Glass House (27 page)

Megan asked a few questions that were more
cursory than meaningful. Then she and Finn chatted with Claire
Alexander in that courteous, lingering kind of way that can run on
too long. The dying end of the conversation became as awkward as
the start, full of hesitations and pauses and emptiness.

“We’ve taken too much of your time,” Megan
said abruptly. “Far too much, so we should be going.” She stood,
reached out, and was pleased when Claire rose and shook her hand in
return.

“Thank you,” Megan told her. “I want you to
know we’re very sorry about Lora.”

They were almost out the door when Claire
stopped them, asked them to wait a moment, and disappeared back
into the house. They stood, uncomfortable and uncertain, until she
returned. A large manila envelope was in one hand, and she passed
it to Megan.

“I think maybe it makes sense for you to
take this.”

Megan lifted the envelope’s metal closing
tabs, opened the flap, and peered inside. “What is it?” she asked.
She pulled a few documents out and started to flip through
them.

“I don’t know, actually,” Claire said. “I
found them in Lora’s room yesterday. I was going through some of
her things. Just trying to … well, trying to get her around me
again, I guess. And I came across those. They’re the only things I
found that I didn’t recognize.”

Megan went back to the first document and
unfolded it. It was a map, not quite four feet square. Rivers and
hills, roads, governmental boundaries – they were all marked
out in bright, precise lines, like a plotter printer would produce.
She studied it.

“What’s this language?” She tapped a finger
on words in a key at the bottom. “It looks like Dutch.” Megan
looked up and Claire shrugged.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “I don’t know
what these are, and I don’t know why Lora would have them. Which
tells me their Waldoch’s somehow. Something from him. And since I
know no one probably will ever be able to tie him to Lora’s death
anymore, I think you should have them, for whatever you need to
do.”

Megan passed the map to Finn and turned to a
photo in the small collection of documents underneath it. The
picture was of six diamonds, photographed closely enough that Megan
could pick out flaws in two of the larger stones. They all were cut
and polished and shining brightly against a snow white, backlit
screen or tabletop, and they all were pink.

“It isn’t Dutch,” Finn said from behind her.
Megan turned to him. “It’s Afrikaans.”

He took the picture as Megan handed it to
him, examining it while Megan repeated her thanks to Claire. They
left and climbed into the Chrysler, not a glance between them, and
Megan found the road that pointed them toward Samuel Chilcott’s
town, an hour or more back to the east.

As she was driving, what kept coming to her
didn’t involve the initial reason for the trip. It wasn’t Waldoch.
It wasn’t even Lora Alexander or the necklace and map and
photo.

It was the image of Claire, alone, talking
to these two strangers about a loss that must have been impossible
to bear. Megan couldn’t shake that picture – the solitary
woman in the meticulously kept house, who looked old when people
arrived but younger at their contact.

“Why does she stay?” Megan asked.

Finn looked over at her. “In the house, you
mean?” He’d been studying the map, open on his lap. The photo and
the other documents were in his hand.

“Yeah. Her daughter and husband are gone.
Big house, full of nothing but things. No people left but her.
Gotta be lots of memories, some of them not so great. So why’s she
sticking around?”

“Because of exactly what you just said.
Everyone’s gone but her, so the house is all she has. The only
thing left for her is the place where those people used to be.”

“Not too good a reason for a decision like
that.”

“It’s more than not too good a reason,” Finn
replied. “Locking yourself up the way she has is a little bit
off.”

And that brought Megan – thinking about
Claire Alexander alone in her home and Finn commenting on it the
way he had – to her own life. She wasn’t exactly sure how the
discussion turned like that, but she found herself telling Finn
about Ben’s death and a lost year that followed. It occurred to her
somewhere in the middle of the story that she was telling this to a
man she once put in prison. And more than a few things were wrong
with that in the grand scheme of the world, she supposed, but it
didn’t stop her. She started, told him, and then finished at the
point where she came back to the house, parked the Chrysler in the
garage, and started working again a few days later.

There was silence at the end. The digestive
kind that means the person hearing what’s said is having to sort a
couple things out.

