Starter House(110)

“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.”