Read The Sound of Glass for Free Online Page B

to enjoy having brothers around, especially after Cal left.” He paused, his thoughts turned inward. “I do know that she loved Gibbes very much. Enough to send him away.”
    I could see that Mr. Williams didn’t understand what she’d meant any more than I did, so I didn’t press. “But why would Gibbes blame Edith? What could she have done to make Cal leave?”
    Mr. Williams shrugged. “She never confided in me.” Patting my arm, he said, “And I guess now we’ll never know.”
    We were headed back toward the staircase when I paused in front of a closed door that we hadn’t gone through yet. “What’s in here?”
    Mr. Williams tried the knob. “I’m not really sure, to be honest. I imagine it’s the stairs to the attic, since we haven’t run across those yet. Don’t know why the key’s missing, though. All the other doors have their keys in the locks, and I know I wasn’t given any extras. I know a good locksmith and I’ll send him over. I’m sure it’s only old furniture and clothes up there, but you never know.” He winked, as if a surprise in the attic might make up for the rest of the house.
    I put my hand on his arm. “It’s fine, you know. The house. I think . . .” I stopped myself from telling him that I felt the house had been waiting for me, that maybe we had been waiting for each other, each needing our dust and cobwebs cleaned out. “I think I’ll enjoy setting it all to rights.”
    He smiled, looking relieved. With one last look at the locked door, we made our way down the stairs, Mr. Williams holding my elbow whether I needed it or not.
    It was at least twenty degrees cooler downstairs with the air-conditioning units in the dining room and front parlor blowing out air that, while not exactly cold, was better than the heat from upstairs.
    “Do you garden, Merritt?”
    I shook my head. “No. Not that I wouldn’t want to learn, but I’ve never had the opportunity. Cal and I only had a small yard, and he hated to spend any time working in it, so it was pretty sparse.”
    The old lawyer looked at me oddly. “Follow me through the kitchen. Edith really loved her garden, although as you can see, it became too much for her in the end.”
    We walked through a kitchen with appliances that were decidedly midcentury but, as Mr. Williams explained, were all in fine working order—including the refrigerator and stove, which looked like they’d been ripped out of a scene from the fifties TV show
Leave It to Beaver
.
    He opened the back door and waited. I smelled the garden before I saw it, a sweet, heady fragrance of flowers I was not familiarwith, mixed with a rich green aroma not unlike the pluff mud. There was a narrow porch and then a wide flight of tabby steps, and I stood on the top one, staring at the magical place in front of me. Four wind chimes dangled from the porch, and I found their presence somehow unnerving, their soft sound like a constant whispering where you couldn’t understand the words.
    “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a narrow door at the end of the porch.
    “The entrance to the basement. Nothing you need to see. Mostly cobwebs, I expect. Still has the dirt floors and timber rafters. Slave quarters back in the day, I suspect. Not much use for it now except for a wine cellar, most likely.” He winked.
    I turned my attention back to the garden. A winding brick walkway meandered its way through patches of brightly colored shrubs and flowers, skirting the high wall I’d seen from the front yard. It was covered with a climbing vine that drew me to it with its scent. I stood before it and couldn’t help but smile.
    “That’s Confederate jasmine,” Mr. Williams offered. “Has a short growing season, but every garden has at least some of it.”
    “It’s gorgeous,” I said, taking in a deep breath.
    “Cal put in this bench for Miss Edith, so she could sit and enjoy her garden. He made it just for her.”
    Behind me, against the side garden wall,