Starter House A Novel (25 page)

Lacey felt, in her right hand, the warm hard knob of Bibbits’s head, thrusting in for attention. He was panting hard, and his front paws quivered. She pulled him into her lap, and he sighed and laid his chin on her thigh. She rubbed his velvet ears and tried not to think about the house. The golden floors, the porthole window, the fifty-year-old maple; she was six years old again, anchorless, completely in her mother’s hands.

Which mother? The otherworldly or the worldly-wise?

Ella Dane gestured to the table in the suite’s alcove, where Lacey’s laptop was waiting for her. “Pull up that stuff you were going to show me.”

Lacey carried Bibbits over to the chair, sat with him on her lap, and logged on. As she pulled up her archived pages, Ella Dane read over her shoulder and eventually said, “Beth Craddock. Why was she convicted so fast?”

“Somebody broke into her house and killed her baby when she was sleeping? Who’d believe that?”

“Well, sure, but look.” Ella Dane pointed out the third paragraph in the newspaper story. “They were out forty-five minutes. I was on a jury once.”

“You were?” When had Ella Dane lived the kind of life that would land her on a jury? A tax-paying, fully documented life, registered to vote, with a stable address?

“Sins of my youth. It was a drunk driver. We all knew he was guilty, but it took more than an hour just to take the vote. People wanted to wait for lunch. And nobody wants to believe a parent can hurt a kid.”

“It happens all the time.”

“People don’t want to believe it. Trust me on this. People who
should
know, they don’t want to know. This Craddock jury didn’t even take time to get friendly. Forty-five minutes? That’s one unanimous vote. How could they be so sure?”

“Maybe the father knows.” Lacey pursued the name Craddock down a couple of blind alleys. “His name’s Everett,” she said, and there he was, in Spinet Cove, just north of Charleston, owner of a bed-and-breakfast called La Hacienda. The website showed a Southwest-style cluster of pink adobe huts, palmettos in the parking lot, swimming pool, beach access, local golf, and a dark man with wings of gray hair at his temples, the older self of the smiling young husband in the Craddock family’s Christmas portrait, taken four months before Tyler’s death.

Lacey clicked Contact Us, and wrote,
I live at 571 Forrester Lane in Greeneburg, and there are things I need to know about the house. If you are the Everett Craddock who lived there, please call me.
She added her cell-phone number and hesitated, with her hands floating over the keyboard. “What if it’s not him?”

Ella Dane reached over her shoulder to hit Send. “Then he won’t answer. He might not, even if it
is
him.”

Someone knocked on the hotel room door. Lacey laid Bibbits on the bed and opened it, and there was Eric, with his hand raised to knock. They fell back from each other, as if repelled by a magnetic force. “Wha-a-a-t . . . ?” she stammered. “Why?” She hadn’t thought about him since taking the money; she hadn’t thought he might wonder where she was or try to find her.

“Why?” He stepped into the room and pulled the door shut behind him. “Lacey, my God, what happened? You couldn’t have called?”

“There wasn’t time.”

“Blood all over the floor; you can’t imagine what I thought! I’ve been calling everyone. Dr. Vlk. The hospital. Everyone. I thought you were dead. You couldn’t have even texted me?”

He didn’t seem all that happy to find her alive. How dare he shout at her this way, like a parent who’d grabbed his kid away from a busy road—who did he think he was? “You didn’t answer when I called,” she said.

“Tell him,” Ella Dane said. She was still online and had opened a new window to answer another e-mail from one of her dog owners, hiding the Craddock trial and La Hacienda.

“Tell me what?” Eric said.

He raised his hands, palms forward; he was making an effort to control his temper, and she tried to meet him halfway. “I should have called again. I’m sorry. But I can’t go home. It’s not safe. There’s something in the house.”

“Lacey. Lacey, please. Can we sit down and talk?”

She let him guide her to the bed; she even let him slip her sneakers off her swollen feet. She said again, “I can’t go home.”

