The Glass House

by Nancy Lynn Jarvis

  Pat’s appreciation of Garryn Monteith’s knowledge and ability to impart it to his students continued to grow during the morning in spite of, or perhaps because of, his over-the-top presentation. He was charismatic and a showman, and Pat was in the mood to let him entertain her. She had been enjoying the class more, too, because after she hadn’t accepted his offer of private lessons, he had stopped insinuating himself into her personal space, and relegated her to being just one of “his darlings.” She was ready to drill with fearless abandon.

  But drilling holes proved to be taxing, and during the afternoon her teacher had again begun hovering and helping her too much, always with a hand on her shoulder and a whisper of encouragement in her ear. Her mind worked more on how she might move his over-reaching attentiveness along to the receptive Suzanne than on the task at hand.

  By the end of the day, all necessary holes had been completed, and there had been no glass casualties among the students’ spiders.

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  “Today will be the most exciting day of our time together, because this is when I will share my secret techniques with you, my darlings,” Garryn Monteith announced as the class gathered on the third day in the kitchen for coffee and Joe’s creation of the morning: cinnamon rolls.

  Joe interrupted Garryn’s speech to offer him a pastry. “Here you go, Garryn. I made this one especially for you. It’s gluten free.”

  “Thank you, Joe, but I’ll just have my usual coffee this morning. I’m watching my waistline.” He postured before his students, twisting left and right with one hand on his stomach and the other behind his back as he posed and sucked in this gut.

  “No you don’t, Garryn. I put a lot of time and effort in this for you. I insist you at least taste it.”

  Joe’s tone remained friendly, as did Garryn’s, but Pat perceived a bit of alpha male jousting between them. Garryn was the one to back down.

  “Well, since you went to all the trouble of making this just for me, and if you ladies don’t think I look too fat”—murmurs of reassurance about his physique erupted from the audience—“perhaps just a bite or two.” Garryn flashed his practiced smile as he took the pastry and made a show of taking a measured bite. “Yes, Joe. Very good. Possibly a little salty,” Garryn said. He took a second bite and then placed the dish with his pastry on the fireplace mantel.

  A few minutes later, Garryn clapped his hands. “It’s time to go, my darlings. Aren’t you excited to see your masterpieces? And aren’t you even more excited for me to share my patented way of mounting them for display with you?” With that, the Pied Piper of glass lead his students toward the studio with Lillian bringing up the end of the procession.

  As she had the day before, Lillian unlocked the kiln. She reached for the handle to open it, smiled at Garryn enticingly, and asked, “Should I?”

  Garryn gently brushed her aside. “No, my dear, allow me. You know that being the first to look inside the kiln and seeing the beauty my darlings have created is my favorite part of being a teacher.”

  He placed both hands on the kiln door bar-handle and raised the door over his head. He released it and leaned forward to peer inside the kiln.

  “App. App.” He spun toward the group. “App. App.” His mouth opened and closed rapidly. His eyes rolled up in their sockets, and he clutched his chest. His body convulsed, and then with a final gasp, Garryn Monteith collapsed facedown on the floor.

  Pat’s commiseration dinner was simple―spaghetti, broiled garlic bread, and green salad loaded with artichoke hearts and scallions to eat, and a decent Sangiovese to drink―and hastily put together. Joe took the heaping basket of warm bread from Pat who sat to his left at her kitchen table.

  “I came running when I heard all the screaming,” Joe said. “I knew that much commotion was more than a reaction to one of Garryn’s witty stories or some disappointed student wailing because her peony was broken.”

  “I’ve never seen someone die before,” Syda shuddered.

  “His heart attack must have been massive, because when the EMTs got there, they told me he was already gone,” Lillian added.

  “So that’s what it was?” Pat asked. “He had a heart attack?” She passed the spaghetti to Greg.

  “That’s what it looks like,” Greg said. “The sheriff will check his medical history to see if he was under a doctor’s care for heart issues. If he wasn’t, and if he seemed healthy, an autopsy will have to be done.”

