Starter House(85)
Lex howled, wordless, in panic and pain. He jumped into his car and drove away across the Miszlaks’ lawn and Harry’s, tires grinding and spitting turf, and turned the corner with his lights still off. His car’s single voice vanished into the murmur of the neighborhood: dawn air rattling the maples, the highway purring a mile away. Harry Rakoczy’s door closed and more of his lights came on, a constellation appearing star by star, until his whole house was lit. Eric armed the security system, locked his house, and began his journey to the sea.
Sammie’s illegal copy of Lex Hall’s juvenile record lay on the passenger seat. The nine-year-old Andrew Halliday Junior had been taken in by Harry Rakoczy and his wife on his release from the hospital and had spent most of the next nine years in the system, mostly for arson. The last of these convictions came in 1975, when Junior was thirteen. Kid stuff. Backyard campfire that got away was his defense, and taken alone, it might have worked. Taken in context of a new fire every time the kid came home, not so much. In 1976, an assault on Harry Rakoczy’s wife, Margaret, and later that year a much more serious attack on his young cousin. Junior Halliday, then fourteen, beat the five-year-old Teddy Rakoczy unconscious with a bag of toy cars. That was the end of his life with the Rakoczys. From then on, he bounced between detention, foster care, and group homes.
At least he’d outgrown arson. As Eric turned onto Austell Road, he surprised himself with the wish that Lex would relapse, that the Miszlaks would come home to a smoking ruin, 571 Forrester Lane burned flat to the ground, nothing left but a big fat check from State Farm. His grandmother’s Ukrainian Easter eggs, all his books and clothes, he’d gladly let them go if it meant they could be free of the house and the debt.
He shook the thought away. That kind of thinking—avaricious, dishonest, unscrupulous—had led his parents step by step from undue optimism to creative accounting to outright fraud. He’d set the security system. If the house caught fire, the alarm would go off and the place would be saved, mortgage and all.
Chapter Thirty-eight
LACEY COULDN’T FIND THE BABY. She had laid him down on a towel so she could pick up a shell, just a few yards away along the beach. When she looked back, how flat was the sand, flat as still water barely shivering, with a dull gray surface and a yellow light floating on it. That was the towel. Where was the baby?
He was too little to crawl, too young to run away. The sand lay flat as the sea, and between sea and sand, the foam stitched and stitched again an endless seam perpetually torn, threadbare, ragged, beaded with tiny fish swirling up in the ripples and flicking themselves off the sand as the water pulled back. She’d left him in the dry sand, but the towel was wet.
“Where are you?” she said.
“Here.”
It was Drew who answered her. He was digging with the orange plastic shovel. He wore black trunks patterned with white palmetto silhouettes, and he pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head, pushing the hair off his summer-brown face. “You left me, but I found you.”
“I’m sorry, baby, I had to go.”
“Everybody leaves me. Nobody cares. I’m all alone, all alone, all alone!” His voice rose higher; each word sounded again and again, hanging and beating in the air like wings, a flailing white storm, alone, alone.
Lacey pulled her lower lip into her teeth and held it. This could not, could not be. Though she felt the shell’s weight in her hands, the sharp sand under her bare feet, even the salt pricking her skin, though the screaming voice whipped around her, though her baby was somewhere on the beach alone, it could not be.
“Alone, alone, alone,” Drew wailed, tossing shovelfuls of sand to either side. Each syllable flung itself outward, a fierce white bird, and the white birds whirled up and down and crossed each other, a column, a tower, a cyclone of gulls stooping and rising, fighting over one particular spot on the beach.
The eastern sea turned gold on its far edge. The sun rose, and Spinet Cove’s motels made a wall between sea and land, lit here and there as early risers went about their business. There was no wet towel, and the baby was safe inside her, kicking, alive. There was no shell in her hands, though she still felt it.
Her fingernails were clogged with sand. She had blisters on her palms and thin scratches, freshly bleeding, where the broken shells had cut her. She was standing on the beach with the orange shovel at her feet, and the only real thing from the dream was the noise, the towering battle of gulls, every bird in Spinet Cove drawn to one spot. As each gull landed, a dozen others stooped over it and beat it into the air. Lacey had to see what they were fighting over. Some small thing, torn this way and that, shredded in those yellow beaks. Bibbits, what else?