Starter House(55)

“If you can go see the doctor, you can make cookies.”

Nothing strenuous. After what he’d done the last time he lost his temper, she didn’t dare refuse. She’d never feared a child—but she’d also never taught a child who could kill her. She dragged herself out of bed and took her laptop into the kitchen, where she found black and orange construction paper and set Drew to cutting out pumpkins and hunchbacked cats while she put a batch of sugar cookies in the oven.

“This is nice,” she said. She poured a glass of milk and sat next to Drew. The smell of warm vanilla filled the room. This wasn’t so bad—maybe she could live with it. It was like having her own private classroom, a class of one.

He crumpled up the cat he was working on. “I messed up again!”

“It’s for Halloween. There’s no such thing as messing up; it’s a monster cat.”

“It’s only got three legs and its ears are weird.”

“We’ll name it Frankenkitty. Look how ferocious it is.” Lacey smoothed out the crumpled cat and made it dance along the table. “Look at me, I’m big and bad. Oh no!” Frankenkitty bumped against the glass of milk. “Poor Frankenkitty, he can’t see where he’s going, what shall we do?”

Drew looked sideways at the paper cat. “Make eyes for it?”

Lacey cut eyeholes in the paper cat’s head: one, two, and then a third, right in the middle. She taped over the eyeholes and then colored the clear tape with red marker, adding a black slit to the center of each eye. “Monster three-eyed cat!”

“Cool,” Drew said. “What’s that smell?”

“Cookies!” Lacey lunged for the oven. She got to the cookies just before they burned, and by the time they were cool enough to eat, Drew had lost interest in making Halloween decorations.

“Bored bored bored bored,” he chanted, kicking the table leg.

“Stop that.”

“Don’t have to listen to you. You’re not my mother. Bored bored bored bored.” He slowed down his chant and found a way to make the word even more ugly and irritating: he paused on the r, thrusting his chin forward, curling his tongue, and lifting his upper lip. “I’m borrrrrrrrrrrrrred.”

Boredom was only a step away from irritation on the noisy-boy emotional scale. Boredom, irritation, petulance, annoyance, anger. Greeley Honeywick fell down the stairs and felt her baby die. Remember Beth Craddock, a name Lacey hadn’t felt safe searching for, with Drew breathing down her neck every time she opened the laptop. Discipline, distract, and redirect. “Let’s play a game,” she said urgently.

Drew stopped kicking. “What kind of a game?”

“Chutes and Ladders. It’s in with my school stuff. Eric put it in the attic, in a cardboard box somewhere. Go get it, and we’ll play.”

Lacey listened to Drew’s feet pounding up the stairs. How would he get into the attic? Would he float up or materialize there? If he just appeared out of nowhere, as he seemed to do so often, could he carry a real thing like the Chutes and Ladders game with him? What about the things he had, the bicycle and his clothes and everything else, did they only exist when he wanted them?

By the sound of it, Drew was dragging a chair from the master bedroom to the attic hatch. Then came the groan of the attic hatch opening, and the crash of the stairs sliding open. Seconds later, without closing the attic hatch or putting Eric’s chair away, Drew ran into the kitchen with spiderwebs in his hair and the Chutes and Ladders game in his hands. “Can I be green?”

“Sure. You set it up while I check e-mail.” Lacey logged on as Drew unfolded the Chutes and Ladders board, pausing to eat two more cookies. “You practice rolling the die,” Lacey said. Now was her chance, while Drew was busy with the cookies and the game. She Googled Beth Craddock.

“Six,” Drew said. He rolled a six. “Four.” He rolled a four.

“No cheating,” Lacey said. There were three Beth Craddocks. One came up on a genealogy website. She had seventeen children and died in 1783, probably of exhaustion, poor thing. One was an optometrist in Fairbanks, Alaska, offering a free eye exam with purchase of frames. Generous, but unlikely. The third was a South Carolina woman who had murdered her two-year-old son in 1981 by drowning him in the bath. Lacey’s heart stood still and the baby’s pulse beat in her veins like a hummingbird. She remembered the day she had washed Bibbits, how irrationally determined she had been that he must be clean, now; how she had held him underwater as his paddling feet slowed.

“Did you ever play with a kid called Tyler Craddock?” she asked. She moved her cursor to the minimize button, ready to vanish the page if Drew looked toward her.