Floating Staircase (37 page)

He may not have killed Elijah, but those are the eyes of a cold-blooded killer, all right.

“Veronica didn't know how long she'd been out,” Dentman went on, “but when she came to, Elijah was still gone. That's when she sat down on the stairs and waited for me.”

“All right. So you come home. Then what?”

“Just like I said—just like she said. She told me what I've told you now.”

“And did you believe her? That the boy had just vanished into thin air?”

Dentman didn't respond.

“Are you going to answer the question?”

“My sister, she's very delicate.”

“I understand. We've been over that already. Are you going to answer my question?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Then what do you think happened?”

“I don't know. But whatever it was, it was an accident.”

“I think I know.” Dentman grinned. “Yeah?”

“These blackouts—”

“I know what you're getting at. She didn't do anything to deliberately hurt that child.”

“Okay. But accidentally, maybe—”

“Stop it. You're putting words into my mouth. I didn't say that.”

“Then tell me how we've got to this place. Tell me how we're hearing this story from you now when back in the summer we heard a completely different one—that you'd been home watching the boy and that Veronica had been in bed with a headache. It's obvious you concocted that to protect her at the time—you didn't want her answering any direct questions, sure—but look where it's gotten the both of you.”

Quick as a jackrabbit, Dentman stood. His chair went skidding backward on the floor, causing the two uniformed officers to fumble into one another in an attempt to catch it. His chained hands planted firmly on the tabletop, David looked about ready to spit fire.

At the opposite end of the table, Strohman could have been watching an old black-and-white movie on AMC.

“Down!” instructed one of the uniformed officers, clamping a hand around one of Dentman's massive shoulders.

The second officer quickly shoved the chair against the backs of Dentman's knees. “Sit down!”

Like a ship sinking into the ocean, Dentman slowly lowered himself down on the chair.

“Your temper calls into question everything you're telling me,” Strohman said. “I'm beginning to think we're all wasting our time here.”

“You wanted a fucking statement. I gave you one.”

“What happened after you got home and your sister told you Elijah had disappeared? After you searched the house and couldn't find him?”

“You want me to say it, don't you? You're going to make me say it.”

“Yes,” Strohman said, “I am.”

Dentman leaned closer to Strohman over the table and said, “I thought she might have hurt him real bad and that she hadn't realized it.”

“Hurt him?”

“Killed him,” Dentman said. It was like an absolution.

At that moment, I realized I was holding my breath.

“I kept asking Veronica what she did, but she said she couldn't remember, that she had blacked out while looking around for him. I asked her if it was possible something happened to him by the water. She just cried and said he'd hit his head. She said this over and over again, too. So I went down to the water. I called Elijah's name. I searched the surrounding woods and then waded into the lake. I couldn't find him . . . but I saw the blood on the step.”

“How long did you search for him?”

“A long time. Maybe thirty minutes. I couldn't imagine where he'd gone. If he'd . . . if he'd gone under and gotten stuck somewhere, I had no way of knowing and no way of finding him, of pulling him out.”

“Then what?”

“I went back to the house. I told Veronica to go upstairs and change into fresh clothes. She did. I took her wet and bloody housedress and tossed it in the basement furnace.”

My heart leapt. The blood pumping through my veins sounded like a freight train in my ears.

“Then I told her we needed to call the cops because if Elijah was under the water, I couldn't get to him. We needed the cops to get to him. She was fading in and out fast, and I thought she was going to have another attack. I had her sit down on the couch as I called the police. When I hung up the phone, I went over to her and let her curl up in my lap. I rubbed her head and told her exactly what to say to the police when they arrived—that she'd been asleep the whole time, up in bed with a migraine, and that I had been downstairs looking after the boy. ‘Let me take care of it,' I told her. I promised her.”

Dentman had been talking too fast for Strohman's pen to keep up; the chief of police had simply set it aside midway through Dentman's statement and merely listened, his hands in his lap, one leg over the other. After a moment, Strohman had Dentman repeat the story, which he did verbatim, before suggesting they bring in Veronica to corroborate it.

