Starter House A Novel (35 page)

“We’ll save some pound cake for you. Maybe brandy, too, if you’re lucky.”

Lacey came in; she still had that bruised look around her eyes. Her week at the beach hadn’t done her any good at all. He felt a pang of hunger for the flaming strawberry pound cake. No part of Lacey’s attention was on him as she kissed him, and already she was moving away, pulling him toward the front door. “This is my mom’s friend, Jack McMure. He’s an architectural therapist.”

He would have known the man for a friend of Ella Dane’s, even without the introduction. He looked about three hundred years old, or a badly aged seventy, bald on top with a fringe of hair starting level with the tops of his ears. He’d grown out the fringe to its full length and tied it in a three-foot-long braid, thin as a pencil, with found objects tied into it: bottle caps, twist ties, candy wrappers. Birthmarks and age marks stained the top of his head in a pattern like a map of Indonesia.

“How nice to meet you,” Eric said. “There are some motels on Austell Road.”

“Oh, Eric,” Lacey said, with disappointment in her voice, “he’s here to help us.”

Jack McMure whirled with his arms outspread. He was wearing some kind of poncho, handmade out of—could it be?—duct tape. “We don’t need help,” Eric said, hoping Sammie and Floyd would save a few strawberries. “We need to be alone.”

“We’re not alone,” Lacey said. “We never have been. That’s the whole problem.”

“I know.” Eric pulled her into the living room, leaving Ella Dane and her crazy friend to do whatever they were doing, walking up the stairs and banging on the walls. “I thought you needed your mom, and you told me she made you crazy and I didn’t listen. We’ll tell her she has to go.” If Lacey would be reasonable. That was all he wanted.

“We’ve never been alone here. There’s someone in the house. A ghost, okay?”

“No such thing,” he said.

“People have died here. A whole lot of people. A whole family called—”

“Halliday,” he said, and kissed her on the nose, ignoring her sudden stiffness. “Yes, it was terrible. We wouldn’t have bought the house if we’d known. But it’s just a house. Those people died a long time ago.”

She was pushing at him all at once, all elbows and beating hands. “You knew? How long have you known?”

“Couple weeks, I guess. I asked Sammie to find out.”

“You knew and you didn’t tell me?”

“Why would I tell you?”

“You think you know so much! There’s more than one family that had a kid die; how about Beth Craddock, do you know about her? There’s this woman, she used to live here, she fell down the stairs—I just talked to her husband. He pushed her, but it wasn’t him, it was the ghost. He gets inside people and he makes them do stuff. You’re not
listening
.”

Chanting came from the stairs now, as Ella Dane and her friend marched up and down. Eric wished he’d listened when Lacey told him she didn’t want her mother in the house. “Get those people out of here,” he told her.

“They’re trying to help.”

“That kind of help we don’t need.”

“It’s probably no good. Greeley’s kept a list of the things she hears about. This house has been exorcised twice by Catholics and once by Methodists, and once by a guy with a bag full of copperheads. There’ve been eleven deaths, nobody knows how many miscarriages. Four babies drowned, five kids and two women fell down the stairs—the same things keep happening, over and over.”

“People die,” Eric said. “People get hurt. About a quarter of pregnancies miscarry; I looked it up when you got pregnant. Who is this Greedy person?”

“Greeley Honeywick. She says the last baby born in this house was Dorothy Halliday.” Lacey pulled a wad of paper from her purse. “She e-mailed me at the motel. These are facts. These are things that happened.”

“I believe you.” That shut her up for a minute. Eric spoke quickly. He had maybe ten seconds to get through before the craziness slammed down again. “People die, people get hurt all the time. Sometimes it happens a lot of times in the same place. That’s statistics, it averages out. If you flip a coin a million times, you’ll get twenty heads in a row. You don’t start thinking you’ve got a magic coin.”

“You think it’s
coincidence
?”

“Maybe there’s something real,” he conceded. Not a chance, but if it kept her rational, he’d allow it. “People fall on the stairs. Maybe the light’s bad. We can put in track lighting. Maybe there’s something wrong”—he hunted for things that could be wrong with the stairs—“like the steps are uneven, so people keep tripping.”