He began to rub her feet. “When I went home, and there was blood on the floor, Lacey—” His voice cracked; he bowed his head and pressed her feet a little too hard. “You don’t know what I thought. The things I thought— Whose blood was it?”

“Mine,” Ella Dane said. “It was an accident.” She paused in the doorway. “You’d better tell him.” She left the room.

“When the hospital and the cops and Dr. Vlk didn’t know anything, I started calling hotels,” Eric said. He began to work on her feet again. “I started at the front of the alphabet, and Sammie started at the back. It took us an hour to find you.”

“I took money out of the account. Five hundred bucks.” Eric hated it when she used her debit card and didn’t tell him. “But I can’t go home. There’s a thing in the house. A person. A ghost.” There, she’d said it. Her hands tingled, and she felt her whole body prickling. Her heart closed in shame. It felt like confessing to infidelity. “A ghost,” she said. “It’s dangerous. It attacked Ella Dane.”

Eric let go of her feet. She felt his weight lift from the bed, as she had felt Drew’s weight so often. “Be serious,” he said.

“It’s a little boy. I can’t go home, Eric, listen to me, I can’t! He’s hurt people. People died there—a baby, it drowned in the bath.”

“That was a long time ago. It’s our house now.”

She wiped her eyes and glared at him. “You
knew
and you didn’t tell me?”

“I just found out today. And it isn’t even the same bathtub. Harry replaced it, remember? So you’ve paid for the room already, you might as well stay till morning, and then you’ll feel better and you can come home.” He sat down again, and she let him take her feet in his hands. “Look how puffy you are. Dr. Vlk says she wants to see you Monday; you’d better ask her about it. There’s a spa. You and your mom can have a girls’ day out tomorrow; you know you need a haircut.”

“Well, I’m so sorry I’m not up to your standards,” she said. But then he took her left foot in both hands and pushed his thumbs up along her sole. She sighed. “That feels so good. You can keep doing that. I’m sorry.”

“What happened to Ella Dane?”

“It cut her. With a broken plate.”

Eric’s hands paused on her foot, and she wiggled her toes to encourage him. “You broke another plate?”

He
would
worry about the plate. “I can’t go back. It’s not safe for the baby.”
No living baby since 1971,
Greeley Honeywick had said. How could she be so specific? “Please come with me,” she said to Eric. “We can sell it.”

“We can’t afford to sell it. There wasn’t five hundred bucks in checking. You went into the overdraft. The bank charges a seven-dollar fee and twenty percent interest, in case you want to know. You can’t live in a hotel.”

“I can’t go home.”

He was rubbing her ankles now, one in each hand. It felt wonderful. He said, “Where can you go? You can’t get any more money from the bank.”

“Why not?”

“There isn’t any. The overdraft’s maxed out. The fees pile up; you have no idea how much trouble we’re in. And there’s nothing wrong with the house.”

She knew that tone. Eric was terrible at keeping secrets. “You’ve found out something,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“What’s going on is, I’m going home, to our house that we bought together. You can take your weekend, get it out of your system, and come home. Somebody has to be the adult here.” He patted her feet one last time and stood up from the bed. “Right now, Lacey, I’m walking out of here. I’ll do everything I can to fix this, but you have to help me. Come home with me. Please.”

Lacey shook her head, and her cell phone began to ring on the nightstand. She checked the number but didn’t answer. It was a return call from Everett Craddock’s motel in Spinet Cove. “Who is that?” Eric asked.

“Somebody who knows the truth. Eric, if you’d only listen.”

“You are exactly like your mother. Exactly like.”

Outraged, she bounced against the pillow. “You
said
that? You didn’t say that.”

“I did say it. But I don’t want to walk out of here without you. Please.”

She folded her arms over her belly. “If you loved me . . .” She hated to hear herself say it, but it was too late to stop. “If you loved me, you would believe me. Even if it was impossible to believe. If I go back, the baby will die.”

