“Don’t answer that door,” he said, with a childish ferocity that triggered her teacher’s instinct to take him to a quiet place and ask what was wrong. The doorbell rang again. “Don’t talk to her.”
Who? Her thoughts scattered. There was something important, something she had to tell or ask him, but some mute heavy thing sat on her tongue and resisted her. She pushed through it. “Where is your mother?” she said, but that wasn’t what she needed to know. She opened the door and saw CarolAnna Grey and a little girl with a clipboard.
“Hey, Lacey,” CarolAnna said. “It’s nice to see you. This is Madison.” She pushed the child forward. Lacey glanced back up the stairs. Drew was gone.
“You want to buy something for my school?” Madison thrust a dog-eared catalog at Lacey: Academy Notions, a collection of Christmas gift wrap, scented candles, and outrageously expensive chocolate. The PTA at her old school used the same firm. Waxy chocolate, magnolia-scented candles, flimsy gift wrap and plastic Christmas banners: dollar-store goods at boutique prices, and the PTA got 5 percent of the profits.
At least this child would leave, not hang around the house, appearing in nightmares and sliding around corners. “Sure,” Lacey said, taking the catalog. Madison showed no enthusiasm at this possible sale, but CarolAnna took a step forward, holding out a pen. “Do they still have the candied pecans?” Lacey asked.
“I dunno.”
“Madison! Page seven,” CarolAnna hissed.
Madison rolled her eyes. “What she said.”
CarolAnna handed Lacey the pen and the order form, and Lacey said, “My checkbook’s inside. Come in and cool off for a minute.”
CarolAnna hesitated, glancing along the empty street as if someone might be waiting for her. “Thanks,” she said just before the silence became awkward. “I’d like to see what you’ve done with the place.”
Lacey was as delighted as if a carload of her old friends had come up from Columbia. Maybe CarolAnna would stay a while. Sit on the back porch, drink iced tea, try Ella Dane’s black bean paste fudge. “I’m so glad you came,” Lacey said.
Madison jumped backward down the porch steps. “I’m not going in there. It’s the murder house.” Her voice hung and echoed off the porthole window.
“Murder house?” Lacey said blankly. You know this already, the teacher voice admonished her.
“I told you when you were looking at it,” CarolAnna said quickly, as if responding to an accusation. “There were deaths.”
“Not murder.” Lacey kept her voice steady. She was surprised—she wanted to be surprised—but the shock felt more like recognition. The murder house, of course; what other house could it conceivably be? CarolAnna’s well-trained face was blandly open, making the moment ordinary; it was nothing, happened every day, just two adults chatting about the strange ideas of children. “Murder.” Lacey pushed the word at CarolAnna. She hadn’t spoken it in July, so she’d have to hear it now. “Murder. I’d have remembered that.”
She wrote her address on the order form. She thought she was moving slowly, performing large simple gestures for an audience far away, but the handwriting was a panicky sputtering scrawl, not her own teacherly script.
“Nobody’s ever seen it and lived,” Madison said pertly. “The thing in the house. It eats babies. There’s never been a baby in this house.”
On cue, the baby kicked. “There’s one now,” Lacey said. What would Eric say to this? She needed his voice. He would laugh. He would give no more credence to a child’s superstition than to a squirrel hissing in a tree.
“You wait,” Madison said.
“Maddie, stop. There’s nothing at all wrong with this house,” CarolAnna said.
“The kids at school told me about it,” Madison said. “Everyone knows.”
Lacey had to stay calm to get the rest of the story. “It’s perfectly normal. Kids always tell stories. Where I taught, the fourth-grade girls wouldn’t sit at this one table in the cafeteria. It had the poison touch, that’s what they said. So what about this house, Madison?” She wrote out the check: fifteen dollars for three ounces of candied pecans. Ridiculous.
“The kids told me when I started taking violin with Mr. Harry. They told me, Don’t go next door or the thing will get you, the thing in the murder house. Because of all the people that died here.”
CarolAnna, flushed under her makeup, was already reaching for the check. Lacey had only a few seconds to get more information from Madison, and she needed to know everything—was there danger, was the baby in danger? “How many people?” she said.