Starter House A Novel (31 page)

ERIC’S ALARM CLOCK
went off at four on Saturday morning. He lay for a moment moaning, feeling blunt pains in every bone; he felt about a thousand years old. Four in the morning, oh God, why? He had stayed up late Friday night to read Lex Hall’s juvenile record, which Sammie Vandermeijn had unearthed. Interesting, even frightening in spots, but it could have waited.

Lacey. Ella Dane had called to tell him where they were. He was going to drive down to Spinet Cove and talk to her, just talk. And listen. More listening than talking would be good, no matter how crazy she sounded. Maybe there was something in what she said, something in the house. Maybe being pregnant, the hormones, the baby, something had opened the back of her mind, let the past blow in like leaves through the kitchen door. She’d been afraid of the stairs before she knew anything about the house’s history. He’d swear to that in her defense.

They’d never had a fight. Not like this. Sometimes they argued, but they found their way to agreement, eventually, and he always remembered, no matter how annoying she was, that he loved her. He hoped she would do the same for him. Their marriage couldn’t end this way, on their first bad fight. He drifted back to sleep and half dreamed that she was beside him in the warm bed. Lacey, not the Lacey he’d seen in the hotel, but the Lacey of last year, slim and cheerful and healthy, fearing nothing. She could be that girl again. She was still that girl.

The second alarm went off, 4:15; 4:15 on a Saturday morning, oh God. He shambled to the bathroom and looked at the mirror. That was a 4:15-in-the-morning face if there ever was one, a look at his future if the next fifty years went wrong. If
today
went wrong, if Lacey didn’t come back. He swung the medicine cabinet open for aspirin, and halfway through its arc the mirrored door caught a reflection of something, a blond head turning swiftly away, the white edge of an arm and a hand.

“Lacey?” He turned to look back into the bedroom.

He’d have heard her car if she’d come home. He swung the mirrored door again, and there it was, the slash of fair hair and a pale arm. What did the mirror see? In the bedroom, dim and watery light spilled from the bathroom. Maybe the window’s white blinds had caught the bathroom’s cast-off light and reflected it blond and white. It could be nothing else. Over the last week, he’d been careful not to leave clothes lying around, after giving himself a shock by glimpsing a white shirt and seeing it as a body curled in a chair. This was a small house, but too big to live in alone.

He swung the mirror. It had to be the blinds. He couldn’t keep his mind from slipping to the living room, the furniture with feet, creeping around in the dark. . . . He turned on the bedroom light and stood in the doorway to reach the hallway light switch. That was better. He needed a remote control that would turn on all the lights together. Four thirty. If he wanted to be at Spinet Cove by midmorning, he’d better quit daydreaming.

He hurried downstairs and put an English muffin in the toaster and three frozen sausage patties in the microwave. With breakfast in progress, he ran back up the stairs to toss a few things in a garment bag. Then down the stairs, slipping a little on the fourth step from the bottom; he caught the banister and bumped down the last three steps on his heels. Oh, that hurt, it jarred his teeth. He rubbed his jaw with both hands, just behind and under his ears, and what was that in his driveway, some immovable shadow?

The toaster popped. Eric made his sandwich: strawberry jam on the bottom muffin, sausage, a dribble of maple syrup, the second sausage, more strawberry jam, the third sausage, and wasabi mustard on the top muffin. Courtroom breakfast, his favorite, greasy and hot and spicy and sweet. What was in the driveway, blocking his exit?

He opened the front door. A beige car was pulled right across his driveway. He could see the tire tracks where it had driven across his grass. It was parked with its passenger door four inches from his back bumper. He’d never be able to get out.

Eric finished his sandwich, went back inside for his cell phone, and walked over to the beige car. He rapped on the driver’s window. “Hey,” he said. “You can’t park here.”

The beige car was greenish in the security light from Eric’s porch, its windows dark as mirrors. For a moment, he was certain it was empty, that it had never been driven and someone had towed and abandoned it here, where it had taken root, never to move again. He rapped harder. Something moved in the dark inward space. “Hey!” Eric said loudly.

