“My mother-in-law cut her arm.”
“You owe me dinner. Bring me something from Abernathy’s. I’ll call Floyd.”
“Don’t mind me, make a party of it.”
Eric stopped at the lobby ATM to get two hundred dollars for the weekend, remembered the account was overdrawn, and decided to use Discover for his expenses until his next paycheck. Lacey didn’t have a card for the Discover account; he’d opened it before they were married. On his way to the parking lot, he called his bank’s emergency hotline and canceled both debit cards. He canceled all the credit cards except Discover, even the emergency Visa. It gave him a stinging, childish satisfaction: that would show her. But the baby was his as much as hers. He had to make sure she couldn’t disappear with his son.
Driving home, he called ahead to Abernathy’s and ordered a party platter of variety sliders to go. Sammie had an astonishing appetite for such a slender woman; she must exercise like a maniac. Any leftovers, he could reheat for breakfast, although if Floyd came over, there’d be no leftovers. A new plan formed as he drove. Saturday night’s drivers—some of whom would be calling Moranis Miszlak from the detention center in an hour or two—swooped past him in the left lane, veering like the little boy in the Skyview lobby.
The new plan was, keep the house. It felt immediately, viscerally right. His house, not hers. He wasn’t about to bankrupt himself to finance her craziness. Something was wrong with his rearview mirror. Small lights flicked and vanished. He adjusted the mirror. His breath gelled in his throat, and his car swung right; the passenger-side tires shuddered across the rumble strip and slid on the gravelly shoulder. Luckily, he was going the legal fifty-five, and not the community standard of seventy, so he was able to pull back into his lane. He adjusted the mirror again, but it was gone, whatever he had seen: the top of a fair head, low in the backseat, as if Lacey were there, huddled behind the driver’s seat instead of sitting beside him with her seat belt on. He turned the mirror from side to side, and the backseat was empty. Of course it was empty. Lacey had left him, and when he went to find her, she refused to come home. He opened his mouth to take deep deliberate breaths, trying to control his slamming urgent heart.
The fear came from Lacey, her irrational thoughts infecting him. This was the power she had over him. She said ghost and he almost killed himself on the highway, because of a random something in the mirror. Ella Dane had brought it into their house, whatever it was, a chimera of her superstition—candle smoke and the echoes of chants—Lacey’s childhood come to life. And it was his own fault. She’d warned him and he’d insisted on bringing Ella Dane into their home.
He couldn’t live like that. Lacey had to choose. Him or her mother. He controlled his racing mind with conscious plans: debit cards, credit cards. Keep the house—that was the only reasonable plan.
Chapter Thirty-one
THE NEXT DAY, Sunday afternoon, Lacey and Ella Dane stood in the Civil War section of the Greeneburg Cemetery. Bibbits had led them here. Ella Dane opened the cooler, where the dog lay cradled in ice bags, paws curling toward his body, black lips locked in an eternal snarl.
Lacey recalled the dogs of her childhood: Henry who was hit by a car; Noodle who had a high fever and vomited for three days before closing his eyes forever; the smiling Pomeranian called Salsa who lived to the age of nineteen and simply stopped breathing one day. Each of these had a real grave, chosen with care. Bibbits deserved the same.
“Is this the place?” she said. A week ago, she would have sighed and rolled her eyes. But if Drew could throw a tantrum over a game of Chutes and Ladders, then Bibbits could pick his own grave. Maybe Ella Dane wasn’t as crazy as she seemed.
On the other hand, maybe she was exactly that crazy. It was five in the afternoon, and this was the fourth place that Bibbits’s finicky and indecisive spirit had led them. They’d been to the antebellum mansion-museum Gage House, then to the playground at Rosemont Park, which Bibbits approved until Lacey mentioned that the playground was soon to be remodeled and repaved, with a climbing wall, a bungee bridge, and a skateboard half-pipe. “Bibbits will get dug up,” she said.
“He won’t like that,” Ella Dane agreed, and they visited Burgoyne Elementary, which made Lacey nervous—only three miles from home, could Drew sense her, so near?—because Bibbits loved children and wanted to be near them. This came as news to Lacey. Bibbits growled at children and had bitten several. Here, too, the problem was new construction. Sooner or later, the district would scrape up enough money to rebuild Burgoyne’s termite-ridden gymnasium, and the project might involve any part of the school’s grounds.