Starter House A Novel (24 page)

As Lacey reached the corner of Forrester and Forrester Hills, she saw a sheriff’s cruiser coming the other way. So they’d come for Lex and Theo. She was glad Lex had already taken the baby home.

Could Drew walk in Harry’s house? Harry had a picture that looked like him, so most likely he could; it was not as safe a sanctuary as Lex thought. Not a good house for his baby either. As she turned, she glanced in the rearview mirror. The cruiser stopped at Harry’s house. The late sunlight cast reflections of the surrounding houses and trees onto the windows of Lacey’s house, and she could see nothing but a tossing chaos of other windows and other doors, masked and revealed by the rushing leaves.

Chapter Twenty-eight

AS THE NEW GUY,
Eric volunteered for the Saturday shift on call. So far, it had been quiet, but it would pick up by late afternoon and spike around four
A.M.
, after closing time, which estranged husbands considered the perfect time to repossess or vandalize their almost-exes’ cars. He expected calls from the detention center, bail bondsmen, incoherent clients, and counsel for the party of the second part. What he did not expect was Sammie Vandermeijn, with her hair in a new, shorter bob and bright orange bangs, appearing in his office door on her day off to announce, “Oh my God, Eric, do you know what you did, you bought the Halliday house, and now you’re living in it!”

“You know it’s Saturday.”

Obviously, she knew it was Saturday. She was wearing a turquoise tracksuit and no makeup at all. “I’ve been hearing about that place my whole life, and I’ve always wondered if any of the stories are true. And you’re
living
in it. The Halliday house. That is so cool.”

“Sammie,” Eric said forcefully. He had to stop her babbling and get a clear answer out of her. “What are you saying? What’s wrong with my house?”

“It’s haunted. I didn’t recognize the address at first, but it’s the Halliday house for sure. I used to go there Halloween night with my cousins and throw eggs at it, after trick or treat.” Sammie shook her head and laughed at her past self. “The things kids do. Awful things. We never thought about the people who were living there, how hard it must have been to clean up. ’Course, eggs are more expensive these days, so maybe you won’t have it so bad.”

“Sammie, please. Sit down and tell me. Sit.” He gestured at the clients’ chair.

She had written up her discovery in a tidy memo, and she handed it over the desk and waited as he read. “Are you sure this is the same house?” he asked once.

“Sure I’m sure. County tax records don’t lie.”

On the ninth of April in 1972, a high school history teacher named Andrew Halliday had come home, and for reasons never made clear he spent the afternoon murdering his family, beginning by drowning his baby daughter and finishing the job by shooting himself. Whenever he heard one of these stories, Eric wondered why the angry parent didn’t save everybody a lot of trouble and pain by starting with himself. Somehow they never did. The children were Andrew Junior, James, Matthew, and Dorothy. The wife was Dora Rakoczy Halliday.

“Does this have something to do with Harry Rakoczy next door?” he said.

“She was his sister.”

“And Lex Hall?”

Sammie snatched the paper from under his hand. “Didn’t I put that in? I pulled up the title search to find out how Lex Hall got hold of the house. And he inherited it from his parents. Andrew and Dora Halliday. He changed his name from Halliday to Hall, but he’s one of them, all right. He’s the one who got out alive.”

“There was another kid who wasn’t home?”

Sammie seemed disappointed. He sympathized. Dropping a bombshell wasn’t nearly as much fun if you had to stand around afterward and explain the bang. “There were four kids, three boys and a baby girl. Andrew Junior, James, Matthew, Dorothy. Nice normal family, but you know that’s what the neighbors always say.”

Eric didn’t think Lex Hall’s neighbors would say that. More likely they’d line up for the opportunity to say he was an obvious nut, and they’d always known it was only a matter of time before he cracked.

“Then one day,” Sammie said, “Andrew Halliday snapped, drowned the baby, lined the wife and the boys up at the top of the stairs and shot them, one by one.”

“And Lex is . . . ?”

“Andrew Junior. He survived. The Rakoczys adopted him. I tell you what, you are in big trouble, worse than I thought. You can’t have that man as your client. Living in his old house, where all his people died. That’s when they start mailing you dead possums and anonymous human thumbs. We’ll find him a new lawyer, first thing Monday.”

“You can’t tell Lacey about all this.”

Sammie snorted. “She doesn’t know? Yeah, right, and Floyd’s going to double my salary. Any day now he’ll get around to it. I’ll just hold my breath.”

“I don’t think she knows. She’s never said.” But it would be just like Lacey to find out some terrible thing and then keep it from him, believing she had to protect him. What was he going to do about this mess? A house where a whole family had died, and Lacey already nervous and unhappy. He’d have to do what Harry had done: live somewhere else, use the house as a rental, and eventually sell it, after the baby was born. Lacey was in no shape to pack up and move again. Depending on the housing market, which with any luck was hitting bottom right around now, they’d only have to keep it a couple of years to break even. And there’d be taxes, if it wasn’t their primary residence. His mind spun along the numbers. They couldn’t get another mortgage as long as they had this one, and how would they afford rent? They’d manage if the house had tenants, but not if it stood empty for long. Taxes, utilities, water . . .

It was all right for Sammie; she’d known the story all her life, and she wasn’t living there. What did the tragedy of the Halliday family mean to her? She saw the same thing happen on CNN twice a week. Harry Rakoczy had told them people died there, but he’d never hinted at anything like this. His own sister, his niece, and his nephews all murdered; and he lived next door to it and owned it all those years, waiting for what?