The driver’s door swung open. Eric stepped back. For the space of five breaths, nothing moved. Then out came a worn sneaker, a denimed leg, a chambrayed arm and side, and the long dim face of Lexington Hall. “I need to talk to you,” Lex said.

“What the hell?” Eric closed his hand around his cell phone, so Lex wouldn’t see it.
He knows where you live,
Sammie had said. “You can’t be here.”

“You’re my lawyer. I paid for you.”

“Harry paid. I’m refunding your retainer,” Eric said, and too bad if Floyd didn’t like it. Eric would pay it out of his own pocket, anything to get Lex Hall off his driveway.

“You’re my lawyer. I need my baby.”

Eric took a breath to answer and stopped himself just in time. Never argue with crazy people. Arguing with crazy people makes you crazy. “You have to make an appointment. I can’t talk to you here.”

“That shiny girl won’t make an appointment. She only lets me see the other one. You’re my lawyer. I paid for you.”

“I am telling you to leave,” Eric said, clearly and loudly. A light came on in Harry Rakoczy’s house. “Leave my driveway now, Mr. Hall.”

Lex Hall’s hands came up to his own chest, clutching and twisting the fabric of his shirt, as if he might tear the shirt off or pull it up over his head and hide inside it. “I didn’t,” he said. “I don’t want. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t.”

Eric was sorry. He ignored the feeling. Lex might be a poor sick damaged thing, but compassion was a luxury out of the Miszlaks’ budget. Lex’s sufferings, Lex’s lost child couldn’t be Eric’s problem. “You have to leave,” Eric said. “I’m not your lawyer. You can’t come to my house. Go away or I’m calling the cops.”

The light in Harry Rakoczy’s house moved. The upper dormer light disappeared, and a new light appeared, green and yellow in the stained glass over his front door, then the door opened, and a broad yellow fan opened across Harry’s grass. “Who’s there?” he called, an old man’s timid question in the dark.

Lex howled, wordless, in panic and pain. He jumped into his car and drove away across the Miszlaks’ lawn and Harry’s, tires grinding and spitting turf, and turned the corner with his lights still off. His car’s single voice vanished into the murmur of the neighborhood: dawn air rattling the maples, the highway purring a mile away. Harry Rakoczy’s door closed and more of his lights came on, a constellation appearing star by star, until his whole house was lit. Eric armed the security system, locked his house, and began his journey to the sea.

Sammie’s illegal copy of Lex Hall’s juvenile record lay on the passenger seat. The nine-year-old Andrew Halliday Junior had been taken in by Harry Rakoczy and his wife on his release from the hospital and had spent most of the next nine years in the system, mostly for arson. The last of these convictions came in 1975, when Junior was thirteen. Kid stuff. Backyard campfire that got away was his defense, and taken alone, it might have worked. Taken in context of a new fire every time the kid came home, not so much. In 1976, an assault on Harry Rakoczy’s wife, Margaret, and later that year a much more serious attack on his young cousin. Junior Halliday, then fourteen, beat the five-year-old Teddy Rakoczy unconscious with a bag of toy cars. That was the end of his life with the Rakoczys. From then on, he bounced between detention, foster care, and group homes.

At least he’d outgrown arson. As Eric turned onto Austell Road, he surprised himself with the wish that Lex would relapse, that the Miszlaks would come home to a smoking ruin, 571 Forrester Lane burned flat to the ground, nothing left but a big fat check from State Farm. His grandmother’s Ukrainian Easter eggs, all his books and clothes, he’d gladly let them go if it meant they could be free of the house and the debt.

He shook the thought away. That kind of thinking—avaricious, dishonest, unscrupulous—had led his parents step by step from undue optimism to creative accounting to outright fraud. He’d set the security system. If the house caught fire, the alarm would go off and the place would be saved, mortgage and all.

Chapter Thirty-eight

LACEY COULDN’T FIND THE BABY.
She had laid him down on a towel so she could pick up a shell, just a few yards away along the beach. When she looked back, how flat was the sand, flat as still water barely shivering, with a dull gray surface and a yellow light floating on it. That was the towel. Where was the baby?

