by Ronald Malfi
“Christ. I’m hurt you think I’m so weak.”
“Grow the hell up. Don’t try and make me feel guilty. I won’t.”
Jodie was right. Notwithstanding the sting of betrayal I felt, I understood why she’d kept it from me. Too clearly I could summon the memory of that night after my mother’s funeral, the words that were said in anger and the punches that were thrown.
“Okay,” I said at last, closing the distance between us. I hugged her and felt the beer bottle press into my abdomen. “Okay.”
Jodie sighed against my shoulder, and I let her go. I expected her eyes to be moist but they weren’t. She just looked incredibly tired.
“I want you to call someone, have them come out and get rid of all that stuff,” she said, nodding in the direction of Elijah’s bedroom. “And I don’t want to talk about what happened to that boy anymore. It’s unsettling but it has nothing to do with us.”
“Right,” I said, massaging her shoulder with one hand. “It has nothing at all to do with us.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The following morning I telephoned a company called Allegheny Pickup and Removal and spoke to a fellow with the unfortunate name of Harry Peters about getting rid of Elijah Dentman’s things. It would take ten days for them to fit me into their rotation: a duration Jodie wasn’t too thrilled about. Yet if Jodie gave the hidden bedroom and its cache of childlike artifacts more than a passing thought each day, she did a spectacular job not letting it show.
I, on the other hand, found myself creeping down into the basement bedroom any chance I could get—and against the promise to my wife that I would do just the opposite—because I felt an inexplicable longing to sift through all Elijah’s things.
The story Adam had told me about Elijah’s accidental death coupled with the discovery of the boy’s tomblike bedroom had caused a previously diminishing spark to reignite in the center of my creative soul. My writer’s block evaporated like clouds of heavy fog retreating out to sea; once again I was able to see the bright lights of that grand city.
I lost all interest in the manuscript I’d been trying to write—the first few chapters of which Holly had already read and loved—and began fleshing out descriptions of a make-believe family (that maybe wasn’t so make-believe) rooted in some disturbing and interpersonal dysfunction. A single mother and her young son come to live with the boy’s uncle and ailing grandfather in the final days before the grandfather passes on. What sort of life did these characters live? What happens to a young boy who’s forced to live in a ten-by-ten room that resembled something out of “The Cask of Amontillado”?
Of course, the similarities between Elijah’s death and my own brother’s were not lost on me. Both had drowned at roughly the same age. Both of their bedrooms had been left eerily undisturbed following their deaths—Elijah’s in the basement of 111 Water-view Court and Kyle’s in our house in Eastport. Since Adam was the eldest, Kyle and I had shared the bedroom. After Kyle’s death, my father moved my stuff out, and I bunked in Adam’s room until that cold December day when my parents, silent and moving as if manipulated by strings, finally packed up all Kyle’s belongings and transferred them to the garage.
(Whatever happened to Kyle’s stuff after that remains a mystery to me; after our father died and our mother went to live with her sister in Ellicott City, Adam and I returned to our childhood home to take care of our father’s estate. I’d expected to find Kyle’s stuff still in the garage—expected to be mercilessly confronted by it like a murderer facing Judgment Day—but was surprised to find it gone. And somehow that was worse than having to see that stuff all over again, because it meant that there had been at least one specific moment in time when my parents had to go through everything in order to get rid of it, and it hurt me to think of the grief it must have caused them.)
Because of these similarities and because I had no idea what Elijah Dentman had looked like, I gave my fictional little boy characteristics very similar to Kyle’s—slight of frame, bright hair, handsome eyes with great fans of lashes, gingery spray of freckles across the saddle of his nose. The only towheaded male in our family: the odd man out. The writing came in a fury and left me drained but excited by the end of each session.
One afternoon while Jodie was out with Beth, I phoned Adam and told him to come over as soon as he could. He showed up on the front porch in his dark blue police uniform, his hat in his hands. The uniform made him look twice as big, the body armor he wore under his shirt giving him the overall rounded appearance of a whiskey barrel.
“What in the world is so important? You were practically out of breath on the telephone.”
I took him downstairs and showed him the room.
“Holy shit.” Adam stared in awe at what I’d uncovered. “Are you kidding?” Like Jodie, he remained in the doorway, as if an invisible barrier were preventing him from crossing the threshold.
Later that evening, I was overcome by another strong impulse to put words to paper. But I was tired of sitting on the sofa with a notebook on my lap. I located a rolling chair stashed away with various other forgotten relics in the basement and wheeled it into Elijah’s bedroom and right up to the kid’s desk. I adjusted the chair so that it came to an agreeable height, then flipped open my writing notebook and scribbled furiously.
I sketched out caricatures of Tooey Jones, Ira and Nancy Stein, the Christmas party at Adam’s house, and the basement bedroom secreted behind the wall. I wrote detailed passages describing the floating staircase on the lake. And of course I wrote of Elijah Dentman, my central character, my tragic figure, the poor boy held captive in an underground bedroom dungeon. What kind of child was Elijah? What does being trapped in a basement do to a ten-year-old boy? (I thought of the shoe box of dead birds and felt a numbness creep through me like a fever.)
