Floating Staircase

by Ronald Malfi

  I brought the glass to my lips and took a small swallow. Fought back a wince. “Uh . . .”

  Tooey laughed again. “Well?”

  “It’s delicious,” I said.

  “Come on. Be honest.”

  “I’m new here,” I reminded him. “I don’t know if I can. I’m trying to win friends tonight—”

  “Come out with it!”

  Still grimacing, I said, “It’s horrible. It tastes like motor oil mixed with cough syrup.”

  “Ahhhh! So you’re saying I used too much cough syrup?”

  “Or too much motor oil,” I suggested.

  Following my lead, a few of the braver men tasted Tooey’s Tonic. Mutual grimaces abounded.

  “Drink it all, man,” Adam said at my side. He was looking forlornly at his own beverage. “It’s tradition.”

  I imagined crazy little Tooey Jones mad-scientisting away in the supplies cellar beneath Tequila Mockingbird, bubbly test tubes and smoking vials suspended by a network of clamps, pulleys, and hooks over his head, concocting his latest brew.

  A handful of men who had previously been in the den with the women appeared in the kitchen doorway, strategically after the last of Tooey’s Tonic had been choked down.

  Mitchell Denault nodded at me and took a step in my direction. “I don’t want to embarrass you,” he said, a few hometown minions at his back, “but I wanted to get your John Hancock on this.” Like a Vegas mogul displaying a royal flush, he slapped a paperback copy of my latest novel, Water View, on the kitchen counter.

  A fellow behind him—Dick Copeland, an attorney—patted the breast pocket of his Oxford shirt for what I assumed was a pen.

  “I see Adam’s still trying to weasel his fifteen percent by promoting my work,” I said, gathering up the copy of Water View and opening it to the title page. The pages were pristine and the spine had no creases; I could tell the book had been recently purchased and not read. Dick’s pen finally materialized, and he handed it over to me with the excited impatience of a ten-year-old displaying an honor roll report card. I signed the book and thrust it in the general vicinity of Mitchell, Dick, and their horde of cronies.

  By ten o’clock, most of the guests had left. I shook hands and grinned while committing to dinners at houses hosted by people I did not know. Only a few stragglers remained. The women still occupied the den, now talking quietly and in that secretive, whispering way only women have. The few remaining men lingered in the kitchen, picking at the leftover dip and finishing off the hard liquor.

  I had drunk way too much; sometime during the night I’d become overwhelmed by the threat of senselessness that accompanied excessive drinking. But it made the more intrusive of the remaining guests more tolerable, and conversation flowed freely toward the end of the night.

  I went over to the buffet table to scrounge around at the last of the food, balancing a plate in one hand and a Fordham beer in the other.

  A man hovered over the buffet table beside me. He had small, angular features and dark oil-spot eyes swimming behind the lenses of thick, rimless glasses. His eyebrows were like nests of steel wire, and his face was networked with vibrant red blood vessels that betrayed the man’s affinity for drink. I pegged him to be in his midfifties.

  “I don’t think we’ve met,” I said, setting my beer down on the buffet table and extending my hand. Even in my simmering state of inebriation, I felt sobriety rush up to greet me. “I’m Travis Glasgow.”

  He shook my hand—a slight, effeminate grasp followed by a quick release. A man who did not like to shake hands. “I’m Ira Stein. You and your wife are the newcomers—is that right?”

  “Yes. We’ve been here a full week. We were living over in London before Adam told us about the Dentmans’ house coming on the market.”

  “Nancy and I are your next-door neighbors. You can just barely see our house without the leaves on the trees.”

  “So you guys are the log cabin overlooking the lake,” I said. I recalled the way the smoke from the chimney climbed into the gray sky that day I’d walked north along the edge of the lake. “It’s an amazing view.”

  Ira nodded once almost robotically. “It’s very nice, yes.”

  “I’m still shocked we got our place so cheap.”

  “Well, we’re glad you and your wife . . . ?”

