The Glass Flame

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  Giff stood just above us now, his ash-blond hair shining palely in the sun, and when he smiled I lost the sense that he wasn’t really handsome. It was a beautiful smile that flashed down at us, yet I had a strong feeling that it wasn’t entirely real. Giff, I suspected, would have been more pleased if we hadn’t discovered him here, and I wondered why. Nevertheless, he answered Trevor’s question without hesitation.

  “Dad wanted me to have a look at this place, Trev. He wants a report on its condition.”

  “Why?”

  The smile flashed off like a light extinguished. “Belle Isle is never going to work out the way you planned. You must know that by now. It will revert back to Dad and he’ll put it all to more practical use.”

  “Not for another two years,” Trevor said.

  “You’ll give up before then.”

  “No,” Trevor told him quietly, “I won’t. The fires are over now and we’ll move ahead. No one would stay around to set another and possibly get caught. Even charged with murder.”

  Giff turned and waved an arm again. “Come on out, Maggie. Our secret has been discovered.”

  Again there was movement from the hemlock wings and Maggie Caton sauntered out upon the stage to join her stepson. She wore a man’s white shirt over her jeans, and her plump person still had a look of being put together with pins and bits of string. The pepper-and-salt mass of red hair turned dingy in the sun as she came to stand beside Giff, staring down at us from the edge of the stage.

  “My secrets are still secret,” she said and grinned at me. “Hello, Karen. What do you make of Belle Isle? Have you met Cecily yet?” Her look traveled over me rather oddly, and I remembered the smudged state of my clothes.

  “I’d like to,” I said. “Lori tells me that she’s still around. That is, she told me before she locked me into Cecily’s sitting room.”

  I was being deliberately provocative. Trevor dropped my hand and I moved a few steps away from him, sensing his disapproval but feeling that small attacks on every front were the only weapons I could use. And I meant to use them. Only with surprise could I catch anyone off guard.

  Giff shook his head at the thought of Lori locking me into Cecily’s room, while Maggie looked down at me from the stage, owl-solemn!

  “Do you remember what I told you this morning?”

  She had told me a lot of things, but I knew what she meant—that I should go away as soon as the funeral was over, and never look back.

  “I don’t remember.”

  Trevor spoke brusquely. “There’s not much else to see, Karen. A few dressing rooms are around in back, but they were built of wood and they’re falling down. Shall I take you home now?”

  There was no further point in staying with him. I had probably misread that moment of friendship, and I disliked his cold courtesy.

  “You’ve taken enough time from your work on my account,” I said. “Perhaps Giff and Maggie will let me go back with them. When they’re ready.”

  Maggie gave her stepson a quick look, and I suspected that I was not entirely welcome. But that was where I must be—where I was least wanted. Trevor couldn’t tell me anything more for now, but perhaps Giff and Maggie could. An increasing sense of tension was rising in me. Almost without my being aware of it, I was being driven by a race with time. As though some hidden clock were ticking away toward—toward what? Were the fires really over? But even if the man who had set them had fled, the influence behind him remained and was all the more dangerous because of the guilt of David’s death. It was the man who gave the orders who must be found and exposed. I must think only of this. Doggedly.

  Trevor left us and went up the tiers in long strides to the side entrance by which we had come in, disappearing through it.

  “Have you seen all you want, Giff?” Maggie asked.

  “Enough for now. My car’s around on the service road, Karen. Shall we walk over there now?”

  Once more I was aware of his charm—aware but not susceptible. I trusted Gifford Caton no more than I did anyone else.

  We went through an opening in trees that edged the stage and down steps leading to ground level. Here I saw that a semicircle of connecting wooden dressing rooms had been built. Several were in a state of near collapse, but there was one with an open door that showed a partially furnished interior. Curious, I went to look in.

  Giff spoke at my shoulder. “That’s where Great-grandmamma used to dress. Some of her things are still there. As you can see, Lori has been fixing it up.”

  “It’s her own private museum,” Maggie said.

  “Do you mean the theater has never been used since Cecily’s death?”

