Starter House(116)
“He’s conscious?”
“Not yet. Docs say there’s a bad concussion and a lot of broken bones. They’re putting him back together. The knife stayed in Hall. I knew he was trouble. We told him to get a different lawyer,” he said to the cop, “and he took it bad.”
“What bones?” Lacey said. “He’s not—it’s not his spine? He’s not paralyzed?”
“Legs, hip, arm, skull fracture. Don’t worry, girl, he’ll pull through.”
“Tell me what happened,” the cop said.
Someone was interviewing Harry Rakoczy, right now. Someone was interviewing Lex Hall’s wife. Ella Dane, somewhere in this same hospital with Jack—someone would find her soon and question her. Lacey braced herself and said, “Okay, so. This is how it is. I only met Lex a couple times at Harry’s house when he brought the baby over. Something happened last night with him and his ex, I guess, maybe. I don’t know.”
“Don’t tell me what you don’t know, ma’am. Tell me what you know. Where were you last night?”
“I stayed at Harry’s.” How odd that must sound to them; why hadn’t she been in her own house, right next door? “Eric and I had a fight. Mom’s boyfriend fell down the stairs so she was here with him, and I didn’t want to be alone. You know, in case I went into labor.”
“Lots of people fall down those stairs, seems like,” the cop said.
He had no idea. “We need to get a contractor to look at them,” Lacey said.
“What did you and your husband fight about?”
“Money. It was stupid. He spent the night I don’t know where . . .”
“With me,” Floyd said, to Lacey’s surprise. “At my girlfriend’s condo.”
“And this morning?” the cop said.
The baby’s pulse surged to 210. They all watched it, the living lie detector. What would Harry and Ella Dane say—what could they say? Ella Dane might say anything. “My mom thinks the house is haunted,” Lacey said. Floyd buzzed his lips, and the cop gave him a reproachful look. “I can’t help it, that’s what she thinks. She and her boyfriend were doing a ritual to make it safe; that’s when he fell.” The baby’s pulse fell to 180. “It sounds crazy, I’m sorry, but that’s what they did. I stayed with Harry. Lex came over with his baby.”
“When?”
“How would I know? I had a lot on my mind. In the morning I went home.” Theo. Theo had gone back and forth between the Miszlak and Rakoczy houses. There would be evidence of that. “I took Lex’s baby for a few minutes so Lex and Harry could talk. Then Harry came and took her back. And then Lex came over, and he was shouting, crazy.” And he was dead, the one witness who could never refute her testimony. “Yelling, screaming, I don’t know what. He broke a plant on my porch.” Would Harry admit to breaking the plant? If he did, she’d say she’d only heard the smash and had assumed it was Lex. “I don’t know what he wanted.”
“I do,” Floyd said. “He wanted Eric.”
Corroboration. She must be doing all right. “So Eric came home and they talked, him and Lex. I was . . .” And where was she? If they questioned Eric before she had a chance to talk to him—his concussion would cover any discrepancies. “I was running a bath. Lex came upstairs, and he had the knife.” Eric had been holding the knife; her fingerprints were on it, too. Her knife from her kitchen, why not. “Eric got the knife away from Lex, they were fighting and they fell down the stairs.”
“Did you let Hall in?” the cop said.
“I might have left the door unlocked, I don’t remember.”
The cop shook his head at her, Stupid woman, leaving the door unlocked, you think your neighborhood’s so nice but if you knew what I knew, and she knew he was convinced. Floyd patted Lacey’s hand and said to the cop, “You got enough? This girl needs to rest, now.”
“We might have some more questions later.”
“You got more questions, you come to me,” Floyd said. He waited until the cop left and added, “That goes double for you. They got questions, you call me. Got it?”
“I’ve got nothing to hide,” Lacey said.
“You keep telling them that.” He leaned over and kissed her forehead. “You done good. I’ll keep an eye on the boy for you.”
Left alone, Lacey watched the baby’s heartbeat on the monitor, steady at 180. Safe and whole. She grabbed the sheet with both hands and pulled it up, bunching it in a mass on her knees. The thought of the house she now possessed, the family she had defended, left her desolate. Dropping her face into the bundled sheet, she sobbed for that wasted, lost, and ruined life, the child she had failed to save, for Lex, for Drew.