Floating Staircase (7 page)

I closed the notebook and kissed her. “Sounds like a plan.”

“You working on something?”

“Just jotting down some notes.”

“Finally beat the writer's block?”

I shrugged, noncommittal. “Don't jinx me.”

She straightened up and tugged off her coat. “Did you get to those boxes in the basement?”

“Of course.” I thought of the watery footprints again. A chill raced down my spine.

Jodie leaned her head on my shoulder and ran one hand up the length of my neck and into my hair. “You smell good.”

I turned and kissed her. She eased onto the sofa and pulled me down on top of her. Out of nowhere I was overcome by an animal lust I hadn't felt since the days before our wedding. I was certain Jodie felt it, too, and a moment later, we were making love on the couch, my jeans dangling from one ankle as I wrestled Jodie's blouse, which was only partially unbuttoned, over her head. The whole thing lasted only three or four minutes, but the ferocity and passion made up for the duration.

When we were done, I rolled onto my side as Jodie sat up. She put her blouse on, then leaned down and rested her head against my chest. Our labored respiration was in perfect syncopation.

“That was something,” I said after a few moments of silence.

“Hmmm.” She sounded far away and close to sleep.

“Hey,” I said, squeezing one of her shoulders, “falling asleep afterwards is my job.”

“Sorry. I'm just exhausted. I didn't get much sleep last night.”

I thought about my midnight jaunt to the lake and grinned. “Oh yeah?”

“I kept having a strange dream.”

“What dream was that?”

“There was someone in our room. Someone just standing there at the foot of the bed watching us sleep. It was so real I kept waking up. I must have dreamt it four or five times.”

I felt a cold sweat break out along my body. While I remembered going to the lake last night, I'd forgotten—until now—the reason I'd woken up in the first place: the sensation that someone else was in the bedroom with us. I'd even gotten out of bed and stood in the upstairs hallway looking down over the landing, momentarily certain I could see a crouching visitor lurking in one darkened corner of the foyer.

“Hey.” Jodie rubbed my chest. She craned her neck so she could look at me. “You're sweating like a champ.”

I squeezed her shoulder again and kissed the top of her head. “You wore me out, lady.”

T
he party at Adam and Beth's came as a much-needed reprieve from all the work Jodie and I had been doing on the new house throughout the first week. Most of the fixes had been cosmetic—painting walls, repairing broken tiling, fixing the electrical outlets that dangled like loose teeth from the walls—and we ended our first week at 111 Waterview Court dappled in dried paint and with blisters on our fingers.

Jodie fell back into the swing of her graduate program and picked up a teaching internship at the college during winter semester three days a week. Ideally, her absence should have afforded me the perfect opportunity to get some writing done . . . yet truth be told, the writing had stopped coming to me months ago. Admittedly, my writing notebooks were currently overflowing with drawings of cartoon animals humping each other in a vast assortment of acrobatic positions.

Holly Dreher, my editor at Rooms of Glass Books, had started leaving exasperated messages on my cell phone asking about the rest of the chapters I'd promised her. Though I hadn't checked my e-mail in several days, I was pretty sure my in-box would be filled with her pushy, overanxious messages as well. I still had two months before the official deadline, but at the rate I was going, I was beginning to consider photocopying pages from the latest Stephen King novel and FedExing them to her.

People started to filter into Adam's house around a quarter to six. The Goldings were the first to arrive. A furtive little couple, they came bundled in woolen earth tones and proffering a small Crock-Pot covered with a tinfoil tent, then spent an unusual amount of time hovering over the small Vinotemp carriage that, this early in the evening, was equipped only with a stack of leftover Christmas napkins and a small plastic vial of toothpicks.

Ten minutes later, a few more couples filed in. Adam selected an Elvis Presley Christmas CD for the stereo, and with the addition of each newcomer, something akin to a party took shape.

“For the most part, everyone here in the neighborhood is tolerable,” Adam said, preparing drinks for his guests. We were alone for the time being in the kitchen. “Of course, as with any town, there are a few individuals that'll make your skin crawl.” He cut a lime into half-moon wedges and added, “Gary Sanduski, for example. He gets talking about his car dealership, you'll want to drive a cocktail fork through your brain.”