  “Jodie.”

  “We’re glad you and Jodie moved in. The Dentmans were a peculiar family, as I’m sure you’ve heard. Not to speak ill of those poor people and what happened to them, of course. Nonetheless, they were peculiar.”

  “What do you mean? What happened to them?”

  “I’m talking about the tragedy. What happened to the boy.”

  I shook my head. Fueled by an overconsumption of alcohol, I felt a wry grin break out across my face. “I’m sorry. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “The Dentman boy?” He raised a peppery eyebrow.

  “What about him?”

  “Oh.” Ira stared at his plate, which was empty except for a few olive pits and a plastic toothpick in the shape of a fencing sword. Then he looked across the room at a frail, amphetamine-thin woman I assumed was his wife, Nancy. She was leaning against the wall and peering into the sunken den where the other women were talking. Ostracized from the group, she could have been a lamp, a decorative statue on an end table.

  Nancy turned her head and returned our stare. I thought she would smile but she didn’t.

  “What happened to the Dentmans?” I said again.

  “I’m sorry,” he muttered, waving one hand. “Really. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “No,” I said. “What—”

  “Really, really,” Ira said and actually stuck out his hand for me to shake.

  Perplexed, I didn’t take it right away.

  “It was careless. Never mind. It wasn’t my place and I apologize. Travis, it’s good—it’s good to meet you.”

  I watched him join his wife against the wall. They talked with their faces very close together, the uniform arcs of their backs and bends of their necks forming, as is occasionally depicted between lovers in cartoons, a crude heart between them.

  Jodie bustled by me, burdened with a tray of desserts. “Some shindig,” she crooned without stopping.

  I hardly heard her; I was still staring at Ira Stein from across the room.

  After everyone had left, Adam and I smoked cigars on the back porch. Surrounded by darkness and the deep sigh of wind through the pines, I never felt farther away from London, from D.C., from all the places I’d always pictured myself living and growing old.

  “What happened to the Dentmans?” I asked.

  Adam looked sidelong at me, and for a moment I couldn’t tell if he was going to smile or scowl. In the end, he did neither. Adam had always been tough. Somehow, perhaps through some cosmic interference, he had always known what to do, what to say. Now I felt I was getting a firsthand view of a different side of my older brother—the Adam who was just as lost and vulnerable as every other human being who had ever walked the Earth.

  “Hey,” I went on, “what’s the big neighborhood secret?”

  “I’m assuming someone said something at the party,” he said, turning away from me.

  “Ira Stein mentioned it, but he didn’t go into any detail. He seemed embarrassed about bringing it up. What happened?”

  “Ira Stein,” my brother muttered under his breath. His tone suggested he did not completely approve of him.

  “Come on, man.”

  “An old hermit owned your house for like a billion years, long before Beth and I ever moved here. Bernard Dentman. I can’t say anyone in the neighborhood even really knew the guy, although I guess Ira Stein and his wife may have known him better before he’d gotten ill. The Steins have been here for pretty much their whole lives, so they know what goes on behind every door.” Again, that nonspecific tone of disgust.

  “When we first moved here, the neighborhood kids used to scare Jacob by sa
ying the old man was really a ghost over two hundred years old and he haunted that house. I finally convinced him that Bernard Dentman was just an old man and nothing more.

  “Last year Dentman got sick, and his two grown children moved in with him. David and Veronica.” Adam shrugged. “They were equally as weird. Veronica had a son about Jacob’s age, but none of the kids around here played with him or even saw him except when he’d play in the yard. Elijah was slow and home-schooled. I don’t think he was, you know, retarded or anything like that. Autistic, maybe. Anyway, Veronica and David stayed on at the house and took care of their father until he died.”

  Adam sucked on his cigar, then pulled it from his mouth to watch the ember glow red. “Elijah drowned in the lake behind your house last summer. That’s why Veronica and David moved out in such a hurry and why the place was such a steal. I guess it was too hard on them. They needed to get the hell out of there.”

