Floating Staircase (24 page)

Like a wooden puppet, her head slowly rotated on her thin neck until her attention settled back on me, this time with greater scrutiny. She was black, but her skin was as pale as ash, her lips white and blistered. I imagined one of the nurses attempting to draw blood from this living scarecrow only to be awarded with a puff of ancient dust as the needle broke through the dying woman's flesh.

She didn't need to speak; the question was in her eyes.

“My name's Travis Glasgow. My wife and I just moved to Westlake last month. We're in the old Dentman house.” I didn't know where to go from here, and the woman's urgent stare was unrelenting. I grasped at a straw. “The Steins send their regards. They wanted me to give you this, actually.” I made a gesture as if to extend the flowered plant to her, although I knew she would be unable to physically accept it.

Something in her face alerted me to the fact that she no longer remembered who the Steins were. At this, I felt a sinking loss drop through my body. This trip, it appeared, was going to be a bust.

Althea grimaced, scrunching her lips together to start up the motor of speech. When she spoke, her voice was the creaking sound of a coffin lid. “Set it down over here, son, where I can smell the flowers.”

I walked around the side of the bed and placed the potted plant atop a small nightstand piped with industrial steel. The only other thing on the night-stand was a picture of a handsome young boy in a dark blue cap and gown. I wondered if it was her son Earl had spoken to on the phone.

“What'd you say your name was again?”

“Travis Glasgow. I hope I'm not disturbing you, ma'am.”

With fossilized hands, she smoothed out the blankets on her lap. There was an IV attached to one broomstick arm. “I look busy to you?”

I offered her a crooked smile. “No, ma'am.”

Her lower lip quivered as her face folded into a frown. “You say you live where, now?”

“The old Dentman house in Westlake. The one on the lake.”

“The old Dentman house,” she said. In her condition, it was impossible to gauge the tone of her voice.

“You used to tutor the Dentman boy, didn't you? Elijah Dentman?”

Despite her illness, Althea was no less perceptive; she picked out something unsettling in my question and hung on to it in temporary silence, perhaps going over my question and the reasons for why I'd be here asking such a thing. I listened to her wheezing respiration and did not hurry her. Eventually, she said, “You a friend of the Dentmans?”

“Not really, ma'am. I didn't even know anything about them until I moved into their house.”

“So why'd you come here? I appreciate the company, Lord knows, but I don't understand it. All this way to bring me someone else's plant?”

This made me smile a nervous smile. It made Althea smile, too. She had the yellowed, plastic-looking teeth of a skeleton, a corpse.

My hands, the traitors that they were, had been unraveling a thread from my parka. Suddenly aware of this, I started to unzip my coat but paused halfway. “Would you mind if we talked for just a bit?”

“Only person comes to see me is Michael,” she said wanly, “and he certainly don't bring me plants. So you're welcome to stay . . . provided I don't get too tired on you.”

I took my parka off and draped it over the back of a metal folding chair that stood next to the night-stand. I sat down in the chair, my gaze returning to the framed picture of the handsome young man in the cap and gown. “This is Michael?”

“My son, yes,” Althea said, and this time there was no mistaking the emotion in her voice. “My only baby. He's a good boy, this one. Got his demons like everyone, sure, but he's a good one.”

“He's a handsome kid. Athletic.”

“This here's his college graduation picture. See that? First in my family to graduate college. On a scholarship. How you gonna like that?”

“Good for him.”

“He just needs to find himself a better job. It's tough today, kids out of school trying to find jobs.”

“Does he come to see you much?”

“Used to. It gets hard for him. I don't blame him.”

“My mom died of cancer several years ago. Breast cancer. She hung on for a while. It was rough on her. On my brother and me, too.” This, of course, made me think of her funeral and how Jodie had dragged me out of Adam's house in a fit.