“And the bathtub, all the babies who drowned there? Dorothy Halliday and Tyler Craddock and the others?”

“Nobody’s ever drowned in our bathtub. It’s brand-new. Harry put it in when he sold the house. Maybe the old one was slippery. You can’t look at a place that’s had some bad things happen and say it’s haunted. Bad things happen everywhere. Is the whole world haunted? That’s just insane.”

“Okay then.”

“Okay then?” This was easier than Eric had expected, and he mistrusted her sudden compliance. “Okay then, what?”

“Okay, so you don’t believe in it. But I want Jack to stay with us for a few days. Will you do that for me?”

Eric looked at Jack, who had stopped spinning and was now standing at the foot of the stairs, arms wide, head tilted so far back that the thin braid brushed the back of his knees. He hummed one tone in his throat and another in his nose, shatteringly out of tune. The geometry of the house came clear and Eric saw the walls and floors as a net of transparent wires. Jack McMure stood directly under the bathtub, staring up at it through the floor. The Hallidays had fallen, dead and dying, exactly where he stood. In spite of Eric’s own certainty, it made him shudder; and did Lacey know where Jack was standing and where he was looking?

“They died here,” Jack intoned. “I’m sensing water, the presence of water.”

“Most of them died here.” Lacey pointed at the ceiling. “Dorothy died upstairs.”

Eric got ahold of himself. He gripped his elbows and pulled them tightly inward. Lacey knew how the Hallidays had died, and she must have told Jack;
the presence of water
—who did the old nut think he was fooling? The house was full of plumbing. Kitchen, bathrooms, sewer lines. It didn’t take a psychic, or whatever he called himself, to know there was water nearby. That was an architectural fact. “This is great,” Eric said. The psychic started to hum again, the double hum differently tuned, now, so that a third tone trembled into existence. “But I’ve got work to do. If you don’t mind, I’ll head down to the office.” Maybe Sammie’s offer of flaming strawberry pound cake was still open.

“It must be purified,” Jack said.

“Will that get him out?” Lacey asked.

“No. It will pull his attention to us. We can open the way out and release him. I’ll need to burn herbs.”

“Herbs?” Eric asked suspiciously.

“Sage mostly,” Ella Dane said.

“I need the spirit’s name,” Jack said. “His name in the smoke will . . .”

They waited for the end of the sentence, but that seemed to be all. “Drew,” Lacey said into the silence. “Andrew Lexington Halliday Junior.”

Eric laughed. Lacey and Ella Dane looked at him with their eyebrows drawn down and the lips tight; he had never realized how much they looked alike. “Something’s funny here?” Lacey said. “I’m trying to save the baby’s life and something’s
funny
?”

“Is Andrew Halliday your ghost? Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“He’s the one who’s been drowning babies in the bathtub and pushing people down the stairs all these years? Andrew Junior.”

“Yes, I’m sure; yes, it’s him, yes!”

Lacey shook the wad of paper at him, and he took it, unfolded the pages, and folded them again with square corners and sharp edges. Immediately, he felt better. “Well, that really is funny. Because . . .” Eric looked at all three of them, Lacey’s crazy mother, Lacey herself who would be just that crazy someday and was halfway there already, and the foul old nutcase the two of them had disinterred from under some moldy rock. “Because doesn’t somebody have to be dead to make a ghost?”

“Yes, and so?”

“Andrew Junior’s not dead.”

“But . . .” Lacey gaped at him. “But it’s him. It’s Drew. One of the brothers survived, I tried to find him on the Internet but there are too many Hallidays out there; I haven’t tracked him down yet. The one in the house is Andrew.”

Eric pressed his advantage. “Andrew Junior’s the one who survived. He grew up, changed his name, got married, had a baby. He’s crazy as a weasel on meth, but he’s not dead. He’s my client. You met him at Harry’s house. Andrew Lexington Halliday Junior is Lex Hall.”

