Floating Staircase

  Sneakers and bathing suit on, I crept out of the bedroom and followed Adam down the hall to the living room. We exited through the patio door at the back, since it was the farthest point from our parents’ bedroom and would elicit the least amount of noise. Before following him out, I glanced over my shoulder to see Kyle standing at the far end of the hall, a milky and indistinct blur in the darkness, watching me. Like a ghost.

  It went on this way for much of the summer until Adam came down with the chicken pox. He got them pretty bad and was laid up in bed for two weeks, looking depleted and miserable, his skin practically indistinguishable, expect for the knobby red splotches, from the white sheets on which he rested.

  Kyle and I had gotten the chicken pox when we were both very young (and despite my mother’s deliberate exposure of Adam to us in our mutually reddened and itchy state, he hadn’t caught them from us), so there was no concern that we, too, would become ill. I remember Kyle and I eating grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch at the foot of Adam’s bed while the three of us watched the portable television our dad had transported to the top of Adam’s dresser. This vision, however mundane and uneventful, is one of the most vivid I have carried with me into adulthood.

  Of course, we’d stopped going down to the river and to the double dock at night. Yet summer was coming to an end, and I’d gradually become addicted to the thrill of springing off those boards and soaring like a blind bat out into the night, interrupted only at the end by the icy, bone-rattling crash through the black, salt-tasting water. I feared he might be sick straight until winter when it would be too cold to resume our nightly jaunts.

  Then one night after I was certain our parents were asleep, I sat up in bed and whipped the light sheet off my legs.

  I heard Kyle’s bedsprings creak as he rolled over and propped his head up on one hand. He watched me dress silently in the dark. “Are you going alone?”

  “Quiet. Yes.”

  “Mom and Dad say never to swim alone.”

  “Mom and Dad also don’t want us sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night, do they?”

  Kyle was silent; he looked like he was unsure if I’d asked him a legitimate question that required an answer or if I was teasing him.

  I sat on the floor and pulled my sneakers on over bare feet. I’d grown accustomed to sneaking out of the house with Adam and had done so on numerous occasions without much concern—I believe some part of me understood that had we ever been caught by our father, Adam, the older of the two, would have sustained the brunt of our father’s wrath: for me, a buffer of sorts—but on this night I was cutting out alone and with no buffer. With some hesitancy, I questioned my loyalty as a brother: if caught, would I try to lessen my punishment by throwing Adam under the bus, claiming this had been his plan from early in the summer and I was only continuing the trend?

  “Let me come,” Kyle said from his bed. The moonlight was filtering in through the partially shaded windows, making his blond hair shimmer a ghostly white.

  “No.”

  “I could be a good lookout.”

  “I don’t need a lookout.”

  “What if the man with the gun comes back?”

  I paused, lacing up my sneaker. “How’d you know about that?” We’d never said anything to Kyle—or anyone—about the old goat who’d fired his rifle into the air.

  “I heard Adam talking to Jimmy Dutch in the yard before he got sick.”

  “Did you say anything to Mom or Dad?” I knew that he hadn’t, otherwise it would have been our hides. Still, I had to ask.

  “No.”

  “And you better not.”

  “I won’t. But let me come. I’ll be quiet. I’ll be good.”

  (This is the moment I relive every time I shut my eyes, every time I think back to the events of that summer. There is no escaping any of it. There is no denying.)

  “Okay,” I said after a time. “But you have to be quiet, and you have to do everything I tell you. No question. Got it?”

  “Yeah.” He sprung upright in bed; even in the darkness I could make out the ear-to-ear grin on his round face.

  “Now get your stuff.”

  It is fair to say both those boys died that night. I will; I will say it. I am a testament to that. The walking dead.