  “Vinnie wouldn’t allow it,” Giff explained. “But of course if Dad takes the place over after Trevor he’ll turn it into a real theater. There could be money in a place like this if it was opened to seasonal visitors. We’d tear all this stuff down, naturally, and rebuild.”

  The vultures waiting, I thought, still strongly on Trevor’s side.

  I went up the single step and through the door. One wall of the small room was still a mirror and I saw my soot-streaked yellow sweater and gray slacks reflected in its wavery surface. A wooden chair had been drawn before the make-up shelf, where a single scarlet and black jappened box rested. Where I’d have expected a damp and musty smell, there again seemed to be a faint aroma of sandalwood. When I sniffed, wrinkling my nose, Maggie laughed.

  “Nona’s ubiquitous candles. Eric brought some home from his last trip to Hong Kong and Nona dotes on them. I wouldn’t have them around, but Lori’s been bringing them over to the island to counteract must and mildew. To make things pleasanter for Cecily, she says. Lori enjoys whimsical games, as you’re already discovering.”

  Whimsical was not exactly the word I would have used, but I let it go.

  The decorated black tin box coaxed my curiosity, and with one finger I flipped up the lid. Inside was a rouge-stained rabbit’s foot, a soiled powder puff, a round box of cake rouge with an old-fashioned label on the lid, sticks of dried-out grease paint, eyebrow pencils and brushes. Surely a turn-of-the-century theatrical kit. I let the box lid fall with a clank. These must have been things Cecily Fromberg had used in her pretense that she was an actress on the stage, and the sympathy I’d felt for her in that room at the octagonal house and out in the theater returned. Somehow, leaving these pitiful remnants of her life here seemed almost indecent.

  “Why haven’t these things been put away?” I asked Maggie, who had stepped into the room behind me. “It’s a little macabre, isn’t it?”

  She looked at me in the distorting mirror. “Vinnie gave an order to leave her dressing room alone, and he never countermanded it. He didn’t want anyone coming here to touch her things. Except himself. Since he hasn’t been gone all that long, nothing has been done.”

  “Sometimes,” Giff said from the doorway, “he used to come here at night when he was staying on the island. I remember once when my parents brought me here with them, looking for him because he’d disappeared from the house. I remember walking out from the wings with my father and seeing him out there—sitting on a step watching the stage, as though he might see her again. That was after he was old and his second wife had died.”

  “It’s terribly Victorian and sad,” Maggie said. “Nobody goes around haunted anymore.”

  Oddly, a memory of the weird ferns of Maggie’s mural returned to my mind, and I wondered. Wasn’t that a haunted painting?

  I moved on about the small room. Again there was a wardrobe cabinet that belonged to the days before closets were in use, and I looked inside to see two or three moldering costumes hanging there, their sequins long since dulled. An age-shredded wrapper that Cecily must have worn when making up clung to a hook, and I closed the door quickly, shutting out my own intrusion. Out in the room stood what might once have been a fine Recamier sofa, straight out of a French painting. Now its satin was frayed and torn, and mice had made a nest at its foot.

  “L
ook at this!” Suddenly Maggie pounced and drew out something from beneath the sofa, holding it up.

  The object was an empty tomato juice can, its bright red and white label intact, and the top gone.

  “Our ghosts have a thirst,” Maggie said dryly.

  Giff came into the room, crowding it with his tall presence, and took the can from her. “Sorry, I must have left that behind. I’ve camped out a few times, both here and up at the house, trying to find out what was happening.”

  So Lori had been right. “What have you found out?” I asked.

  “Only that there’s been someone around. Before the last fire, that is. But I wasn’t lucky enough to catch him, and I haven’t been over here since.”

  “Did you ever hear of anyone named Joe Bruen?”

  Giff shook his head. “I don’t think so. Why?”

  I was never sure whether Giff was telling the truth or not, and I glanced at Maggie. Her usually direct and open look had turned oddly blank. Yet the expression was gone in an instant, leaving me unsure of what I had seen, and increasingly distrustful of both of them. Why had Maggie and her stepson really come to the island? What were they searching for if the danger of fire was over?

