Floating Staircase (22 page)

“The fact that she's been institutionalized half her life doesn't surprise me in the least,” I said. “Talking to that woman was like talking to one of Jack Finney's pod people.”

“You sure she wasn't just in mourning over her son?”

“I thought she was at first, but then I could tell something was . . . well,
off.
She seemed terrified of her brother.”

“Here,” Earl said, finally locating what he'd been searching for. He hobbled over and gave me a stack of eight-by-ten color glossies.

As I looked through them, I was aware of the old man's hand coming to rest on my shoulder. I felt a pang of sadness for him and couldn't help but wonder about the backstory between him and his estranged son.

I flipped through several photos before I recognized the location. “This is my backyard. I've never seen it in summer, the leaves on the trees and all the bushes and flowers in bloom. You took these?”

“Annie Leibovitz, remember?”

One shot was of the lake behind my house, the foliage around the lake as heavy as a shroud. There were police officers gathered around the cusp of the lake, and two divers were rising out of the water in scuba gear. Another photo had the front grille of a police cruiser in the foreground, parked down in the grass of the sloping hillside. There were a couple of shots of David speaking with police, but his face was mostly blocked by police hats. Lastly was a photo of Veronica standing by herself and halfway concealed by trees. Her face had that same vacuous, haunted expression she'd had when I'd knocked on her front door.

“That's the shot,” Earl said from behind me, looking over my shoulder. “That's the one that gave me chills for nights afterward. Just like you said—that goes beyond a mother in shock, beyond a mother in mourning. In fact, how would you say she looks to you? You're the writer. How would you describe her?”

I thought long and hard before admitting she looked absolutely terrified.

“Right,” Earl agreed without hesitation. “Scared to death.”

There was something else that bothered me about the photos. I flipped through them a second and third time, trying to figure out what it was, but it eluded me.

“There were enough people milling about by the lake that afternoon, as you can imagine,” Earl said. “I blended right in, and after a while no one paid me any mind. I got close enough to eavesdrop when the cops were questioning David. The guy was calm and specific, unruffled by the cops' questions. When it came time to ask Veronica some questions, she just sounded like a record skipping on a groove—'I was asleep. I was asleep. I was asleep.' Finally, David told the cops to leave her alone, that she was delicate and they were upsetting her.” He shook his head, his eyes distant and glassy. “I can still hear her clear as day—'I was asleep. I was asleep.'”

“You think she was coached?”

“By David?”

“Who else?”

“It's possible. But it's hard to tell with that woman. I don't think a single word that ever came from her mouth has sounded natural. That'd be my bet.”

“Hmmm,” I said, still flipping through the photographs. “You're probably right.”

“None of them ever made it to print,” Earl said, still hunkering over my shoulder. “Fat Figgis said they were too gruesome for
The Muledeer.”

“Fat Figgis?”

“Jan Figgis,” he said. “My editor. The woman's four hundred pounds if she's an ounce.”

“Can I hold on to these?”

“The photos? Shoot, you can keep ‘em.”

“Thanks,” I said, slipping the glossies inside the cover of one of my notebooks. “And can I bother you with a favor?”

“Bring it on, son,” he said, returning to his seat across from me at the table. (The epithet did not slip by me unnoticed.)

“I want to put your investigative skills to the test. I need you to locate a woman named Althea Coulter for me. All I know is she used to live in Frostburg and she's most likely licensed as a grade school teacher.” I thought about how Nancy had referred to the woman, then added, “There's a good chance she might already be dead, though.”

“Can I ask who this Althea Coulter is?”

“For a brief time, Elijah Dentman was home-schooled when he lived in my house. According to the Steins, Althea Coulter was his teacher. I want to talk to her.”

“Alive or dead,” Earl promised, “I'll find her.”

H
onest writing, much like honest people, comes without wanting anything in return. I found myself on an exploration of characters—characters that begot story; story that begot emotion—traversing through Edenic pastures and Elysian fields where dead boys frolicked in barefooted bliss on the dew-showered plains, and terminal skies reflected the roiling slate seas instead of the other way around.

I was out back chopping firewood when Adam came over. I heard his boots crunching through the crust of snow before I actually saw him emerge from the trees.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.” I went on chopping. The goddamn furnace was still uncooperative, so Jodie and I were going through several logs a day in the fireplace. It hadn't snowed for days, but it was still deathly cold.

“Haven't seen you in a couple days. I popped in yesterday, but Jodie said you'd gone out somewhere. Some book research or something.”

“Yeah.”

“You ever take any of that stuff to Veronica Dentman? I never heard how it went.”

“I did,” I said, splitting another log.

“And . . . ?”

I rested the axe head in the snow and leaned on the handle. I was out of breath and sweating despite the cold. “I brought her a box. She was . . . standoffish.”

“Understandable. You probably gave her one hell of a shock showing up like that.”

“Then David came home, and he gave
me
one hell of a shock. He thought I was a cop.”

Adam chewed his lower lip. “Nothing happened, did it?”

“What would happen?”

“Never mind.”

“Did you guys know he has a criminal record?”

Adam looked away from me. His nose was red and one nostril glistened. “Don't tell me that just came up in conversation with him.”

“No. I found that out on my own.”

“How?”

“That's not important,” I said, not wanting to get Earl and his elusive sources mixed up in all this. “Did you know?”

“About David's past? If you're questioning the PD's investigative techniques, that's really none of your business.”

“It's just a simple question.”

“Of course we knew. We ran a background on him. What do you think, we're a bunch of Barney Fifes out here, tripping over our shoelaces and shooting ourselves in the foot?”

“Okay,” I said. “That's all I wanted to know.”

“To know for what?”

“Forget it.” I hefted the axe over my shoulder.

