had apparently left at the counter, a white marble shot through with black veins that faded to gray as they sank deeper in the pale stone. She sliced a lemon in half, nudged a glass juicer down the counter toward Clare, and dropped the two sides of the divided lemon beside it.
    Clare picked one half up, touched its fleshy heart to the sharp tip of the juicer, and pressed down. “You’ve lived with ghosts before, haven’t you?” she asked, as juice ran down the glass slopes into the juicer’s moat.
    Bridget’s mother nodded and sliced another lemon into pieces. “Why do you ask?”
    â€œWho were they?” Clare said.
    â€œWhat you have to understand,” Bridget’s mother said in a tone that indicated she didn’t really expect Clare to understand at all, “is that real ghosts have very little to do with the ghost stories you might hear from other children.”
    â€œThey