He was too little to crawl, too young to run away. The sand lay flat as the sea, and between sea and sand, the foam stitched and stitched again an endless seam perpetually torn, threadbare, ragged, beaded with tiny fish swirling up in the ripples and flicking themselves off the sand as the water pulled back. She’d left him in the dry sand, but the towel was wet.

“Where are you?” she said.

“Here.”

It was Drew who answered her. He was digging with the orange plastic shovel. He wore black trunks patterned with white palmetto silhouettes, and he pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head, pushing the hair off his summer-brown face. “You left me, but I found you.”

“I’m sorry, baby, I had to go.”

“Everybody leaves me. Nobody cares. I’m all alone, all alone, all alone!” His voice rose higher; each word sounded again and again, hanging and beating in the air like wings, a flailing white storm,
alone, alone
.

Lacey pulled her lower lip into her teeth and held it. This could not, could not be. Though she felt the shell’s weight in her hands, the sharp sand under her bare feet, even the salt pricking her skin, though the screaming voice whipped around her, though her baby was somewhere on the beach alone, it could not be.

“Alone, alone, alone,” Drew wailed, tossing shovelfuls of sand to either side. Each syllable flung itself outward, a fierce white bird, and the white birds whirled up and down and crossed each other, a column, a tower, a cyclone of gulls stooping and rising, fighting over one particular spot on the beach.

The eastern sea turned gold on its far edge. The sun rose, and Spinet Cove’s motels made a wall between sea and land, lit here and there as early risers went about their business. There was no wet towel, and the baby was safe inside her, kicking, alive. There was no shell in her hands, though she still felt it.

Her fingernails were clogged with sand. She had blisters on her palms and thin scratches, freshly bleeding, where the broken shells had cut her. She was standing on the beach with the orange shovel at her feet, and the only real thing from the dream was the noise, the towering battle of gulls, every bird in Spinet Cove drawn to one spot. As each gull landed, a dozen others stooped over it and beat it into the air. Lacey had to see what they were fighting over. Some small thing, torn this way and that, shredded in those yellow beaks. Bibbits, what else?

Could gulls dig so deep, or had someone dug down to it, using the orange shovel? Lacey’s fingertips were abraded and sore. There was a smell on her hands—she dug up handfuls of clean sand and splintered shells to scrub her palms clean and ran down to the water to rinse in the sea. Salt burned in every tiny scrape.

Drew was
here
. He’d followed her. Here, to the sea. How was this possible? She hurried up to the motel office, and there at last was Ev Craddock, lying in a recliner with his feet up, watching a shopping channel on the office television.

“Look at this,” he said, as if he and Lacey had spent the last hour discussing kitchen gadgets as shown on TV. “The lids and containers are interchangeable.” He shook his head, marveling. “The things people think of.” His feet were bare, knobby and calloused, and his legs were woolly with old-man fur. He looked like he’d spent half his life climbing mountains barefoot. His wonderful hair fell to his shoulders in broad waves bright as steel. His face was so darkly tanned, he looked mummified.

The woman on television pressed a small device against a valve on the container’s lid and explained how the system pulled air out of the container, creating a vacuum seal. Lacey felt a moment of pure longing—how perfect, exactly,
exactly
what she needed, until she remembered she didn’t have a kitchen anymore. “Hi,” she said, “I’m Lacey Miszlak. We talked on the phone.”

“It’s off-season. You missed the Clam Festival. There’s not much here but the beach. We got miles of it, as much as you want.”

Lacey sat in the other chair. On the television, the woman was now demonstrating an automatic folding spatula. “I didn’t come for the beach. I need to know what happened on Forrester Lane.”

“You can read it on the interweb. Anybody can read it.” The woman on television had moved on from the folding spatula and was now demonstrating a small vacuum cleaner on the most unlikely messes: marbles, cocoa powder, modeling clay. It could also suck wasps right out of the air. “I got to get me one of those,” Ev said.