Eric’s phone rang, and Sammie answered it: “Moranis Miszlak.” She frowned. “Have you been arrested? I’ll let him know, and he’ll get back to you on Monday.” The phone gabbled at her, and she pulled a face. “Monday. He’ll call you when he gets in. Good-bye.” The phone kept on whining at her, but she hung up. “Speak of the devil. That was Lex Hall. Deputies just repoed his baby.”

“He’s got visitation.”

“Cambrick MacAvoy filed an emergency order. Nasty. I told you. You don’t want to be in court with that woman.” The phone rang again, and she picked it up and said in a neutral, measured tone, “You have reached the offices of Moranis Miszlak. Our office hours are Monday through Thursday eight
A.M.
through five thirty
P.M.
, Friday nine to noon, and Saturday,” an infinitesimal pause as she glanced at the clock, “two to five.” The minute hand clicked to twelve, the hour hand to five. “Please call back during business hours. Thank you.” She hung up on Lex’s protests.

Eric was charmed. “How often do you do that?”

“As often as I want. What are going to tell your wife?”

“Nothing.”

“Right, because it’s so great for a marriage when people keep secrets.”

“I’m not keeping secrets.”

“Sure you are. You’re not going to tell her about the Hallidays, are you? You know, what I’d wonder about is what she’s not telling you.”

“Lacey tells me everything.” Almost everything. She hadn’t told him why she didn’t want to buy baby furniture. She hadn’t told him Dr. Vlk said it was time to start birth classes. When she failed the Praxis teaching certification test the first time she took it, she didn’t tell him until she took it a second time and passed, because she knew how anxious he would be.

Lacey kept secrets, not to protect herself, but to protect him.

“Tells you everything,” Sammie scoffed. “Sure she does. When? You’re always here. Just because you’re on call, you don’t have to be actually
in
the office. That’s why they call it a smartphone. Go home.”

He couldn’t go home. A thousand reasons jumped into his mind. Files he might need to reference, research he might have to do. The house pushed him out; the thought of the house repelled him. Those three little boys, falling down the stairs, dying, dying, dead—and if he could imagine it so clearly, how would Lacey react? He’d never tell her; she could never know. He opened his laptop. “I’ve got work to do.”

She slapped the laptop closed, and he pulled his hands away just in time. “I like Lacey,” she said. “She’s a sweetie. You should bring her round here more often. And now, go home.”

Chapter Twenty-nine

“I’M JUST SAYING,”
Ella Dane said again, “get to the ATM. Cash, baby girl. Cash is a girl’s best friend.” The drama of their flight had taken ten, maybe twenty, years from her life, and she had flicked back to an earlier self, as if her personality were a deck of cards newly shuffled, and instead of the queen of diamonds (spiritual and refined), the topmost card was now the jack of clubs (vigorous and combative). She was the veteran of a dozen sudden flights from homes that had abruptly become unbearable. Never for exactly this reason, but she was no stranger to blood on the floor, the sudden seizure of all that was most precious and abandonment of everything else.

She even insisted on stopping at Little Pigs on Airport Road and eating a pulled-pork sandwich, the first meat she’d touched for years. Consequently, she now called to Lacey from the bathroom, where she and the barbecue disputed for possession of her body. More groans, another flush, and Ella Dane’s voice again, now gray and dim: “They can use credit cards to follow you, baby.”

“Who can?”

“Men.” Another flush. “Cash tells no tales. There’s an ATM in the lobby.”

“We’re not running away from Eric. We’re running away from the house.”

“It’s the same thing. He’ll never believe you. And if he
does
believe you, the worst that happens is you put the money back, no harm, no foul.”

“There might be fees.”

“Cash. Trust me. Go get it.”

Lacey went down to the lobby and withdrew the daily maximum from the joint checking account: five hundred dollars. The machine charged a five-dollar fee. She pressed Cancel and thought about it. Five hundred dollars. She’d never had that much all at once, cash in hand. But this lively, powerful version of Ella Dane, this was the mother who got her enrolled in the best high school in the district when they were technically homeless, by parking the car in the school’s parking lot and refusing to move until Lacey was admitted. This was the mother who paid the orthodontist even when the power was cut off, because they’d only have to take cold showers for a couple of weeks, but straight teeth were forever. This was not the mother who read auras and interpreted dreams. If Ella Dane said she needed cash, cash was what she needed. She withdrew the five hundred.

In the back of her wallet, behind the grocery-store membership cards, was the emergency Visa, the card she and Eric never used, except for dinner once a year on their anniversary to keep it active. She pulled it out and took a cash advance of fifteen hundred dollars, the maximum.

Two thousand dollars made an alarmingly thin chunk, not quite an inch in twenties. And the Skyview Convention Center charged a hundred fifty a night, once all the taxes were added in. This money wouldn’t last them two weeks.

Ella Dane would know what to do. Lacey went back to the room, where her mother had logged on to answer her subscribers’ questions about their dogs. “Here’s one,” Ella Dane said. “Her dog keeps looking at her in a meaningful way. She thinks he has a message from her last husband, who has passed on.”

“Dead?”

Ella Dane read on. “Moved to Tucson. The dog keeps weeping.”

“So what’ll you tell her?”

“The usual. Check with the vet. Change his diet to the vegan food. Put her right hand on the dog’s head while he’s sleeping, and try to tune herself to his energies. . . .” So the aura-reading Ella Dane was still present. Lacey wished the woman would choose one persona and stick to it, instead of shifting this way.