“You live in your dead husband’s house?”
Finn finally asked. He folded the map and tucked it back into the
envelope that Claire had given them on their way out.

“Yes.”

“And it used to be his dead
grandmother’s?”

“Yes,” Megan repeated. Then she added a nod,
for no other reason than the fact that she hadn’t liked the sound
of the spoken admission very much.

Another slice of silence.

“With his mom dead in the middle of that
somewhere?”

Megan only offered the nod this time.

“That’s a little messed up, isn’t it?” he
said.

Megan thought of her house. With its old
feel and old wood and old smell, it wasn’t unlike Claire’s enough
to make her comfortable at all in the conversation. There was quiet
in it, like Claire’s. Lost purposes, also like Claire’s. Megan
thought about keeping an eye on the police cruiser down the street,
just to pass the time. And of the walnut tree planted by Ben’s
father, with that sudden desire she’d had to have it gone.

Most of all, though, she thought about Ben,
and she did manage to smile a little at that.

“I suppose it is messed up, in a way. But
it’s what I needed to do at that time.” She glanced at Finn. “Isn’t
that how you’re supposed to decide things?”

His gaze drifted up from the papers he still
held, then out at the passing countryside. “Doing what I figured
was right for a particular time was how I ended up in jail.”

That shut it down. No more questions. No
more life examinations on the highway. No anything. They didn’t
talk again until they reached Chilcott’s house.

At
the Home of Samuel Chilcott

There was a water tower, pale blue, and a
grain elevator, dirty white, with railroad tracks running under it.
A John Deere dealership, with green-painted and yellow-highlighted
tractors parked out front in a left-to-right ascending line of
height, lawn mowers to harvesters. A coffee shop and a drive-in,
which somehow managed to be different businesses in a town of
around 300 people. At this time of year, there were more faces in
the coffee shop’s windows than in the drive-in’s. It wasn’t summer
yet, and coffee was still selling faster than ice cream.

The main road was a county highway that
paralleled the train tracks, spitting off little paved streets to
the north, with no stoplight or even a sign to mark them. In turn,
the side streets made a broken checkerboard of a town, with some of
them meeting at intersections and cutting out squares, some ending
without warning, and a couple others running straight into the
countryside, where their blacktop surfaces gave way to dirt and
gravel.

Megan saw houses like the ones first graders
draw, all rigid in structure and planning but slightly crooked in
execution. A box for the building, a triangle for the roof, and a
rectangle door with a tiny circle knob. Two windows above the door,
both of them marked with +-shaped crosshatches, like the eyes of a
dead cartoon face. Brown lawns and an occasional tire swing on a
more occasional tree. American cars in the driveways, with no
exceptions.

They passed a VFW and a Legion Hall. A
baseball field behind the Legion, with sunken, dirt base paths, an
outfield of dead dandelions, and unprotected benches at the sides
for dugouts. A grocery store that would carry an inventory of five
of every basic imaginable. Soup and bread and milk. Cereal, coffee,
and crackers. Soap and shampoo, 409 and Mr. Clean. Five cans, five
loaves, five jugs, what have you, which the apron-wearing grocer,
or perhaps his comely daughter, would ring up on a register that
still had punch keys and a
ka-chinging
ENTER button for the
butt of the grocer’s or daughter’s hand.

It was probably the single most Midwestern
town Megan ever had seen, no bigger than a square mile, and she
still had to stop and ask directions to find Chilcott’s house. The
grocer didn’t recognize the name, or he said he didn’t, but he
offered finger-pointing and hand-waving directions when she showed
him an address that Finn came up with. Those directions were spiced
with markers – the new brick schoolhouse, the corner where the
college boys tried to start that pizza delivery place, the Legion
Hall with the ball field out back – but they could have been
simplified to,
take the road out front and drive it till it
tracks the stream, then keep going
.

Which they did.

With the effort at finding Chilcott, Megan
didn’t think to ask Finn about the logistics of actually talking to
the man until they were heading up the walkway. But she asked him
then.