“Mine's the stomach,” said Althea. “They been cutting little pieces of me away, a bit here and a bit there, snip-snip, but it really ain't the pain that's so bad. It's the sick. I get really sick in the mornings. Hard to eat food. Sometimes, too, I can't even sleep at night.”

“There's nothing more they can do for you?”

“What's to do? What's left? Look at these things,” she said, extending her arms with great care. They were as thin and as shapely as the cardboard tubing inside rolls of toilet paper. A network of veins, fat and blue-black, was visible beneath her nearly translucent skin. “Scrawny things. Jab me full of needles, drain me like a sieve.” But her tone wasn't bitter. In fact, there was almost a sense of humor in it. Then she sighed. “We can put people on the moon and send radio pulses and whatnot into outer space, but we've yet to completely explore the mysteries right here on Earth, the mysteries right here inside our own bodies.”

“I'm sorry,” I told her. “If I'm disturbing you, I'll go.”

Althea looked like she wanted to wave a hand at me. “Death is the disturbance. People are just passing road signs along the way. But listen to us, sharing cancer stories, trading them like baseball cards. Who wants to talk about cancer?”

“Not me.”

“Me, either.” She looked at me, then the picture of Michael. It was like she was desperate to find some sort of similarity between us, although she would be hard-pressed to find it. “You said you were married, I b'lieve. You got any children?”

“No, ma'am.”

“You wanna stay and chat, you best quit being so damned polite, boy. I ain't your mamma. It's insulting.”

“Sorry. I'll try to be ruder.”

Althea cleared her throat, and it was a rather involved process. Aside from the scratchy, phlegm-filled rattle in her chest, her eyes also watered up, tracing tears down the contours of her face. It was disturbingly easy to make out her skull beneath that thin veil of stretched skin. Finally, after her throat was cleared and she'd wiped away the errant tears with the heels of her hands, she said, “So how come you're visiting some strange lady you ain't never met before?”

I'd had a whole song and dance routine prepared, no different than the one I'd performed for Ira and Nancy, as a way of greasing the wheels . . . but looking at this woman, I was suddenly certain she would easily see through such a lie.
She can see straight down to the pit of my soul,
I thought without a doubt.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” I hadn't known what I was going to say until the words were already out of my mouth. It had been a question I'd been dying to ask someone since moving to Westlake, but until now, I did not think I'd found the person who'd be able to answer it.

“Ghosts?” Althea said, as if she'd misheard me.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know it sounds crazy.”

“You're not a police officer, are you?”

“No,” I said, thinking,
You a cop? Strohman send you here?
“I'm a writer.”

“A writer who wants to ask an old woman about ghosts?”

I smiled warmly and rubbed my hands together between my knees. “Do you know about what happened to Elijah Dentman? That he drowned in the lake behind their house last summer?”

“Read about it in the papers.” She stared at her twisted fingers atop the bedclothes. Her knuckles were like knots in a hangman's noose.

“I'm bothered by that,” I told her. “I'm bothered by the fact that he died and they never found his body. I'm bothered by what I think was a slipshod investigation by Westlake's finest. I think something happened to that little boy, and it was not an accident. But I've got no way of proving that, so I've come here to talk to you.”

“And what is it you think I can tell you?”

“Honestly, I don't know. Maybe nothing. But maybe you know something that you don't realize is important, something that when added to everything else I've uncovered will help complete the puzzle.”

Althea merely looked at me without a change of emotion. If she felt anything—anything at all—on the heels of what I'd just said her face did not betray such emotion. “Be a dear and open those blinds, please,” she said finally, her voice still sedate.

I stood and crossed to the window. There was a plastic length of tubing the width of a pencil hanging vertically from one side. I turned it until the blinds separated, then pushed them all to one side. Outside, there was no bright sunshine, no dazzling blue sky, only a lazy drift of cumulous clouds. Everything looked hollowed out and the color of old monochromatic filmstrips. I could see my car in the parking lot. Above it, the two falcons I'd witnessed nesting in the mezzanine earlier were circling in the air, waiting like buzzards for my Honda to die.