“Okay. So I'll need a cocktail fork handy. Check.”

“And the Sandersons. They're an odd duo. I'd bet a hundred bucks the husband's gay. He runs an interior decorating company from the house, and his wife's a mortgage broker or something. Point is, we're not really friends with everyone here, but Beth wanted to invite the whole goddamn neighborhood. She said it makes for good karma, and, anyway, you should know all your immediate neighbors.” Adam clucked his tongue. “Ever the strategist, my wife.”

The Escobars; the Sturgills; the Copelands; the Denaults; Poans; Lundgards; de Mortases; Father Gregory, the cherubic Catholic priest from Beth's congregation; barrel-chested Douglas Cordova, my brother's partner on the police force; Tooey Jones, the owner of Tequila Mockingbird, the tavern Jodie and I had passed while driving through town—my brother's house magically unfolded into a veritable cornucopia of chambray work shirts and foresters' boots, of Allegheny colloquialisms packaged in alpine-scented skin.

Many of my new neighbors insisted on having a drink with me. Not wanting to be rude, I was half in the tank by the time most of the men cornered me in Adam's kitchen. They were all good-natured, overly friendly in a small-town way, and the excessive alcohol made it so I didn't mind the bombardment. Jodie was occupied in the den with the women, their voices loud and screechy as they filtered down the hallway and into the kitchen nook.

Tooey poured shots into half-pint glasses from a dark-colored, label-less bottle. At first I thought it was liquor—bourbon, maybe—but as it poured I could see a foamy head forming at the surface. A few of the men laughed in unison at something Tooey said, and one even clapped him on the back. Someone tried to pinch one of the glasses, but Tooey playfully slapped him away.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Tooey said, shoving a half-pint glass in my free hand. “Make sure everyone's got a glass first.”

“How come you didn't play bartender at my Christmas party, Jones?” one of the men wanted to know.

“Maybe I should have. It certainly would have livened things up.”

Some bullish laughter.

“Come on. Come on,” said another man.

I turned to Adam, who had also been burdened with a glass of the dark, foamy liquid, and whispered, “What is this stuff?”

“Tooey's Tonic,” he said.

“But what
is
it?”

“Beer.”

“For real?” I held it up to the light. It was greenish in color, and I could see pebbly particles swimming around near the bottom of the glass. I thought of witches cackling about toil and trouble while stirring a cauldron.

“He changes the recipe almost weekly,” Adam said close to my ear. “Been trying to get a distributor for the stuff for years. His bar's the only place you can actually buy it.”

“It looks like it should be outlawed,” I said and perhaps a bit too loud, as a few of the men chuckled.

“Green,” Tooey responded, “is the cure for cancer. Green is what makes the world go round-round-round. Green is gold.”

“It's not easy being green,” I added.

Tooey's mouth burst open, and a fireball of laughter burst out. It looked forced but wasn't. He had a wide mouth, with narrow, sunken cheeks, and I could see the landmarks of his fillings from across the kitchen. His clothes—a flannel shirt, suede vest, faded blue jeans—hung off him like clothes draped over a fence post. The only remotely handsome feature was his eyes—small, faded blue, genuine, somber, humane.

“Good one, Shakespeare,” Tooey said. Anyone else calling me Shakespeare would have irritated the hell out of me, but there was an easiness to Tooey Jones—in his eyes, perhaps—that made it sound comfortable and almost endearing, the way old army buddies had nicknames for one another. “But—
but—
but
taste
it. Taste it.”

I brought the glass to my lips and took a small swallow. Fought back a wince. “Uh . . .”

Tooey laughed again. “Well?”

“It's delicious,” I said.

“Come on. Be honest.”

“I'm new here,” I reminded him. “I don't know if I can. I'm trying to win friends tonight—”

“Come out with it!”

Still grimacing, I said, “It's horrible. It tastes like motor oil mixed with cough syrup.”

“Ahhhh! So you're saying I used too much cough syrup?”

“Or too much motor oil,” I suggested.

