Starter House A Novel (11 page)

CarolAnna hesitated, glancing along the empty street as if someone might be waiting for her. “Thanks,” she said just before the silence became awkward. “I’d like to see what you’ve done with the place.”

Lacey was as delighted as if a carload of her old friends had come up from Columbia. Maybe CarolAnna would stay a while. Sit on the back porch, drink iced tea, try Ella Dane’s black bean paste fudge. “I’m so glad you came,” Lacey said.

Madison jumped backward down the porch steps. “I’m not going in there. It’s the murder house.” Her voice hung and echoed off the porthole window.

“Murder house?” Lacey said blankly.
You know this already,
the teacher voice admonished her.

“I told you when you were looking at it,” CarolAnna said quickly, as if responding to an accusation. “There were deaths.”

“Not murder.” Lacey kept her voice steady. She was surprised—she
wanted
to be surprised—but the shock felt more like recognition. The murder house, of course; what other house could it conceivably be? CarolAnna’s well-trained face was blandly open, making the moment ordinary; it was nothing, happened every day, just two adults chatting about the strange ideas of children. “Murder.” Lacey pushed the word at CarolAnna. She hadn’t spoken it in July, so she’d have to hear it now. “Murder. I’d have remembered that.”

She wrote her address on the order form. She thought she was moving slowly, performing large simple gestures for an audience far away, but the handwriting was a panicky sputtering scrawl, not her own teacherly script.

“Nobody’s ever seen it and lived,” Madison said pertly. “The thing in the house. It eats babies. There’s never been a baby in this house.”

On cue, the baby kicked. “There’s one now,” Lacey said. What would Eric say to this? She needed his voice. He would laugh. He would give no more credence to a child’s superstition than to a squirrel hissing in a tree.

“You wait,” Madison said.

“
Maddie,
stop. There’s nothing at all wrong with this house,” CarolAnna said.

“The kids at school told me about it,” Madison said. “Everyone knows.”

Lacey had to stay calm to get the rest of the story. “It’s perfectly normal. Kids always tell stories. Where I taught, the fourth-grade girls wouldn’t sit at this one table in the cafeteria. It had the poison touch, that’s what they said. So what about this house, Madison?” She wrote out the check: fifteen dollars for three ounces of candied pecans. Ridiculous.

“The kids told me when I started taking violin with Mr. Harry. They told me, Don’t go next door or the thing will get you, the thing in the murder house. Because of all the people that died here.”

CarolAnna, flushed under her makeup, was already reaching for the check. Lacey had only a few seconds to get more information from Madison, and she needed to know everything—was there danger, was the baby in danger? “How many people?” she said.

“All of them!” Madison flew down the steps and along the sidewalk, stopping only when she was past Harry’s house.

“I’m really sorry,” CarolAnna said, with irritation. She was apologizing for Madison’s rudeness, not for the house and its secrets. “It’s just rumors. You got a good deal on this house. You should be happy here.”

CarolAnna followed her daughter down the street, and the front door ripped itself from Lacey’s hand and slammed. Drew stood there, red-faced and shaking. “Don’t listen to people!” he said. “Don’t let them in. I told you not to!”

“I want to know what it means,” she said.

“I don’t have to tell you anything.”

Lacey leaned against the door and locked her hands on the doorknob behind her. “Where do you live?” she said.

“Here. It’s my house.”

The doorknob pressed into Lacey’s back. That was hard and solid, a real thing. She pressed against it to the point of pain. This was happening, not a dream; Drew was the unseen thing in the murder house—she didn’t have the luxury of disbelief, not if the baby was in danger. “How long have you lived here?”

“Since forever. I never left.” His breath hitched (his
breath,
she noticed, what breath?), and he snorted and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. It was too real.
Ghost,
she thought, but she could not believe it. Her mind flurried with images of last fall’s PTA fund-raiser, Spookapalooza; she had supervised the haunted bouncy house, and the little spooks lined up with their faces painted, zombie, vampire, witch, just as physically present as Drew was now. He was barefoot, and his left big toenail was bruised black. How could that not be real? He snorted and wiped again, and she couldn’t resist; she let go of the doorknob and opened her arms to him, as she would to any unhappy child.