“You'll have to wait in holding while we talk to her, of course,” said Strohman, closing his notebook.

“Then she won't talk to you.”

“Why's that?”

“Because the last thing I said to her was to say she'd been sleeping. Until I sit with her and tell her otherwise, that's all you'll ever hear from her.”

A small chuckle began to rumble up through the chief of police. A similar rumbling could be heard from his men throughout the viewing room.

“That's a neat trick,” Strohman said after his chuckling had subsided. “You know we can't have you two—”

“Bring her in here now. With me. With all of us. I'll sit right here and tell her to tell the truth.”

Strohman sucked on the inside of his left cheek. Then he clapped, startling everyone except Dentman, and said, “All right. Let's do it. But I need to take a piss first.”

Outside on the front steps, a group of us burned through cigarettes and shuddered against the cold.

“Coldest fucking winter in a decade,” McMullen said, digging around in the seat of his pants. “Miserable godforsaken place.”

Five minutes later, we were all gathered in the viewing room as Veronica was brought in, unshackled, and placed in a chair midway between her brother and Chief Strohman.

Flipping to a clean sheet of notebook paper, that goddamn pen beginning to jitterbug in one hand, Strohman started asking Veronica questions.

Her responses, never changing, started out almost comical . . . then turned sad and somewhat frightening. “I was asleep.”

“Veronica, your brother just told me you—”

“I was asleep.”

“You need to understand—”

Pulling her hair and shouting like a child: “I was asleep! I was asleep! I was asleep!” She slammed her hands down on the table, her nails digging audibly into the wood.

A good number of us cringed.

“Fuck's sake,” Strohman uttered.

“Wait,” said Dentman. With surprising tenderness, he clasped one of his sister's skeletal hands in both of his. The sound of his thumbs rubbing along the back of her hand was like the crinkling of carbon paper. “Darling,” he said quietly, “it's time to tell the truth now.”

Trembling like a day-old fawn, Veronica drank her brother in, scrutinized him, as if he were a stranger she was supposed to know. A second before the tears came, I could sense their arrival. They began streaming down her sallow, colorless cheeks, her lipless mouth quivering. The tendons in her neck stood out like telephone cables. “He . . . hit his head . . . on the stairs . . . on the lake . . . blood . . . on me, on him . . . carried him back to the . . . the house . . . blood everywhere . . . went to . . . went . . . turned my back . . . when I came back . . . gone . . .”

No one said a word. All eyes were locked on the fragile woman who was breaking apart right in front of us. Her words suddenly didn't matter. Her brother's words, either. It was on her face, all of it. I prayed for someone to say something—anything—and only hoped that until they did the silence wouldn't crush the life out of me.

In the interrogation room, Strohman closed his notebook.

A
dam dropped me off that evening. Weakened, spiritually fatigued, I entered the house with no greater designs other than to crawl beneath the stream of a warm shower and wash the tiredness from my marrow.

Jodie was standing at the foot of the stairs, half-cloaked in shadow.

The look on her face immediately froze my blood. “What?”

“I think . . .” She looked around—a blind child suddenly given the gift of sight. “I think . . . someone was in the house.”

“What are you talking about? Were you asleep?”

“Yes. But noises woke me. Thumping noises. Like an animal in the attic or trapped behind the wall. I got out of bed to see what it was. I thought maybe you'd come home and I hadn't heard the front door. So I called your name.” I watched as a chill zigzagged through her. “Oh, Jesus.”

“What? Jodie . . .”

“I called your name, and then I heard someone run across the living room and slam the front door.”

“Babe.” I went to her, embraced her. “You were dreaming.”

“No. I was awake.”

“There's no one here. I just unlocked the door now. It was locked.”

“Are you sure?”

“I swear it.”

