Starter House A Novel (32 page)

“I need to know, because it keeps on happening.”

“Been keeping on happening for years. My Tyler, he wasn’t the first.”

“Who was the first, then? How did it start?”

Ev worked his mouth as if he were chewing a small but tough tangerine. He knew the name; Lacey watched him decide. Every impulse pushed her to speak again, to demand the answer. She bit her lip to keep the words down. Ev grunted and lowered the recliner’s footrest. “You think you got away, coming here,” he said. “You think you got that baby safe. You ain’t got away and that baby ain’t safe.”

Lacey shook her head. This she could not believe. The baby kicked, and she clutched the amethyst pendant and pressed it hard against her heart. “There has to be something I can do. There’s always something.”

“My Bethie, she lost a baby for every one that lived. Some blood thing went wrong and they failed. She felt them go, and it hurt her, but you got to take what you got coming. Not every baby can live. You got to let it go. Get away from that house before you start the next one.”

“I can’t accept that.” The baby was viable, Dr. Vlk said. She’d brought him so close, come so far, left Eric to bring the child to a safe place, and now what—
let it go,
like a flawed recipe, toss out the first pancake of the batch and see if the second was better? “I can’t do that,” she said. She wanted to shout, but her voice had narrowed to a thread.

Ev shrugged. “That’s all I got for you,” he said.

So he wasn’t going to tell her the name of the first child to die in the house. It mattered, she knew; a teacher’s first step, when a child had trouble in the classroom, was to find out what had gone wrong at home. Something had gone wrong for Drew. She needed the name, his family’s name, or she would never find him.

There was the edge of an idea. Home, school . . . “I need to go online,” Lacey said.

Ev gestured at the desk. “You can use my computer. Knock yourself out. Wi-Fi’s better here than in the rooms.” He shuffled into the front office to start coffee and lay out yesterday’s donuts, the free continental breakfast. He left the door open, and a sea wind blew through the room and through Lacey, clearing out the cobwebby hesitation of the last two months. She was a teacher. She knew how to find things out. It took her all of fifteen seconds: a website called myoldyearbook.com, whose users uploaded yearbooks—their own, their parents’, books they found at yard sales and junk shops—searchable by school and year.

No living baby since 1972
. Lacey searched for
Burgoyne Elementary 1972
and six yearbooks came up, one of them the Burgoyne in Greeneburg. She scanned the young faces, pausing at every blond head, looking for Matthew, James, or Drew.

Second grade: Matthew Halliday. The colors were old, changed with time, but she thought Matthew’s eyes were hazel rather than blue. She moved on to the third-grade pages and hovered over another face. James Halliday. Closer, but Drew was thinner than this. Maybe James Halliday’s smile made his cheeks so round. She’d never seen Drew smile like this. Fourth grade, the nine- and ten-year-olds.

Andrew Halliday Junior.

Drew. The name fit, and she had known from her first sight of him that he was small for his age. Among the other fourth graders, he had a young, soft look. He sat very straight against the photographer’s blue background, giving a dutiful smile, anxious around the eyes, a careful, conscientious child, smoothly combed. This one turned his homework in on time and volunteered to put the art supplies away.

She cut and pasted the Halliday pictures, e-mailed them to herself, and logged off. The computer screen disappeared in a fiery haze, and she scrubbed at her eyes with a napkin. That sweet, careful child. What happened to him?

“Coffee?” Ev Craddock said. “I got a new pot on. It’s the good stuff.”

Lacey pulled up the picture of Andrew Halliday Junior. “Is this him?”

“Holy Christ.” Ev collapsed on the sofa beside Lacey. “Can’t be. That’s any kid. Like a regular kid you’d see on the beach.”

“Please, tell me what happened. I really need to know.”

Ella Dane wandered into the office. “I feel a sense of peace,” she announced, “like something good just happened. Like Bibbits is released from earth. Who’s that?”

“Please,”
Lacey said again.

“I did the same as you,” Ev said. “Got in the car and drove away. Me and the older kids, Joey and MacKenzie. The cops took Bethie and I ran for it.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Camping at Yosemite. Every time I counted, there were three kids in the tent and one of them wasn’t mine.”

“He must have been there before,” Lacey said. She clung to the idea of safety, Spinet Cove as a haven, Drew on the beach a nightmare brought on by the screaming gulls. Her torn hands? Injured by yesterday’s burial. “I bet his family went camping. If they went to Yosemite when he was alive, then he could be there with you, right?”

“He talked to me. He was mad at Bethie, said she wouldn’t play with him anymore. So I took Joey and MacKenzie to Vegas, got a job working for a landscaping company, put the kids in school. Bethie was on trial, and I went back one time to testify. I thought he, Drew, I thought he’d stay with her, but he followed me back to Vegas. He started riding in my truck. Got mad every time I picked the kids up from school. MacKenzie was six.”

“Did you start doing things without knowing?”

“I’m allergic to peanuts. He wanted a banana split. I watched him eat it. Woke up in the hospital with a tube in my throat, turned out I’d eaten the thing myself, all those peanuts on top. It was just like Bethie said. I watched him eat it, but it was me.”

“Me too,” Lacey said, rubbing her wrist where Ella Dane had seized it during the game of Chutes and Ladders, feeling again that mingling of rejection and recognition when Drew’s hand became her own.

“I sent the kids to Bethie’s parents in Saskatchewan, and I stayed in Vegas with Drew till he left me, then I came here. Started a landscaping business, bought this place when I retired. He”—he tapped Andrew Halliday’s face on the computer screen—“
this
kid was never here. Not with me. You seen him here?”

“Maybe.”

She wanted to deny it. It was the tide—they’d buried Bibbits below the tide line, and the waves had exhumed him and left him for the gulls. The tide, not Drew.

