Jack McMure whirled with his arms outspread. He was wearing some kind of poncho, handmade out of—could it be?—duct tape. “We don’t need help,” Eric said, hoping Sammie and Floyd would save a few strawberries. “We need to be alone.”
“We’re not alone,” Lacey said. “We never have been. That’s the whole problem.”
“I know.” Eric pulled her into the living room, leaving Ella Dane and her crazy friend to do whatever they were doing, walking up the stairs and banging on the walls. “I thought you needed your mom, and you told me she made you crazy and I didn’t listen. We’ll tell her she has to go.” If Lacey would be reasonable. That was all he wanted.
“We’ve never been alone here. There’s someone in the house. A ghost, okay?”
“No such thing,” he said.
“People have died here. A whole lot of people. A whole family called—”
“Halliday,” he said, and kissed her on the nose, ignoring her sudden stiffness. “Yes, it was terrible. We wouldn’t have bought the house if we’d known. But it’s just a house. Those people died a long time ago.”
She was pushing at him all at once, all elbows and beating hands. “You knew? How long have you known?”
“Couple weeks, I guess. I asked Sammie to find out.”
“You knew and you didn’t tell me?”
“Why would I tell you?”
“You think you know so much! There’s more than one family that had a kid die; how about Beth Craddock, do you know about her? There’s this woman, she used to live here, she fell down the stairs—I just talked to her husband. He pushed her, but it wasn’t him, it was the ghost. He gets inside people and he makes them do stuff. You’re not listening.”
Chanting came from the stairs now, as Ella Dane and her friend marched up and down. Eric wished he’d listened when Lacey told him she didn’t want her mother in the house. “Get those people out of here,” he told her.
“They’re trying to help.”
“That kind of help we don’t need.”
“It’s probably no good. Greeley’s kept a list of the things she hears about. This house has been exorcised twice by Catholics and once by Methodists, and once by a guy with a bag full of copperheads. There’ve been eleven deaths, nobody knows how many miscarriages. Four babies drowned, five kids and two women fell down the stairs—the same things keep happening, over and over.”
“People die,” Eric said. “People get hurt. About a quarter of pregnancies miscarry; I looked it up when you got pregnant. Who is this Greedy person?”
“Greeley Honeywick. She says the last baby born in this house was Dorothy Halliday.” Lacey pulled a wad of paper from her purse. “She e-mailed me at the motel. These are facts. These are things that happened.”
“I believe you.” That shut her up for a minute. Eric spoke quickly. He had maybe ten seconds to get through before the craziness slammed down again. “People die, people get hurt all the time. Sometimes it happens a lot of times in the same place. That’s statistics, it averages out. If you flip a coin a million times, you’ll get twenty heads in a row. You don’t start thinking you’ve got a magic coin.”
“You think it’s coincidence?”
“Maybe there’s something real,” he conceded. Not a chance, but if it kept her rational, he’d allow it. “People fall on the stairs. Maybe the light’s bad. We can put in track lighting. Maybe there’s something wrong”—he hunted for things that could be wrong with the stairs—“like the steps are uneven, so people keep tripping.”
“And the bathtub, all the babies who drowned there? Dorothy Halliday and Tyler Craddock and the others?”
“Nobody’s ever drowned in our bathtub. It’s brand-new. Harry put it in when he sold the house. Maybe the old one was slippery. You can’t look at a place that’s had some bad things happen and say it’s haunted. Bad things happen everywhere. Is the whole world haunted? That’s just insane.”
“Okay then.”
“Okay then?” This was easier than Eric had expected, and he mistrusted her sudden compliance. “Okay then, what?”
“Okay, so you don’t believe in it. But I want Jack to stay with us for a few days. Will you do that for me?”
Eric looked at Jack, who had stopped spinning and was now standing at the foot of the stairs, arms wide, head tilted so far back that the thin braid brushed the back of his knees. He hummed one tone in his throat and another in his nose, shatteringly out of tune. The geometry of the house came clear and Eric saw the walls and floors as a net of transparent wires. Jack McMure stood directly under the bathtub, staring up at it through the floor. The Hallidays had fallen, dead and dying, exactly where he stood. In spite of Eric’s own certainty, it made him shudder; and did Lacey know where Jack was standing and where he was looking?