The Ghost in the Glass House Read Online Free

mother’s mind to shift. And in the last three years, this was the closest her mother had ever come to admitting that she might share Clare’s homesickness.
    Clare barely dared to move, seized by a gambler’s hope. She knew the odds against her, but the chance to win swept all other thoughts away.
    â€œWe could go home,” Clare ventured. “If you’re tired of hotels.”
    Instantly, her mother’s hand rose from Clare’s shoulder.
    â€œOh, darling,” she said. “New York in the summer? Haven’t the social reformers been trying to pass some kind of law against that?”
    Clare searched her mother’s face, but her features had already settled into a bright mask. Her mouth twisted faintly at her own joke. Her blond hair, waved around her face, glowed almost white, as it always did in sunlight. Her pale blue eyes were perfectly distant.
    She kissed Clare’s forehead and went out into the hall.
    â€œMack,” she called. “Clare has saved our lives.”
    Still at the window, Clare stared down at the garden, warped and bent by the old glass.
    She raised her hand and tapped three times, but no one answered.

Four
    C LARE’S FRIEND B RIDGET ANSWERED the door of the shingled mansion her parents had taken for the summer herself. She was wearing a sleeveless lavender party dress covered with vines picked out in silver sequins, despite the fact that it was eleven o’clock in the morning. The gown hung loose on her, a dead giveaway that she’d rescued another castoff of her mother’s, although Clare knew better than to point this out.
    â€œClare,” Bridget said. “I was afraid you’d been taken by bandits on your way through the wilderness. How did your mother ever find a place that’s not even on the shore?”
    She stepped aside to let Clare pass into a wide entry hall dominated by a round wooden table inlaid with mother-of-pearl in the shape of a compass rose. On the far side of the room, two sets of French doors opened on a screened porch. Beyond the screen the ocean gleamed.
    â€œDo you have any Visitors?” Clare asked, to take revenge for Bridget’s slight to Clare’s mother.
Visitors
was what Bridget’s mother called the spirits, intimations, and presences that had shared the homes Bridget’s family had occupied over the years. Clare’s intense interest in these Visitors was a source of gratification to Bridget’s mother and a point of contention with Bridget, who thought about ghosts very much the same way that most people thought about God: despite the fact that they were probably real, it was unforgivably impolite to talk about them.
    Bridget turned on her heel and headed for the porch. “The house is free,” she said over her shoulder, meaning that her mother’s current Sensitive hadn’t detected any spirits yet this season.
    The porch was furnished with white wicker stuffed with yellow cushions and pillows. A bouquet of sea-garden flowers, also white and yellow, stood on a low table, the foot of its vase filled with wet sand against the gusts of ocean wind.
    Bridget’s brother Teddy was slouched in one of the low-backed chairs. He and Bridget had both inherited the same elements of their parents’ remarkable beauty: their mother’s dark blue eyes, framed by their father’s thick chestnut hair, which spilled over Bridget’s shoulders in waves and hung over Teddy’s brow in lush curls. Bridget complained frequently that Teddy’s eyelashes were longer than hers, and his face was so pretty it sometimes seemed misplaced on a boy’s shoulders. His long legs in their light summer flannels jutted out in front of him like the off-kilter framing beams of a half-finished building.
    He took Clare in with a measuring glance that flickered over her face, dropped to her white cotton dress, and lingered on her bare arms.
    Heat rushed into Clare’s