  “He wasn’t that old,” Lillian’s shoulders hunched, “just a couple of years older than me. I’ve known him since we were both in our mid-twenties; he never complained to me about his heart or his health.”

  “Then he’s probably headed to the autopsy table,” Greg declared.

  “The idea of him being taken apart on an autopsy table…” Lillian cringed and then focused her thoughts elsewhere. “I plan to hold what would have been the last day of instruction tomorrow. I know Garryn’s techniques for attaching the flowers to stems. It’s really not hard, and I’ve watched him explain how to do it so many times during the other classes he taught here. Most of the students said they can stay for at least a part of tomorrow; I’ll teach an abbreviated session. We’ll offer a full refund to Suzanne Cummings—she’s local, but she’s just too upset to come back—and to Patsy Jones who has to fly back to New Jersey on a red-eye tonight—and a big discount to everyone else. You two will come back, won’t you?” Lillian asked Syda and Pat.

  “I guess so,” Syda said softly.

  “Of course we will,” Pat spoke with alacrity. “Come on, Syda, we have to see if we’re good at this. How else will we know if we’re destined to become the new Annieglass?”

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  Joe had coffee and donuts waiting for the students in the studio the next morning. The coffee was as good as ever, but the donuts were store-bought and left in their pink bakery box, there for anyone who wanted one. Most students had coffee; few were up to eating a donut.

  Lillian positioned herself where Garryn usually stood as he instructed the class, but unlike the way Garryn Monteith began his morning sessions with humor and lightness, she was somber.

  “I just don’t know what to say.” Her voice caught and she dropped her head down. It took her almost a minute before she could continue. Others sniffed in sympathy with her and with the cognizance of what had happened the day before.

  Joe put his arm around her shoulders and held her tight, offering physical as well as moral support.

  “Garryn was a special friend and a talented artist. He would want us to finish his lessons. I won’t be entertaining like he was, but I do know how to teach what he would have if he hadn’t…” Lillian had to stop again, this time because of tears. Finally, she said, “If you’ll go to the kiln and get your work…”

  “Or if you want me to, if you’d rather not return to the alcove, I’ll bring your peonies out to you,” Joe offered. “You’ll have to tell me what color flower I should look for and where your tray is in the kiln.”

  The students had placed their trays in the kiln by table in reverse order of where they sat. Table three and half of the second table were on the top shelf. The first few students took Joe up on his offer, and because of the placement pattern, it was easy enough for him to find each student’s tray. But as more flowers came out of the kiln, students grew pluckier. Most of the rest were carried out by their creators.

  The final flowers in the last row on the bottom shelf belonged to the two missing class members, Patsy Jones and Suzanne Cummings, and to Syda and Pat. Once Joe had removed the trays belonging to the other women, Syda and Pat were ready to get theirs.

  Syda hung back as they approached the kiln. “I don’t know if I can do it,” she whispered to Pat.

  “That’s okay. I’ll hand yours to you,” Pat said.

  She leaned far into the kiln, pulled Syda’s tray toward her, and then picked it up, turned, and gave it to her friend.

&nb
sp; Syda took it, grateful that she didn’t have to touch the kiln.

  Pat bent in again and began dragging her tray toward the front of the kiln. Her tray was a makeshift one and, after two firings, felt fragile compared to Syda’s tray. She was concerned that it might crumple if she picked it up, so she slowly pulled her tray forward, letting it rest on the kiln bottom.

  As her tray reached the forward edge of the kiln, Pat noticed a flutter of fine ashes. She hadn’t seen ashes when she retrieved her tray after the first firing, and she feared that the ash was coming from her tray’s bottom. Rather than risk the tray collapsing and causing a catastrophe, Pat took her two finished glass pieces out of the kiln and carried them back to her workspace.

  She left the door up and her tray and forming bowls in the kiln. Lillian should know the makeshift tray had done its job, but barely, so she could design a better one or make any future student who had to rely on one aware of its shortcomings.

