“Stop!” Lacey slapped Drew. “Stop it now!”
Drew’s left hand flew to his cheek and he stared at Lacey. “You hit me.”
She stumbled backward, as shocked as he was. She had never hit a child, not even the one who tried to strangle his bully. “I’m sorry, Drew, I’m sorry.”
“You did it on purpose.”
“No, no.”
Tears kaleidoscoped her sight. The colors splintered, the child’s yellow hair and white shirt, the golden floor and the red runner. There was blood on the floor, and the other voice was Ella Dane, saying again, “It’s okay, baby, you made him stop.”
Bibbits had barked himself into a panting stillness. Blood ran down Ella Dane’s left arm, and Lacey’s hands were sticky. “Mom,” she whispered. “What happened? What did I do?”
“Can you bandage this for me?” Ella Dane was using her emergency voice, calm and competent and ready for anything. Something terrible must have happened.
“You need stitches.” Lacey remembered the broken plate. She’d picked up the broken plate, that big piece. And then what? Something had attacked her, and she’d fought it off with the weapon in her hand. “Did I do that?”
Ella Dane squeezed her arm above the cut. “There’s a first aid kit under the kitchen sink. We have to get out of here, Lacey; there’s no time. Bandages. And can you grab my laptop, and Bibbits’s blanket from the living room. Before he comes back.”
“He’s still here,” Lacey said.
Ella Dane picked Bibbits up and the dog pressed against her, shivering, too exhausted even to cough. “Are you sure?”
She felt it, all the air in the house pressing in against her breastbone, and the baby kicking in protest. Lacey closed her hands. He had used her to attack Ella Dane, stepped inside her as easily as entering an unlocked room. Never again. She was a teacher, and it was time he learned what that meant. It all began with control. You had to rule the room, first thing on the first day. Lacey had never had trouble ruling the room. It was all in the look. The teacher’s eye.
She’d let him get away with it. She’d let him think it was his house. “You go out and wait for me,” she said, and Ella Dane obeyed as unthinkingly as any well-trained nine-year-old, out the door before the echo faded.
Lacey faced the stairs. “That will be enough,” she said, in the mild but deadly pay-attention voice. Screaming never helped. The children who most needed discipline had been ignoring screams their whole lives. “Go to your room.”
All the upstairs doors opened and slammed together. The feeling of presence lifted, as if a too-tight mask had fallen from Lacey’s face. Something shook in her throat, a whimper fluttering to escape, and she held it down. Teachers did not whimper. Rule the room. She let her gaze sweep left into the living room, up the stairs, to the right of the stairs toward the dining room and kitchen, deliberately moving her head and not just her eyes. Nothing moved.
“Stay here,” she said, and she left the house.
Chapter Twenty-seven
ELLA DANE HAD PUT BIBBITS in her car. She took her laptop from Lacey and said, “You drive first, I’ll follow you.”
“I have to call Eric.”
“First we leave. Call him when we get there.”
“Where?”
“Columbia, my friend Jack—he’ll know what to do.”
Lacey shook her head. Drew had forced her from the house; there was no way Eric would leave Greeneburg, so she had to stay. “Somewhere closer,” she said.
“It’s not your fault,” Ella Dane said.
Whose fault was it, then? Lacey had made cookies with Drew and taught him to draw. She had welcomed him without resistance into her loneliness; she had opened the door. She licked her lips, tasting salt. “Beth Craddock.”
“Who’s that?”
“She used to live here. She drowned her little boy. She said she couldn’t have done it, someone came into the house while she was asleep.”
No living baby since 1972. A green landscape kept rising in Lacey’s inner vision, bright fields of sugar, populated by tiny dinosaurs. Tyler Craddock’s birthday cake. Focus. “Those hotels out by the airport,” she said. “They’re all less than ten years old. Let’s go there.” Maybe Drew couldn’t go to a new place, somewhere he’d never been in life, a building raised after his death. That made sense; she clung to it.
Ella Dane must have had the same thought. “How long has he been in the house, this spirit of yours?”
“Forty years.”
“What happened forty years ago?” Ella Dane asked as Lacey got into her car.