  “Let’s not stand here talking,” Maggie said impatiently. “This place gives me the creeps. It’s not all that Victorian anymore. Arson’s as modern as that tomato juice can, regardless of its history.”

  “And sometimes as useful,” Giff said. There was irony in his words, but his eyes were bright and watchful, his look fixed on me.

  Maggie was right, I thought, and Cecily’s long-ago tragedy had nothing to do with what was happening now. Today there was only fire to be reckoned with—and David’s death.

  “Let’s go home,” Maggie said.

  Again I was aware of how tall Giff was, and of how intent his eyes could be, how watchful behind his often careless manner. He didn’t immediately follow Maggie through the door.

  “Did David write you anything in those last weeks, Karen? Anything revealing, that is?”

  “As a matter of fact, he did,” I admitted, and walked past him into bright sunlight.

  Giff stepped down beside me. “Is it a secret, Karen? What was it he wrote you?”

  “It’s no secret. I’ve told Trevor.”

  “And you told me,” Maggie said. “I mean that David wrote you that if anything happened to him it wouldn’t be an accident.”

  Had I told her that? I wondered. I had told Trevor, yes, and Nona. And a little while ago I’d told Lori. But Maggie? I couldn’t remember and I felt confused, unsure.

  “And that was all?” Giff questioned.

  “Of course,” I said. “If I had any real information, Trevor would have taken it to the police.”

  “Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t,” Giff said, and I knew he believed I’d held something back.

  However, he let the matter go, and we left the row of crumbling dressing rooms, walking toward a path that dropped steeply down an embankment. Following Giff, with Maggie behind me, I reached the sandy beach that I had seen when I’d stood beside Trevor on the tower balcony.

  “Dad asked me to check on this,” Giff said. “We’ll need to bring in a few new loads of sand. This inlet is especially good for swimming. Fairly shallow until you get out into the lake.” He sounded assured, as though Trevor’s plans were already in the past.

  A green arm of land lined with pines reached its half-moon around one end of the beach, protecting it and forming a tiny bay. Directly across the water was the Belle Isle project in its beautiful setting, with the hills rising beyond.

  But it was not the houses we watched now. A rowboat was coming toward us, already halfway across the lake to the island. Chris Andrews pulled stoutly at the oars, his back toward us as he rowed, clearly unaware of our presence. He didn’t see us until he neared the beach and turned around, his fair bangs ruffled in the wind. Then he rested his oars uncertainly, staring at us over one shoulder, his expression as grave as ever.

  My camera was ready and I snapped a couple of shots of him in the boat, not sure what prompted the impulse, but again obeying it. Perhaps I wanted a means of coming closer to Trevor’s son.

  “Come ashore,” Giff called to him, and after a moment’s further hesitation and a glowering look at me, Chris pulled again on the oars, and the prow of the boat grounded in the sand. Giff pulled it up on the beach and Chris got out reluctantly, standing tall and poised as if for flight.

  “You here on some special mission?” Giff asked. “Or just rowing for the fun of it?”

  The look on the boy’s face was not a normal reaction to so simple a question. He looked so alarmed that I thought he might have run again if Giff hadn’t taken him by the arm and led him up the sand.

  “What’s wrong, Chris? Maybe you’d better tell us.”

  The boy twisted in his grasp and found an excuse as his eyes fell on me. “It’s her! She’s Uncle David’s wife and he was no good. Aunt Nona says he was evil. So she is too and she has no right to take pictures of me!”

  I sensed that he was fabricating on the spur of the moment, blowing up a smoke screen of protest and excitement to cover his real reason for rowing to the island. Nevertheless, his words stung.

  “You’re right about one thing, Chris,” I told him. “I shouldn’t have taken pictures of you without your permission. But since I have, I’ll give you the prints, and the negatives too when I get the film developed. And I promise not to do it again.”

  Maggie smiled at us both warmly. “There—Karen has made you a handsome apology and everything’s fine. But I’m jealous. She hasn’t taken a single picture of me. I’d have thought I’d make a nice plump ghost back in Cecily’s dressing room.”

