Inconceivable. She couldn’t make herself believe it. Men didn’t drown babies. A father who decided the time had come wasn’t afraid of blood. Andrew Senior shot the rest of them, but not the baby. That was a mother’s murder.
She saw it as if she had sketched it from a photograph. The image moved from her hands to her mind. Dora Halliday dipped her elbow into the water, testing the temperature. She took off the baby’s pink smock, unpinned the cloth diaper, rinsed it in the toilet, dumped it in the bucket, which was empty and smelled of bleach. She washed diapers twice a day, and had done so for the five years between the birth of her first child and the toilet-training of her third, and now she was doing it again. She laid Dorothy in the water, gently as if into bed. Those hands, hands that had played the violin with such ferocious passion, were now water wrinkled and soft and had spent more time cleaning human waste than practicing scales. She looked down, with her heavy white eyelids, her marble mouth so finely curved and yet so hard, and pressed her right hand against Dorothy’s face as she lowered her backward and down, under the surface, and an island of bubbles floated across the child’s body and rebounded off Dora’s arms.
“Lacey!” Ella Dane said.
Lacey remembered her mother calling her, four or five times, from very far away. The bathtub was empty and dry. The baby kicked, and Dora Halliday’s hand spread over the small chest and held her down—the baby kicked, and Lacey’s own hand was spread over her belly, pressing too hard against the life inside her.
“Lacey!” Ella Dane pulled Lacey’s hand away. “What is it?”
“I saw something.” No. She had recalled it, not as her own memory, as if someone had told her this is what happened. “It was the beginning of the murders. I think maybe the mother killed the baby. Does that make a difference?”
Jack McMure said, “The name would make a difference.” He leaned over the herbal smoke and wafted it toward his face. The smoke seemed stronger in here than in the other rooms, both the bright and the dark odors more intense, the clouds white and swirling, like cream poured into water, because this room was smaller.
Maybe some other reason.
“It’s James or Matthew,” Lacey said.
“We’ll have to keep calling him Drew, since that’s the name he chose,” Ella Dane said.
“This is the fountainhead,” Jack McMure said.
“Does he mean there are ghosts in here?” Lacey asked.
“Imprints,” Jack said.
Lacey looked at her mother, who explained, “Influences, memories, stains.”
Like a young woman, her saint’s face rigid as her youngest child breathed water under her hand? A memory, a stain. Lacey stared into the smoke until her eyes smarted, trying to read messages in the white cloud.
The front door slammed. “Eric’s back,” Lacey said. As she left the bathroom, the fresher air in the hallway struck her like a shock of cold. She coughed and clutched the door. It wavered like cloth under her hand, and the whole house twisted, sucked upward into the smoke’s plume, pressed down like a baby’s head under a mother’s hand. The door slammed again, and Lacey hurried toward the stairs. “Eric?” she said.
The entrance was empty, the welcome rug kicked to the side and crumpled. The door turned on nothing and crashed shut. Lacey walked down, not letting herself hurry.
She stood in the entrance, where the floor was a pool of gold. She looked up to the porthole window, a black circle, starless night quartered by the white frame. She had expected a moon. The front door opened to darkness. No light shone from Harry’s windows across the grass, no windows gleamed from across the street, yellow from floor lamps or blue from televisions. The house’s light stopped at the threshold. Lacey reached out, with a hand so cold that it felt like someone else’s, and closed the door. Drew stepped out from behind it as it swung across the dark.
He glowered at her. He was so angry, and yet so small; at that moment she could not fear him in spite of everything. “You came back,” he said.
“I told you I would.”
“You said you loved me, but it was all a lie.”
Lacey knew angry children. They would do the worst thing they could, but mostly she could cozen them out of their rage. And then there was Allan Montego. Two weeks into her first year, he refused, utterly and passionately refused, to take a note to his parents about his homework. She insisted and demanded, she asked him why, why?, and he swung his book bag against the Smartboard and cracked the screen. Although she argued on his behalf at the hearing, he was expelled, because it wasn’t his first violent act, but it was her fault. She had pushed him farther than he could go.