Starter House A Novel (26 page)

The pieces of his plan, broken by the child’s shout, settled in a new pattern. What good would it do to sell the house? Lacey would take some crazy dislike to the next place, and the next and the next. Ella Dane had raised her that way, always moving, always leaving. Lacey complained about it, but she and Eric had lived together for three years, moving every year, once to a large apartment with two roommates, then to a smaller apartment with just the two of them, and last to married student housing, which was why they married when they did, and it was Lacey’s idea to move, each time. She’d never settle. Year after year, for the rest of their lives, she’d uproot him.

Eric’s cell phone rang. Someone was calling from his home phone, giving him a moment of weirdly dislocated horror—who, who, how?—until he remembered that Sammie had come to help him find Lacey, and she was still there. “Hello?” he said, and it was Sammie, wanting to know if he’d found his wife.

“She’s here,” he said. “She’s staying.”

Sammie gave him silence with room for words, information, confession, but he could do that trick in his sleep. He said nothing back at her, and she broke first. “I’ll clean up this blood,” she said. “Unless you need to keep it for the cops, for some reason.”

“My mother-in-law cut her arm.”

“You owe me dinner. Bring me something from Abernathy’s. I’ll call Floyd.”

“Don’t mind me, make a party of it.”

Eric stopped at the lobby ATM to get two hundred dollars for the weekend, remembered the account was overdrawn, and decided to use Discover for his expenses until his next paycheck. Lacey didn’t have a card for the Discover account; he’d opened it before they were married. On his way to the parking lot, he called his bank’s emergency hotline and canceled both debit cards. He canceled all the credit cards except Discover, even the emergency Visa. It gave him a stinging, childish satisfaction: that would show her. But the baby was his as much as hers. He had to make sure she couldn’t disappear with his son.

Driving home, he called ahead to Abernathy’s and ordered a party platter of variety sliders to go. Sammie had an astonishing appetite for such a slender woman; she must exercise like a maniac. Any leftovers, he could reheat for breakfast, although if Floyd came over, there’d be no leftovers. A new plan formed as he drove. Saturday night’s drivers—some of whom would be calling Moranis Miszlak from the detention center in an hour or two—swooped past him in the left lane, veering like the little boy in the Skyview lobby.

The new plan was, keep the house. It felt immediately, viscerally right. His house, not hers. He wasn’t about to bankrupt himself to finance her craziness. Something was wrong with his rearview mirror. Small lights flicked and vanished. He adjusted the mirror. His breath gelled in his throat, and his car swung right; the passenger-side tires shuddered across the rumble strip and slid on the gravelly shoulder. Luckily, he was going the legal fifty-five, and not the community standard of seventy, so he was able to pull back into his lane. He adjusted the mirror again, but it was gone, whatever he had seen: the top of a fair head, low in the backseat, as if Lacey were there, huddled behind the driver’s seat instead of sitting beside him with her seat belt on. He turned the mirror from side to side, and the backseat was empty. Of course it was empty. Lacey had left him, and when he went to find her, she refused to come home. He opened his mouth to take deep deliberate breaths, trying to control his slamming urgent heart.

The fear came from Lacey, her irrational thoughts infecting him. This was the power she had over him. She said
ghost
and he almost killed himself on the highway, because of a random something in the mirror. Ella Dane had brought it into their house, whatever it was, a chimera of her superstition—candle smoke and the echoes of chants—Lacey’s childhood come to life. And it was his own fault. She’d warned him and he’d insisted on bringing Ella Dane into their home.

He couldn’t live like that. Lacey had to choose. Him or her mother. He controlled his racing mind with conscious plans: debit cards, credit cards. Keep the house—that was the only reasonable plan.

Chapter Thirty-one

THE NEXT DAY,
Sunday afternoon, Lacey and Ella Dane stood in the Civil War section of the Greeneburg Cemetery. Bibbits had led them here. Ella Dane opened the cooler, where the dog lay cradled in ice bags, paws curling toward his body, black lips locked in an eternal snarl.

Lacey recalled the dogs of her childhood: Henry who was hit by a car; Noodle who had a high fever and vomited for three days before closing his eyes forever; the smiling Pomeranian called Salsa who lived to the age of nineteen and simply stopped breathing one day. Each of these had a real grave, chosen with care. Bibbits deserved the same.

“Is this the place?” she said. A week ago, she would have sighed and rolled her eyes. But if Drew could throw a tantrum over a game of Chutes and Ladders, then Bibbits could pick his own grave. Maybe Ella Dane wasn’t as crazy as she seemed.

On the other hand, maybe she was exactly that crazy. It was five in the afternoon, and this was the fourth place that Bibbits’s finicky and indecisive spirit had led them. They’d been to the antebellum mansion-museum Gage House, then to the playground at Rosemont Park, which Bibbits approved until Lacey mentioned that the playground was soon to be remodeled and repaved, with a climbing wall, a bungee bridge, and a skateboard half-pipe. “Bibbits will get dug up,” she said.

“He won’t like that,” Ella Dane agreed, and they visited Burgoyne Elementary, which made Lacey nervous—only three miles from home, could Drew sense her, so near?—because Bibbits loved children and wanted to be near them. This came as news to Lacey. Bibbits growled at children and had bitten several. Here, too, the problem was new construction. Sooner or later, the district would scrape up enough money to rebuild Burgoyne’s termite-ridden gymnasium, and the project might involve any part of the school’s grounds.

