The Glass Flame

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  Giff looked at me over her bent head. “How recently did you see Joe Bruen?”

  “Yesterday,” she said. “He—he was awful. I was scared of him.”

  “And now you want to tell us where he is so something can be done to stop him?” Giff said.

  Her head came up fiercely. “No! I mean—not yet. I don’t know. I’m all mixed up. I thought it would be easy. I thought it would be a way to get even with him. After that—that woman. The Andrews woman!”

  So Lori had been playing with danger again—walking the high edge of the precipice. But the woman between us wasn’t ready to talk the whole thing out as yet. Her own actions had begun to frighten her.

  “Perhaps it isn’t necessary to tell us all about Joe,” I said quietly. “Someone hired him, of course. If you just tell us who that person is—”

  Giff stirred on the bench beyond her. “No, Karen. That isn’t good enough. It’s Joe we want. Go on, tell us the rest, Mrs. Bruen.”

  She was staring at me. “Yes, I’d like to tell you about who hired him. But not now. Not here. Maybe another time. If I could just see you alone.”

  I shook my head emphatically. “No. That isn’t possible. You’d better tell us everything right now while you have the chance.”

  But we had pushed her too far, and she jumped up from her place between us and ran in the direction of the elevators. Giff was after her fleetly, his hand reaching for her arm, and when I joined them I took her other arm.

  “Don’t be afraid,” I said. “No one’s going to hurt you. You were right in coming to us. But you need to tell us everything or there’s no way we can help.”

  She went limp between us, making no attempt to struggle or get away, and by the time we reached the lighted area opposite the elevators she seemed entirely unresisting.

  Nevertheless, we waited, not pushing the button for the car at once. Now that there were lights overhead I could see her face more clearly. She had put on very little lipstick, but her eyes had been carefully lined and thickly shaded, and the lashes were long and false. She was pretty in a not too distinguished way, and her figure, even under the heavy sweater, was opulent.

  “What sort of work do you do?” I asked her.

  She was being cautious now, and she thought about that for a moment as though she feared some trap. “I used to be a go-go dancer. But Joe didn’t like me to keep on after we were married. We didn’t need the money, so I quit. Though sometimes it gets awfully boring—not working.”

  “Not lately, I imagine,” Giff said.

  Her expression was more startled than the remark seemed to call for, and she reached past him and pressed the button for the car.

  “Look,” she said. “I’ll show you something. I’ll show you just one thing.”

  Fumbling in her hurry, she opened her plastic handbag and took out an envelope. She didn’t release it into our hands, but removed a wallet-sized picture and held it up for us to see.

  “That’s Joe,” she told us. “It was taken just last year.”

  The man who looked out at us was some years older than Gwen. His mouth was hard and straight, his chin slightly weak, and his gray hair curled in a thick mass over his forehead. It was a face one might easily cast as the villain in any B movie.

  “Well, that’s some help,” Giff said. “Though not much. Now we know what he looks like, at least.”

  “Your father already knows him,” I pointed out.

  Giff’s look was scarcely approving, but he made no comment.

  The elevator was taking its time, and Gwen Bruen had begun to fidget. It was clear that she wished herself elsewhere by this time.

  “Where are you staying?” I asked her.

  “You think I’m nuts—to tell you that? I’d like to talk to you, Mrs. Hallam. But when you’re alone. That’s the only way I’ll do it. I only called Mr. Caton because I didn’t think you’d come alone the first time to meet me. But maybe now—”

  “No way,” I said. “I wouldn’t any time.”

  “That’s too bad. That’s really too bad. But maybe you’ll change your mind.”

  “How can I if there’s no way to reach you?”

  “Oh, but I know how to reach you,” she said. The elevator door slid smoothly open, and she stepped ahead of us into the waiting car.

  I tried to catch Giff’s eye on the way down, but he avoided my look, and his usually expressive face seemed blank and guarded. I wasn’t sure that Giff would cooperate in turning Gwen Bruen over to the police. I suspected that he had his own secrets to guard—perhaps having to do with his father.