  Lillian hadn’t begun her instructions when Pat noticed Kandi Crusher was packing up her glass pieces. Kandi was at table three, about as far away from where Pat’s workstation was as could be. Kandi looked up from packing her pieces in brown paper and gave Pat a finger-wiggle wave. Pat knew Kandi was signaling a goodbye, but her curiosity made her ignore that and interpret the wave as a gesture of invitation.

  She left her place, walked quickly, and rounded the table as Kandi finished wrapping and began to place her glass pieces in a sturdy box.

  “Are you leaving?” Pat asked. “I hoped we could talk again before everyone headed home.”

  “I’m out of here as soon as I finish securing my work.”

  “Do you have to catch a flight?”

  “No. I live near San Francisco and drove down.”

  “Don’t you want to see how to mount the flowers? You said you were looking forward to learning a lot today, didn’t you?”

  Kandi’s mouth turned up on one side in a smirk, “I already know all there is to know about Garryn Monteith’s ‘secret system.’ I planned to assemble my project before Garryn spoke, show everyone what I had done, and confront him in front of the class.

  “I don’t have to do that now, though, now that he’s dead. And Lillian’s just another one of the people he used while it was convenient for him. I have no need to make her look bad in front of the students, so there’s nothing more for me to do here. Time for me to leave.” Kandi hoisted her packed box. “It was nice meeting you, Pat.”

  “Me, too. I enjoyed meeting you, too.”

  Pat returned to her workspace as Lillian called the students to attention. “I have to talk fast because several of you have to leave before noon, so let’s start immediately with how to use the stamen to hold everything together.”

  Pat spotted more and more students packing up as Lillian spoke. Angela left almost immediately, as did two others at her table. By the time Lillian finished her lecture and announced lunch was waiting in the kitchen, there were only six class members remaining to take her up on the lunch offer, only four not counting Syda and herself.

  “I made tamales,” Joe explained as the small band walked into the kitchen. “I made them yesterday when I thought we’d still have to be gluten free. Fortunately, tamales are forgiving about when they’re cooked.”

  With only eight, the class and its hosts fit around the high L-shaped serving counter handily. The arrangement was conducive to chitchat. The conclusion of the course and the successful creation of wonderful glass peonies as different as their makers should have led to lively talk, but not much conversation happened. Everyone seemed relieved when it was deemed enough time had been spent over lunch and they could leave.

  Pat watched Joe, and especially Lillian, hug each of the departing students and voice an “I’m so sorry” to them. When only she and Syda remained, it seemed like the appropriate time to warn Lillian about the disintegrating tray.

  “Lillian, I’m not complaining, especially since I know you let Syda sign me up after the class was full, but the tray you made for me, which worked fine for the first firing, is disintegrating now. There was ash coming off the bottom of it as I dragged it forward. I was afraid to pick it up for fear it would collapse and break my work.” Pat smiled feebly, hoping she wouldn’t leave her hosts and Syda thinking she was an unappreciative whiner. “Just a heads-up.”

  Lillian’s forehead furrowed into a slight frown—not an angry one, but a curious one. “It’s not the first time I’ve improvised trays. Ashes, you said? I don’t see how that’s possible. Will you show me what you mean?”

  The four of them trooped out to the studio and into the kiln alcove. Everything was as Pat left it earlier.

  “I pushed the tray back into the kiln, but see,” she moistened her index finger and dabbed it in a bit of ash at the very front of the kiln. She held her finger aloft for the three others to see the spot of ash adhering to it. “There’s not much, but enough that it made me worry about the integrity of my tray.”

  Lillian peered into the kiln and then picked up Pat’s tray. She gave it a light one-handed shake and then turned it over and drummed on the bottom of it with the fingers of her other hand.

  “It’s fine; completely solid,” she pronounced. “Although, you are right, there is a bit of ash residue on the bottom of it. I have no idea where it came from, though, because it’s not from the tray degrading. I wonder if one of the students accidently put something in the kiln, perhaps papers with sketches on them, something that adhered to the bottom of their tray without them noticing it? She shook her head, “I can’t imagine any paper residue surviving the kiln heat, though. Oh, well, wherever the ashes came from, they need to go. Any ash residue could compromise future work.”

