“All of them!” Madison flew down the steps and along the sidewalk, stopping only when she was past Harry’s house.
“I’m really sorry,” CarolAnna said, with irritation. She was apologizing for Madison’s rudeness, not for the house and its secrets. “It’s just rumors. You got a good deal on this house. You should be happy here.”
CarolAnna followed her daughter down the street, and the front door ripped itself from Lacey’s hand and slammed. Drew stood there, red-faced and shaking. “Don’t listen to people!” he said. “Don’t let them in. I told you not to!”
“I want to know what it means,” she said.
“I don’t have to tell you anything.”
Lacey leaned against the door and locked her hands on the doorknob behind her. “Where do you live?” she said.
“Here. It’s my house.”
The doorknob pressed into Lacey’s back. That was hard and solid, a real thing. She pressed against it to the point of pain. This was happening, not a dream; Drew was the unseen thing in the murder house—she didn’t have the luxury of disbelief, not if the baby was in danger. “How long have you lived here?”
“Since forever. I never left.” His breath hitched (his breath, she noticed, what breath?), and he snorted and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. It was too real. Ghost, she thought, but she could not believe it. Her mind flurried with images of last fall’s PTA fund-raiser, Spookapalooza; she had supervised the haunted bouncy house, and the little spooks lined up with their faces painted, zombie, vampire, witch, just as physically present as Drew was now. He was barefoot, and his left big toenail was bruised black. How could that not be real? He snorted and wiped again, and she couldn’t resist; she let go of the doorknob and opened her arms to him, as she would to any unhappy child.
He burrowed in her arms, and his hair smelled of salt and dirt. This had to be real, this living child, this warmth, the softness of his T-shirt, his shoes squeaking on the floor. “You can cry if you need to,” she said. “It’s okay.”
“I’m not crying.” Drew let go of her, pushed her away, and ran for the back door. He was gone, and the door neither opened nor closed; Ella Dane, with her laptop on the kitchen table, didn’t raise her head as he passed. Ella Dane, who claimed to be a psychic. Crystals and candles, and communion with the spirits of strangers’ dogs. Drew’s feet pounded behind her chair—he ran so close behind her, she could have touched him as he passed—and she sensed nothing. Her blindness to Drew shook Lacey more than Madison’s story or CarolAnna’s obvious discomfort.
Maybe the hormones of pregnancy had opened some long-locked door in Lacey’s brain, and Drew was not a ghost, but madness; she was haunting herself. It was just as likely—more likely. Lacey’s knees gave way, and she sat down and leaned against the door. Her life was filled by a child she did not know; was Drew her someday baby, the imaginary become real? But the other children told Madison Grey a scary story when she started violin lessons. If the house had a dark history, the children would remember.
The fourth-grade girls shunned the table with the poison touch. Not all the fourth-grade girls, just a particular group, too old for their years, with double-pierced ears and ironed hair. They were obnoxious, all rolling eyes and jutting hips and supercilious, impatient groans. They were hysterical, superstitious, irrational. But they weren’t wrong. At that table, a kindergartner had almost died of a peanut allergy three months earlier. The fourth graders and the kindergartners never crossed paths, yet the girls knew. Don’t sit there, it’s got the poison touch.
Who would know about her house? She couldn’t ask CarolAnna Grey, who had already concealed so much and would be on guard against further questioning. Ella Dane was obviously no help. It eats babies, Madison said. Lacey had to know before the baby came.
Chapter Thirteen
ALL LACEY’S LIFE, she had watched her mother know the unknowable: she’d kept Lacey home from school the day of a tornado, she could always find a lost thing by standing still and repeating its name. Social studies book, social studies book—you were studying in bed and it’s fallen between the mattress and the headboard. Coincidence, Eric called it, when Ella Dane greeted him by name on the telephone without benefit of caller ID. Lacey always carried an umbrella if Ella Dane suggested it, no matter how bright the day seemed. So if the house was dangerous, how could Ella Dane not know?
Lacey went into the kitchen and said, “Mom, did you feel something come through here just now?”