Starter House(87)

No living baby since 1972. Lacey searched for Burgoyne Elementary 1972 and six yearbooks came up, one of them the Burgoyne in Greeneburg. She scanned the young faces, pausing at every blond head, looking for Matthew, James, or Drew.

Second grade: Matthew Halliday. The colors were old, changed with time, but she thought Matthew’s eyes were hazel rather than blue. She moved on to the third-grade pages and hovered over another face. James Halliday. Closer, but Drew was thinner than this. Maybe James Halliday’s smile made his cheeks so round. She’d never seen Drew smile like this. Fourth grade, the nine- and ten-year-olds.

Andrew Halliday Junior.

Drew. The name fit, and she had known from her first sight of him that he was small for his age. Among the other fourth graders, he had a young, soft look. He sat very straight against the photographer’s blue background, giving a dutiful smile, anxious around the eyes, a careful, conscientious child, smoothly combed. This one turned his homework in on time and volunteered to put the art supplies away.

She cut and pasted the Halliday pictures, e-mailed them to herself, and logged off. The computer screen disappeared in a fiery haze, and she scrubbed at her eyes with a napkin. That sweet, careful child. What happened to him?

“Coffee?” Ev Craddock said. “I got a new pot on. It’s the good stuff.”

Lacey pulled up the picture of Andrew Halliday Junior. “Is this him?”

“Holy Christ.” Ev collapsed on the sofa beside Lacey. “Can’t be. That’s any kid. Like a regular kid you’d see on the beach.”

“Please, tell me what happened. I really need to know.”

Ella Dane wandered into the office. “I feel a sense of peace,” she announced, “like something good just happened. Like Bibbits is released from earth. Who’s that?”

“Please,” Lacey said again.

“I did the same as you,” Ev said. “Got in the car and drove away. Me and the older kids, Joey and MacKenzie. The cops took Bethie and I ran for it.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Camping at Yosemite. Every time I counted, there were three kids in the tent and one of them wasn’t mine.”

“He must have been there before,” Lacey said. She clung to the idea of safety, Spinet Cove as a haven, Drew on the beach a nightmare brought on by the screaming gulls. Her torn hands? Injured by yesterday’s burial. “I bet his family went camping. If they went to Yosemite when he was alive, then he could be there with you, right?”

“He talked to me. He was mad at Bethie, said she wouldn’t play with him anymore. So I took Joey and MacKenzie to Vegas, got a job working for a landscaping company, put the kids in school. Bethie was on trial, and I went back one time to testify. I thought he, Drew, I thought he’d stay with her, but he followed me back to Vegas. He started riding in my truck. Got mad every time I picked the kids up from school. MacKenzie was six.”

“Did you start doing things without knowing?”

“I’m allergic to peanuts. He wanted a banana split. I watched him eat it. Woke up in the hospital with a tube in my throat, turned out I’d eaten the thing myself, all those peanuts on top. It was just like Bethie said. I watched him eat it, but it was me.”

“Me too,” Lacey said, rubbing her wrist where Ella Dane had seized it during the game of Chutes and Ladders, feeling again that mingling of rejection and recognition when Drew’s hand became her own.

“I sent the kids to Bethie’s parents in Saskatchewan, and I stayed in Vegas with Drew till he left me, then I came here. Started a landscaping business, bought this place when I retired. He”—he tapped Andrew Halliday’s face on the computer screen—“this kid was never here. Not with me. You seen him here?”

“Maybe.”

She wanted to deny it. It was the tide—they’d buried Bibbits below the tide line, and the waves had exhumed him and left him for the gulls. The tide, not Drew.

“You think you got away, running away from the house? You ain’t got away till he lets you go. Ten years he stayed with me in Vegas till he faded. Dimmed out, like when you lose a radio signal, driving. There were old people in the house those years, no kids, he wasn’t interested in them, but when they died and a young family moved in, must have been early nineties, he got onto them and forgot about me.” The telephone rang, and he went into his office.

Ella Dane sat next to Lacey and hugged her. “Baby, I’m so sorry,” she said.

“There’s got to be something I can do,” Lacey said. But she had already done what she could do, in getting out of the house. It had cost her everything, and it wasn’t enough. If Drew had reached the Craddocks in Nevada, she had nowhere to run. Ella Dane’s crystals and candles had done nothing to protect her—or maybe they had; she was still pregnant, and she’d carried the baby all the way to viability, which was more than Greeley Honeywick had done. “Or is there something you can do?” she said.