Starter House(115)

“Make him stop,” she said. “Don’t let him hurt himself.”

“Stay back,” and she couldn’t tell anymore if it was Eric’s voice or Drew’s. “Stay back,” he said again, whoever he was. “Lacey, stay back.”

They were at her feet. She put out her bleeding hand as if she could stop them. Lex clung to Drew, arms and legs wrapped tight, and Lacey pulled up the teacher’s voice one last time: “Sideways. Now.”

They rolled over each other at the top of the stairs, and Eric’s foot shot out and felt for the banister post, braced and pushed. They fell, Eric and Lex and Drew and the knife together, into blood and silence. Lacey waited for the contraction to pass, so she could go and call for help.





Chapter Fifty-one

THE NURSE ADJUSTED THE STRAP around Lacey’s belly, and the baby’s pulse flashed on the monitor’s screen, 183. “Is that fast?” Lacey said. She preferred the other machine, the one that said hush-hush. This one showed the baby’s pulse in a jagged blue line with a red number. She tugged the strap; the line flattened, the red number dropped to zero, and the nurse made an impatient noise and pulled it back into position. The number jumped to 208, and adrenaline prickled in Lacey’s veins. She pretended not to see the watcher by her bed, the cop with his clipboard, waiting to question her. “It’s getting faster,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. It’s normal,” the nurse said. She turned the machine so Lacey could see the screen without craning her neck. “He’s fine; you’re both fine. Dr. Vlk will be here soon. I’ll go find out how Dad’s doing, okay?”

Lacey had come to the hospital in the ambulance, holding Eric’s hand; he was unconscious but breathing, the EMTs said, monitoring his breath, flashing lights into his eyes. He was stretchered into the emergency room, and a nurse came with a wheelchair to take her up to Labor and Delivery, depositing her in a curtained cubicle with a frighteningly narrow bed. She clutched the sides to keep from rolling off. Lex had come in a different ambulance, followed by police.

“Can you talk now, Ms. Miszlak?” There were two cops. One was waiting in the ER for news of Eric, and this one had followed her upstairs. She liked him; he had a warm, basset-hound face, creased by years of sympathy. He was not her ally, she reminded herself. He was no friend of hers. “Tell me what happened,” he invited.

Lacey settled into the pillows. After everything they’d gone through, they weren’t out of danger yet. She was exhausted; she wanted to cry, she wanted to sleep, but first she wanted an ultrasound to tell her the baby was safe. What did the police want from her—what kind of trouble was this? She needed time to think.

“I need to know if my husband’s okay,” she said. She had squeezed his hand in the ambulance, until the EMT pushed her aside, and his hand had been utterly unresponsive, all expression and personality wiped out of his face; she had never seen him like that, even in his deepest sleep.

“The man in your house. He’s someone you know?”

“Lex Hall. My husband’s a lawyer, he’s a client. And he’s my neighbor’s nephew. What about Lex, is he okay?”

Oh, that sympathetic look; she didn’t trust him at all. “We don’t know yet.”

That meant he was dead. Lacey laid her hands over the monitor belt and made her fingers relax. The baby’s pulse stayed steady at 179. Lex dead. Surely this meant Drew was gone, Andrew Halliday was made whole, the lost child and the broken man. Her eyes overflowed, and she reached for the tissues on the table and blew her nose.

The curtain opened and Eric’s uncle Floyd sailed in, jovial in his pink seersucker suit and a maroon bow tie. “You answering questions without me, girl?” he boomed.

Lacey gaped at him. “Why not?”

“You been cautioned?”

“She needs to be cautioned?” the cop said.

“Does she?” Floyd said.

That was all the caution she needed. Drew had killed Lex, destroying the memory he could not endure. For the world and the law, there was no Drew. If Lex was dead, Eric had killed him. His freedom, their future, depended on Lacey’s words. She gathered her shattered thoughts. Water in the tub, blood on the stairs—Lacey in a bathrobe, Eric with a knife. What narrative could make sense of this? The stranger in the house, always the same stranger, from the beginning.

“Uncle Floyd,” she said. “How is Eric? Have you seen him?”

He dragged a metal chair through the curtain and sat at the head of her bed, where he could watch the fetal monitor. “Baby’s still good,” he said. “I’ll tell him.”