Floating Staircase (18 page)

“Well,” Ira said, “I would never have asked, and I'm sure Nancy never did, either.”

“She was a good woman,” Nancy said, addressing her steaming mug. The way she said it made me think Althea Coulter was dead.

“Would have been unprofessional,” Ira went on, as if his wife hadn't spoken. Then he leaned closer to me, and I could see the bleariness of his eyes as they swam behind his glasses. “Someone should have been watching him that day by the lake.”

The conversation was closing in on the details of Elijah's death. I felt a giddy sense of elation at that—an emotion for which I would hate myself later, once I had ample time to replay the entire conversation in my head.

“What exactly happened that day?” I asked, and it was like firing a flare into the night sky.

“No one was watching him,” said Ira simply. “He was out there playing on that damnable staircase when he fell and cracked his head and drowned.”

“Did either of you hear or see anything?” Of course, having read the newspaper articles, I already knew the answer to this question. But it seemed the next logical jump, and I wanted to keep them going.

“Nancy heard him cry out.”

“I heard
someone
cry out,” Nancy corrected.

I asked her what she meant.

“It was late afternoon. It was a cool day so we had the windows open. I'd just started dinner when I heard a high-pitched . . . I don't know . . . a high-pitched wail.”

“About what time was this?”

“Around five thirty. If I eat dinner too late, I get horrible indigestion.”

“And you're not sure it was the boy?”

“Honestly, I didn't think anything of it at the time. As you'll soon learn, there're plenty of noises around the lake in the summer—birds, animals, children playing. You can even hear traffic on the other side of town echo out over the water on cool summer nights, and God help us when the loons come back to roost. The thing about the lake is it plays with the sound, twists everything like a riddle, and bends it out of proportion. You think you hear something off to the left, but it's really a quarter of a mile out on the other side of the lake past the pines.”

“So when did you realize it had been Elijah?”

“I guess after the police came by and asked if we'd heard anything unusual,” Nancy said. “I thought about it long and hard and said I'd heard someone cry out—or
thought
I did. But I never said with any certainty that it had been that little boy,” she added quickly and in such a fashion that I suddenly knew this poor woman had lost sleep over this many nights. “It's important to understand that.”

“I understand,” I said. “Did either of you see Elijah out there that afternoon?”

“I saw him,” Nancy said, and it was as if she were confessing to some heinous crime. She looked miserable. Her skin had grown so pale I thought that if she pricked herself with a needle, she wouldn't bleed. “I'd been out walking Fauntleroy earlier that day by the lake. Elijah was standing on the staircase and jumping off into the water like a diving board. I remember shaking my head and thinking how dangerous it was.”

“There's the rest of the boating pier just under the surface of the water,” Ira interjected. “You dive too deep and strike your head.” He made a face to show that his premonition about the dangers of the floating staircase had obviously come true. “We're always chasing the neighborhood kids away in the summer.”

“Did you see or hear anything that day, too, Ira?”

“It was a weekday. I was teaching a late class at the college.”

“What time was that?”

“Class ended at six fifteen. I would have went to my office to gather my things before heading home.” Considering, he said, “I suppose it was around seven o'clock when I finally got home.”

I considered this, then turned back to Nancy. “Was he alone when you saw him? Down by the water?”

“Yes.” She dropped her voice like someone about to spread a rumor and said, “None of the other children ever played with him.”

“How come?”

For the first time since we'd started this conversation, the Steins both went silent. Nancy stared at her mug, which was no longer giving off steam. For a split second I feared she might return to the kitchen.

Eventually Ira said, “Go on. Tell him about the dog.”

“Chamberlain wasn't just a dog,” Nancy scolded, sounding genuinely hurt.

“We used to have two of these moppets,” Ira said, motioning with one loafered foot at Fauntleroy. (The dog must have recognized the condescension in Ira's voice because he growled way back in his throat.) “Chamberlain got cancer two summers ago and died last spring.”

“The treatments wouldn't take,” Nancy said miserably.

“Doc gave us some pills to put in his food when the time came. It was nice and easy.”

