Lex’s knife whirled over the desk, dismembering the pineapple in tidy slices. “This is a good pineapple,” he said. He put the knife in his bag and left the room.
Eric moved the laptop to a dry corner of the desk. He sank backward into his chair, blinking the panic haze out of his eyes. As soon as the door shut, he buzzed Sammie again and said, “Does Lex Hall owe us money?”
“I need to go over his account.”
“Don’t. Just let him out. Lock the door behind him.”
Eric heard doors opening and closing, and Sammie’s professional voice: “Have a nice afternoon, sir.” Then she was back, asking urgently, “Do you need the cops? What’s going on in there?”
Eric looked at the pictures: the car seat, the woman forcing the baby’s hand closed around the chicken leg. What must it be like to be Lex Hall, frustrated, indignant, boiling over with desperate love, lacking even the most basic vocabulary to explain himself? The pineapple wasn’t a threat. It was a moral argument.
“Sure,” he said, “everything’s fine.”
The pineapple was beautiful, translucent gold rayed with deeper gold veins, and it tasted sweeter than canned fruit, rich and fresh, without the gummy aftertaste of syrup. As a moral argument, it was pretty damn convincing. But it wouldn’t go over well in court.
Chapter Seventeen
A WEEK AFTER Lacey questioned Harry Rakoczy, while she was still wondering how to find someone else to ask besides the obvious (Drew himself), Ella Dane came home with a sort-of-not-really-a-futon, a sofa-sized thing similar to a dog bed, stuffed with buckwheat.
Lacey nudged the sack with her foot. “We’ll never eat this much buckwheat.”
“It’s a bed. My friend Jack McMure says buckwheat is a natural psychic buffer.”
Ella Dane didn’t want to sleep upstairs after what Drew had done to her room. She’d been camping out on the living room sofa, and now she dragged the buckwheat sack into the other front room, the future formal parlor. The next morning she claimed she had never slept better in her life, there was nothing for the spine like sleeping on buckwheat, and the grain gave off a life energy so beneficial to the lungs, “much better than your metal coils,” she said, “and the cover’s a mixture of bamboo and hemp.” Lacey noticed Bibbits gnawing a corner of it and wondered how long it would take him to open it.
Lacey went online and searched for haunted houses in Greeneburg. She found dozens of websites for Halloween attractions, and surprisingly few reports of real hauntings, most of them not in the city of Greeneburg but in mountain palaces in the north of the county, summer homes of wealthy nineteenth-century families, all of them a hundred years old at least and most of them well into their second lives as bed-and-breakfast inns. Romantic haunted weekends abounded. Ladies in white could be seen in rose gardens, Confederate soldiers walked on porches, and phantom carriages raced down old roads, bearing doomed lovers to tragedy. The Confederate Museum in downtown Greeneburg was so thronged with haunted relics that no dog would enter the building, and a blind tourist from Pennsylvania had filed suit against it. There was a photograph of glowing orbs outside the old county courthouse; it reminded her of Ella Dane’s ideas about ghosts. She found no information about 571 Forrester, and she preferred not to discuss her search with Ella Dane.
Though Lacey slept alone, Drew never came. Eric visited her room every evening, but he was far away even when present, doing something important in his mind, drafting documents and planning depositions. Dutifully he asked her about her day. Her day was fine. She was reading a book about Piaget. She had walked around the block. “Great,” he said heartily and left her to sleep alone.
She saw less of him now than when they were first dating. She’d fallen in love with his car, to begin with, the powder-blue BMW Z4, a noticeable car on campus; she’d wanted to be seen in that car to make another guy jealous. Her friends, especially her roommate, Phyllis, warned her the driver of a car like that couldn’t help but be a spoiled rotten kid and a jerk. She wondered if Eric’s friends advised him he could never be sure if a girl wanted him or his car. He’d been shy of her and so respectful she wasn’t sure why he’d asked her out at all. When the time came for him to make the move, he didn’t, for weeks. Finally, one evening in his apartment, she took off her clothes and asked him what he planned to do about it. He said, “I wasn’t sure you wanted to.” She laughed, but it worried her; the next morning he said he loved her, so that was all right.
Was he doing that again? Waiting for her to make the move, to be certain she wouldn’t reject him? She was off bed rest and Dr. Vlk assured her that sex was safe, but Lacey thought it wasn’t—not with Drew in the house. It might upset him, and after what he’d done to Ella Dane’s room, that was not a risk she was willing to take.