The Sound of Glass by Karen White
For my parents
acknowledgments
Thank you to the lovely people of Beaufort, South Carolina, for your kindness and warm hospitality, especially the staff at the Rhett House Inn and native Beaufortonian Nancy Rhett. A huge thanks and hugs to friend and fellow author Dee Phelps for the private tours and insider information on your beautiful hometown. This book couldn’t have happened without you!
A special thanks to airline pilot Steve Weber for all the technical information about planes, flight paths, and basically anything I needed to know, and to Tracy Ferro, MSN, RN, PCCN, for your incredible help regarding all things health related in this story.
Thank you to Meghan White and Alicia Kelly, my “research buddies,” who accompanied me on my trips to Beaufort and waited patiently as I asked endless questions of tour guides and read every inscription on every gravestone.
Last but not least, thanks to BFFs and authors Susan Crandall and Wendy Wax, whose insights help shape and perfect each book I write. Thanks for being there since the beginning and through the ups and downs of this crazy writing thing we do.
One need not be a chamber to be haunted,
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
—EMILY DICKINSON
prologue
BEAUFORT, SOUTH CAROLINA
JULY 1955
An unholy tremor rippling through the sticky night air alerted Edith Heyward that something wasn’t right. Like a shadow creeping past a doorway in an empty house, or the turn of the latch on a locked door, the movement outside Edith’s opened attic window raised the gooseflesh along her spine. Her breath sat in her mouth, suspended with anticipation as icy pinpricks marched down her limbs.
Her gaze moved from her paintbrush and the tiny drop of red paint she’d drizzled onto the chest of the doll’s starched white cotton nightgown, to the sea-glass wind chime she’d made and hung just outside the window. The stagnant air of a South Carolina summer had stifled any movement for months, yet now the chimes seemed to shiver on an invisible breeze, the frosty blue and green glass twitching like a hanged man from a noose.
She jerked her gaze to the locked door, wondering whether her husband had returned. He didn’t like locked doors. The bruises on her arms, carefully placed and easily hidden under long sleeves, seemed to press against her skin in memory. Edith dropped her paintbrush, barely aware of the splatter of red paint on the dollhouse-size room she’d been re-creating, eager to unlatch the door and make it down to the kitchen and her mending basket before Calhoun had cause to wonder where she was.
She’d barely slid from her stool when the sky exploded with fire, illuminating the river and the marshes beneath it, obliterating the stars, and shooting blurry light through the milky glass of the wind chime. The stones swayed with the shocked air, singing sweetly despite the destruction in the sky behind them. Then a rain of fire descended like fireworks, myriad balls of light extinguished into hiccups of steam as soon as they collided with water.
Smaller explosions reverberated across the river, where the migrant workers’ cottages clustered near the shore like birds, their roofs and dry postage-stamp lawns easy fodder for the hungry flames that fell from the heavens. A fire siren whirred as Edith leaned out the window as far as she could, listening to people shouting and screaming, and smelling something indiscernible. Something that smelled like the tang of wood smoke mixed with the acrid odor of burning fuel. She recalled the hum of an airplane from when she’d been working on the doll, right before she’d thought the earth had shifted, and imagined she knew what was now falling from the sky.
A thud came from above her head, followed swiftly by the sound of something heavy sliding down the roof before hitting the gutter. Then the sound stopped and she pictured whatever it was falling into the back garden.
Edith ran from the room, ignoring the shoe-size bruises on her hips that made it hard to walk, sliding down half the flight of stairs to the second story, where her three-year-old son, C.J., lay in his bed, blissfully unaware of the sky falling down around them. She scooped him into her arms, along with the baby blanket he’d worn thin but wouldn’t give up, feeling his warm, sweaty skin against her own. Ignoring his whimpers, she moved as quickly as she could with the boy in her arms down to the foyer.