  —and these two brothers sneak out of the house, quiet as mice treading the floorboards of a vicarage. They enter the woods, wearing nothing but their swimming trunks and sneakers, each with a towel draped around his neck. The dark shapes of the trees crowd in all around them. They are convinced the trees are moving around them like living creatures; yet when they turn and look at them head-on, they are as still as statues... as trees. They walk swiftly beneath the cast of the moon through the wooded path, then finally down to the bank of the river. This is summer; this is grand; this is what it is all about.

  Up ahead, the river opens wide as it approaches the mouth of the bay. Both boys feel the immensity of it in their guts. The older boy, the thirteen-year-old, continues quickly down the riverbank toward the looming double helix structure.

  “Are the stories real?” the younger boy wants to know.

  “What stories?”

  “The stories Dad tells.”

  The older boy, who has dark curly hair and a body like a lizard or a bird, with long arms and long legs, says, “Yes. Of course they are, stupid.” Trying to frighten his little brother. “Why would Dad lie to us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They’re real, all of them.”

  “Even the Wendigo?”

  “Especially the Wendigo. It’s probably out there right now, watching us.”

  “No,” says the younger boy. “Stop it.”

  “Stop what?” Chuckling.

  “You’re just trying to scare me.”

  “Will you be scared when it comes time to jump?”

  “Jump where?”

  The thirteen-year-old points at the threatening dinosaur shape of the double dock. “Off there. Off the top pier.”

  Suddenly, the younger boy looks very frightened. All their father’s stories are real to him, the monsters and the imaginary boys who live in the woods and eat children. It is a warm night, but the little boy stands there shivering, his pale chest pimply with gooseflesh and his teeth chattering like a rattlesnake’s warning. He looks white, too white. Almost transparent. The older brother thinks, Ghost.

  “Climb the stairs to the top,” instructs the older brother, “then take a deep breath, run, and jump off.”

  “Jump,” parrots the younger brother, the uncertain tone of his small voice bending the word somewhere between a statement and a question.

  “You’re not scared, are you?”

  The younger brother shakes his head.

  “Then climb up and jump. I’ll hold your towel.”

  “First?”

  “First what?”

  “You want me to go first?”

  “Unless you’re too scared. Unless you’re a chickenshit.”

  “Don’t say that,” reprimands the little brother, though his voice is too weak and trembling to sound imposing. “Don’t say that word.”

  “Shit,” repeats his brother. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  “Stop it.”

  “And fuck, too,” says the older brother, lowering his voice. This is the forbidden word, the word of all words. Biblical in its mystery and strength. “Are you a fucking chicken?”

  The little boy looks like he wants to cry.

  “You wanted to come out here,” says the older brother. “If you’re not scared to do it, then do it.”

  There is much hesitation. Paradoxically, just as the older brother is about to club him on the shoulder and tell him to sit in the weeds and be quiet, the little brother hands him his towel and takes off his sneakers.

  The brazenness surprises the older brother—had the situation been reversed, he’s unsure whether or not he’d be able to summon an equal amount of courage.

  The younger
boy steps around the shrubs in bare feet, leaving little prints in the mud, and proceeds to climb the staircase leading to the upper pier. His climb slows midway, where he glances down at the ground, and then he continues until he reaches the top. He is just a black blur, an outline in the darkness. The moon is distant and covered by trees and clouds; the night is as dark as the basement of lost dreams, and the older brother can hardly see him.

  He whispers to him, “Be careful.”

  The little boy’s small, frightened voice comes back to him: “I will.” There is the sound of a deeply inhaled breath.

  He’s really going to do it, the older boy thinks.

  Small, hurried footfalls race along the planks of the upper dock, the sound like a distant train rattling a wooden bridge.

  Wow, he’s really going to do it. I don’t believe it.

  Then silence as the little boy reaches the end of the pier and leaps into space. Somewhere out there, suspended in the black.

  One Mississippi, two Mississippi . . .

  The older boy anticipates the splash—he can hear it and feel it before it even happens.

  But it doesn’t happen.

  There is no splash.

