Glass Houses Read Online Free Page A

he’s sober,” Elizabeth said, “but he’s not sober a lot of the time, is he? And he does like to hang out on Society Hill. He’s got less of a chance of getting rolled there. He may be a drunk, but he’s not an idiot.”
    â€œSo you think he’s the man in the story, the one they didn’t name? You think that’s Henry. But when the police were here they said he couldn’t be the Picture Window Killer, or whatever it is—”
    â€œPlate Glass Killer.”
    â€œâ€”because he had an alibi for one of the deaths. Or something like that. There was a reason he couldn’t be. So they wouldn’t arrest him, would they, since they already knew that.”
    â€œI don’t know,” Elizabeth said.
    Margaret came back to the table and sat down. Now she was more than nervous. She had reached a level of panic the like of which she hadn’t had since menopause, when everything in her life was in panic. It was odd how it went. It was when you were young that you were supposed to be excited and frightened. When you got older you were supposed to mellow into a mature wisdom that made you both calm and happy. She reached into the fruit bowl in the middle of the table and took out an apple. She didn’t really like apples. She didn’t want to eat one.
    â€œWe knew she was going to be trouble, didn’t we?” Margaret asked, noticing with a certain amount of annoyance that Elizabeth was doing the crossword again, “when she first came here. When she first married Daddy. We knew she was going to be trouble.”
    â€œShe’s been dead and buried for thirty years.”
    â€œShe was an alcoholic,” Margaret said stubbornly. “That’s why Henry is an alcoholic. We should have seen that coming a long time ago. We should have had him committed.”
    â€œYou can’t just have people committed against their wills,” Elizabeth said. “Not unless they’re convicted of something, and Henry has never been convicted of anything. He doesn’t even drive.”
    â€œStill. We should have done something. Daddy would have done something. He did something about her in the end.”
    â€œShe was hospitalized for alcohol poisoning. Daddy had nothing to do with it.”
    â€œI keep expecting him to show up on one of those programs.
American justice.
Or
Investigative Reports.
They’ll do a program on the black sheep of prominent families, and there he’ll be, sleeping on the sidewalk with newspapers all over him and his shoes in shreds. I don’t understand why he doesn’t just come home. I don’t understand why he has to live his life out in public like that.”
    â€œHe isn’t living his life in public, Margaret. He’s just living it away from us.”
    Margaret put the apple back and went to the stove. She’d make herself some coffee. If it was earlier in the day, she could have had the new maid get it for her, but the new maid wasn’t living in. Nobody wanted to live in at their house at the moment because of what had happened to Conchita and the fact that it had happened right in their own back courtyard. Conchita. In her childhood, maids were either Irish or black. They had names like Kathleen and Lydia. They spoke English with accents, but they spoke it well.
    Margaret pulled the coffeemaker out of the little roll-front wooden appliance port they had had built into the kitchen counter. “I think you’d care more,” she said. “You found her. Wasn’t it horrible? Doesn’t it matter to you that our own maid was strangled with a nylon cord and her face was all cut up by pieces of glass?”
    â€œOf course it matters to me.”
    â€œYou don’t act like it. You act as if it had nothing to do with us, but it does. Because it was our maid. Because of Henry. Because of a lot of things. I was thinking before about what it was like, growing up in this