“I can’t do it. I can’t believe that. Lacey, I’m sorry, I just can’t.” He stood in the door, waiting for her. She looked at her knees, not raising her face even when the door whispered along the carpet. He was going; he was gone. After everything. After she had made him face the world when Foothills Financial collapsed; after he’d refused to sell her ring. She twisted the ring, but her finger was so swollen, she couldn’t get it off. He’d helped her with her job search, she’d called Uncle Floyd and asked him to hire Eric—after everything, he was walking out, because of a house, because of
money
? Lacey pulled the pillow from the head of her bed, hugged it tightly, and wept into it. But he couldn’t hear her, and he wasn’t coming back.

Ella Dane came back in and sat at the computer a few minutes after Eric left, and mercifully she said nothing either in comfort or blame. Lacey sat next to Bibbits, stroking him for the comfort of his small warm body. His fur felt dry, and when she rubbed his ears, there was something wrong. He was sleeping at last, poor thing; the shock of Drew’s attack and the sudden removal from the house had upset him terribly. At least he wasn’t coughing.

She touched his nose. It was cold and beginning to dry. She already knew what had happened, but she opened her palm in front of his mouth and waited for the touch of breath anyway.

“Mom,” she said carefully.

Her mouth and throat filled with tears. Bibbits, how she’d hated him for so long, but he’d been a good dog, a comfort to her over the last couple of months; he’d kept her from being alone. Poor old boy. All those months dosed with
Taraxacum,
dandelion essence, instead of real medication, and then Drew had been too much for his thick, exhausted heart.

“Mom,” she said again. “I think something happened.”

Ella Dane was still surfing on Lacey’s laptop. “Just a minute.”

“Mom, there’s something wrong.”

“Don’t worry, the arm’s stopped bleeding. I probably won’t need stitches after all.”

“Mom.” Lacey didn’t want to say it. She wanted to crawl into the hotel bed, under the clean strange sheets and the scratchy blanket, and close her eyes and pretend she didn’t know what was happening in the small body curled at the foot. She’d be careful not to kick him off the bed; she wouldn’t have to say anything, eventually Ella Dane would notice. But Drew had done this. Drew had given the old dog’s heart its final shock. And Lacey was responsible for whatever Drew did. She forced herself to speak. “Mom, there’s something wrong with Bibbits.”

Ella Dane came over with her brown glass vial. “Just a drop of
Taraxacum
and he’ll be good as new.”

“I don’t think he’s breathing, Mom. I’m sorry.”

Chapter Thirty

IN THE SKYVIEW LOBBY,
Eric turned on his heel and headed back to the elevators. Away from Lacey and her outrageous complaint, his mind worked clearly again. He had a plan, fully formed: sell the house and take the loss—twenty thousand dollars, a hundred dollars a month, he’d borrow the money to get out of the mortgage—rent some quiet apartment—ask Ella Dane to stay when the baby came—Lacey could go back to work, subbing if she couldn’t get a full-time job in the district; or back to school, to get her master’s in special ed, as they’d planned she eventually would. Money would be tight for a year or two, but by the time the baby was in school, they’d be back on track.

Sell the house, take the loss. And the ceiling in Ella Dane’s room, he’d have to get that repaired and the whole room repainted before the house went on the market; they could even use the same Realtor. Those were only details: sell the house and take the loss, or Lacey would be the loss, and the baby with her, leaving him with a house he’d never meant to keep more than five years in the first place. He’d go back and tell her right now.

But as he turned toward the elevator, it opened. A blond child on old-fashioned roller skates swooped in front of him, pressed all the buttons with both fists, and swerved directly toward Eric. Eric stepped back, hands up to fend off or catch the child, who surprisingly bared his small teeth and gave a high whoop of exhilarated rage, a monkey shriek. The elevator door closed, and the other three elevators were all stopped on upper floors.

Another whoop echoed in the lobby. Eric couldn’t see where the child had gone, and none of the other travelers in the lobby seemed at all distressed by his strange passage. Eric felt disproportionately troubled by the encounter, as if a stranger’s voice had shouted in the dark to save him from an unseen danger, a cliff over deep water.