Floating Staircase

  Strohman came in next and shut the door behind him. He was wearing the same unbuttoned shirt and slacks from our previous meeting, only now he’d thrown a suit jacket over his shirt. He looked like someone recently roused from a fitful sleep. “Okay, David,” Strohman said, sitting in a chair at the opposite end of the table. He placed a large folder on the table in front of him as the two uniformed officers faded against the far wall.

  I had been anticipating a certain formality to the interrogation, something direct and witty and straight out of an Elmore Leonard novel, but instead I found myself quickly disappointed with Strohman’s unceremonious approach.

  Sleepy-eyed and looking terminally bored, Strohman sat half-slouched in his chair like someone at an AA meeting. Casually, he flipped open the folder and asked Dentman if he understood his rights.

  “Yeah,” Dentman muttered. Even in low tones, his voice vibrated the intercom speakers.

  Someone from the audience got up and adjusted a volume control knob on the wall.

  “Are you ready to give your statement?” Strohman asked.

  “Not yet.”

  Strohman looked nonplussed. The expression was out of place on his face. “Oh yeah?”

  “I want to make something clear first,” said Dentman.

  “What’s that?”

  “My sister. She isn’t well. She hasn’t been well in a long time. I think you already know that”—his gaze shifted almost imperceptibly toward the two-way mirror, as if he knew we were all behind it, watching him—”but I want it stated for the record anyway.”

  “Okay.”

  “I love my sister. Now that Elijah’s dead, she’s all the family I got.”

  “Understood. Are you ready now?”

  Dentman nodded.

  Strohman patted his shirt pockets. An arm emerged from the shadows as one of the officers handed him a pen. “Tell us what happened the day your nephew disappeared,” Strohman said.

  “I was at work all day. I’m not exactly sure what time I got home, but the sun was starting to go down. I remember that. Veronica was home alone with the boy, just like she was every other day. She was a good mother. She tried to be, even when she was having one of her moments.”

  “What do you mean? What moments?”

  “Sometimes she draws a blank. Sometimes she just stares and doesn’t answer, and some part of her mind retreats far back inside her, I think. It’s important you understand that part, too.”

  “They’re already gunning for insanity,” one of the officers in the viewer’s room commented.

  There were a few assenting murmurs.

  “All right,” Strohman told Dentman. “Go on.”

  “When I came in the door, Veronica was sitting on the stairs, staring straight ahead at the wall. I thought she was, you know, having a spell again. I called her name a couple times, but she didn’t answer. So I went over to her and sort of lifted her up by the shoulders.” Dentman mimed the motion, awkward with his hands chained together. “That seemed to wake her out of it. She blinked and her eyes came back to normal again. That’s when I noticed she was covered in mud and that her housedress was wet.”

  Strohman raised one eyebrow. “Wet?”

  “Real wet. From top to bottom. There was water and mud on the step where she’d been sitting, too.” Lowering his voice, he added, “There was blood on her. That’s what scared me right away.”

  “Okay.”

  “I asked her what happened and she said, ‘He disappeared.’ Just over and over again, that’s all she would say. ‘He disappeared; he disappeared.’ I mean, I knew she was talking about Elijah—there was no one else in the house—so I started going around the house calling the boy’s name. He didn’t answer, but that wasn’t unusual for Elijah—he was special, like his mom—so I did a real thorough search of the whole house before I again started asking Veronica what had happened.

  “But she just kept saying the same thing—that he disappeared. Finally, I sat her down at the kitchen table and told her calmly to tell me what happened. She said Elijah was swimming in the lake that afternoon. She was out in the garden, keeping an eye on him. The boy liked to swim, but it was important to watch him. She said he started to climb on that staircase thingy in the water there, and she yelled at him to come down off it. It was dangerous for a boy like Elijah to be climbing it.”

  Again, Strohman’s eyebrow arched. “A boy like Elijah?”

  “He was special, just like I said,” Dentman reiterated, a bit of irritation in his voice. “He wasn’t like other kids.”

  “All right. Keep going.”

  “She said at one point she saw him standing at the topmost part of the staircase. She got scared and shouted to him. That was when he fell.”

  “The blood on the step,” mumbled someone in the back row of the viewing room.

  Strohman leaned back in his chair and whapped the pen against his chin. He seemed content to sit in the increasing silence without prompting Dentman to continue.