  There is a sound, though—a harsh, sickening thud from the water. It reminds the older boy of baseballs slapping the hide of a catcher’s mitt. No splash. He calls his brother’s name, and there is no answer, either.

  No splash. No answer. Just that sickening thud that froze his marrow and paralyzed his feet to the ground…

  “All right, son,” said Detective Wren, placing a doughy hand on my thin, quaking shoulder.

  Tears blurred my vision, and my chest hitched with each sob.

  “It’s all right. Calm down for a minute, and we’ll keep going when you’re ready.”

  A small floating dock—no bigger than a twin mattress and covered with a panel of slate two inches thick—had broken free of its moorings earlier that evening. It floated unanchored and unobserved for several hours, making its way up the river and toward the bay. By the time Kyle leaped off the upper pier of the double dock, the floating barge was directly below him, invisible in the darkness.

  The sickening thud I heard was the sound of Kyle’s head opening up on the slate before he rolled, unconscious, into the river where he sank like a stone and drowned.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  At seventy-seven, Earl Parsons had a face like an old bloodhound who’d been scolded one too many times for rooting around in the trash. His body was of the long-limbed variety, like an orangutan or a tree sloth, and he came packaged in pale blue polyester slacks, a checkered flannel work shirt, American flag suspenders, and a bulky nylon ski jacket with a faux fur collar that looked like something a sheriff might wear in the mountains of Colorado. His graphite-colored hair was unevenly parted and plastered to his scalp with what must have been several handfuls of camphor-scented liniment. It was my assessment he didn’t often comb his hair. Yet he arrived with such an air of genuine appreciation and country pleasantness that I couldn’t help but like him immediately.

  “This is great,” he said. “I mean, I really appreciate your time, Mr. Glasgow. If I had to write one more article about Mora Chauncey’s cocker spaniels, I think my head would cave in.”

  We were sitting in the living room, Earl leaning forward in a cushioned armchair while I sat across from him on the sofa. Jodie was perched on the sofa’s arm beside me, beaming. Sheila the librarian had probably mentioned to him that I was married—I remember saying something about my wife to her that day at the library—so he arrived not only with his spiral-bound notebook and a camera slung around his neck but hoisting a bouquet of wildflowers, which Jodie graciously accepted and put into a vase.

  “I’m just flattered you think I’m newsworthy,” I told him.

  “Not to downplay your accomplishments as an artist, but anything louder than a fart around here’s newsworthy to me,” he said, then glanced at Jodie and looked horrified. “Oh, ma’am, I’m sorry. I’m just a tactless old fool who spends too much time alone. My apologies.”

  Jodie waved him off. “Please. Do I look like some debutant who’s never heard a fart before?”

  He smiled, his teeth nicotine stained and choppy, and growled laughter at the back of his throat. “I guess you’re a woman of the world, all right.”

  “Well said.” To me, she said, “I like this old man. Can we keep him?”

  This sent Earl into a fit of laughter that reminded me of gravel crunching beneath car tires, his eyes tearing up and his big, rough hands slapping his knees so hard I feared his legs would crumble to powder. The laughing jag lasted several seconds and was contagious; by the end of it, we all felt like old friends.

  “Before we begin,” he said, removing a paperback from his coat pocket, “I was hoping you’d scribble your John Hancock in this for me. If, of course, it’s not too much of an imposition.”

  He passed me the book. When he said on the phone he was reading one of my novels, I just assumed it was the copy of Silent River from the public library. But this was a copy of Water View, newly purchased and, as evidenced by the creases in the spine and a few dog-eared pages, already read.

  “It was great,” Earl said, handing me a pen. “Those last thirty pages flew by. I’ve already started The Ocean Serene, too. I know I’m reading them out of order, but to be honest, I hadn’t planned on reading any beyond this one here. It sucked me in and I had to read more.”

