Starter House(66)

She slapped the laptop closed, and he pulled his hands away just in time. “I like Lacey,” she said. “She’s a sweetie. You should bring her round here more often. And now, go home.”





Chapter Twenty-nine

“I’M JUST SAYING,” Ella Dane said again, “get to the ATM. Cash, baby girl. Cash is a girl’s best friend.” The drama of their flight had taken ten, maybe twenty, years from her life, and she had flicked back to an earlier self, as if her personality were a deck of cards newly shuffled, and instead of the queen of diamonds (spiritual and refined), the topmost card was now the jack of clubs (vigorous and combative). She was the veteran of a dozen sudden flights from homes that had abruptly become unbearable. Never for exactly this reason, but she was no stranger to blood on the floor, the sudden seizure of all that was most precious and abandonment of everything else.

She even insisted on stopping at Little Pigs on Airport Road and eating a pulled-pork sandwich, the first meat she’d touched for years. Consequently, she now called to Lacey from the bathroom, where she and the barbecue disputed for possession of her body. More groans, another flush, and Ella Dane’s voice again, now gray and dim: “They can use credit cards to follow you, baby.”

“Who can?”

“Men.” Another flush. “Cash tells no tales. There’s an ATM in the lobby.”

“We’re not running away from Eric. We’re running away from the house.”

“It’s the same thing. He’ll never believe you. And if he does believe you, the worst that happens is you put the money back, no harm, no foul.”

“There might be fees.”

“Cash. Trust me. Go get it.”

Lacey went down to the lobby and withdrew the daily maximum from the joint checking account: five hundred dollars. The machine charged a five-dollar fee. She pressed Cancel and thought about it. Five hundred dollars. She’d never had that much all at once, cash in hand. But this lively, powerful version of Ella Dane, this was the mother who got her enrolled in the best high school in the district when they were technically homeless, by parking the car in the school’s parking lot and refusing to move until Lacey was admitted. This was the mother who paid the orthodontist even when the power was cut off, because they’d only have to take cold showers for a couple of weeks, but straight teeth were forever. This was not the mother who read auras and interpreted dreams. If Ella Dane said she needed cash, cash was what she needed. She withdrew the five hundred.

In the back of her wallet, behind the grocery-store membership cards, was the emergency Visa, the card she and Eric never used, except for dinner once a year on their anniversary to keep it active. She pulled it out and took a cash advance of fifteen hundred dollars, the maximum.

Two thousand dollars made an alarmingly thin chunk, not quite an inch in twenties. And the Skyview Convention Center charged a hundred fifty a night, once all the taxes were added in. This money wouldn’t last them two weeks.

Ella Dane would know what to do. Lacey went back to the room, where her mother had logged on to answer her subscribers’ questions about their dogs. “Here’s one,” Ella Dane said. “Her dog keeps looking at her in a meaningful way. She thinks he has a message from her last husband, who has passed on.”

“Dead?”

Ella Dane read on. “Moved to Tucson. The dog keeps weeping.”

“So what’ll you tell her?”

“The usual. Check with the vet. Change his diet to the vegan food. Put her right hand on the dog’s head while he’s sleeping, and try to tune herself to his energies. . . .” So the aura-reading Ella Dane was still present. Lacey wished the woman would choose one persona and stick to it, instead of shifting this way.

Lacey felt, in her right hand, the warm hard knob of Bibbits’s head, thrusting in for attention. He was panting hard, and his front paws quivered. She pulled him into her lap, and he sighed and laid his chin on her thigh. She rubbed his velvet ears and tried not to think about the house. The golden floors, the porthole window, the fifty-year-old maple; she was six years old again, anchorless, completely in her mother’s hands.

Which mother? The otherworldly or the worldly-wise?

Ella Dane gestured to the table in the suite’s alcove, where Lacey’s laptop was waiting for her. “Pull up that stuff you were going to show me.”

Lacey carried Bibbits over to the chair, sat with him on her lap, and logged on. As she pulled up her archived pages, Ella Dane read over her shoulder and eventually said, “Beth Craddock. Why was she convicted so fast?”

“Somebody broke into her house and killed her baby when she was sleeping? Who’d believe that?”