Starter House(67)

“Well, sure, but look.” Ella Dane pointed out the third paragraph in the newspaper story. “They were out forty-five minutes. I was on a jury once.”

“You were?” When had Ella Dane lived the kind of life that would land her on a jury? A tax-paying, fully documented life, registered to vote, with a stable address?

“Sins of my youth. It was a drunk driver. We all knew he was guilty, but it took more than an hour just to take the vote. People wanted to wait for lunch. And nobody wants to believe a parent can hurt a kid.”

“It happens all the time.”

“People don’t want to believe it. Trust me on this. People who should know, they don’t want to know. This Craddock jury didn’t even take time to get friendly. Forty-five minutes? That’s one unanimous vote. How could they be so sure?”

“Maybe the father knows.” Lacey pursued the name Craddock down a couple of blind alleys. “His name’s Everett,” she said, and there he was, in Spinet Cove, just north of Charleston, owner of a bed-and-breakfast called La Hacienda. The website showed a Southwest-style cluster of pink adobe huts, palmettos in the parking lot, swimming pool, beach access, local golf, and a dark man with wings of gray hair at his temples, the older self of the smiling young husband in the Craddock family’s Christmas portrait, taken four months before Tyler’s death.

Lacey clicked Contact Us, and wrote, I live at 571 Forrester Lane in Greeneburg, and there are things I need to know about the house. If you are the Everett Craddock who lived there, please call me. She added her cell-phone number and hesitated, with her hands floating over the keyboard. “What if it’s not him?”

Ella Dane reached over her shoulder to hit Send. “Then he won’t answer. He might not, even if it is him.”

Someone knocked on the hotel room door. Lacey laid Bibbits on the bed and opened it, and there was Eric, with his hand raised to knock. They fell back from each other, as if repelled by a magnetic force. “Wha-a-a-t . . . ?” she stammered. “Why?” She hadn’t thought about him since taking the money; she hadn’t thought he might wonder where she was or try to find her.

“Why?” He stepped into the room and pulled the door shut behind him. “Lacey, my God, what happened? You couldn’t have called?”

“There wasn’t time.”

“Blood all over the floor; you can’t imagine what I thought! I’ve been calling everyone. Dr. Vlk. The hospital. Everyone. I thought you were dead. You couldn’t have even texted me?”

He didn’t seem all that happy to find her alive. How dare he shout at her this way, like a parent who’d grabbed his kid away from a busy road—who did he think he was? “You didn’t answer when I called,” she said.

“Tell him,” Ella Dane said. She was still online and had opened a new window to answer another e-mail from one of her dog owners, hiding the Craddock trial and La Hacienda.

“Tell me what?” Eric said.

He raised his hands, palms forward; he was making an effort to control his temper, and she tried to meet him halfway. “I should have called again. I’m sorry. But I can’t go home. It’s not safe. There’s something in the house.”

“Lacey. Lacey, please. Can we sit down and talk?”

She let him guide her to the bed; she even let him slip her sneakers off her swollen feet. She said again, “I can’t go home.”

He began to rub her feet. “When I went home, and there was blood on the floor, Lacey—” His voice cracked; he bowed his head and pressed her feet a little too hard. “You don’t know what I thought. The things I thought— Whose blood was it?”

“Mine,” Ella Dane said. “It was an accident.” She paused in the doorway. “You’d better tell him.” She left the room.

“When the hospital and the cops and Dr. Vlk didn’t know anything, I started calling hotels,” Eric said. He began to work on her feet again. “I started at the front of the alphabet, and Sammie started at the back. It took us an hour to find you.”

“I took money out of the account. Five hundred bucks.” Eric hated it when she used her debit card and didn’t tell him. “But I can’t go home. There’s a thing in the house. A person. A ghost.” There, she’d said it. Her hands tingled, and she felt her whole body prickling. Her heart closed in shame. It felt like confessing to infidelity. “A ghost,” she said. “It’s dangerous. It attacked Ella Dane.”

Eric let go of her feet. She felt his weight lift from the bed, as she had felt Drew’s weight so often. “Be serious,” he said.