Floating Staircase

  “I already gave you the records.”

  “I know. But we need to go through the appropriate legal channels.”

  “Will it screw anything up that I’ve already given you the records?”

  “It shouldn’t, although a good defense attorney will certainly try to make an issue of it. But you weren’t operating under the direction of law enforcement. No one bullied or persuaded you into getting those records and handing them over. Truth is, they’re fair game. The subpoena’s just to make sure we’ve got no holes in the case.”

  “Do you think this thing will really go to trial?”

  “I have no idea. I’ve never been a part of anything this big before.”

  Like the static-laden call over a CB radio, I could hear Paul Strohman inside my head saying, Most of my officers have never seen blood let alone worked a homicide investigation. And on the heels of that, as poignant as a warning: I could tell you stuff that would make you spend the rest of your nights sitting up in bed, listening for every little creak in your house.

  As Adam weaved through the dark streets, I watched the shapes of the trees whip by on the shoulder of the road.

  “So let’s say Dentman did cover up for his sister,” I said to the passenger window. “Let’s say she killed her son and he knew nothing about it, had nothing to do with it. What sort of charges is he looking at?”

  “Obstruction, false statements, conspiracy, aiding and abetting. Christ, I don’t know.”

  “Jesus,” I mused.

  “Don’t tell me you’re having some change of heart. Not after all this.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m just trying to digest the whole thing.”

  Adam choked on a laugh. “Are you kidding me? You’re the only one who had any clue. Imagine how Paul fucking Strohman feels right now.”

  “But I was wrong. It was Veronica, not David.” I thought about this, my mind racing. “What did you mean, David won’t say a word?”

  “He refuses to talk. He won’t give a statement. No one’s heard him open his mouth since we brought him in.”

  We, I thought. Since we brought him in. This is fucking surreal.

  “Would Strohman consider dropping the charges against David in exchange for a statement?”

  Adam’s face was a ghastly green in the glow of the dashboard. “That would be up to the DA, not Strohman. Besides, what makes you think Dentman would agree to that? He lied for his sister the first time around. I doubt he’ll be willing to toss her in the fire for some reduction in charges.”

  “That’s not what I’m thinking,” I said. “Not exactly.”

  He glanced at me. “What is it?”

  “It’s just . . . I’m just thinking. Any chance you can get Strohman to feel out the DA?”

  “About dropping Dentman’s charges in exchange for some incriminating confession against his sister?”

  “Not a confession,” I corrected. “A statement. I don’t think Dentman’s got anything to confess.”

  “Well,” he said, not without some brotherly con descension. “That’s certainly a change in your tune.” He turned the wheel, and the cruiser crawled onto Main Street. Ours were the only headlights on the street. “Anyway, if we’re talking first degree murder, the DA’s going to want someone to do jail time.”

  “And it won’t be Veronica, will it?” I said.

  “You’ve seen her, talked to her,” said Adam. “There’s not a jury on the planet who’ll put that woman in prison, no matter how gruesome the crime. Not that we even have a body,” he added sternly, as if this were somehow my fault. “Given her background, even a court-appointed defense lawyer will push for insanity and will probably get it. The only bars that woman will see will be on the windows of a sanitarium.”

  I let this sink in.

  “Do you think we’ll ever find out exactly what happened to Elijah?” I said as we pulled onto Waterview Court.

  Adam seemed to chew on this for a second or two. “I can’t say. But we’re one step closer, aren’t we?”

  The headlights pierced the darkness of our street. The streetlamps were out, and it was like driving along the floor of the deepest ocean.

  “You scared the shit out of me that day on the lake,” Adam said out of nowhere. “When I saw you pick up that axe . . .”

  “I scared myself,” I admitted, surprised by my own candor. “I just had to know.”

  “How did you know?”

  In my head, Althea Coulter spoke up: Nature does not know extinction. It knows that when life is snuffed out and the soul vacates the body, it must, by definition, go somewhere. And if you don’t believe in God or a god or in heaven and hell, then where do souls go?

  “Ghosts,” I said as we came to a slow stop in the cul-de-sac. “Do you believe in them?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Jodie was propped up in bed, reading a Louis L’Amour paperback illuminated by a reading lamp over the headboard.

  Kicking off my shoes and crawling into bed on top of her, I kissed up her neck and chin to her lips.

  “Quit keeping me in suspense,” she said. “What’s it all about?”

  “I don’t know how much I’m actually supposed to say.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “I think they arrested David and Veronica Dentman,” I said.

  “Did they find out what happened to the little boy?”

  “No.” My head on her chest, I was talking to her breasts.

  “What did they need your help with?”

  “Information.” I couldn’t go into it all now, not now. Out of nowhere, exhaustion had clunked me smartly over the head. “Details. Stuff I’d uncovered in my research.”

  “My smart writer.” She kissed the top of my head. “Wow. My stinky writer, too.”

  “I’ll shower.”

  In the bathroom, I peeled off my clothes and stood beneath the hot spray until it turned cold. Back in the bedroom, the reading lamp had been extinguished, and Jodie’s light snores could be heard over the ticking of the clock in the hallway.

