Starter House A Novel (40 page)

Chapter Forty-nine

“SHE DIDN’T MEAN IT,”
Harry said.

Lacey pressed a bag of frozen peas against her right shoulder, where one of Lex’s wild blows had connected. Lex squirmed and cried in his seat like a bee-stung child, furious and unwilling to be helped, as Harry tried to press a cool washcloth on his red face. Lacey resented it. What right did Lex have to fuss?
She
was the one who’d been hit, so where was her cool washcloth? But no, Harry just shoved the bag of peas into her hand. Theo, under the table with three copper-bottomed saucepans and a wooden spoon, made an intolerable noise.

“Junior!” Harry caught Lex’s flailing hands. “Look at me.” Lex didn’t raise his head, but Harry lowered himself awkwardly on his old knees to meet his gaze. “She didn’t mean it.” He pressed the washcloth against Lex’s forehead. Lex flinched it away. “Close your eyes.” Lex closed his eyes, and Harry spread the damp cloth over his face.

“Excuse me,” Lacey said in the coolest tone she could muster. “Hello?”

Harry pushed a small white bottle across the table to Lacey. “Have an aspirin.”

“Pregnant women can’t have aspirin.”

“There’s Tylenol in the cabinet over the sink.”

Lacey waited. Did he mean that she should get up, in her condition, and walk across the kitchen, and get her own medication? Yes, apparently he did. “Thank you so much,” she said. She meant him to notice the sarcasm, and she meant it to hurt.

“Look what you’ve done,” Harry said reproachfully. “He hasn’t been this bad for years. He’s been doing so well—even with Jeanne—I could have got him through that. Look at this.”

Lex wailed from under the washcloth, “She tried to make me do a bad thing!”

“I only want him to come and talk to Drew.”

Lex wailed again. He tore the washcloth off his face and ran upstairs. A bedroom door slammed, and the noise of his sobs came muffled through the walls. Theo banged her saucepans with her spoon. Lacey wished they would all shut up and let her think. She almost understood . . .

“We couldn’t handle him when he got into his teens,” Harry said. “Whenever he wasn’t in detention, the county put him in a group home. He used to run away and go back next door.”

“Did he ever talk to Drew?”

“He never went in. He set fires in the yard, but he never got close enough to the house to do any damage. Mostly he’d just stand across the street and shout. I finally made him understand he could never go there.”

“Sounds like the lesson took,” Lacey said, listening to the cries from upstairs. “What’d you do, beat it into him with live wires?”

“Repetition and discipline,” Harry said. “You can teach Lex anything eventually.”

“Well, isn’t that nice.”

“It’s too dangerous for him. I owe it to Dora to keep him safe.”

“Too dangerous for
him
? What about Tyler Craddock? What about Greeley Honeywick’s baby?”

“He’s my sister’s child; he’s all that’s left.”

“Drew’s left. He says they left him all alone. Do you owe it to Dora to help him?”

“Why do you think I held on to the house all these years?”

“Why’d you sell it to us?” Lacey asked the question quickly, without letting any tone of anger or accusation color her voice. Harry would talk about Lex when he wouldn’t talk about Drew? She was fine with that. Not
why did you sell me the house when you knew it would kill me
but
why did you sell the house, after you kept it so long?

“You were perfect, you even look like Dora. Your hair’s the same color. And you were a teacher and an artist. I thought you could help Drew, if anyone could.”

“Help him? How?”

Harry ducked under the table to give Theo a metal spoon. He showed her how to hit the pans with the metal spoon, and how the two spoons made different noises. Theo gave a baby screech of pure joy and banged louder than ever.

“You thought I would die there,” Lacey said.

“No, no,” Harry said from under the table.

“Yes, yes. I’d die and I’d go on and Drew would go with me. He would recruit me to be his guide, like you said.”

“No, no.” Harry came up from under the table. His face was red. “I never wanted anyone to get hurt. I thought you could talk to Drew.”

“Talk to him? You sold us the house so I would die there, me and my baby both. Don’t you lie to me.” This sweet old man, whom everyone liked and respected: she was going to make him face what he had done.

“So many people have died.” Harry leaned across the table to grasp Lacey’s hands. She pushed her chair back. “When I put people in the house, people die, babies die. When I live in the house myself, Ted’s kids start seeing him in Australia. Same thing when I leave it empty. They’re my grandchildren. If only one more person had to die, I thought, someone who could take Drew away, it would be the last one.”