  Lillian placed Pat’s tray in the storage rack near the kiln, found a hand brush, and swept the traces of ash out of the kiln onto the floor.

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  Syda pounded on Pat’s front door. “Pat, Pat, open up!” she shouted.

  Dot rushed to the door and woofed a discreet, “Pat, are you hearing the knocking; I know your hearing isn’t as good as mine?” instead of a bark announcing that there was a stranger at the door.

  “Coming,” Pat yelled over the pounding and woofing as she made her way from her guestroom-now-office, where she had been arranging furniture.

  Between her eagerness to get inside and Dot dancing around her feet, Syda practically fell into the house when Pat opened the door.

  “You are not going to believe this,” Syda howled. “The heart attack Garryn Monteith suffered wasn’t a heart attack at all. He died from cyanide poisoning!”

  “Cyanide poisoning?”

  Syda’s already-rapid delivery got even faster. “Uh-huh. You remember Greg said there would be an autopsy if Garryn didn’t have a medical history? Well, he didn’t, and there was, and the cause of death came back as cyanide poisoning.”

  Pat frowned. “But how did he get cyanide in him?”

  Syda bobbed her head up and down, “Good question. Excellent question. He wasn’t an outed spy with a suicide capsule, so someone must have given it to him. Greg says the sheriff is looking at murder.

  “Everyone in the class is a suspect—us, too—but they’ve brought Joe in for a serious talk and are calling him a person of interest because he cooked our meals, and they think he could have slipped something into Garryn’s food. The sheriff asked for the remains of the special cinnamon roll Joe made for Garryn the morning he died, but Joe said he disposed of it right after breakfast. Greg says that’s what makes the sheriff think Joe is his prime suspect.”

  Pat shook her head. “You’ve seen films where someone is poisoned by cyanide, haven’t you? It’s fast. The victim goes down almost immediately. If Joe put cyanide in Garryn Monteith’s food, he wouldn’t have made it out of the kitchen. Besides, Joe is such a nice guy, and what motive would he have?”

  “I don’t know. All I can say is what Greg told me. It’s probably going to be on the news to
night.” Syda licked her lips in anticipation. “I’m married to a deputy sheriff who tells me basics in investigations, but he always holds the juicy details back. I know the investigators always know things only the perpetrator knows. It’s how they trip up the bad guys, and it’s also how they know when a crazy confesses. I don’t know why someone would confess to something they didn’t do, but you’d be amazed how often that happens.” Syda produced a big eye roll. “So maybe they have something on Joe that we don’t know.”

  “You said everyone in the class is a suspect, not just Joe?”

  “Yes. We’ll all be getting a call or a knock on the door for a longer interview than the quick one we had the morning Garryn died, before anyone thought he was murdered. Of course, the deputy sheriffs will act like they just want to know if we noticed anything, but secretly I’m sure they’ll be looking at us as murderers. Isn’t that exciting?” Syda asked with gusto.

  After a cup of coffee and some lemon pound cake Pat had made now that she had some free time, and a head poke into Pat’s new office so Syda could suggest where her surfer painting should be hung, Syda left as hurriedly as she had arrived.

  Pat used a nail and the heel of her shoe to pound it into her office wall and hung Syda’s painting before she settled down in front of her computer. She was a researcher and old habits died hard; she smiled to herself as she looked up cyanide poisoning.

  The circumstances of her research might be gruesome, but the process was familiar and, dare she think so, fascinating. Her research confirmed what she thought she knew. In a large enough dose to kill, ingested cyanide caused obvious distress within a minute or two and death within a few more minutes. There was no way Garryn could have led his band of students down to the studio, chatted at them, and made his way to the kiln without symptoms. He would have been complaining about dizziness or stomach pains, possibly even been disoriented.

  Any way she considered it, if Joe had put cyanide in Garryn’s food in a large enough dose to ensure a quick death, Garryn wouldn’t have been fine until he clutched his chest and collapsed. Her research suggested that could only happen with inhaled cyanide.