  “That’s very nice of you. I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

  On the title page, I wrote:

  To Earl Parsons, my wife’s new pet—

  May all your farts be silent but deadly.

  Travis Glasgow

  I gave him back the book and expected him to read what I wrote, but he didn’t. He stuffed it into his pocket and, grinning like a child, said, “I really appreciate that. I never got a book signed by anyone before.”

  The interview lasted for almost half an hour, with Earl asking the usual questions about how I got started in the business, where I got my ideas, and which one of my novels was my favorite. He segued into our reasons for coming to Westlake and our impressions of the town so far. I supplied him with the requisite answers. The old guy seemed pleased.

  During a break in our conversation, Jodie convinced him to stay for lunch. Although he seemed fretful about imposing, Jodie’s pestering broke him down and he agreed. Jodie slipped into the kitchen to make coffee and sandwiches.

  “She’s lovely,” Earl said after she’d gone.

  “Are you married?”

  “You’re looking at a bachelor of the first order right here in your living room.” He winked at me, a glitter in his eye. “Doesn’t mean I ain’t ever been in love before, though. Went through my fair share of broken hearts.”

  “How long have you been working for the newspaper?”

  “Lord,” Earl said, sitting back in the chair. He looked too big for it, his legs like oversized pistons jutting at awkward angles. “Must be about a decade or so. Just after I retired from the mill.”

  “Do you know about what happened to the little boy who lived in this house? The one who drowned in the lake?”

  He pressed two fingers to his forehead and, almost as if reciting poetry from memory, said, “Elijah Dentman, ten years old. Mother’s name was Veronica. Didn’t have no father.”

  “That’s a good memory. Do you know who covered the story for the paper when he drowned?”

  “Sure do,” he said. “Was me.”

  I blinked. “No kidding?”

  “Like I said, I’m the resident Woodward and Bernstein around here.” He drummed his fingers against the camera that hung across his chest. “Resident Annie Leibovitz, too, I suppose.”

  “I read your articles about what happened,” I confessed and leaned forward in my seat.

  “You know, I joke about nothing ever happening here worth writing about, but the truth is, I’d prefer writing about pie eating contests and cocker spaniels th
an to ever have to report on something like that again.”

  “Were you on the scene while they were searching for the body?”

  “All evening and well into the night. I left when the divers gave up the next morning.”

  “Without the body,” I said. This wasn’t a question. I was testing the air between us.

  “Without the body,” he repeated, and we looked at each other for a beat longer than necessary.

  “Don’t you find that odd? That this is a self-enclosed lake and the body was never recovered?”

  Earl didn’t answer me right away, and I thought maybe I’d insulted him somehow. Then he cleared his throat and glanced over my shoulder, possibly to make sure Jodie was out of earshot. “There’s plenty strange about what happened to that boy, the least of which is the fact they never found his body. I assume, based on your timing asking these questions, that your wife doesn’t know about what happened?”

  “She knows a boy drowned in the lake. That’s about it. She hasn’t pursued the details.”

  “You mind me asking why you’re interested in the matter? If it’s none of my business, please say so and I’ll shut my yap.”

  “I think things were overlooked,” I said. “I think the cops didn’t know how to handle an investigation of that magnitude and didn’t turn over every stone. I think a boy doesn’t just drown in a lake and completely disappear, even if the police didn’t start searching for him until a couple hours later after he went missing.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I think Elijah Dentman was murdered.” It had been on my mind for some time now, not only in the writing I’d been doing but in real life, too. The pieces didn’t add up to make a complete whole. What cinched it for me was the visit to West Cumberland where I stood face-to-face with David Dentman.

  To my surprise, Earl did not scoff at the notion. Just the opposite: he seemed to embrace it. “You got a suspect in mind?”

  “Could be anyone, I guess. Could be some vagrant that ran into the kid down by the water. Could be someone the kid knew from town.”

  The old man shook his head. “No, that ain’t what you think. Tell me what you think.”