While they stared, Lacey and Ella Dane round eyed and soft mouthed, Jack with his lower lip folded over the upper as if he had no teeth, Eric turned on his heel, grabbed his briefcase, and left the house, not even slamming the door. Let them think about that, before they started burning their herbs. Sage mostly. Yeah, right.

Chapter Forty-three

JACK MCMURE SAID
it was too late to turn back once the ritual was begun; they’d have to continue without knowing Drew’s real name. Lacey trailed after them as they hunted Drew through the house. She thought they were wasting their time. She felt emptiness in each room. The rooms seemed taller, thinner too, as if the whole house had been drawn upward and narrowed. There were fewer shadows and less color. The burgundy leather in the living room dulled to a rusty brown, and the bright gold floors were a lusterless orange beige. Silence pressed in, so that she had to cough just to make sure she hadn’t gone deaf.

Ella Dane and Jack were upstairs. “Mom?” Lacey said. She climbed the stairs boldly, right up the middle of the steps without even touching the banister, so confident were her feet. “Where are you?”

“Bathroom,” Ella Dane answered. All the upstairs doors were open. In the center of each room, a smudge of herbs burned in a Mason jar. The herbs were mostly sage, with something brighter, maybe lavender, and a thicker, clotting scent that she decided to believe was not marijuana.

In the bathroom, Ella Dane looked up from her Mason jar, cigarette lighter in hand. The center of this room was beside the bathtub, where a woman would kneel when washing a child. Or drowning one. Aching knees on the hard tile floor. Beth Craddock knelt there, holding Tyler underwater. And Andrew Halliday Senior with Dorothy?

Inconceivable. She couldn’t make herself believe it. Men didn’t drown babies. A father who decided the time had come wasn’t afraid of blood. Andrew Senior shot the rest of them, but not the baby. That was a mother’s murder.

She saw it as if she had sketched it from a photograph. The image moved from her hands to her mind. Dora Halliday dipped her elbow into the water, testing the temperature. She took off the baby’s pink smock, unpinned the cloth diaper, rinsed it in the toilet, dumped it in the bucket, which was empty and smelled of bleach. She washed diapers twice a day, and had done so for the five years between the birth of her first child and the toilet-training of her third, and now she was doing it again. She laid Dorothy in the water, gently as if into bed. Those hands, hands that had played the violin with such ferocious passion, were now water wrinkled and soft and had spent more time cleaning human waste than practicing scales. She looked down, with her heavy white eyelids, her marble mouth so finely curved and yet so hard, and pressed her right hand against Dorothy’s face as she lowered her backward and down, under the surface, and an island of bubbles floated across the child’s body and rebounded off Dora’s arms.

“Lacey!” Ella Dane said.

Lacey remembered her mother calling her, four or five times, from very far away. The bathtub was empty and dry. The baby kicked, and Dora Halliday’s hand spread over the small chest and held her down—the baby kicked, and Lacey’s own hand was spread over her belly, pressing too hard against the life inside her.

“Lacey!” Ella Dane pulled Lacey’s hand away. “What is it?”

“I saw something.” No. She had recalled it, not as her own memory, as if someone had told her
this is what happened
. “It was the beginning of the murders. I think maybe the mother killed the baby. Does that make a difference?”

Jack McMure said, “The name would make a difference.” He leaned over the herbal smoke and wafted it toward his face. The smoke seemed stronger in here than in the other rooms, both the bright and the dark odors more intense, the clouds white and swirling, like cream poured into water, because this room was smaller.

Maybe some other reason.

“It’s James or Matthew,” Lacey said.

“We’ll have to keep calling him Drew, since that’s the name he chose,” Ella Dane said.

“This is the fountainhead,” Jack McMure said.

“Does he mean there are ghosts in here?” Lacey asked.

“Imprints,” Jack said.

Lacey looked at her mother, who explained, “Influences, memories, stains.”

Like a young woman, her saint’s face rigid as her youngest child breathed water under her hand? A memory, a stain. Lacey stared into the smoke until her eyes smarted, trying to read messages in the white cloud.