  We walked through the atrium lobby, and out revolving doors to the paved strip in front of the Greencastle. Neither of us was holding her arm by that time, and without warning she darted away and ran across the driveway, disappearing into thick bushes that dropped down the hillside to the next level of road. I started after her, but Giff pulled me back.

  “Let her go, Karen. It’s no use. She won’t tell us anything more now, and she’ll have a car down there ready to go. We can’t catch her on foot. Or in my car, by the time we get it out of the parking space.”

  I wasn’t sure that he couldn’t have captured her if he’d gone after her on foot, but I could also see that if we became aggressive we might frighten her off entirely. When we were in Giff’s car he patted my arm reassuringly, his good nature reviving.

  “Don’t worry. She’ll be heard from again. And when she is, let me know. Don’t, under any circumstances, go off to meet her alone. We can’t be sure how much of what she told us was the truth, or what her unsavory husband may be up to now.”

  I agreed readily enough, but I was still wondering about Giff. The excitement I had sensed in him earlier had disappeared—perhaps because he was no longer keyed up to meet an unknown adventure. We found little to talk about on the drive home, and when he dropped me off at Trevor’s I thanked him politely for the evening. He held my hand for a moment, his familiar, somewhat mocking expression back in place.

  “Will you tell your father about tonight?” I asked.

  He looked startled. “Certainly not. He’d find whatever we did wrong because he would have handled it better. Are you going to tell Trevor?”

  “Yes, of course,” I said.

  His smile had a twist to it as he drove away. I went into the house, looking into one room after another. I could hear Nona playing her dulcimer, but I didn’t seek her out in her own rooms. Trevor was the one I wanted to find.

  The door of his office was open, and he was at his desk. When I paused in the doorway, he looked at me across the room, his eyes cool and uninviting, as I had seen them that afternoon.

  “I’d like to talk with you,” I said.

  He stood up, gesturing me into the room, and I went to sit in an easy chair near his desk, feeling unutterably depressed. There was nothing about him to invite easy confidence, nothing to tell me he cared whether I stayed or went. The change in him had been growing worse in the last day or two, and he was a man I no longer knew.

  I sat primly upright, my hands clasped in my lap. “I went out to dinner at the Greencastle tonight,” I said. “With Giff.”

  “Yes—Nona told me. It’s a pleasant dining room.”

  “Giff didn’t take me there because it’s pleasant. He’d had a phone call from a woman named Gwen Bruen.”

  That seemed to startle him. “Go on.”

  “Giff had agreed to bring me to meet this woman when she called him on the phone. He chose the roof of the hotel for our meeting.”

  Trevor flung down the pencil he was holding with a violence that bounced it off the desk. “My God! Why?”

  “I think Giff likes to be whimsical. First he gave me the grand tour of the tenth floor and showed me Vinnie Fromberg’s office. At eight-thirty we went up to the roof.”

  “I’ll talk to Giff. He should never have taken you up there.”

  “Mrs. Bruen wanted to meet me. It was the only way she would come. I think she’s feeling
revengeful toward her husband. I think she’d like to turn him in, but is afraid to.”

  Trevor’s first surprise had died a little, and now, strangely, he didn’t seem particularly interested in what I was telling him.

  “What else did you learn?” he asked.

  “Very little. She wasn’t ready to talk. Not with Giff there. Though she admitted that Joe caused David’s death, and she showed us a picture of her husband.”

  “Much good that will do if we can’t find him. You remember we have his fingerprints too. Did his wife have any suggestions?”

  “No—though she wanted me to meet her somewhere alone.”

  “Which you mustn’t do under any circumstances.”

  “Of course not. I told her so. When we came downstairs she ran away from us, and there was no chance of catching her.”

  “That wasn’t being smart of Giff—to let her go.”