He burrowed in her arms, and his hair smelled of salt and dirt. This had to be real, this living child, this warmth, the softness of his T-shirt, his shoes squeaking on the floor. “You can cry if you need to,” she said. “It’s okay.”

“I’m not crying.” Drew let go of her, pushed her away, and ran for the back door. He was gone, and the door neither opened nor closed; Ella Dane, with her laptop on the kitchen table, didn’t raise her head as he passed. Ella Dane, who claimed to be a psychic. Crystals and candles, and communion with the spirits of strangers’ dogs. Drew’s feet pounded behind her chair—he ran so close behind her, she could have touched him as he passed—and she sensed nothing. Her blindness to Drew shook Lacey more than Madison’s story or CarolAnna’s obvious discomfort.

Maybe the hormones of pregnancy had opened some long-locked door in Lacey’s brain, and Drew was not a ghost, but madness; she was haunting herself. It was just as likely—more likely. Lacey’s knees gave way, and she sat down and leaned against the door. Her life was filled by a child she did not know; was Drew her someday baby, the imaginary become real? But the other children told Madison Grey a scary story when she started violin lessons. If the house had a dark history, the children would remember.

The fourth-grade girls shunned the table with the poison touch. Not all the fourth-grade girls, just a particular group, too old for their years, with double-pierced ears and ironed hair. They were obnoxious, all rolling eyes and jutting hips and supercilious, impatient groans. They were hysterical, superstitious, irrational. But they weren’t wrong. At that table, a kindergartner had almost died of a peanut allergy three months earlier. The fourth graders and the kindergartners never crossed paths, yet the girls knew.
Don’t sit there, it’s got the poison touch
.

Who would know about her house? She couldn’t ask CarolAnna Grey, who had already concealed so much and would be on guard against further questioning. Ella Dane was obviously no help.
It eats babies,
Madison said. Lacey had to know before the baby came.

Chapter Thirteen

ALL LACEY’S LIFE,
she had watched her mother know the unknowable: she’d kept Lacey home from school the day of a tornado, she could always find a lost thing by standing still and repeating its name.
Social studies book, social studies book—you were studying in bed and it’s fallen between the mattress and the headboard.
Coincidence, Eric called it, when Ella Dane greeted him by name on the telephone without benefit of caller ID. Lacey always carried an umbrella if Ella Dane suggested it, no matter how bright the day seemed. So if the house was dangerous, how could Ella Dane not know?

Lacey went into the kitchen and said, “Mom, did you feel something come through here just now?”

Ella Dane had closed her computer and was stirring a pan of refried beans on the stove. “We’re having burritos,” she said. “Grab some plates, would you?”

Lacey opened the cabinet and pulled out a couple of plates. “Did you?”

Ella Dane moved the pan off the heat. “There was a draft on my neck.”

Lacey took a breath and held it. Ella Dane used to read tarot for her friends, and then stopped, five years ago, because (she said) she was getting too good at it and did not want to open herself to demonic influences. Her last boyfriend, Jack McMure, specialized in spiritual cleansing, coming into homes that had suffered violent crimes or unhappy deaths and chanting until the spirits left. If anyone would believe her, Ella Dane would, but Ella Dane had lived in the house for a month and sensed nothing. And if she
did
believe, she’d call Jack in, and Lacey would have to explain it to Eric.

“Are you feeling something in the house?” Ella Dane said. “Bibbits has been nervous. He’s an old soul, you know. Very sensitive.”

“There’s a little boy; he keeps coming in,” Lacey said, and something crashed upstairs: broken glass, and then something heavy, tumbling and shattering as it fell.

