“Let me give you her number,” the tall husband said, and Lacey noted: not our number. “I’m sure she’ll be happy to hear from you.”
Lacey called the number, and a small girl, one of the auburn-haired twins, answered the telephone. “Can I talk to your mom?” Lacey asked.
“I don’t know,” the little girl said slyly, “can you?” She giggled.
“Aren’t you the cutest thing, you. May I speak to your mother?”
The little girl handed the phone over, and Greeley Honeywick said, “Who’s this?” She had a PTA-mom voice, no time for nonsense. This was a woman who held a full-time job, kept her house perfect, was active in her children’s school, and ran triathlons, all with no feet.
Lacey heard all that in those three words, so she said briskly, “Ms. Honeywick, I’m calling from Greeneburg, South Carolina, and we’re doing a piece in the newspaper on alums and teachers from Burgoyne Elementary. Your name came up.”
“How?”
“Somebody remembered, and I Googled you. Honeywicks aren’t exactly a dime a dozen. Do you have a minute?”
Greeley launched into a well-practiced lecture on the importance of physical fitness for young people, and an upcoming fund-raising triathlon for the Special Olympics. It was like listening to Ella Dane explain how to sprout wheat. All that sincerity and well-meaningness. Please, no more. Drew could appear any second; there was no time for this. “And I understand you lost both feet?” Lacey interrupted.
“Yes. A domestic accident.”
“Did it happen while you were teaching here at Burgoyne?”
“It happened at home. Domestic, that’s what it means.”
That vertigo, the terror on the stairs. Lacey held her breath for a moment, for courage, and said, “Did you fall down the stairs?”
“You’re not from any paper. Who are you?”
“Did you live at 571 Forrester Lane?” Lacey asked.
Silence, so long that Lacey began to wonder if she’d been cut off, and then Greeley said, “Do you?”
“There’s this thing on the stairs, something falling.”
“It’s not me. I mean, I fell down the stairs, but the thing was there when I moved in. It kind of came over me one time; it overtook me and I fell. I never told anyone what happened. The thing on the stairs. Nobody would believe me.”
It was true. It was all true. After everything she’d felt and seen in the house, Lacey was still amazed. Ella Dane believed it, but Ella Dane believed anything. This sane stranger, her faith mattered. Maybe she felt the same about Lacey, maybe she had held her secret for eighteen years, waiting for this call.
“I believe you,” Lacey said. “Was it a little boy?”
“My legs were broken, and then I got this infection in the hospital and lost my feet. And I was pregnant when I fell. Three months. What’s it to you?”
That child should be seventeen. There was no teenager next to the auburn-haired twins in any of the pictures. Also, Greeley had sidestepped the question of Drew. “I’m pregnant,” Lacey said. “Twenty-nine weeks.”
“How’ve you kept it so long?” This question took Lacey’s breath away. Greeley went on, “I did some research on the house after we moved. There hasn’t been a live baby born in that house since 1972. He doesn’t like babies.”
Madison Grey had known the truth: It eats babies, she’d said. That meant Drew, when he was angry. Lacey saw Ella Dane’s room smashed. That could be her baby’s room, six months from now. Stuffed animals shredded, cardboard books exploded in confetti, slats of the crib driven like spears into the walls. The corner of a blue blanket showing under the overturned body of the crib—blue satin turning red. And silence. Lacey’s eyes burned. She swallowed and swallowed but could not speak.
Drew killed children. If Lacey doubted it, she could go upstairs (when it was safe, whenever that might be) and look at the ceiling of Ella Dane’s room, the demolished plaster, the beams, the drooping swaths of pink fiberglass. The handyman still hadn’t come to fix it; there was all the evidence a person could want.
“I have to go,” Greeley said. “You’d better get out now, that’s all I can say to you; get out now and hope it’s not too late. He was in the hospital, and he touched my feet. . . . I felt them die. I felt the baby dying inside me. Don’t you remember Beth Craddock? Get out.” She hung up the phone.
Lacey laid her own phone on the nightstand and lay back against the cushions. Dying inside. She realized she’d felt no motion from the baby for an hour or two. With both hands, she bounced her belly, waited for some answering motion, shook it again. Wake up, be alive. Strong as an eel, the baby pushed against her hands and slid away.