Page 17

CHAPTER 17

“WHAT IN THE HOLY goddamn hell!” said Arthur.

Baby woke up on the kitchen floor several feet from where she’d been standing. Some inexplicable instinct told her she’d been out for only a second or two, but it was still an effort to claw her way back to reality and figure out where she was and what had happened.

Baby sat up and looked at her left palm, which felt like it was burning. A red streak was seared across the flesh. Her head throbbed.

“What, what, what — ” Arthur went to her and hovered uncertainly at her side. “What the hell happened?”

“The sink.” Baby shook her tingling hand and got to her feet. “Don’t touch it. Don’t touch anything.”

“I don’t understand.” Arthur followed Baby to the sink. She examined the faucet without touching it, then bent down and opened the wooden doors under the sink. She noted the copper pipe that disappeared behind the cleaning products into the cabinet base. She shut the cabinet, straightened up, turned, grabbed her phone from her purse, and walked out the front door.

Arthur stayed at her heels as Baby walked through the waist-high weeds at the side of the house. She located the kitchen window, then looked down and spied the weather-worn lattice covering the crawl space beneath the house. She slid her phone in her back pocket, gripped the lattice, and tried to yank it back. The rusted nails groaned.

“Tell me what’s going on,” Arthur pleaded.

“Your kitchen sink is electrified,” Baby said.

“It’s what ?”

“When I grabbed the faucet, the electric charge went into my hand.” Baby bent and yanked hard at the lattice, threw her back into it. It came away from the side of the house. She set it in the long grass. “I saw a kid get shocked like that once at camp. The idiot stuck his finger in an electric outlet.”

Baby crawled under the house, looked up, and followed the copper pipe that emerged from the kitchen floorboards and ran horizontally along the brickwork.

“What you’re saying doesn’t make sense.” Arthur’s voice reached her from the yard. “I used the kitchen sink last night. I — I set up the coffee maker.”

“Have you used it today?”

“Uh ... no?”

“So whatever happened to it must’ve happened between last night and now.”

“We should call an electrician,” Arthur said. “And we should get you to a hospital. Get your ass out of there.”

“I’m fine. Fortunately, I barely touched that faucet.” Baby crawled deeper into the dark, following the pipe to where it met the ancient water heater. “Electrician, yes. Hospital, no.”

She pulled her phone from her pocket and turned on the flashlight. She could see what she assumed was the source of the problem: An old brick pillar beneath the house’s entryway had crumbled, tipped, and smashed into a solid wood beam as it fell. The wooden beam played host to both the copper water pipe from the kitchen sink and a black electrical cable. Baby shuffled in the dirt until she was right up on the pipe and the cable and examined the meeting point. The corner of a brick, it seemed, had squashed the pipe and the cable together, denting but not bursting the pipe and cutting into the plastic casing of the cable, exposing the live wires.

Baby was no electrician, but she knew that electrical wires and metal pipes weren’t friends. The collapse of the pillar had caused the two parties to meet. The only question was whether the pillar collapse that had added Arthur’s faucet to the electrical circuit was a freak accident or something orchestrated.

She shuffled closer still. Her iPhone light picked up the edges of the plastic casing. They looked sharp. Like they had been cut, not smashed.

She froze, and a tingle passed through her that had nothing to do with electricity. She swept the flashlight over the dirt beneath her. She could see the imprints her boots and hands and knees had left. She also saw other marks coming from a different direction. Baby followed the other tracks to the back of the house.

By a piece of lattice at the back stairs, she saw a handprint in the dirt. The hand was much bigger than hers. Probably much larger than Arthur’s too.

Arthur had tracked her. The old man crouched with difficulty outside the wooden lattice and peered in at her.

“Arthur,” Baby said. “Don’t go back inside the house, okay?”

“Why?”

“Because someone is trying to kill you.”