“Bibbits!” Ella Dane cried, and the dog barked once and then retreated to the safety of a cage of chair legs. He was shivering, with his black lips pulled off his teeth in a soundless snarl, and the stub of his tail tucked low. His panting accelerated and deepened into a cough.

The house rang with cracks and claps, and a long rending splinter, some thick piece of wood, twisted until its fibers ripped, and the air conditioner surged on again, flooding chill air from every vent. Ella Dane rushed for the stairs, with Lacey following more slowly. Footsteps crossed the upstairs hall, which was visibly empty, with a fat serpent of dust drifting and the afternoon light striking slant columns through it. The footsteps hurried through the dust, and not one mote turned in their wake. The bathroom door slammed open and rebounded from the wall.

“Who’s there?” Ella Dane said in a soothing voice. “We won’t hurt you.”

Her courage took Lacey’s breath away. This invisible thing shook the house from door to roof, and Ella Dane promised not to hurt it? Lacey wished she herself could be so bold.

All the upstairs doors stood open, except Ella Dane’s. The dust rotated through the sun-slant, and behind the white door Ella Dane’s room exploded. Lacey shrieked and covered her face, while Ella Dane hugged her. The noise went on and on, a pounding fury, footsteps racing around the room, splintering wood, flying objects crashing into walls; such a sound should have been the harmony to a scream of rage, yet they heard no voice. It ended at last, and Lacey saw she had squeezed her mother’s hands white.

“Who’s there?” Ella Dane said again, massaging her knuckles. She opened the bedroom door.

The window was broken and its frame hung in long deadly shards from the wall. The room was shattered, destroyed, the furniture broken to bits. Ella Dane’s clothes and books were shredded. Pieces of the dresser and the bed jutted from the drywall. Parts of the ceiling were shattered; Lacey saw the beams, and shreds of pink insulation bulging down from the attic. It looked like the kind of damage left by a tornado, dresser drawers freakishly impaling the wall, a paperback book driven into the ceiling.

Lacey pressed her hands over her mouth. She couldn’t think about Drew, angry for a reason she couldn’t guess and dangerous in his anger, or about Ella Dane who owned so little, that little now ruined—she could only think of Eric. He couldn’t see this, his mind didn’t work this way, he couldn’t stand it. She thought of the way he’d been ready to give up their engagement, their life together, everything, just because it turned out his parents were crooks. His mind didn’t change easily. That was her job, to find out the new life and lead him into it. This, though, was a life he would not live. She started gathering shreds of purple batik cotton, the remains of Ella Dane’s favorite skirt. “We have to clean it up right now,” she said. “Help me.”

There was no glass on the floor under the empty window. The window had been broken from inside. Ella Dane took the purple cotton scraps from Lacey’s hands. “What’s in your house?” she asked. “Is this a poltergeist? How long has this been happening?”

“How come you don’t know?”

“You said there was a little boy. A spirit?”

“I don’t know.”

“A ghost? He talks to you, you see him? And he’s hidden from me—that’s not just an imprint, that’s intelligent. Maybe even demonic.” Ella Dane seemed to take to this idea with a gleeful excitement. “Has it touched you?”

“No.” Lacey set aside the conversation with Drew, her dream, every eerie sensation she’d had. The murder house. She wouldn’t tell Ella Dane; she rejected it completely. This was a thing she would not allow. And she had touched Drew; she had hugged him—he was real. “He lives in the neighborhood.” He was trouble; he knew 571 Forrester’s reputation, just as Madison Grey did, and he’d tried to make her believe he was the thing in the house, but she would not believe it, would not, would not.

“No child could do this,” Ella Dane said, waving at the ruin of her room.

“You have to keep the doors locked. He’s been coming in.”

“All right, Miss Clever, if a little boy did this, if a
child
broke my bed and smashed the ceiling, where is he? We came up the stairs. There’s no other way out.”

“The window. He must have climbed down the tree.” Tree climbing: an old-fashioned skill. A tree-climbing boy was now as rare as a candy-making mother. The branches closest to the window were thinner than Lacey’s wrist.