Starter House(86)

Could gulls dig so deep, or had someone dug down to it, using the orange shovel? Lacey’s fingertips were abraded and sore. There was a smell on her hands—she dug up handfuls of clean sand and splintered shells to scrub her palms clean and ran down to the water to rinse in the sea. Salt burned in every tiny scrape.

Drew was here. He’d followed her. Here, to the sea. How was this possible? She hurried up to the motel office, and there at last was Ev Craddock, lying in a recliner with his feet up, watching a shopping channel on the office television.

“Look at this,” he said, as if he and Lacey had spent the last hour discussing kitchen gadgets as shown on TV. “The lids and containers are interchangeable.” He shook his head, marveling. “The things people think of.” His feet were bare, knobby and calloused, and his legs were woolly with old-man fur. He looked like he’d spent half his life climbing mountains barefoot. His wonderful hair fell to his shoulders in broad waves bright as steel. His face was so darkly tanned, he looked mummified.

The woman on television pressed a small device against a valve on the container’s lid and explained how the system pulled air out of the container, creating a vacuum seal. Lacey felt a moment of pure longing—how perfect, exactly, exactly what she needed, until she remembered she didn’t have a kitchen anymore. “Hi,” she said, “I’m Lacey Miszlak. We talked on the phone.”

“It’s off-season. You missed the Clam Festival. There’s not much here but the beach. We got miles of it, as much as you want.”

Lacey sat in the other chair. On the television, the woman was now demonstrating an automatic folding spatula. “I didn’t come for the beach. I need to know what happened on Forrester Lane.”

“You can read it on the interweb. Anybody can read it.” The woman on television had moved on from the folding spatula and was now demonstrating a small vacuum cleaner on the most unlikely messes: marbles, cocoa powder, modeling clay. It could also suck wasps right out of the air. “I got to get me one of those,” Ev said.

“I need to know, because it keeps on happening.”

“Been keeping on happening for years. My Tyler, he wasn’t the first.”

“Who was the first, then? How did it start?”

Ev worked his mouth as if he were chewing a small but tough tangerine. He knew the name; Lacey watched him decide. Every impulse pushed her to speak again, to demand the answer. She bit her lip to keep the words down. Ev grunted and lowered the recliner’s footrest. “You think you got away, coming here,” he said. “You think you got that baby safe. You ain’t got away and that baby ain’t safe.”

Lacey shook her head. This she could not believe. The baby kicked, and she clutched the amethyst pendant and pressed it hard against her heart. “There has to be something I can do. There’s always something.”

“My Bethie, she lost a baby for every one that lived. Some blood thing went wrong and they failed. She felt them go, and it hurt her, but you got to take what you got coming. Not every baby can live. You got to let it go. Get away from that house before you start the next one.”

“I can’t accept that.” The baby was viable, Dr. Vlk said. She’d brought him so close, come so far, left Eric to bring the child to a safe place, and now what—let it go, like a flawed recipe, toss out the first pancake of the batch and see if the second was better? “I can’t do that,” she said. She wanted to shout, but her voice had narrowed to a thread.

Ev shrugged. “That’s all I got for you,” he said.

So he wasn’t going to tell her the name of the first child to die in the house. It mattered, she knew; a teacher’s first step, when a child had trouble in the classroom, was to find out what had gone wrong at home. Something had gone wrong for Drew. She needed the name, his family’s name, or she would never find him.

There was the edge of an idea. Home, school . . . “I need to go online,” Lacey said.

Ev gestured at the desk. “You can use my computer. Knock yourself out. Wi-Fi’s better here than in the rooms.” He shuffled into the front office to start coffee and lay out yesterday’s donuts, the free continental breakfast. He left the door open, and a sea wind blew through the room and through Lacey, clearing out the cobwebby hesitation of the last two months. She was a teacher. She knew how to find things out. It took her all of fifteen seconds: a website called myoldyearbook.com, whose users uploaded yearbooks—their own, their parents’, books they found at yard sales and junk shops—searchable by school and year.