“Jesus.” She laughed nervously against my collarbone. “Oh, Jesus.”

In the morning, Adam showed up with a document for me to sign. It looked very official and said Consent to Search at the top. “Strohman wants your permission for us to dig up your lawn once the ground thaws a bit.”

“He thinks Elijah's buried in the yard?”

“He thinks if David Dentman could brainwash his sister so easily to lie to the police the first time, what's to say any of what was said last night was the truth.”

“Are you serious?”

He handed me the consent form and a pen. It was serious, all right.

“They've both been charged.”

“With lying to the cops?”

“With murder,” Adam said. “David's still at the station. He's being charged as an accessory. Veronica's being shipped to a hospital over in Cumberland this afternoon. She's been practically catatonic all night.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“What is it? You look sick.”

Truth was, I
felt
sick. “It feels wrong.”

Taking the signed form from me, Adam folded it in halves, then slipped it into the back pocket of his chinos. “Vindication's a little harsher than you'd hoped, huh?” He went to the door.

“Hey, you really think they're going to find the body buried in the yard?”

“I don't know what to think,” Adam said and left.

I called Earl and told him everything I knew. He would be the first to break the story.

“What do you do now?” he asked me after I'd given him all I had.

“Nothing,” I told him. “My part in this is over.”

F
ebruary was angry and eager and shook us to our souls. Once again, the whole world seemed to freeze. But by early March, the snow had receded, and the gray slope of our lawn rose as if out of ash. The blustery winds grew tame and warmed up. We celebrated Jacob's eleventh birthday, and he dazzled us with card tricks. Jodie finished her dissertation and looked forward to receiving her PhD in May. She had verbally accepted the full-time teaching position at the university, and although it wouldn't start until the fall, she went out one afternoon with Beth to shop for a whole new wardrobe.

Sales for
Water View
continued to climb. The whole Dentman ordeal nearly a month behind me now, I began to feel the writing bug edge closer and closer again. That was good; like the parent of a child gone away to summer camp, I had been eagerly awaiting its safe return.

Jodie surrendered the upstairs office to me. I stocked it full of my writing implements, fresh heaps of notebooks, word processor, and lucky ceramic mug. I wrote there in the mornings before Jodie woke up, downing cup after cup of overpowering Sumatra coffee. Sometimes when I knew Jodie was still sound asleep, I would open the single window and smoke a cigarette, my head poking halfway out into the chilly morning air.

Having aborted the story of the Dentmans and the floating staircase, I resumed the partially finished manuscript of which I'd already sent sample chapters to Holly Dreher in New York. It was coming smooth and good and honest. As with every other book, it was important to write it honestly.

(Once, at a writers' conference in Seattle, I'd had a few drinks with a best-selling novelist. Like teenagers confused about their sexuality, this author's novels traversed that blurry and often fatal line between genres, and he drank expensive scotch and listened to jazz records in his hotel room because he thought those things made him more writerly. We must have talked for hours that evening at the hotel bar, but the only thing I took away with me was his comment that all good books were honest books and that all the rest could suck a fat one. I took half of that sentiment and filed it deep down in the writing center of my brain and have used it ever since. All good books
are
honest books.)

So I wrote, and it was strong and good and honest.

One afternoon, I heard the bumping sound. It was the same sound Jodie had heard that night when I'd come home from the police station—I was certain of it. The first time I heard it, I was alone in the house and standing in my underwear in the kitchen about to pour a fresh cup of coffee. It sounded like it was coming from upstairs. But when I reached the top of the stairs, the sound stopped.

The next time I heard it, I was lying in bed at night. Beside me, Jodie was sleeping the sleep of the blissfully innocent. I could hear it across the hall, and for one insane moment, I imagined a dozen tiny elves walking on the keyboard of my word processor, finishing my book for me. I got out of bed and crossed the hall, flipping the light on in the office. The sound had stopped. I stood there holding my breath, listening for a very long time, but it didn't start up again.