Read Online The Ghost in the Glass House by Carey Wallace - Free Book Online

she’d never felt her father’s presence as she walked down another lonely hall or tried to will herself to sleep on another speeding train. But death was where she would find him again, a secret world that belonged only to the two of them. It had become a retreat for her: an escape and a shelter like the glass house, where she and her father could watch the world go by with all the sound cut off.
    So to speak with someone from the other side now carried the threat of truth. It reminded her that death was not her private retreat, but everyone’s common fate, vast and unknown, like the moment she’d been left in the cave alone, multiplied forever.
    Several days had passed before her curiosity about Jack had overcome her reluctance to face this. On the way down the hill, she’d steeled herself against fear, and braced for a prank.
    But the thought that she might return to find Jack gone had never crossed her mind.
    She folded her arms against a wave of disappointment. Wind in the leaves above made the shadows on the furniture ripple like shallows at the water’s edge. Jack hadn’t terrified her when he was there, but now that he was gone, the glass house seemed truly haunted by the other world where he belonged.
    She went over to the divan and sat down.
    Before her father’s death, on some Sunday mornings, they had crossed the park their house stood on to visit the small stone church on the other side. Among the garble of ideas Clare collected there, she had gleaned that God knew everything. This made her cautious. Life, as far as she could tell, was an elaborate dance that turned on knowing when to tell the truth and when to keep it secret. In her experience, the truth could only be tolerated sparingly. If people knew what she thought of them, or if she actually did whatever she wanted, she and her mother would never be invited anywhere again. So if God knew all these things, could he be trusted to keep them secret? More important, what must he think? Better, she thought, to give him wide berth, like a man at a party who has had too much to drink and is temporarily capable of saying anything.
    But now, when she wanted an answer that nobody else knew, God’s omniscience suddenly seemed useful. And from what she remembered, God also held sway in the other world that Jack belonged to.
    She bowed her head and tried to remember whether or not to close her eyes. After some hesitation, she left them open.
    Dear God
, she began.
    A shower of shreds of turquoise and white paper rained down on her upturned hands.
    Clare’s head snapped up.
    Jack laughed.
    Clare’s hands flew from her lap. The scraps scattered on the carpet. An instant later, she was on her feet, her fists clenched.
    â€œYou look just like an Apache brave!” Jack crowed, his voice delighted.
    His admiration seemed genuine, but Clare didn’t take it as a compliment. She shook off her fighting posture and brought her heels together in a more ladylike stance.
    â€œNo one else ever jumped up to fight like that,” Jack said. “Usually they’re scared out of their wits.”
    â€œDo you drop paper on everyone?” Clare demanded.
    â€œNo,” Jack said, with a note of pride. “They’re the endpapers from a romance of the sea. It took me days to tear them up.”
    His voice came from overhead, as if he were inside the glass chandelier that hung from the central peak of the roof.
    Clare’s curiosity edged her fury aside. “Can you fly?” she asked the chandelier.
    â€œNope,” Jack said cheerfully. The chandelier began to sway. Its crystal drops chimed and clinked. “But it doesn’t hurt when I fall, so I can climb just about anything.”
    Clare scanned the panes of the glass ceiling that sloped over the chandelier. There was nothing a child could have gotten purchase on to reach the fixture. “How did you get up there?” she asked.
    â€œThe