Finn took hold of her elbow, stopping her
next to a paint-peeled tricycle that once would have had all its
wheels but now was reduced to only the big one in front. “You
shouldn’t talk to him at all,” he said, and Megan wasn’t sure if
the sound in his voice was insistence or a little bit of fear. “I’m
the one talking here.”

Finn’s earlier description of Chilcott and
his attitude toward women hadn’t been lost on Megan, and she didn’t
argue the point. Finn knocked at the door, and they waited.

He knocked again when no one answered, and
he leaned to peer through a window that was filmed with prairie
dust. “Jesus, what a mess,” he muttered. He pulled at a shirt cuff
and wiped a spot clean. “The more things change….” He sighed, and
he knocked harder.

They waited longer. Megan opened her mouth
to suggest leaving after a few more seconds of silence, but Finn
raised a hand. “He’s in there.” He knocked,
pounded
, on the
door, making it rattle in its frame.

“Chilcott!” he shouted. “Finn Garber! Get
off your ass and get to the door!”

Megan thought back to the conversation with
Finn, outside the law school.
More than acquaintances
, he’d
agreed when she asked how well he knew Chilcott.
Less than
friends
. Nonchalantly staring at her shoes, studying the
sidewalk and the broken tricycle, watching the sky roll some
clouds, seeing a breeze move the tops of a few trees she could see,
Megan had an idea that the two men might know each other better
than Finn first suggested.

She heard Sam Chilcott before she saw him.
Feet hit the floor and shuffled slowly somewhere inside. A soft
groan came, and the door cracked open, barely at first and then in
a rush, as if it were stuck but suddenly gave way.

At the sight of Chilcott, Megan couldn’t
tell if he’d been sleeping or if he just always looked blind and
worked over. His eyes, big and bleary, were half-closed and damp at
the corners, his mouth, big and bleary in the same way, frowned
skeptically or antagonistically or both. The crescent moon of hair
that still encircled the back of his head was at full attention on
the right and swept forward as a pointing finger on the left. Like
the eyes and the mouth, the hair was big where it existed. It was
long, cut for a comb-over that wasn’t performed, and down his neck
and under his ears it blended into a ratty beard that he was
scratching.

Chilcott was shoeless, with socks that were
gray and punched through with holes at the toes. He wore faded
jeans, shredded at the cuffs, and a tee shirt, red washed out to
pink and stained under the arms. In silkscreened letters that were
cracked with age, the shirt read, “Just Like Judas,” and it
stretched over a frame that, like the man’s other features, was
big – height, width, shoulders, everything.

Chilcott was frightening because of that
size. Everything about him was a touch uncontrolled and unruly, yet
Megan could also imagine that when caught at the right time, Samuel
Chilcott might have days when he was the life of a party somewhere.
He seemed the kind of half-lunatic that some people would find
entertaining.

“Garber?” he said. He was groggy. He wiped
the back of a hand across his eyes, a smear of moisture dragging
over his cheek. “Good Christ.”

Chilcott’s voice was a contrast to his
build. It rattled with a needed throat clearing, but it was
surprisingly soft and tinged with a lolling, northeastern accent
that was thick and high enough to sound like stretched rubber
bands.

Chilcott’s gaze went from Finn to Megan. He
looked her up and down, scratching at his chest and staring at
hers. “Who’re you?”

Finn cut any answer off. “I’m a lawyer now,
Sam.” Megan’s head turned at the tone, which showed familiarity,
and at the bald lie, which the familiarity smoothed over.

“Bullshit,” Chilcott said to him. “Fucking
bullshit.” Those exact words were in Megan’s mind at the same time,
but Chilcott was smiling and she wasn’t.

“It’s true,” Finn said. “Megan Davis.” He
held a hand toward Megan. “Colleague of mine. We’re trying to track
down some info, and I thought you might be able to help.”

For a moment Megan wanted to reach over and
throttle Finn. She wanted to tell him he didn’t dare characterize
this the way he had. But that was the same moment when Chilcott
plainly was trying to figure out if Finn actually could be a
lawyer, and it didn’t last long. Megan saw Chilcott ponder it, give
up, chuckle, and open the door wide.