  “Veronica said he hit his head hard on one of the stairs,” Dentman went on eventually, “and then fell backward into the water. She ran down to him and out into the lake. That’s how her clothes got messy, with the mud and water and all. Anyway, my sister’s pretty small, but she somehow managed to pull Elijah onto land. She said she carried him all the way to the house while he bled from one whole side of his head. She was afraid to look at the wound because it was bleeding so much. That’s how she, you know, how the blood got on her dress.”

  “Then what happened after Veronica got Elijah to the house?”

  “She brought him inside. He started to moan and his eyelids fluttered. She said she laid him on the floor against the wall at the foot of the stairs and ran into the kitchen. She wanted to get something to clean up the blood, to stop the bleeding.”

  “Why didn’t she call an ambulance?”

  “Because Veronica doesn’t think that way. All her life she’s only looked toward one person to make things better.”

  “That person was you,” Strohman said. He wasn’t asking it, was simply stating it as fact.

  “You’d understand if you grew up in our house.”

  “Because your father had been mean. Abusive.” He said it in such an offhandeded way, I thought Dentman was going to spring out of his chair and throttle him, handcuffs and all.

  “He’d been something, all right,” Dentman said from the corner of his mouth. He shifted in his seat, and his gaze once again ran the length of the two-way mirror.

  I felt a chill ripple through my body.

  “Okay,” Strohman said, glancing at his notebook. That pen was still tap-tap-tapping away, this time on the corner of the table. It was a wonder he hadn’t driven the entire viewing room mad. “So she didn’t call an ambulance. Then what? Is that when you came home?”

  “No. She said she went around looking for bandages and antiseptic. She finally found some under the kitchen sink.”

  “Naturally,” said Strohman.

  “When she came back to where she’d left Elijah, he was gone.”

  Strohman’s pen tapping ceased just long enough for him to jot down a few notes in his notebook. Then he looked at Dentman. “Gone?”

  “He disappeared,” Dentman said.

  No, I thought, shivering against the wall while watching all this unfold on the other side of the glass like someone watching a stage play. No, that’s not right. People don’t just disappear. Nature does not know extinction.

  Exhaling with great exaggeration, Strohman said, “Disappeared.”

  “She came back, and all that was left of him was a wet spot on the carpet. Lake water. And blood.”

  “This is what she told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she say she did next?”

  The officer in the folding chair closest to me cursed as his cell phone began chirping with a tune that sounded incriminatingly like Britney Spears. Bolting from his chair and rushing out into the hallway, he caus
ed enough of a ruckus for me to miss the beginning of what Dentman said.

  “—his name and then started looking around the house. She said she thought he might have gone down to lie on the sofa, but when she looked, he wasn’t there. So then she checked upstairs, the bedrooms and the bathroom, but he wasn’t there, either.”

  “He wasn’t in his room?”

  “Elijah’s room was in the basement. He would have gone past the kitchen and down the hall to get there. If he’d done that, Veronica would have seen him.”

  “But did she check the basement?”

  “She looked there last. He wasn’t there.”

  Strohman checked his notes. “His bedroom was in the basement, you said?”

  “It was a room my father built a long time ago. Elijah liked it. He could hide in it, and it was dark and quiet. Veronica hated that he liked it, but she couldn’t get him to come out. Eventually we just moved his bed and the rest of his stuff down there.”

  Strohman rubbed his forehead and looked like he was ready for a nap.

  In the shadows toward the back of the interrogation room, the two uniformed policemen shifted soundlessly.

  “Okay, David. So Veronica looks and she can’t find him. What did she do next? Did she just sit down on the stairs and wait for you to come home? Because that’s how you found her, correct?”

  “No. I mean, yes, that’s how I found her. But that’s not . . . it didn’t happen like that.”

  “Tell me how it happened.”

  “She said she couldn’t remember it all. It went black for a while.”

  Strohman asked him what that meant.

  “One of her spells,” Dentman said. “She must have worked herself up real good and had one of her spells.”

  “A blackout,” said Strohman. “Like, uh . . .” He snapped his fingers in rapid succession. “Like, hey, nobody’s home. Right?”

  Strohman’s glibness about the whole situation stirred something inside David Dentman. Even from my vantage, I could see it simmering and kicking off white sparks just beneath the surface of his eyes.

  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. L
et’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.