“You think you got away, running away from the house? You ain’t got away till he lets you go. Ten years he stayed with me in Vegas till he faded. Dimmed out, like when you lose a radio signal, driving. There were old people in the house those years, no kids, he wasn’t interested in them, but when they died and a young family moved in, must have been early nineties, he got onto them and forgot about me.” The telephone rang, and he went into his office.

Ella Dane sat next to Lacey and hugged her. “Baby, I’m so sorry,” she said.

“There’s got to be something I can do,” Lacey said. But she had already done what she could do, in getting out of the house. It had cost her everything, and it wasn’t enough. If Drew had reached the Craddocks in Nevada, she had nowhere to run. Ella Dane’s crystals and candles had done nothing to protect her—or maybe they had; she was still pregnant, and she’d carried the baby all the way to viability, which was more than Greeley Honeywick had done. “Or is there something you can do?” she said.

“There might be rituals,” Ella Dane said. “I’ve never done anything like that, but I can find out. I talked to Jack McMure when I went to Columbia for the pictures. . . . We’d have to go back to the house. You need to know who he was, and how he died, and why he can’t rest. You need to know everything about him. And you have to be completely sure you’ve got the name right, that’s what Jack says, otherwise it makes them mad. We’ll have to go back to Greeneburg. Jack told me you have to face him where he’s strongest. Can you do that?”

“I’ll have to,” Lacey said.

Going back to the house meant going back to Eric; a ritual in the house meant Eric would know everything. Oh, how he’d hate it; there was no coming back from that. It was the end of their marriage. The child moved under her skin. Someday he would be fourteen years old, sulky and angry, resenting her for everything she had done (things she hadn’t even done yet), as cruel to her as she had been to Ella Dane. He would never be grateful. He would hate her for the divorce, as she had hated her mother for the loss of Grandpa Merritt.
I did this to save your life.
Sometime in those years, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, he would leave her to live with Eric, happy to be free of his crazy mother. Her eyes were hazy with tears, and Drew’s nearness prickled all over her skin; he was thinking of her, paying attention, reaching out. There was no time.

Chapter Thirty-nine

WHAT HE WOULD SAY TO LACEY:
he planned it all the way down, four hours alone in the car, not even listening to the radio. He thought through his words and said them out loud, sometimes gesturing with his right hand. What he would say to Lacey—he would speak reasonably, which was the one thing none of his clients did, however often they were deposed; they
just wanted to tell her
or
needed to make her understand
; they never meant to hurt anybody, they
only wanted to talk
.

He only wanted to talk to her. He listed his points of argument:

First, that the life of a single mother was hard, hard on the mother and harder on the child, and she of all people knew that.

Second, that she needed him; although yes, she had supported him through law school, he had dragged her through her education degree, and she would never have passed her certification tests without his help.

Third, that there was nothing wrong with their house, except the ceiling in Ella Dane’s room, and he would ask Dr. Vlk to recommend a psychiatrist.

Fourth, that everybody knew there was no such thing as a haunted house, especially if it had vinyl siding.

Fifth, did she think he had time for this?

Strike that.

Fifth, that a baby needed a father.

Sixth, that Lacey was barely competent to survive on her own, let alone take care of a baby, and her mother was even worse, and that if Eric went to court for custody, he’d have no trouble finding witnesses as to the character of the Kendall women.

Seventh, that he didn’t want to spend another night alone, because he couldn’t sleep. The house whispered.

Eighth, that he loved her.

Ninth, please come home.

A list of ten would be cleaner, but that was all he had. There were flaws in the progressive logic of his thoughts, but it would have to do. And here was Spinet Cove. What a dump. How could people live like this? La Hacienda: red tile roofs and black iron verandas, streaks of rust staining the fake-adobe walls. Whom did they think they were kidding? And why had Lacey come here?

Ella Dane had told him they were in 117, at the end of the row. Now he was here, he forgot his arguments, the structure, the clear reason walking from point to point. If he could remember, she would have to come home, because not even Lacey could disprove his logic, but it was all gone. There she was, in a red sundress, standing in the door of her room and looking out to the beach, where the gulls whirled. He ran across the parking lot before he had time to talk himself into turning around and driving back home.

“Lacey,” he called.

She looked at him without surprise. “Okay,” she said.

She turned and walked back into the room, leaving the door open, so he followed her in. “I need to talk to you,” he said. “Can you please listen?”

“Okay,” she said again, in a dull, uninterested tone, as if he had asked her if she wanted a boiled egg. “I’m almost ready.”

There was a strange smell in the room, worse than the damp carpet and dirty seashell odors of beach hotels. Maybe some kind of sewer leak. He wouldn’t be surprised, in this dump. Lacey’s suitcase was on the bed, packed—if you could call it packing; she had just flung everything in and mashed it down—and ready to go. He’d caught up with her just in time. Where would she go? Probably she herself had no idea. “There’s nothing wrong with our house,” he said, remembering one of his arguments.

“If you say so,” she said. “It doesn’t matter now, anyway.”

He remembered the eighth and ninth points of his argument. “I love you,” he said. He took her hand. “Please come home.”

“Okay,” she said, in the boiled-egg voice. She looked at his hand, and he let go.

“What?” he said.

“I said okay. I’ll come home. I’m getting ready, I’m packed. I just need a bath.”

He had to agree: she really did need a bath. That strange smell in the room hung about her hair and her skin. He caught a wave of it whenever she moved. “I can ask Ella Dane to leave if you don’t want her around,” he offered, as if she had refused and he needed to bargain with her.

“No, I want her.”

Feeling that something was required of him, he took her hand again. It lay in his as cold and wet as a pork chop, and he shivered, rubbing her palm to bring some life into her touch. “I’m glad you’re coming home,” he said. “I love you.”