  “She surprised us. We never expected—”

  “Giff wouldn’t. Perhaps he didn’t want to stop her. Anyway, it’s a blind alley. She’s not going to lead you to her husband, no matter what she says. It could be some sort of trap. Have nothing to do with it.”

  I wasn’t sure of anything, but I didn’t want to argue with Trevor. Nor could I endure more of this cold indifference he was showing me.

  “Anyway, now you know,” I said, and left my chair to walk through the open doors onto the deck. He let me go outside alone and I stood at the rail looking toward the mountains.

  We were even higher than the Greencastle here, but the lights of Gatlinburg were missing. The night and the stars, the dark mountains, were the same, but they gave no lift to my spirits. There was so much to weigh upon me now. David’s futile death—since according to Gwen Bruen it could have been unintentional. And she hadn’t wanted to talk about Lori, though I had sensed jealousy there. True, there had been no more fires since Lori had died, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be more. I couldn’t believe that any of it was ended. Now Trevor had turned against me for some private reason—or else he was so lost in the darkness of his own mind that there was no longer room for any thought of me.

  If it weren’t for Chris, I would pack up and go home tomorrow, I thought. I must go soon, anyway, no matter what Nona said. The boy was improving and next week he would be going back to school, doing extra make-up work as well. I would miss him. Something warmer than friendship had grown between us. What it meant to him I couldn’t be sure, but it had begun to fill a long-suppressed need in me. And that in itself was dangerous.

  I didn’t know that Trevor was near until I felt his arms come about me. Startled, I turned and looked up at him. I wanted to say, Don’t—don’t hurt me anymore! But I didn’t speak because there was an enormous sadness in his eyes. He held me close for a moment, then kissed me gently.

  “I’m sorry, Karen. I’m sorry for everything. I think it’s best if you go home very soon. You’ll be better off away from whatever else is going to happen here.”

  I started to protest, but he released me and crossed the deck into the house. He had held me tenderly, he had kissed me—but he had walked away. I didn’t understand. I couldn’t understand anything!

  There was no one else I wanted to talk to and I went down to my room and closed the door. When I turned on the light I saw the sheet of notepaper lying on the floor and picked it up. There were only a few words.

  You’re to call someone named Bert at this number tomorrow morning.

  Nona

  Chris must have brought this down to slip under my door. I didn’t know who Bert was, but I had a strong feeling that when I called I would find Gwen Bruen behind the number.

  During the night it began to rain—no small thunder shower that would quickly blow away, but a hard, steady downpour. Trevor had insulated well and the beating on the roof over my room was muted and distant. But even with the enclosed grotto outside, wind flung sheets of rain against the glass doors of my room, striking them with intermittent force. At any other time I might have loved the sound, might have fallen gently asleep to its accompaniment. Now, only torturing pictures went through my mind.

  Visions of rain pounding down upon Belle Isle, stirring ashes and char to a black paste. Rain running like a waterfall down the tiered steps of Cecily’s theater, falling on Vinnie Fromberg’s octagonal house, beating its way through voracious green vines to flood a hidden cabin. And most of all heavy green vines pressing down upon me, burying me as the man in Maggie’s painting had been buried. This would be my nightmare for years to come.

  It was a long while before I slept, only to awake early the next morning to the continued sound of storm outside. Up here on the mountain wind struck the house with enormous force, but it scarcely shuddered because Trevor had built solidly and well.

  My guess about the number I was to call was right. After breakfast I phoned from the hall telephone upstairs. Bert, whoever he was, answered and went away. A moment later Gwen Bruen spoke in my ear.

  “Have you changed your mind?” she asked. “Will you meet me?”

  “Not if I have to come alone,” I said.

  “Then the fires will go on. And God knows what else. Do you want that to happen? A guard can’t be put on every house, and there are ways to get in all around Belle Isle.” She sounded indignant with me, and also a little frantic—even desperate. “You have to take a chance, Mrs. Hallam. I won’t talk to anyone else.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you’re concerned. Because of what I can tell you about your husband. You want to know, don’t you? You don’t want to go all the rest of your life wondering what he was into—you couldn’t bear that. Besides, you’re the only one who can help me. Any of the others would bring the police, and I’m not about to face that.”