  I felt my palms go clammy. I couldn’t speak.

  “You probably noticed the floating staircase, the one coming up through the lake.”

  I nodded. “What is it?”

  “An old fishing pier. A storm came through a few years ago and uprooted it, tossed it on its side. No one ever knew whose pier it was, so no one ever had it removed. Neighborhood kids congregate around it in the summer, dive off it, whatever. Last summer Elijah was out there playing on it.” Again, Adam shrugged. We could have been talking about the weather or the worsening economy. “We worked the investigation and concluded he fell off the staircase, injured his head, and drowned.” His voice had taken on an eerie monotone, as if he were trying hard to sound disinterested in the whole story. “Someone should have been watching him.”

  “Christ. Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

  “Because I didn’t want to ruin this move for you guys. The last thing I wanted to do was burden you with this morbid fucking thing. It’s a nice house, a nice neighborhood. What happened to that little boy is not your cross to carry. And anyway, I know how your mind works.” He sighed and sounded like he could have been one hundred years old.

  Again, I thought of our father. I thought of the way he’d beat me with his belt after Kyle’s funeral service, then disappeared into his study where I could hear his great heaving sobs through the closed door.

  “What do you mean you know how my mind works?”

  “Fuck me.” Adam pulled the cigar from his mouth and examined it as if he’d never seen a cigar before. “Are you really going to make me say it?”

  I didn’t need him to say it. I knew the reason he hadn’t told me about Elijah Dentman was because of what had happened to Kyle. It didn’t take a brain surgeon. Nonetheless, I was a irritated at his overprotection. I wasn’t a little goddamn kid anymore. “Do you think I wouldn’t have bought the house if I’d known?”

  He looked at me. His eyes were hard and piercing. Sober. “Would you have?”

  I shook my head in disappointment and gazed out at the black woods. “Sometimes I think you don’t know me at all.”

  “I’m worried about you.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I’m your older brother. It’s my job.”

  “Stop doing it.” A thickening silence simmered between us for the length of many heartbeats. “Smells like Christmas,” I said finally, eager to shatter the silence and change the subject. “The air. It’s smoky here.”

  “It’s the pines.”

  “We used to have a real tree every year in the house at Christmas when we were kids. Remember?”

  “Of course.”

  “Jodie and I, we started putting up a fake tree every year in London. It became its own tradition. Or some bastardization of tradition, I guess. A fake tree . . .”

  Adam chuckled. “We got one now, too.”

  “They don’t smell the same.”

  “Not like Christmas,” Adam said.

  “Not at all,” I said. “Don’t tell Jodie about it, okay? The drowned boy?”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “You’re right. It’s not our baggage to carry.”

  “I’m glad you think so,” he said and put a hand on my shoulder.

  Ahead of us, the blackness of night seemed to make up the entire world. For all we knew, at that moment we could have been the only two people on the cold, dark face of the planet.

  PART TWO:

  THE BEAUTY OF THE MYSTERY

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Christmas came and went. We celebrated the New Year with Adam’s family at Tequila Mockingbird, Tooey Jones’s pub off Main Street. A heavy snowfall blanketed the town of Westlake that first week of January, and old-timers propped up on stools at Tooey’s bar or at the local barbershop proclaimed this to be the coldest winter they’d seen since they’d been young boys which, by the look of the lot of them, must have been approximately three hundred years ago.

  With the exception of a less than reliable heating unit in the basement, the new house gave us little worry. The day after New Year’s, someone from the gas company examined our heating system. After toiling around with the heating unit, the technician said there appeared to be nothing wrong with it. He then examined the thermostat upstairs, which registered at an even sixty-eight degrees. “Could be the thermostat’s busted,” he suggested. “You’ll have to make an appointment to have someone else come out.”