“Bibbits wants peace,” Ella Dane said, so here they were at Greeneburg Cemetery, under a statue of a horse with an empty saddle. Lacey had researched this spot while writing up a sample lesson plan and field trip for her education portfolio, in her junior year.

One of Greeneburg’s local heroes, General John Banister, was memorialized here. He had disappeared at Shiloh, leaving his horse wounded on the battlefield. The horse charged a Union cannon and trampled five of the enemy. The general’s grieving family buried the horse, planting a garden of rosemary and lavender around the life-size bronze. When the lost general was discovered alive, operating a bakery under the name of Shemple in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1883, there was some talk of removing the statue. By then, it had become traditional for young men to propose marriage under the animal’s eyes, and its muzzle was gold with constant stroking, and anyway, Fly-by-Night had been a true hero of the Confederacy, even if General Banister unfortunately wasn’t.

“This is the perfect place for Bibbits,” Ella Dane said. She knelt beside the cooler and touched the dog’s head. “Isn’t it, baby?”

Lacey’s cell phone rang. She scrambled in her purse—was it Eric? She held the phone in her hands without looking at the screen and let it ring one more time before looking—make him wait for just a second longer—but it wasn’t him. The number was unfamiliar, the area code 803. “Hello?” she said cautiously.

“Ms. Miszlak? Ev Craddock. You left this number.”

Ev Craddock. How dare he call her, cluttering up her phone while she was waiting for Eric to call; he might call any second. Lacey bit the inside of her upper lip to keep from shouting at the man. “Thanks for getting back to me,” she said.

“You’ll want a room?” he said. “Off-season rates.”

A room, room for what? Oh yes, his beachside motel. “No, I wanted to talk to you about the house where you used to live, on Forrester Lane in Greeneburg.”

“You a reporter?”

“No. I live there.”

“You calling from the house?”

“No, I wanted to ask you a question. About your wife. About her trial.”

Everett Craddock gave a wet and rattling sigh. “You sure you want to know?”

Lacey instinctively wiped her own phone on her sleeve. “The newspaper said the jury came back in only forty-five minutes, and I was wondering why were they so quick?” Another death rattle from the phone. “Please,” Lacey said. “I’ve been living in the house. I’m pregnant. I really need to know.”

“I bet you do. Her clothes were wet. Tyler had bruises on his head, matched her hands. Couple of his hairs under her fingernails. She done it, no question. You want to know more, you come down here.”

Lacey patted Fly-by-Night’s golden nose. “Is there more to tell?”

“You left the house?” Ev Craddock asked.

“Yes, I’m done with it.”

“It ain’t done with you.” He began to cough with a ripping noise, as if some wet and necessary vital organ had torn loose and was now working its way up to his mouth—a kidney, maybe. Lacey waited, flinching at the worst of the gurgles.

In the meantime, a group of children with cameras had gathered around Fly-by-Night. Lacey scanned the cemetery and noticed all the casual strollers, some snapping the more exciting monuments with their cell phones, others setting up careful geometrical shots with professional-looking outfits with big black lenses.

They’d never be able to bury Bibbits without being seen. And, worse, photographed. She’d never get a job in the district with something like that on her record. “Hello,” she said into her phone. “Mr. Craddock, are you okay?”

“A room,” he said.

“Bibbits doesn’t like it,” Ella Dane said. “Too many children. Too much noise.”

Lacey blinked at this—they’d been at Burgoyne Elementary, not an hour ago. What happened to Bibbits loving children and wanting to be near them? “What about the beach?” she said.

“It’s outside,” Ev Craddock said. “That’s where we keep it.”

“Bibbits loved the beach,” Ella Dane said.

“Two double beds,” Lacey said into the phone. “Nonsmoking, and we can be there tomorrow afternoon.” She’d have preferred to leave today, immediately, and get as far from Forrester Lane as she could, but she had an appointment with Dr. Vlk tomorrow morning, and Eric might still call. She’d left eight messages for him and she refused to try again. It was his turn. Surely, surely, he wasn’t going to stop talking to her. Their marriage couldn’t end like this. He had to call. Maybe he was calling right now and leaving a message.

Everett Craddock reserved their room, and Ella Dane worked her way through the crowd of children. “Another thing,” Lacey said abruptly, as if she had been arguing with her mother, “we need clothes.”

“You don’t want to go back to the house, do you? Bibbits is scared of it.”

This was the first rational message Bibbits had sent all day, and Lacey wasn’t about to argue. “We’ll pick up a couple things in the hotel,” she said. Something new, something Drew had never seen or touched. There was a gift shop. They wouldn’t have maternity clothes, but she could at least grab a new T-shirt and replace the rest of her clothes tomorrow at the mall on the way out of town.

They drove back to the Skyview. While Ella Dane replenished Bibbits’s ice, Lacey sailed into the Skyview Shoppe, where her credit card was refused. She laughed. “Wrong card,” she said, “sorry,” and handed over two of her precious twenties. Thirty-two dollars for two T-shirts, and Eric had canceled the cards. How could he—how
dared
he, after she’d supported him and taken out loans for his education. He had income and she didn’t, but six months ago it was the opposite, and she’d never thrown it in his face, not even once. Not even when he complained about how they were burning through their savings, when it was all money
she’d
earned. She kept the stiff, public smile stapled to her mouth all the way out of the shop and across the lobby.

Her phone rang in the elevator, and it was Eric. Too late. Canceling the cards, after all they’d been through. That was just mean. She turned the phone off without answering.