When I turned back around, Althea was looking once again at her son's photograph on the nightstand. “What do you write?”

“Novels.”

“What sort of novels?”

“Dark ones. Horror novels. Mysteries. People chasing old ghosts, both figurative and literal.”

Disinterestedly, she managed to lean to one side and adjust herself on her pillows. I could tell the act was not without pain. “Personally,” she said, “I've always preferred romances. Do you ever write anything romantic? A love story?”

“They all start out that way,” I answered, meaning it.

Althea glanced out the window. I could not tell if she was disappointed at the weather or if it was exactly what she'd expected. With Althea Coulter, I found I could assess very little.

“I don't know what it is you're hoping I can tell you,” she said after a time.

“How long did you tutor Elijah?”

“For just over a month. I was sent there through a service with the county. I guess someone found out there was a little boy there who'd not been going to school. The county got after his mother.”

“Veronica.”

“Yes. Veronica.”

“Did you know Veronica's father, Bernard Dentman? It's my understanding Veronica and her brother, David, came back to Westlake to take care of him before he died.”

“That's my understanding as well, though I didn't know the elder Dentman. He had passed before I got there.”

“Why'd you stay only a month?”

“Because my illness was beginning to get the better of me.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Also, there was very little I could do for that child.”

“How's that?”

“He was different.”

My mind returned to Adam's description of the boy on the night of the Christmas party:
Veronica had a son about Jacob's age. Elijah was slow and homeschooled
. . .

“I doubt he was ever officially diagnosed,” Althea continued, “but my guess is he was autistic.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I could just tell. He had trouble communicating, trouble expressing himself, and his overall skills were way below the average ten-year-old. He spoke in fits and starts, like a tractor engine trying to turn over in cold weather. We'd go over simple math problems, and he'd become frustrated and hide under the kitchen table. Sometimes he could be lured out with cookies, but other times he would stay under there until after I'd left for the day. In fact, that's sort of how we got our relationship going, the boy and me, and I would bring him candies and dole them out to him at the beginning of each session.”

“How was his relationship with his mother?”

“She loved him very much. But she was a shattered person herself—I'd always thought something traumatic had happened to her at some point, perhaps when she was a child—and she had difficulty rearing Elijah.”

“What about David Dentman, Elijah's uncle? How was his relationship with the boy?”

“I hardly saw the man,” she said. “I came by weekday afternoons, mostly when Mr. Dentman was out at work.”

“But you'd met him before?” I said.

“Yes.” There was a timorous hitch in Althea's voice. “Two days in a row, toward the end of my month at the Dentmans' house, David Dentman answered the door after I'd knocked. I knew who he was of course—little Elijah had spoken of his uncle to me on a number of occasions—but this was the first time I'd seen the man.”

She expelled a bout of air, the sound like someone squeezing an old accordion. Then she frowned, wrinkles like estuaries running from every direction down her face. “He was very cold to me. He just opened the door and said, ‘Elijah's not feeling well today.' I had my mouth half-opened to ask whether or not the boy's illness was a serious one that required his uncle to stay home from work, but he shut the door in my face before I had a chance to ask the question.”

“That sounds about right,” I agreed. “You said it happened twice?”

“The next day I returned to the house and knocked on the door. Once again, Mr. Dentman answered and spoke the same exact words to me through the crack in the door—that Elijah was not feeling well. He said it like he was reciting dictation from memory. But this time I was ready for him, and I was able to speak before he closed the door on me. ‘I'm sure you're aware the county only allows for a minimal number of days for a child to be ill if he's going to receive a home tutor,' I said. This was only half true—the kid could have his sick days just like anyone else—but something in that man's presence alarmed me. After that first day, I'd spent the whole night thinking about the boy. When Mr. Dentman said the same thing on that second day, I knew something was wrong, and I wasn't going to let him off the hook that easy.”