  Giff, however, was taking no side roads. “You’ve been over here a lot lately, Chris. What’s going on? Were you around when that last fire was set?”

  Chris’s eyes were agonizingly wide and he looked a very frightened boy.

  “No—I wasn’t there! I wasn’t! I didn’t have anything to do with it!”

  “But you did light the first fire,” Giff said. “So you can’t blame people for wondering about the others.”

  If Chris could have escaped Giff’s grasp I knew he would have, but the hold on his arm was too tight.

  “Now then,” Giff went on, “while I’ve got you away from your mother, for once, and from your father, suppose you tell us a few things.”

  Maggie seemed about to protest, but Giff gave her a quick look, and she was silent. This aspect of Gifford Caton was certainly in contrast to the friendly, easygoing guise he usually wore.

  “Talk,” he said to Chris.

  The boy wriggled, trying to get away, and then gave in. “I did set that first fire. You know all that. I was mad at my father and I was trying to get even. But I was sorry afterwards. I’ve told him so, and I’ve told my mother. And the sheriff too. I didn’t have anything to do with the other fires. Honestly, I didn’t.”

  “So why are you sneaking around Belle Isle at odd hours? Suppose you tell me right here and now what you’re up to.”

  “If I catch him,” Chris said, his voice rising, “—if I find out who it is—then I can prove I didn’t have anything to do with the other fires.”

  “If there’s anyone to catch,” Giff said. “And if there should be, what if he turns out to be somebody you like?”

  Chris lowered his eyes. “He’s not anybody I like. He’s not anybody I know.”

  “How can you be sure of that?”

  “Because I’ve seen him. I’ve seen him sneaking around the island. Only he was never close enough so I could catch him.”

  Giff let go of the boy’s arm so suddenly that Chris lost his balance and sat down on the sand. “You’re making this up, aren’t you? This is just another one of your stories.”

  “I did see him! He’s got gray curly hair and he wears lumberjack clothes—a green plaid jacket. Once he caught me watching him from up a tree. I wasn’t close,
but he went straight under the kudzu.”

  “When did you last see this phantom?” Giff asked lightly.

  The boy hesitated for a moment, as though unsure of how much he wanted to tell. “Yesterday,” he said. “Yesterday when—”

  Giff cut him off impatiently. “That’s nonsense. Whoever started that last fire and set the explosion could be wanted for murder, and he’d be far away by this time.”

  Chris whirled around and stared at me. “I’ve got a camera at home. Maybe I’ll bring it over and take a picture of him. The way you take pictures all the time. I never thought of that before.”

  “No dice!” Giff told him. “I’m going to have a talk with your father about this, and you’re going to stay off the island. I’ve been over it thoroughly and I haven’t flushed anybody into view. But if anyone’s hidden over here it could be dangerous.”

  Giff glanced at Maggie—a quick, meaningful look—and she came to his aid. “That’s right, Chris. You mustn’t come here while the island isn’t safe. This is something for the sheriff’s office to handle.”

  “Only nobody has!” Chris flung at her. “Nobody’s found out anything. They just think it’s me.”

  “Of course they don’t. If there was anything to find out, they’d have found it,” Maggie said gently. “But now we’d better start back. You can come with us, Chris.”

  Coming with us was clearly not his choice. “I’ve left my bike over by the entrance gate—” he began.

  “Then we’ll pick it up on the way out and take it back in my station wagon,” Giff said, settling the matter.

  “If you’ll wait a moment,” I put in, “I’ll use up the rest of my film, and then I can get it developed and give Chris his pictures.”

  They waited while I shot one picture across the lake to the houses, snapped another of Maggie in the doorway of Cecily’s dressing room and finished up with the empty amphitheater. I wasn’t attempting to get anything special—just using up the film and making a quick personal record of Belle Isle.

  We didn’t drive straight back to the house, however, but went on into Gatlinburg, where Maggie had an errand. On the way I was aware, as I hadn’t been before, of the kudzu that had enveloped stretches of the countryside, rolling along beside the road, and even attempting to climb a telephone pole here and there. Something that must keep the telephone company busy tearing it down.