Starter House A Novel (34 page)

Chapter Forty-one

LACEY WRAPPED HERSELF
in the big motel towel and set the hair dryer to low, hot, four inches from her left ear. She was safe for a while. Drew had a hit-and-run temper, like so many damaged children. She had a few hours, perhaps even a day, before he sought her again.

She hated the feeling of cold water worming down her back, and the water in her head was worse. Soap burned in her throat; her sinuses were full of sharp gravel, and the taste of bathwater rolled over itself, a hard slick thing. The hair dryer’s warmth spread in her ears, softening and opening the constricted tubes.

When she was little and had earaches, Grandpa Merritt held her on his lap with her mother’s hair dryer inches from her head. She tilted against his left shoulder while the warm air flowed into her right ear. He would tell her how when he himself was small, his own grandfather cured his earaches with hot smoke, lighting his pipe and softly blowing into the young Grandpa Merritt’s ear.

It had made the child Lacey laugh to think of her grandpa as a little boy with an earache. He laughed too, and his stiff beard bristles scraped along her cheek. His arm tightened and she felt safe, loved and comforted and warm all through.

And then he took those pictures, those and how many others? Lacey turned the hair dryer off. She had been so angry at Ella Dane all these years; if Ella Dane had told her, she would have accepted it. Lacey was suddenly positive that Ev Craddock hadn’t told his own children why he’d sent them away. There were no pictures in his office, no graduation caps or wedding gowns, no grandchildren. He saved them, but he lost them.

If they had known he loved them, Drew would have known it, too. Drew could travel, he could show up wherever he wanted. Ev kept his secret to set them free. He built a wall between Drew and his children. He himself was the wall. Ella Dane had kept her secret to preserve Lacey’s innocence.

She would have to do the same, if Eric would let her. All the qualities in Eric that had drawn her to him—his honesty, his constancy, the firm architecture of his mind—all these qualities set him against her now, for he would never abandon the child or the house, or believe he couldn’t have both. If she left the baby at the hospital, Eric would take him home, and in Drew’s house there was room for only one child. She had to get herself into the house, and Eric and the baby out of it.

She had put him through law school, giving her a claim against his future income. If she gave that up, traded it for the house, and let Eric take the baby . . . How many months would he fight to get himself and the baby back into the house? The parent who took the children got the house, mostly. And family law was his specialty.

Or she and Eric could leave the house, rent it out cheap, and make sure the right people took it, a young family with children. Soon, Drew would shift his attention to them. The right family, a mother with a baby girl and a couple of elementary-aged boys, and the Miszlaks could get clean away.

That was life and freedom. That was everything.

“No,” Lacey said. She put her hands over her ears, as if it were someone else’s idea and she could keep from hearing it. No. Ella Dane had left her father’s house, the security of life with Merritt Kendall, on the strength of a handful of Polaroids and a family rumor. She hadn’t traded another child’s future for Lacey’s.

Hadn’t she, though? She’d never reported Grandpa Merritt. In Lacey’s case there was so little to report, pictures that barely flirted with the line of innocence, but she had cousins who’d been abused and she hadn’t encouraged them to turn him in. He’d lived freely in a neighborhood with young families on every side, little girls in swimsuits wherever he looked. Ella Dane saved only her own child. That wasn’t enough.

Lacey pictured herself in an apartment, turning on the local news a year from now, settling in the red leather armchair to read
Pat the Bunny
to the baby, her own healthy living child, and the announcer would speak solemnly of the unexpected death of a toddler or a young mother in a Greeneburg neighborhood. The screen would flash to a reporter standing under a tree, and Eric would say,
Isn’t that our house? Aren’t those our tenants?
She couldn’t live with that.

The door opened, and Ella Dane came in, laptop under her arm. “Talking to yourself?” she asked. She scanned the room. “
Are
you talking to yourself, or is he here?”

“He left.”

“You saw him here?”

“He was mad about Eric being here. He touched me.”