  Sales for Water View were good, as were the scatter of reviews my publisher managed to secure on websites and in a variety of print magazines. Yet despite this good news, I tried to avoid contact with my editor, Holly Dreher, because I hadn’t written a single damned thing on the new book since leaving North London. For whatever reason, there was a giant brick wall seated in the epicenter of my brain. However, I knew I couldn’t keep up the chase forever.

  During one slate-gray afternoon, with the bare tree limbs shaking with the threat of a storm, my cell phone began to chirp in the kitchen. Its persistent call echoed throughout the empty house. (Beth had whisked Jodie away for an afternoon of shopping in town.) At that very moment I had been staring at a blank notebook page, tapping a ballpoint pen against my wrist. And because God enjoys irony as much as anyone, I knew the call would be from Holly.

  Sure enough, snagging my cell phone off the kitchen counter, I recognized the 212 area code: New York. “Hey, Holly.”

  “I was beginning to think you died out there, Travis.” The tone of her voice suggested she knew I’d been avoiding her like some virulent disease.

  “Nope. I’m still alive and well.”

  “I was just making an assumption based on the number of phone messages I’ve left for you that have yet to be returned.” She sighed. I could hear her lighting a cigarette. “How’s the new house?”

  “Needs some work.”

  “Christ. You’re not tearing down walls or putting up walls or anything like that, are you?”

  “No, it’s not that bad.”

  “You haven’t answered my last couple e-mails, either.”

  “Our Internet connection is spotty at best.” Which wasn’t a lie; we’d had some difficulty. We’d complained to our provider, but they assured us the problem wasn’t on their end. Nevertheless, even if I’d been able to access my e-mail for more than a few fleeting seconds at a time before our connection went dead, I wouldn’t have had the fortitude to check Holly’s messages in the wake of the severe writer’s block I’d been suffering.

  “Well, you should get your ass down to the local library, buddy, and let a gal know you’re okay at least. Capisce?”

  “Haven’t had much time to explore the town. I don’t even know if there is a library. You know how it is out here in the sticks.”

  “God. Don’t remind me. I grew up in Incest, Pennsylvania, remember?”

  Outside, the wind grew stronger and rattled the kitchen windowpanes. The house creaked and groaned all around me. It was like being in the belly of a giant fish.

  “Had you read those e-mails,” Holly motored on, “you would have found
high praise from me on those first few chapters.” Dramatic pause. “I’m anxious to read the rest.”

  “Sure,” I said . . . then froze. Movement from the hallway caught my attention. I saw—or thought I saw—a shadow receding down the length of the wall. My bowels clenched, and my heart was suddenly a solid chunk of granite. Covering the phone’s mouthpiece with my hand, I called out Jodie’s name and waited for a response. None came. Anyway, I would have heard the front door open had it been Jodie . . .

  “We’re doubling the print run on this one, too,” Holly droned. “At least, that’s what I’m shooting for. But I need you to deliver.”

  I crept down the hallway in time to see the basement door at the end of the hall slowly close. The latch catching sounded like someone charging a handgun. I swallowed a hard lump of spit.

  “You’re frighteningly contemplative. You’re not going to ask for an extension on this, are you? Because the book is already slated—”

  Somehow I found my voice. “No. That’s good news.” The words all but stuck to my throat. I heard the basement steps squeaking as someone descended. Heart pounding like a jackhammer, I approached the basement door.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” Holly barked. “You sound completely out of it, man.”

  “I’m gonna have to call you back,” I said.

  “What is it?”

  “I think someone just broke into my house.”

  “Travis? Broke into your house?”

  “I gotta go.”

  “Do you want me to call—”

  “I’ll call you back,” I said and hung up. The cell phone was a sweaty block in my hand. I slipped it into my pocket, then opened the basement door. There was a light on down there, one I was positive I hadn’t turned on. And Jodie had not been in the basement at all as far as I could tell. “Hey,” I called, trying my damnedest to sound threatening and failing miserably. “I know you’re there. Come on up and we’ll talk. No need to call the police.”