“Two people,” Lacey said. “You had no right.”

“There wasn’t any other way.”

“Why not take Lex inside and let him talk to Drew?”

“No. I owe it to Dora. He’s all that’s left.”

Lacey rolled her shoulder. It was only bruised, and the frozen peas had soothed away the pain. “He’s all that’s left? Then you won’t mind if I do this.” She stood up and dragged Theo from under the table. Lacey got her hands under the baby’s armpits and hauled her up to balance her on her right hip. Theo’s left leg pressed against the undercurve of Lacey’s pregnant belly, and the baby kicked in greeting. Lacey turned toward the door, and Theo gave her a wet, soft kiss.

Harry started toward her, but the telephone rang, and Lex raised a new shriek of despair, and his uncertainty trapped him in the conflict of demands. “What are you doing? Where are you going?” he called after her.

At the front door, Lacey looked back. “Home,” she said. She walked out of Harry’s house with her double burden, her right leg almost buckling with each step. She crossed their two lawns and hurried up the front steps, getting herself and Theo inside and the door locked just as Harry reached the front door.

“I’ll call the police!” he shouted.

“You do that.” She slid the dead bolt home. “I’ll call them myself. Lex kidnapped this baby and he beat me up. Call them.”

Silence. Lacey set Theo down in the hall and ran through the house, reaching the kitchen door just as Harry did on the other side. She locked it as the knob began to turn. “What do you want?” he said through the door.

“Send Lex over here, and I’ll give him his baby,” Lacey said.

“Or what?”

“Or nothing. I’m not making any threats. Here’s me in the house, a teacher, an artist, a perfect fit, and here’s Theo. She’s Drew’s cousin or his niece or whatever; you think she’s got an hour, ten minutes, how long before he notices her?”

“You wouldn’t.”

“CarolAnna Grey never told me what happened to her. I bet her mom looked at her funny one day and said,
This little girl needs a bath
. CarolAnna was smart and fast, and she got away. Maybe Theo needs a bath.”

“No!”

Lacey waited twenty seconds, long enough to have carried that heavy child up the stairs, and then she turned on the kitchen tap. The kitchen door shivered under a variety of blows, flesh, metal, ceramic; Harry must be using the patio furniture and the planters to hit the door. She opened it. He was covered in dirt, bloody handed in the wreckage of the planter, chrysanthemums at his feet. “What,” she said fiercely.

“I want it to stop. I want it to not happen anymore.”

“I can’t stop it. You can’t stop it.”

Theo crawled across the kitchen floor to grab a chrysanthemum from Harry’s foot. She crammed it in her mouth, then took it out, and poked her tongue in and out, clearing the dirt from her lips. “You think Lex can stop it?” Harry asked.

“It’s his brother. One of his brothers, using his name. Or his father.”

Very quietly, in one of the empty rooms upstairs, a door opened.

Harry picked Theo up and gently pulled the chrysanthemum from her hand. “I’ll send Lex over,” he said. “Give me a minute.”

It was more like ten minutes, long enough for Lacey to shovel her mutilated chrysanthemum back into its broken pot, shaping the dirt into a rough pyramid and laying the terra-cotta fragments over it. She stood in the kitchen doorway and the sense grew in her that someone was behind her, staring at the back of her head. She did not turn.

Bringing Theo into the house!—what was she thinking? She told herself it made no difference. If Drew had a hit list, Theo was on it already. If he could reach all the way to Harry’s grandchildren in Australia, then Dora’s granddaughter on the other side of town had lived in deadly danger from the moment she was conceived.

Lacey accepted no excuses in her classroom.
Never mind telling me why you did it,
she said to her guilty children, and if she didn’t hold herself to that standard, what kind of teacher was she?

She had tried to save herself and her baby by putting someone else’s baby in danger. Theo Hall, human shield. That was no different from what Harry had done, renting the house out to young families for all those years.

“No, no,” she said out loud, and the maple tree shook its yellow leaves at her in the afternoon sunlight.
Yes, yes
. She was guilty. But what else could she do?

What else could Harry Rakoczy have done?

He could have gone into the house and faced it himself.