  The figure of a small boy stood in the doorway of our bedroom. It was too dark to make out any details, but I knew it was Elijah.

  “What is it?” I whispered. “What else do you want?”

  The shape drifted soundlessly out of the doorway.

  I went out into the hall, the staircase to the first floor empty except for the puddles of moonlight coming in through the far windows. Standing at the top of the stairs, I peered down into the well of shadows that made up the foyer. The hallway clock ticked louder, louder.

  Elijah moved through the depths of the foyer, a black shape against a background of black shapes.

  I descended the stairs, the floorboards cold under my bare feet. I was wearing only a pair of sweatpants, my body still wet from the shower, and my chest broke out in goose bumps.

  “Elijah!” It was a shouted whisper through clenched teeth—the way a stern parent might reprimand a child in church. “Where are you?”

  The boy had vanished among the sofa and end table, the lamps and television and armchairs. Upstairs, the hallway clock still ticked, the only sound available to mingle with my hesitant respiration.

  But no . . . not the clock . . .

  It was the sound of the wooden blocks being stacked on the coffee table. It was too dark to see them but I could hear them, less than five feet in front of me—clack, clack, clack. Slow and precise.

  Crouching down so that I was able to frame the coffee table against the curtained glow of the front windows, my breath caught in my throat. The blocks formed a pyramid, its silhouette solid and black against the windows, and as I looked on, I could make out one of the blocks settling down on top of the others, as if having floated there from the ceiling.

  I was unafraid. Instead, a liquid calm filtered through me, causing my joints to tingle and my legs to go wobbly. I sat down hard on the floor. Beside me, one of the heating vents whirred to life: the sound of a foghorn out at sea.

&
nbsp; The definitive shape of a child moved across the front windows: there and then gone.

  My heartbeat caught in my throat. Althea yammered on in my head—One afternoon I was out playing in the palmetto grove when I saw a little girl—and the memory of her words caused me to spring to my feet.

  I could hear him now, moving behind the sofa, the highboy, the swooshing of his bare little feet on the shag carpet. He was moving fast.

  I called his name in rapid fire, my breath rasping through clenched teeth. Blind, I lurched forward in the dark toward the sounds, but each time I reached the spot where I’d heard him, he made a noise in another part of the room. He flitted like a tormented bird that had gotten trapped in the room, desperate and panicked to find a way to the outside world.

  There’s no outside world, I thought. We’re all underwater.

  Suddenly paralyzed by uncertainty, I remained with my back against one wall as I listened to the shuffling across the room. A moment later, I was accosted by what felt like a twinge of electricity sparking to life in my right shoulder, then tracing down my arm until, like strands of gossamer, the electrical current radiated from my fingertips and dispersed into the blackness of the room.

  He just touched me, I thought and shivered.

  Then there were the footsteps at the other end of the hall. Still frozen in a combination of fear and perplexity, I listened. The basement door opened with such force, I expected to hear the hinges wrenching out of the frame. This was followed by the distinctive sounds of human footfalls descending the basement steps: I heard each step creak under imaginary weight, my heartbeat echoing the sentiment. And when the sounds vanished from the other end of the hall, the heating vent in the floor by my feet picked them up: the rattling and commotion of someone moving around down there. A deep, resonant clanging began emanating through the vent, probably coming from the belly of the furnace.

  All went quiet. It happened so quickly it was like someone had stuffed cotton in my ears, like stepping off a battlefield into a silent bunker.

  I stood there for a very long time before I was able to regain control of my muscles. Once I had, I went down into the basement, my bare feet padding on the freezing concrete floor. I turned on the ceiling light and shielded my eyes with one arm as I pressed on toward the furnace. With magnanimous certainty, I approached the furnace and undid the brackets that held the metal facing in place. Beneath, a black cauldron of steel faced me. An iron lid hung down on a hinge. I lifted the lid and peered into the dark maw. It was like looking into the belly of an ancient robot.

  If the body were burned in this furnace, I thought, it would have to have been chopped up into smaller pieces to fit through the hole. If the body were burned in this furnace, there’s probably nothing left inside.

  Or was there?

  By the time the early stirrings of sunlight had crept into the sky, I had shoveled out what amounted to several handfuls of gummy soot from the unit. It sat on a mat of newspapers, reeking like oil and resembling the evacuated matter of a fevered horse. Once I started scooping the gunk out of the furnace, a part of me had hoped to find bits of bone or something in the drippy, fetid mass. But once I’d laid everything out on the sections of newspaper, I knew all the movies I’d seen and books I’d read had been wrong: there was nothing left except carbon detritus and wet ash.

  Exhausted and dejected, I went upstairs where the bedroom alarm clock read 6:09 a.m. Crawling into bed, I curled up beside Jodie and hoped that the sound of her breathing would carry me back to sleep.

  It didn’t.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  At noon the telephone rang. “We need your help,” Adam said, nearly breathless.

  “What is it?”

  “Dentman said he’d give us a statement on one condition.” He paused, possibly for dramatic effect. “He said he wants to talk to you first.”