Following my lead, a few of the braver men tasted Tooey's Tonic. Mutual grimaces abounded.

“Drink it all, man,” Adam said at my side. He was looking forlornly at his own beverage. “It's tradition.”

I imagined crazy little Tooey Jones mad-scientisting away in the supplies cellar beneath Tequila Mockingbird, bubbly test tubes and smoking vials suspended by a network of clamps, pulleys, and hooks over his head, concocting his latest brew.

A handful of men who had previously been in the den with the women appeared in the kitchen doorway, strategically after the last of Tooey's Tonic had been choked down.

Mitchell Denault nodded at me and took a step in my direction. “I don't want to embarrass you,” he said, a few hometown minions at his back, “but I wanted to get your John Hancock on this.” Like a Vegas mogul displaying a royal flush, he slapped a paperback copy of my latest novel,
Water View,
on the kitchen counter.

A fellow behind him—Dick Copeland, an attorney—patted the breast pocket of his Oxford shirt for what I assumed was a pen.

“I see Adam's still trying to weasel his fifteen percent by promoting my work,” I said, gathering up the copy of
Water View
and opening it to the title page. The pages were pristine and the spine had no creases; I could tell the book had been recently purchased and not read. Dick's pen finally materialized, and he handed it over to me with the excited impatience of a ten-year-old displaying an honor roll report card. I signed the book and thrust it in the general vicinity of Mitchell, Dick, and their horde of cronies.

By ten o'clock, most of the guests had left. I shook hands and grinned while committing to dinners at houses hosted by people I did not know. Only a few stragglers remained. The women still occupied the den, now talking quietly and in that secretive, whispering way only women have. The few remaining men lingered in the kitchen, picking at the leftover dip and finishing off the hard liquor.

I had drunk way too much; sometime during the night I'd become overwhelmed by the threat of senselessness that accompanied excessive drinking. But it made the more intrusive of the remaining guests more tolerable, and conversation flowed freely toward the end of the night.

I went over to the buffet table to scrounge around at the last of the food, balancing a plate in one hand and a Fordham beer in the other.

A man hovered over the buffet table beside me. He had small, angular features and dark oil-spot eyes swimming behind the lenses of thick, rimless glasses. His eyebrows were like nests of steel wire, and his face was networked with vibrant red blood vessels that betrayed the man's affinity for drink. I pegged him to be in his midfifties.

“I don't think we've met,” I said, setting my beer down on the buffet table and extending my hand. Even in my simmering state of inebriation, I felt sobriety rush up to greet me. “I'm Travis Glasgow.”

He shook my hand—a slight, effeminate grasp followed by a quick release. A man who did not like to shake hands. “I'm Ira Stein. You and your wife are the newcomers—is that right?”

“Yes. We've been here a full week. We were living over in London before Adam told us about the Dentmans' house coming on the market.”

“Nancy and I are your next-door neighbors. You can just barely see our house without the leaves on the trees.”

“So you guys are the log cabin overlooking the lake,” I said. I recalled the way the smoke from the chimney climbed into the gray sky that day I'd walked north along the edge of the lake. “It's an amazing view.”

Ira nodded once almost robotically. “It's very nice, yes.”

“I'm still shocked we got our place so cheap.”

“Well, we're glad you and your wife . . . ?”

“Jodie.”

“We're glad you and Jodie moved in. The Dentmans were a peculiar family, as I'm sure you've heard. Not to speak ill of those poor people and what happened to them, of course. Nonetheless, they were peculiar.”

“What do you mean? What happened to them?”

“I'm talking about the tragedy. What happened to the boy.”

I shook my head. Fueled by an overconsumption of alcohol, I felt a wry grin break out across my face. “I'm sorry. I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“The Dentman boy?” He raised a peppery eyebrow.

“What about him?”

“Oh.” Ira stared at his plate, which was empty except for a few olive pits and a plastic toothpick in the shape of a fencing sword. Then he looked across the room at a frail, amphetamine-thin woman I assumed was his wife, Nancy. She was leaning against the wall and peering into the sunken den where the other women were talking. Ostracized from the group, she could have been a lamp, a decorative statue on an end table.