  “How do you know I won’t?”

  “Because you’ve got sense enough to know that would lose you everything I can tell.”

  “Does Joe know you’re doing this?”

  “Of course not!” The truth rang in her voice and I sensed that my first guess had been right. She wanted to pay off her husband.

  I played for time, to keep her talking. “Where do you want to meet me?”

  “Come to the house on the island. I’ll meet you outside at ten-thirty this morning.”

  Startled from me, my laughter had an hysterical ring. “That’s the last place I would think of going!”

  “But what I have to show you is there. Telling won’t do. You have to see.” Again conviction rang in her voice. She believed in what she was saying.

  “No,” I said. “I won’t come.”

  “At ten-thirty. Don’t be late,” she told me and hung up.

  I put down the receiver and turned around to find Nona sitting in her wheelchair across the hall, watching me. Obviously she had been listening.

  “You’d better come and tell me,” she said, and wheeled back to her own living room.

  Yes, I thought, I could tell Nona. She, at least, would have Trevor’s interest at heart, and perhaps she would know what to do. I followed her into the cool spacious room, where rain curtained the windowpanes in a moving sheet of water. I sat again on the couch beside the dulcimer, and Nona wheeled her chair opposite me. This morning her graying hair hung in a long braid over one shoulder, as it had the first time I’d seen her, and her green eyes were alert and probing.

  “Begin,” she said.

  I told her what had happened last night on the roof of the Greencastle, putting in all the detail I could remember. She heard me out with no interruption, her look never wavering from my face.

  “You’ll have to go, of course,” she said when I finished.

  I stared at her in astonishment and her smile was wry.

  “Oh, not alone. We’ll have to figure something out. I wish I could go with you, but I wouldn’t be of much use. Trevor—”

  “Trevor wouldn’t hear of it. And I don’t think he’d go himself. He really wasn’t much interested in Mrs. Bruen. I don’t want
Giff. So who is there?”

  Neither of us mentioned Eric, and Chris was too young.

  “Maggie,” Nona said. “She’s sound enough in a crisis, and she’d jump at the chance.”

  “Two women? Into goodness only knows what trap? No thank you.”

  “That’s a cliché. You want brains, not brawn, at a time like this. Poor little Lori didn’t have either.”

  Already she was overriding my protest, wheeling her chair down the room to her own telephone. A moment later she had Maggie on the line. I listened, feeling that I was being catapulted into space by a force that couldn’t be resisted.

  “Maggie, hon,” she was saying, “are you alone? … That’s fine. Listen, sweetie, do you still have that automatic Eric gave you a while back? … Good. Get it out and load it. Karen is coming up to see you right away. It could be that something’s in the wind to stop all the trouble at Belle Isle.… You’d like to help on that, wouldn’t you?”

  A moment later she hung up and turned back to me, her expression alive with excitement. I remembered her telling me once that she would do anything for Trevor and Chris. Even to sacrificing me?

  “Run along now, Karen. Go over to Maggie’s right away, and let her make the plans. The minute it’s all over, you come back here. I’ll want to know everything that happens.” If I followed her directions I wasn’t sure I would ever come back. Yet already I knew the catapult had been fired and I was the missile. But when I started reluctantly to the door, Nona held out her hand and I went to her.

  “Listen to me, Karen. I don’t know what’s over on the island, but whatever it is, it has to be stopped. Until we find Joe Bruen, nothing can be ended. You’ll be all right.”

  “How can you possibly say that?”

  “Because I know. I really do know, Karen. No one is going to hurt you. Go and talk to this woman. That may be all that will happen. Just talk. I know you’ll be fine.”

  Her voice was low and somehow compelling. As though hypnotized, I believed every word she was saying. It was as though she had given me some charm against evil that would get me through. Perhaps she was something of a magician in her own right.