  “I’ll be there in ten,” I said and hung up the phone.

  “This,” exclaimed Paul Strohman, “is complete bullshit.”

  We were in his cramped little office, Strohman behind his desk, Adam seated beside me in one of the two chairs facing the chief of police. Strohman’s big feet were propped on the desk, creating a slight but obvious bend in the desktop.

  “There’s no harm in it,” Adam said.

  “Other than this entire department looking like a school bus full of stooges.”

  “He requested Travis by name. After that, he promised to give us a statement.”

  “Oh, I guess if he promised.” Had Strohman not sighed and run his hands through his hair at that moment, his sarcasm might have struck me a bit harder. Addressing me, he said, “Before you go in there, I need to lay down the ground rules. For starters, we’ve made no promises to him. If he talks, it’s of his own accord. I don’t want to give this fool immunity only to have him confess to chopping the kid into kindling and burying him out in the woods.”

  “Then don’t,” I said. “Only promise him immunity for the charges he’s currently facing—conspiracy, obstruction, whatever.”

  “I hate the idea of giving him a reduction while we go balls-to-the-wall with his retarded fucking sister.”

  “Do you want his statement or not?” I said. “And besides, she’s not retarded.”

  Strohman thumbed the dimple in his chin. “If I sound callous, it’s because this whole thing’s one steaming pile of shit, and I got it all over my shoes. It doesn’t help that you’ve got your nose in everything.”

  “I’m not planning to tell anyone.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re just a swell guy, I guess.” Strohman stood up, all six and a half feet of him. “You go in there and listen to what he has to say. You make him no promises. You tell him nothing he doesn’t already confess to knowing.”

  “Check,” I said, also standing. “Where is he?”

  “In one of the holding cells.”

  Slump-shouldered and withdrawn, David Dentman looked like an overgrown child in the single holding cell. As I approached, Adam shutting the door behind me, he didn’t even bother to look up. Wan midday light spilled in from a number of recessed windows high in the wall. The whole place smelled of camphor and gym socks.

  I sat down in the folding chair in front of the cell and did not speak.

  Sitting on the edge of his cot, Dentman seemed content to stare at his big feet. The shoelaces had been removed from his boots, and his hands, clasped between his legs, looked about the size of hubcaps. With his head bowed, I noticed the whirl of hair that faded to baldness at the topmost portion of his scalp. When he finally looked at me, his face was hard as stone and almost expressionless. This surprised me; I had thought he’d been crying.

  “What else do you know?” he said, his voice just barely above a whisper.

  I spread my hands out on my knees, palms up. “Nothing.”

  “Don’t lie to me. It’s over now.”

  “What makes you think I know something more?”

  “You’ve figured everything else out, haven’t you?”

  “I don’t know anything else. This is where we are.”

  “Goddamn you.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  He hung his head again.

  “They need a statement from you.”

  “Why? So they can put my sister in prison?”

  “Veronica won’t go to prison. But if you cooperate, you might be able to avoid going yourself.”

  “What good does that do me?”

  “Maybe it doesn’t matter to you,” I said. “But maybe it matters to Veronica. Maybe if you cooperate and get your sentence reduced—if you tell them all you know about what actually happened that day—then you’ll still be free to help her. If she goes away to a hospital someplace, she’s going to need you to check in on her and take care of her. You can’t do that from prison.”

  David lifted his head and stared at me. Despite the distance between us, I could count the fine blond hairs that made up his eyebrows. “I don’t trust the police
,” he said. “I won’t say nothing to them unless I know they don’t got nothing else up under their sleeve.”

  “There’s nothing else. Just the evidence that you lied for your sister.”

  “Where is she?”

  “They’re holding her here, too.”

  “What has she told them?”

  We were treading dangerously close to the territory Strohman warned me to stay away from. “She hasn’t said anything yet,” I told him anyway. Fuck Paul Strohman, I thought.

  “And she won’t,” Dentman said. Astoundingly, I thought I saw the stirrings of a smile. It never materialized, however, and I was somewhat grateful for that, for I feared that smile would have haunted my dreams for decades.

  “Tell me what you know,” I said again, leaning closer to the bars of his cell.

  He said nothing for a long time. As he rubbed his face, I once again expected to see his eyes grow muddy with tears, but that didn’t happen. When he looked at me, I felt a twinge in my spine, as if he’d speared me with an iron lance. “Tell the chief I’m ready to talk to him,” Dentman said and turned away.

  “Come with me,” said Adam.

  I followed him down the hall to the same darkened viewing room McMullen had taken me to yesterday. This time, all the folding chairs facing the two-way mirror were occupied, and the room was warm and smelled strongly of bad breath. I clung to the wall beside Adam as the lights in the interrogation room fizzed on.

  Through the intercom system, the sound of the door opening was like something from a 1930s radio show about haunted houses. Escorted by two uniformed policemen, David Dentman entered the interrogation room. His hands cuffed in front of him, his enormous size dwarfing the two officers at his sides, he was ushered over to the seat his sister had occupied yesterday.