“And painless,” added Nancy.

“The next morning I found him dead right over there,” Ira said and pointed to the rectangle of sunlight that spilled in through the glass patio doors. “Probably been sunning himself when he finally passed.”

Nancy sniffled. I couldn't bring myself to look at her.

“I took him out into the woods and buried him halfway down the slope, just before the land gets too rocky. Whole thing must have taken a good hour—you really underestimate the size of a lapdog when you got to dig a hole in the ground for it—and when I looked up, exhausted and sweating, I saw the little Dentman boy staring at me through the trees. He was maybe twenty yards away. I didn't think anything of it until I happened back that way a couple of days later on my way to the water for some fishing and found the grave dug up and the dog's body missing.”

“Lord, have mercy,” Nancy whispered and actually genuflected.

Across the room the record ended, filling the silence with the pop-sizzle-hiss of the needle.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you saying Elijah Dentman dug up your dead dog and made off with it?”

“I'm
saying,”
Ira intoned, emphasizing the word, “that he'd been the only living soul who'd known where I buried the dog. And a few days later, that hole was dug up and Chamberlain was missing. You do the math.”

“But . . . why?” I had no idea what else to say. This tidbit had blindsided me, even in spite of those dead birds I'd found in the cubbyhole last month.

“Who knows?” Ira said. “You tell me.”

“This is such morbid talk,” Nancy said, turning away and hurrying into the kitchen. I thought I heard her begin to sob once she was out of sight.

“What's all this got to do with the history of Westlake, anyhow?” Apparently Ira hadn't drunk enough wine for the peculiarity of our conversation to elude him.

As if to bolster my undercover role, I turned back to the photo album and riffled through a number of pages. “I guess we just got a little fixated. Veered off topic.”

Ira got up to replace the record.

I continued turning the pages of the album without really looking at the photographs while I struggled to digest all that had just been relayed to me. Could it be true? Had Elijah actually dug up the Steins' dead dog? And if so, for what purpose?

What type of motive can you really expect from a troubled young boy?
said the therapist's voice in the back of my head. Again, I thought of the baby birds I'd squeezed to death in a fit of anger and confusion following Kyle's death. The world could be an angry, hurtful place.

Ira put on a Billie Holiday record and remained standing in front of the phonograph, swaying drunkenly to the music.

My hand froze in the middle of turning one page. I hadn't been paying attention but happened to glance down at just the right moment to catch it. The right photo. The impossibly
right
photo. I started sweating so profoundly I thought I might leave stains on the wingback chair.

“What's this?” I managed, hearing all too clearly the way the words stuck to the roof of my mouth.

Ira came over and looked over my shoulder. “That's the staircase before the big storm came and uprooted it, throwing it into the middle of the lake. It was an old fishing pier—didn't I tell you? See how all of that is now submerged underwater? It's very dangerous for kids to dive off.”

My heart was slamming so loudly I waited for Ira to ask what the sound was. A single pearl of sweat plummeted off my brow and dropped onto the photograph, so loud I swore I could hear it:
lop!

It was a photo of the double dock, a replica of the one from my childhood. The one that had assisted me in murdering my brother over twenty years earlier.

T
he summer of my thirteenth year found me at my most rebellious. Much of it was due to my own restlessness, which had started the previous school year when my classes became tediously boring and my mind began to wander. I drew obscene and quasi-pornographic doodles in the margins of my textbooks and penned grotesque little fables about zombies and werewolves in my composition pads. I earned a week's detention for bouncing a few smartass retorts at a substitute teacher, and once, at the urging of some friends, I flooded the second-floor boys' restroom by stuffing balls of paper towels into the urinals, then securing the flush levers in the down position with industrial rubber bands.

It was my last year in middle school before joining Adam in high school, and much of my rebellion was an act to garner unspoken acceptance among my older brother and his friends.

That summer brought with it a previously prohibited wealth of freedom, where my curfew was extended and I was finally permitted to ride my bike across the Eastport drawbridge and into downtown without an adult. These new freedoms afforded me the luxury of tagging along with Adam when he'd traipse off to one friend's house or another, and although he would sometimes grumble and tell me to get lost, most of the time he didn't say anything.