“Oh, Lacey. I can’t handle this alone. We need help.”

Lacey nodded, not wanting to describe that lifetime underwater, twenty seconds at most. “He lost his temper for a minute. I’m fine.” Ella Dane looked doubtful, and Lacey patted the bed. “Sit with me, Mom.”

Ella Dane opened her laptop on the bed. “Look at this; I was online. Downloaded some old articles.” She opened a folder on her desktop, selected a newspaper article, and turned her computer so Lacey could read.

It was the front page on April 10, 1972, the day after Andrew Halliday Senior drowned his baby daughter, shot his wife and three sons, and then turned the gun on himself. The picture was the family’s formal Christmas portrait, 1971. The wife, Dora, looked about fifteen, slender in her tight-waisted checked dress, the baby a long fall of lace. Lacey recognized Dora, the tame trammeled adult self of the wild girl with the violin, Harry Rakoczy’s sister. She was not looking at the camera, but down and away from the descending row of freshly combed little boys, down and inward to the unseen Dorothy. Her eyelids were long and pale, her cheeks and lips uncolored, her thick light hair pulled back off her face. No makeup, no hairstyle for this formal picture. How hard did a woman have to work to wear that narrow-waisted dress, with her fourth child not six months old? And then she didn’t even put on lipstick.

Harry knew. Dora Halliday was Harry’s sister. He knew everything and always had. Lacey filed that for later.

The row of boys sat with their hands in their laps and their knees together. None of them smiled, though the youngest, Matthew, had a smiler’s dimples tucked into the creases of his mouth. Andrew Halliday, in a jacket and tie that matched his sons’, leaned forward with hands on thighs, legs apart, elbows out, as if caught in the moment of springing from his seat. His hair clung in tense light-colored curls, clipped in polished waves. In 1971, a year of shaggy hair and long sideburns, that haircut made a statement.
Leave me alone
.
None of your business
. A military haircut, though the article said he’d taught American history at East Greeneburg High for the last six years and mentioned no military service. He stared straight at the camera, eyes open, brows fiercely lowered.

He was a teacher. Like Greeley Honeywick, like Lacey. How many teachers had lived at 571 Forrester? Teachers like Andrew Senior, young mothers like Dora. He’d drawn Dora’s portrait, so he was an artist, too. Lacey knew, her knowledge both tentative and tactile, that every family had included either a teacher or a young mother, and someone who could paint or draw. It was like feeling her way down a stairway in the dark. Knowledge came piece by piece; she tested each piece and found it true. Drew gathered his family, time after time, and every time the family failed him.

Andrew’s portrait of Dora reminded Lacey of that first day. Harry Rakoczy had seen her sketchbook; CarolAnna had mentioned the pregnancy; Lacey herself had told him she was a teacher. Harry
knew,
he’d always known.

“He looks like a murderer, that man,” Ella Dane said. “Those angry eyes.”

To Lacey, Andrew Senior looked shockingly young. Andrew Junior was nine, but people started families younger back then. He was thirty, thirty-two, maybe. He had a hot, eager look, full of energy, an odd match for the modest Dora, so saintly and pale. The scrawling energy of Andrew’s portrait of Dora with her violin, in Harry’s living room—that was Andrew’s spirit, not Dora’s. Or maybe she got quieter after she married him, maybe she put her violin away.

He drowned the baby in the bathtub, as Beth Craddock drowned Tyler, as Lacey had almost drowned herself (and Bibbits in his bath, that must have been Drew testing how far he could push her; it had seemed so urgently reasonable at the time). The article didn’t say where Andrew Halliday had shot the family, but Lacey knew. Dying, they fell down the stairs. Greeley Honeywick fell, pushed by Drew using someone else’s hand, probably her husband. Others had fallen, no doubt, many others. The question was not how many had died, sucked into the Hallidays’ deaths, but how she could save little not-Merritt, and herself and Eric, too.