For now, I had overpowered the writer’s block and was sailing into port on a soaring, lightning-colored dirigible, high above the blinking lights and the network of distant industrial causeways. Soaring, soaring.
When I finally put down my pen, my hand was throbbing and there was a sizeable blister on my index finger. What I had in the notebook were wonderful passages and detailed descriptions. What I was missing, though, was a story. I knew too little about the Dentmans to accurately riff off their lives. I kept putting my little boy in a basement dungeon but couldn’t understand how he got there. Who was Elijah? Who were the entire Dentman family?
I needed to find out.
CHAPTER TWELVE
It was only 11:15 in the morning by the time I arrived at the Westlake Public Library, and already there were iron-colored clouds crowded along the horizon promising snow.
The library was a squat, brick structure set at the intersection of Main and Glasshouse Streets and fortified by a fence of spindly, leafless maples. Inside, all was deathly quiet. As had become my custom whenever I found myself in a library, I crossed to the G aisle and located only a single, tattered copy of my novel Silent River among the stacks. It appeared to have been someone’s preowned copy that had been donated to the library, as I found the name G. Kellow printed on the inside of the front cover.
At the information desk an elderly woman with a kind, grandmotherly face smiled at me from behind a pair of bifocals. She was massaging a dollop of Purell into her hands.
“Hi,” I said, “I was hoping to search through some back issues of the local newspaper.”
“That would be the Westlake city paper? The Muledeer?”
“The city paper, yes.” Thinking: What a perfectly backwoods name for this town’s rag.
“How far back do you want to search? If it’s roughly within two years, we’ll have the newsprint copies in the storage room. Beyond two years, you’ll find it on microfiche.” She adopted an apologetic tone and added, “I know the microfiche is a tad outdated, even for out here on the tip of the devil’s backbone, but the library hasn’t gotten around to transferring all those files onto the computer yet.”
“
It’s no problem,” I assured her.
Though there was no one else around to overhear, she leaned across the desk and whispered conspiratorially, “Truth is, I don’t like computers. Don’t trust them. Too many buttons, too many things to go wrong. Anyway, I’m an old woman, and I’m not about to learn the tango and the two-step, if you know what I mean.” She smiled, her powdered cheeks flushing red. “Lord, I must sound like the perfect paranoid fool.”
“Not at all,” I said. “I prefer to do all my writing by hand. And I don’t think I’ll need the microfiche. I need to go back to last summer or thereabout.”
“Well,” she said, “you’ll need the unicorn.”
I blinked. “The what?”
The librarian sifted around in a shoe box she’d produced from beneath the counter and came up with a set of keys. Dangling from the key chain was a rubber unicorn figurine. Its paint worn away and its hindquarters decorated with what appeared to be teeth marks, the little rubber figurine could have been a hundred years old.
“This way,” said the librarian, and I followed her around the front desk and through a maze of bookshelves. “Lord knows why Vicky insists on locking the door. It’s not like someone’s going to break in and rob us of all our old newspapers.”
“What was that comment you said before? The one about the devil’s backbone?”
“The tip of the devil’s backbone,” she repeated. “Something my mother used to say. It means the middle of nowhere. Like out here in Westlake.”
“I like it.”
“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” she said. “It’s a wonderful little town.”
I’d meant I liked her mother’s saying but didn’t see the need to explain myself.
We arrived at a nondescript door at the rear of the library. There was a poster on the door depicting a fuzzy orange kitten dangling from a tree branch. The caption, strangely misspelled, read, Hang in Their!
The librarian selected the appropriate key and opened the door. She leaned inside and flipped on the light, bringing into view a room no bigger than a water closet. A rack of shelves stood against one wall, sagging with stacked newspapers. There was a table and a chair in there, too, and a yellow legal pad hung from a peg in the drywall.
“That notepad on the wall is the index,” she said and handed me the keys. “There’s a key to the bathroom on there as well. Guess Vicky thinks someone’s going to come in and steal our toilets, too. Would you like some coffee?”
“No, thanks.”
“Well, give me a shout if you need anything. I’m Sheila.”
“Thanks, Sheila.”
When she’d gone, I stepped into the room and shut the door behind me. The air was stale and—of course—heady with the moldy, woodchip scent of old newspapers. I unhinged the legal pad from the peg and scanned the pages. It took a good minute or two to decode the index, but once I figured out the system, I located specific dates without much difficulty.
The Muledeer was a weekly newspaper, each issue not much thicker than a menu from a roadside diner. I had no specific date for the drowning of Elijah Dentman other than the fact that it had happened last summer, so I started with the first week of June and walked myself through the pages. Because the papers weren’t very wordy I didn’t think it would take me much time to search, and, anyway, something as profound as a neighborhood child’s death would, I surmised, surely command a front-page presence.
Overall, there wasn’t much going on in Westlake, Maryland. For the most part, the newspapers were chock-full of human interest stories, reviews of local talent shows, publicity write-ups for local businesses, and the occasional memorial for an elderly resident who had passed on to that great assisted living facility in the sky. While the articles offered very little newsworthy information, they provided a resourceful peek into the heart and soul of the small town I now called home.
