Starter House(30)
“No.” Lacey set aside the conversation with Drew, her dream, every eerie sensation she’d had. The murder house. She wouldn’t tell Ella Dane; she rejected it completely. This was a thing she would not allow. And she had touched Drew; she had hugged him—he was real. “He lives in the neighborhood.” He was trouble; he knew 571 Forrester’s reputation, just as Madison Grey did, and he’d tried to make her believe he was the thing in the house, but she would not believe it, would not, would not.
“No child could do this,” Ella Dane said, waving at the ruin of her room.
“You have to keep the doors locked. He’s been coming in.”
“All right, Miss Clever, if a little boy did this, if a child broke my bed and smashed the ceiling, where is he? We came up the stairs. There’s no other way out.”
“The window. He must have climbed down the tree.” Tree climbing: an old-fashioned skill. A tree-climbing boy was now as rare as a candy-making mother. The branches closest to the window were thinner than Lacey’s wrist.
Ella Dane shook her head. “You’ve got big problems here, Lacey. You’ve got to take it seriously.”
Lacey picked up a handful of shredded rags, something that used to be one of Ella Dane’s long cotton dresses. “Go get some garbage bags,” she said. “We can get most of this picked up before Eric comes home.”
“The window,” Ella Dane said. “The ceiling.”
“I’ll ask Harry; he’s got to know a handyman. I don’t want Eric to worry about this.”
“I’m worrying,” Ella Dane grumbled, but she caught Lacey’s urgency and ran downstairs for the box of garbage bags.
Chapter Fourteen
THE YOUNG LAWYER needed evidence. Lex well knew what evidence was. It was what they showed in court, to tell the things you did and make a story of it. The lawyers told the story to each other until the thing that really happened disappeared. When you tried to remember, only the story was left, until in the end you told the story yourself, the same story everybody else was telling. Evidence, they called it.
If he wanted to save Theo, he had to tell his own story. Nobody else was going to do it. The lawyer? Five hundred bucks wouldn’t pay the lawyer to find out the truth. Lawyers on TV did that, not real lawyers. Lex bought a camera for seventy bucks and spent another twenty for the memory card. He took pictures of cars in the drugstore parking lot, figuring out how to zoom and take video. By then it was dark.
The streets around Autumn Breeze Apartments, where Jeanne had taken Theo to stay with her mother, Big Jeanne, were busy as always. People drove through the complex’s parking lots at all hours, with their car stereos so loud the Dumpsters in the back lot shivered like big metal drums. The complex had twenty buildings, twelve units per building, three stories each with one apartment in each quarter.
He liked the design. It made sense, like a stack of oranges. He didn’t like the yellow lights, too few and too far apart. He didn’t like the skateboarding kids who zoomed out from the darkness between the buildings. They didn’t care what kind of place they lived in or what it would do to them. The place was loud and senseless; everybody shouted, and laughter sounded like screams. The only good thing about it was the azalea bushes around the back walls of the buildings, so he could get right up to Jeanne’s windows and nobody could see him.
It was after nine at night, and Theo wasn’t in bed. He’d been raising her right, training her to sleep and wake and eat on a schedule, the way he lived his own life, the way the old man taught him: now you do your homework, now you practice the violin. Here it was 9:15 and Theo was strapped in her car seat on the kitchen table, alone, red-faced, shiny around the nose and chin. She’d been crying. Lex took out the memory card and put it back in again twice, to be sure. He zoomed on the window.
Theo started crying again. Lex had a perfect view, and he couldn’t hear a thing. It was like watching a life-sized TV screen with the sound muted.
Jeanne came in with a bucket of chicken, a thigh piece in her left hand. She tore off a chunk of the skin and waved the thigh piece toward the next room, talking with her mouth full.
Seeing her mother, Theo waved her arms and legs. Lex knew from the look on her face that she wanted a clean diaper. Theo hated to be dirty. Jeanne gave the baby a chicken leg. Theo threw the chicken leg on the table. Jeanne gave it back to her. Theo threw it again. Jeanne put it in the baby’s left hand, wrapped the fingers around it, and forced the chicken leg toward the baby’s mouth. Theo turned her head away. The car seat held her in place, and with the chicken in her mouth she had to eat it or suffocate.