She could do that, too. Her whole body shouted
no
and the contraction took hold of her pelvic bones again. Slowly she sat in the doorway and waited for the pain to sink. It didn’t change the truth. She could do what she demanded of Harry: she could go back into the house and face it herself.

Yes, and take her baby into danger with her? She wasn’t living for herself alone.

Neither was Harry living for himself alone. Drew could touch his grandchildren on the other side of the world. There was no way out. She could go into the house, face Drew, and die; she could hold on to him and not let go, take him with her and leave the house clean. Eric wouldn’t understand, but Ella Dane would. The baby—but the baby had no chance anyway.
Sometimes you have to let them go,
Ev Craddock said. Her golden child.

Lex wandered across the back lawn, kicking his feet every third or fourth step, reluctant, sulky and slow. She resisted the urge to call him to hurry up, because he had the look of a child who would slow down even further.
You’re not the boss of me
. Every inch of his body said it, a six-foot-tall gray-headed pouty preteen. She was not ready for this, not one bit.

“I’m here,” he said as he climbed onto the patio.

Lacey gave him her sweetest and most welcoming first-day-of-school smile. “I’m so glad you came.”

“The old man sent me.”

She pulled him into the kitchen. “Can I get you something to drink? Coffee?”

At once, she knew it was absurd to offer coffee to this man, and he said, “Pop?”

“I don’t think so.” Lacey checked the refrigerator. Eric drank Pepsi, but Ella Dane had a habit of draining Pepsi bottles and refilling them with her own concoction of dandelion root and powdered carob. “There’s orange juice, guava juice, some kind of sugarcane thing that my mom likes, and milk.”

“Milk.”

She gave him a glass of milk. She’d been so eager to get him into the house, and now here he was, and what could she do with him? She’d expected some sign—doors slamming, water running, noises, voices—but the house sat quiet in the October sun. Every gust of wind was followed by a light pattering as a wave of leaves jittered across the roof. Occasionally a car drove by, and the more distant sound of Austell Road was a constant faraway surf. Where was Drew?

Lacey cleared her throat. She took the empty glass from Lex’s hand and rinsed it in the sink. “So,” she said. Now she had him here, she wasn’t sure why she’d wanted him. It had felt important. Now she felt nothing. “It’s a long time since you were here.”

“I was never here.”

“I guess not.” Lacey looked around the kitchen. What was the same as 1972? Nothing but the walls, the size and location of the windows—only the bones of the room, and those were identical to Harry’s kitchen next door. “How about if I show you around?” she said, as if he were any ordinary guest.

“I don’t care.”

She led him across to the future dining room, where she’d been sleeping for the past three months. “I’m going to move upstairs when the baby comes,” she said. “We’ll get a real table in here.” The air in the room was thick, not precisely foul, but heavy with animal presence. She needed to change the sheets. Bibbits had slept beside her for weeks. “This was your dining room, right?”

Lex shrugged.

She hurried him past that spot at the foot of the stairs—did he remember lying there, brothers dying beside him, sister already dead? She hoped not. Maybe the bullet had torn the memory from him. “This is the living room.” Stupid. He knew that.

He didn’t answer, and she talked into the increasingly dangerous silence. “So this is where Harry teaches lessons in his house; that’s the most beautiful room, with that gorgeous picture. . . .” Dora Rakoczy, by Andy Halliday. Harry said she looked like Dora. Maybe Lex thought so, too. What about Drew? Did he think she looked like Dora and would it matter to him?

“Would you like to see upstairs?” she asked.

“Can I leave now?”

“Don’t you want to see your old bedroom?”

“I’m not supposed to be here. Can I leave now? Please?”

“Do you remember the Honeywicks? A family called Honeywick?”

“I don’t remember anything. Something bad happened to them.”

“What about the Craddocks?”

“Can I leave?”

“What about—” What was CarolAnna Grey’s maiden name? She’d forgotten, if she’d ever known it. “A little girl called CarolAnna, do you remember her?”

“A bad thing almost happened. Can I go?”

“What about the Hallidays?”

“I don’t remember anything at all.”

These answers. How could he know these things? She stopped looking for Drew and instead stared straight at Lex. His face was tired and anxious, old, so old. His eyes were those of the girl on Harry’s wall—Dora’s eyes, no,
Drew’s
eyes. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Here she was watching and waiting for Drew, and he was right in front of her all the time. Recognition poured over her skin, combing every hair upright.