“I happened to talk with Ira Stein yesterday. It's the reason I came over yesterday looking for you.”

Fuck,
I thought, dropping the axe in the snow. I glared at him. “What are you doing, trying to set me up or something? Catch me in a lie? Yeah, I spoke with Ira.”

“He said you're writing a book about what happened to the Dentmans.”

“That's not what I told him. He was drunk by the time I left and he'd misunderstood.”

“He said you asked a lot of questions about them. You upset his wife at one point, too.”

“Jesus Christ, she got upset when her husband started talking about her dead dog. I told them I was interested in the history of Westlake. We got sidetracked and started talking about the Dentmans. It was completely incidental.”

“So then it's not true? You're not writing a book about the Dentmans?”

I stared at him and counted my heartbeats. When I spoke, I surprised myself with how even and steady my voice sounded. “I don't have to answer any of your questions. We're not in one of your fucking interrogation rooms.”

“Fine. You don't have to answer shit. But let me give you a little brotherly advice. This is a small town and gossip travels fast. You want to keep yourself out of trouble, you'll stop poking around.”

“Fucking unbelievable,” I howled. “Now you're threatening me—”

“I'm not threatening you, asshole. I'm warning you. You've got a nice setup out here, and your wife deserves it. Don't muck it up for her and embarrass her by acting like a fool.”

I blurted out, “I think David Dentman killed his nephew.”

“Is that so?”

“The pieces don't fit. Things don't make sense.”

“Really? And what evidence do you have? Aside from some assault charges for which he'd never been prosecuted?”

What
was
my evidence? The overall weirdness of the whole thing? The fact that David had looked like he wanted to punch me in the throat when he'd come and found me in his home with his mentally disturbed sister? I knew what my gut was telling me, but those gut feelings didn't translate well into actual facts.

My silence at this point was condemning.

“We deal in facts,” said my brother. “Murderers have motives, innocent people have alibis, and you can't lock someone up behind bars because pieces don't fit. Sometimes in real life, things don't fit. This is real life, not one of your books.”

But what if it is?
I thought.

“There was no body,” Adam said. “Those people never got any closure. Leave them alone.”

Still fuming, I kicked my boots off on the front porch and tossed my jacket over the sofa as I entered the house. On the coffee table in front of the sofa, Elijah's colorful wooden blocks were stacked into a pyramid.

Upstairs, I stood in the doorway to the office. Jodie was hunched over her desk before a display of psychology textbooks and reams of photocopied journal articles. She had one finger looped through the handle of a steaming mug of what smelled like chamomile tea.

“Working hard?” I said.

“Thy feelest the crunch upon thee.”

“Did you set up those blocks on the coffee table downstairs?”

“What blocks?” Her nose was buried in one of her books; she didn't turn around to look at me.

I chortled. “Come on. The blocks on the coffee table.”

She turned around in her chair. Her face looked plain without makeup, almost puritanical. “I'm trying to work here. What are you getting at?”

“Someone stacked a bunch of toy blocks on the coffee table downstairs.”

“You look different,” Jodie said, her gaze lingering on me a bit too long. She was reading me. I felt nude standing there in the hallway. “Are you okay?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don't know. You haven't seemed like yourself for the past few days.”

“Who have I seemed like?” I said, and I couldn't help but recall the night Jodie had said she'd gone into the bathroom in the middle of the night and it was my reflection staring back at her from the mirror.
I was you.

“You know what I mean,” she insisted. “No, I don't. Tell me.”

Jodie sighed. “Why don't you go shower and shave, clean yourself up a little bit? You'll feel better.”

“I feel fine.”

“You look haunted.” Her words chilled me. “Maybe you're working yourself too hard on this new book. Take a few days off.”

“All right,” I said, not wanting to prolong this conversation any further.

“You're stressed out. That's why you've been having those nightmares.”

“What nightmares?”

“I don't know.” She drew her eyebrows together. “You sort of whimper like a puppy in your sleep.”

“Do I?”

“It's stress,” Jodie said, returning to her schoolwork.

“What about those blocks?” I questioned the small of her back again.

“I don't know what the hell you're talking about. I don't play with blocks.”

I went downstairs and gathered the blocks, carried them into the basement, and returned them to their plastic blue pail. With a huff I sat at Elijah's tiny writing desk, my knees crammed beneath it at awkward angles, and opened one of my writing notebooks.

Staring up at me were Earl's eight-by-tens, the top one the shot of Veronica partially hidden behind a stand of junipers. Once again I felt that needling insistence that something was trying to jump out at me from the photos, waving its arms like a drowning man to come to my attention. Yet just like before I couldn't figure out what it was.

Let the writing hunt for it,
I thought, grabbing a pen and setting the photos down beside one of my open notebooks on the desk.

In college I'd had a creative writing instructor who'd once said, “Quite often fiction is the best reality; cruelties are so much easier to swallow when they're dressed up and capering about like circus clowns.”

So I let the writing hunt for the missing puzzle piece, printing lengthy descriptions of what I saw in each of Earl's photographs, describing the leathery gray water, the crenellated staircase rising from its glassy surface, the police cars and the fullness of the summer trees, and the scudding cumuli on the horizon. I described the vacuous look in Veronica's eyes and the blurry, almost nonexistent face of David behind a wedge of policemen's hats.

(Although I couldn't be certain, I swore—throughout the entirety of the writing—that someone had come up behind me, slight and hesitant, and began stacking the wooden blocks on the floor. I was aware of this only distantly and through a mental fog, the way drunks remember bits and pieces of their escapades after waking up the next morning with a hangover.)

I was writing and studying the photographs with such intensity that I hadn't heard Jodie come down the basement stairs. She nearly sent me through the roof when she cleared her throat in deliberate irritation.