Then there it was, the headline staring straight at me—
LOCAL BOY DROWNS IN LAKE
I felt an icy wave rush through my body. I was rendered paralyzed by the reality of it. I wasn’t breathing: I was aware of this but couldn’t do anything about it.
Just beneath the headline and to the left of the article was a school photograph of Elijah Dentman. He was fair skinned and towheaded, with a round face and squinty little eyes, but there the similarities between him and Kyle stopped. There was something slow, something underdeveloped about his appearance. It was one of those Kmart portraits with the fake wooded background, so simple and commonplace, yet something in the boy’s eyes made me want to break down and sob.
According to David Dentman, the boy’s uncle, Elijah had been swimming in the lake that afternoon and playing on the floating staircase while David watched him from the living room window and Elijah’s mother slept upstairs. When it began to get dark, David looked up to find Elijah gone. He rushed down to the lake and called for Elijah, but the boy did not answer. He waded out into the lake, still shouting the boy’s name, but to no avail. Panic apparently set in when David noticed what appeared to be blood on one of the wooden stairs of the floating staircase. He hurried back to the house and phoned the police.
The cops executed a cursory search of the lakeside and the surrounding woods. They also interviewed neighbors, and there was a quote from Nancy Stein in the article that corroborated David Dentman’s story: she’d been out walking her dog and saw Elijah playing on the floating staircase. Then later that afternoon she heard what she thought to be a sharp scream by the water. Nancy Stein hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, of course, but now . . .
By the time I read to the end of the article, I felt as though I’d been punched in the stomach, for there was one bit of crucial information Adam had neglected to tell me after the Christmas party at his house: Elijah’s body had never been found. The Westlake Police Department had sent a scuba unit into the lake but did not find Elijah. According to the chief of police, the lake was deep during the summer months, and with all the rain they had been having, the sediment at the bottom was churned up, making visibility difficult. They continued to dredge the lake all evening and well into the following morning, but they never found the boy. They never found the boy.
The final determination was located on the front page of the following week’s paper. Police deduced that the boy had fallen off the staircase and struck his head on one of the stairs, knocking himself unconscious and ultimately drowning. DNA proved the blood on the stair was, in fact, his. The scream Nancy Stein allegedly heard had most likely been Elijah as he fell off the staircase before he struck his head on the step. And just like that the case was closed.
I read and reread the article, unable to comprehend it. The lake was large, sure, but it was a self-contained body of water. How had they been unable to find a body? Had the kid fallen in and been swept away that quickly? It made no sense.
“Brought you some coffee, anyway,” Sheila said, causing me to launch out of my skin. Deep in concentration, I hadn’t even heard the door open. Sheila set down a Styrofoam cup on the table beside the newspapers. Peering over my shoulder, she examined the headline, then shook her head as if gravely disappointed. “I remember that. A horrible tragedy.”
“They never found the body,” I said, my voice paper-thin and incredulous.
“Always such a tragedy when something like that happens to a person so young.” Then she frowned, her face collapsing in a cavalcade of wrinkles. “Why would you want to read about such a terrible thing?”
“My wife and I just moved to town, and I heard about what had happened.” I offered her a wan smile. “I guess I was just curious.”
“A young man like you shouldn’t be curious about such morbidity. You should be thinking about football and fishing and spending time with your wife.”
“I’m a horror writer. Morbid curiosity is my bread and butter, Sheila,” I confessed, picking up the cup of coffee and taking a sip.
She beamed like a proud mother at my use of her name. “So, what do you wr
ite? Short stories?”
“Novels.”
“Really? That’s fantastic! Have any of them been published?”
“All of them.” I’ve always hated this question.
“Well! Would we have any here at the library, then?”
“In fact, you’ve got one of my books right out there on the shelf. Filed under G for Glasgow.” I suddenly wanted to get rid of her and figured this might be the way to do it.
“Now isn’t that something? Glasgow, did you say? Like the city in Scotland?”
“The very same.”
Sheila’s smile grew so wide I thought it might just cleave her face in half. “Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to find the book and have you autograph it. I hope you don’t mind. I’ll put up a nice little local author carousel by the front doors.” She clasped her hands against her bosom. “It’s like having a celebrity in the neighborhood.”
As Sheila scuttled off, I replaced the yellow legal pad on the wall peg. Before leaving, however, I surrendered to a sudden compulsion and flipped back to the newspaper articles about Elijah Dentman. Casting a cursory glance over one shoulder, I tore the pages out of the newspapers and hastily folded them into the back pocket of my jeans.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me they never found Elijah Dentman’s body?”
It was Adam’s day off, and we were sitting at the bar at Tequila Mockingbird, plowing through beers. The ‘Bird, as it was known to the regulars, was a gloomy, rustic pub, with smoked brick walls and floorboards as warped as the nightmares of a madman. A splintered bar clung to one wall and faced an arrangement of circular tables. An old jukebox collected dust beside the restroom door, and exposed ceiling joists, all blackened and unreliable, spoke of past grease fires gone horribly out of control. With all its ghosts and vapors, it was no different than every other small-town bar throughout America.