“The article says one of the children was found alive,” Lacey said. If she could find that person, James or Matthew, and ask him to talk to his brother . . . Hard to find him by the name alone; there must be thousands of Hallidays named James or Matthew.

Ella Dane shrugged that away. “Shot in the head. One of them might have lingered a day or two. I e-mailed Jack McMure in Columbia. He’s been doing spiritual realignment of houses. He’ll come up to Greeneburg tomorrow and have a look. Three hundred bucks for the consult, and he’ll tell you what the therapy costs. Couple thousand.”

“Eric will never go for that. It’s so much money.” If only they hadn’t bought that furniture. If they’d done a thousand other things, if they’d bought a different house, if Eric had taken a different job, if only. “Did you tell him what the problem is?”

“Sometimes tragic events leave imprints. Or there are demonic beings—they’re, what does he call it, a concentrated impulse of nature; they destroy buildings.”

Every impulse of nature was against houses, every gnawing animal, every tunneling root, ice and rust, wind and rain. “Like termites,” Lacey suggested.

“But that’s not Drew,” Ella Dane said. “He’s trapped. Jack says he’s a captive soul turned vicious, like a dog on a chain. He’ll keep on hurting people till he finds a way out.”

“Out where?”

“Out.” Ella Dane waved her hands. “On. Move toward the light, all that. Jack says it’s best not to get real specific, in case you get trapped in your own ideas. He says if you can find out what’s been done before, that’ll save him some time. Anything that other people have tried to get rid of the thing.”

Greeley Honeywick had researched the house’s history, so she’d know of any past exorcisms, cleanses, cures. Could this work? Calling an expert in to get rid of Drew, as if he were mold, asbestos, lead, any deadly thing that might lie hidden in a secret place—could it work? Clean him out, take the place apart, and rebuild it without him?

She went to Ev’s office to e-mail Greeley, and to download directions to Jack McMure’s home in Columbia, where she and Ella Dane would meet. It felt good to have something to do. While she waited for her e-mail, she pulled up the picture of the Halliday family. Not Drew, not the doomed children, not the father with his hands on his thighs ready to spring to his feet—it was the mother she wanted. Dora. That ivory face with the downcast eyes.

She could draw that. It could be beautiful. She felt the shape in her hands. Layers of oil pastels, white over yellow, green over white, building up to that translucent glow, like pure white soap. Those thick curved eyelids, a shadow of blue hinting at the eyes. She’d have to stop on the way home to pick up some more colors.

Chapter Forty-two

ERIC WAS HOME BY FOUR.
Lacey should have been only a few minutes behind him. Half an hour to finish checking out of the motel. Four thirty, five, six. No Lacey. She didn’t even call.

At 6:12, the phone rang. Eric grabbed it and said, “Where the hell are you?”

“Home in my little beddie,” Sammie Vandermeijn said, “all by my lonesome.” Scuffling and laughter, and she added, “Well, Floyd’s here, but he don’t count. Want to come over? Floyd’ll put his pants on.”

“Lacey’s coming home.”

“How happy you sound.”

“She should’ve been here two hours ago.” Eric cleared his throat. That thickness was congestion, maybe allergies, nothing more. All alone, a foreign thought kept running through his mind: she had left him all alone, gone on without him and never looked back; they all did the same thing in the end, they all left. “She hasn’t called.”

“Come on over,” Sammie said. “I’ve got a pound cake and strawberries. We’ll pour brandy on it and set it on fire. I
love
setting food on fire. Floyd bought me a fire extinguisher and he wants to try it out; he’s so romantic, you can’t imagine. Don’t leave me alone with the old goat, or I’ll have to spray him down.”

The foreign thought rattled on. She would leave him, like all the rest. He would be alone without lights or food or voices, until people came again, alone, alone, alone. He pushed it away. Self-pity never helped anyone. Lacey’s car turned into the driveway, followed by Ella Dane’s, with an unknown head in the passenger window, so it wasn’t Lacey’s fault, Ella Dane had made her stop somewhere. “She’s home. I’ve got to go.”