We'd play baseball at Quiet Waters Park and sometimes drop crab lines tied with chicken necks into the oily waters by the marina. We would swim, too, though we could do this easily in the river behind our house where our mother would be able to call us in when dinner was ready and the sky burned fine threads of fuchsia at the horizon. Sometimes Kyle would wander out onto the back porch and peer down at us from over the roof of the shed.

That summer Kyle turned ten and was allowed to follow us to the river, provided Adam kept an eye on him. Kyle could swim—growing up on the river in the little Eastport duplex, we could all swim at a very early age—but the current would sometimes turn on you without notice. Although we'd never known anyone to whom this had actually happened, the local folklore wasn't without its stories of careless boys and girls getting snared in a riptide and dragged straight out to the bay.

(Gil Gorman, a chunky redheaded bully in Miss McKenzie's social studies class, claimed to have had a cousin who'd been carried away by the tide and out into the Chesapeake. Many months later, the poor kid's body had washed up, mostly picked apart by fish—Gil always emphasized this part of the story—on the shores of England, clear across the Atlantic. Though I'd always suspected much of Gil's tale was bullshit, even at my young and impressionable age, sometimes while lying awake in bed at night I would think about Gil's ill-fated cousin swept out to sea and bobbing like a cork in the pitch-black waters of the Atlantic Ocean, screaming to a blanket of stars for help while some overlarge and unseen sea creature nibbled off his toes one by one.)

Summer nights, when our father's workload lightened and he could spend more time with us, we would sometimes camp out on the back porch with him after my mother had gone to bed, listening to the whip-poor-wills in the trees and watching the silver orb of the moon through spindly branches.

My father would smoke short brown cigarillos that smelled like bourbon, and if we pestered him long enough, he would eventually succumb to the telling of the most frightening ghost stories I have ever heard, even to this day. Ghosts, he said, populated the woods and waterways of this region, and many of the homes and inns and taverns in the historic district were haunted. He told us of Ellicott City, an old mill town in Howard County, and of its seven rolling black hills and the fire-scarred institute, long since defunct, that sat on a wooded hillside high above the railroad tracks. He told us of the Wendigo, and we would listen for its breathing. He told us, too, of a small boy formed straight from some young girl's imagination, like a fairy tale, living in the woods somewhere up north, subsisting on small animals and sometimes on small children.

Kyle would always become scared, and Adam would always grow bored, but I could have listened to those stories, as make-believe as I knew them to be, until the sun broke free over the river. After we'd all gone to bed, I would attempt to frighten Kyle with stories of my own until our father's head appeared as a dark outline in the doorway and told us to go to sleep.

Those are all good memories. If I could, I would wrap them in plastic and store them in some lead-lined safe in the back of my mind, protect them from the world. And while I suppose I will always have those memories to take with me, the darkness of what happened later that summer has overshadowed all else, corrupting their beauty and curling up the edges of those memories like pictures burned in a fire.

Even now, some twenty years later, I cannot recall how it all started that summer or who had discovered the double dock to begin with. Could it have been Adam or one of his longhaired, pimply faced cohorts? Or maybe they'd heard about it from someone else at school. Either way, the double dock was finally discovered, and you would have thought we'd unearthed a treasure chest in the sand.

As I've already described, the double dock was just that: one fishing pier stacked atop another, providing a roof of slatted, mossy boards for the pier below it. The upper pier was equipped with a winch and pulley. It was later explained to us by one of Adam's friends whose father was a waterman on the shore that the purpose of the double dock was to hoist boats out of the water after they'd been winterized so the ice wouldn't cut through the fiberglass hulls. It was a fair enough explanation, but no one cared what practical purpose the double dock served. What we cared about was what we used it for: a raised platform from which to spring out into the midnight sky, soaring blindly through the black, not knowing which way was up and which way was down, unable to believe the water was still there until you actually broke through its surface. Exhilarating.