Floating Staircase

by Ronald Malfi

  “It is. Who’s this?”

  “Well, Mr. Glasgow, my name’s Earl Parsons, and I suppose I’m Westlake’s answer to Woodward and Bernstein. I got a phone call from Sheila Brookner—what she called a tip, so to speak—and she said we had ourselves a celebrity in our midst.”

  “Sheila Brookner?” I intoned. Then it occurred to me. “Oh.” She was the librarian who’d let me into the archived newspaper room. For one crazy moment I thought this guy was calling about the articles I tore out of the papers.

  “She said you came by the library doing some research for a new book or something like that.”

  “Hmmm. Something like that.” I considered his Woodward and Bernstein comment, then said, “You’re a reporter.”

  Earl Parsons laughed—the sound of a stubborn old tractor trying to start up in cold weather. “Well, now, you say it like that and you’ll give me a swelled head. I’m actually a retired mill worker, but I do much of the freelance writing for The Muledeer, seeing how the town’s so small. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that my contemporaries on the paper are made up mostly of journalism students from the college.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “It’s not often we get someone famous like yourself coming to live in Westlake.” Another rumbling chuckle. “Never, actually.”

  “I think you use the word famous too generously. I’ve written a few horror novels.”

  “One of which I’m reading right now,” Earl said, perhaps trying to impress me, although I didn’t think he was lying. “Creepy stuff, for sure.”

  “They’re certainly creepy,” I said.

  “I’d like to write up a nice human interest piece on you, if you’d let me. You moving out here’s probably the biggest news since Dolly Murphy won the pie eating contest last fall.”

  I thought of Elijah Dentman drowning in the lake behind my house and how that had surely been bigger news but didn’t say anything.

  “Understand I don’t mean to be a nuisance,” Earl motored on. “If you had the time—and weather permitting—I’d like to meet with you for an interview.”

  I was about to say that wouldn’t be a problem when movement in the living room caught my attention. Seeing that it was the dead of winter, there were no windows open in the house . . . yet the curtain covering the front windows appeared to be billowing out as if manipulated by a breeze. I felt something solid click toward the back of my throat, and for a couple of seconds I could formulate no words.

  “Of course,” Earl said, no doubt interpreting my silence as disapproval, “if it would be too much of an inconvenience . . .”

  “No,” I finally managed. The word came out in a squeak, but I didn’t think Earl noticed. “No, that’s fine. I’m flattered.”

  “How’s tomorrow sound?”

  “That’ll be fine.”

  “I work out of the house so you’d have to come—”

  “Just stop by here,” I told him. My gaze was locked on the curtains. They were made of a semitransparent material that dulled the daylight on the other side to a melancholic nimbus. Through the fabric I could make out the undeniable shape of a small child, an ethereal silhouette against the front windows but behind the curtain, the curtain covering him up like a death shroud.

  Him, I thought. Elijah Dentman.

  “How’s noon strike you?” It was as if Earl’s voice were coming from the moon.

  “Fine.”

  “Hey! Terrific! I’ll see you then, Mr. Glasgow.”

  “Good-bye,” I mumbled and hung up.

  My palms were tacky with sweat, and that awful taste was back in my mouth. Slowly, I closed the distance between the kitchen and the living room. With each step I took, the shape of the child behind the curtains—the child I knew to be Elijah Dentman or whatever remained of him in this world—took on the shape of the holly bushes outside, pressed up against the windowpanes and shaking in the wind. Once I reached the curtains, I did not have to sweep them aside to see that I had mistaken these bushes for the ghost of a lost child. Their horned leaves scraped against the glass like grinding teeth.

  I bent down and put my hand over the floor vent that was beneath the curtains, covering the expulsion of cold air that was streaming through the vent. The curtains stopped moving. I held my breath. A second later, a stiff, crinkling sound emanated from somewhere behind me. I turned my head and saw one of my notebook pages flutter and ripple. The page didn’t actually turn, but it looked like it wanted to.

  I called out Elijah’s name and waited.

  There was no response.

  Something else turned over inside me, and I called out Kyle’s name. Louder this time. I was confused. For a moment, I thought I was a child again, thirteen or fourteen, back in my parents’ house in Eastport, lost and confused in the middle of the night. But no—I was here, an adult in his home. There were no ghosts. There were no dead boys, no dead brothers.

  Five minutes later, after putting on a pair of work boots and an overcoat, I grabbed an unopened bottle of pinot noir, then trudged out into the snow. The wind was biting, and the snow was still coming down as I hiked up the hill toward the Steins’ house. Beyond the trees I could see a banner of charcoal smoke rising from the stone chimney, listing like a thin tree in the northerly winds. I climbed the porch and thumped frozen knuckles against the solid oak door. I thought I heard lilting orchestral music from inside the house.

  To my left, a sweep of velvet curtains parted in the window, then fell back into place. A moment later, Ira Stein answered the door. “Mr. Glasgow,” he said, no doubt surprised to find me standing on his porch. He was dressed in a pair of pressed slacks and a zipper-fronted sweater the color of sawdust. He smiled somewhat disarmingly behind the too-thick lenses of his spectacles. “A bit nasty to be out for a walk, isn’t it?”

  “I felt a bit awkward when we met at my brother’s Christmas party. I wanted to bring you this.” I gave him the bottle of wine.

  “Well, thank you. I hope I didn’t stir up anything that evening.”

  Whoa, boy, you’ve got no idea, I thought and had to fight back a maniacal laugh. “Not at all. I mean, I didn’t know what happened to the Dentman kid, but Adam told me. It’s okay. No harm done.”

  “Please come in.” Ira stood aside, holding the door open for me.

  I stomped the snow from my boots, stepped inside, and Ira shut the door behind me.

  The place was a museum. There were enormous lithographs of old Roman buildings, Mediterranean grottoes, seagoing vessels, and countless European landscapes housed in expensive brass frames on the walls. All the furniture looked pristine and undisturbed, like photos from a catalogue. The Oriental carpet was as thick as a mattress, resistant to the impression of shoes when walked across. I took in the stone hearth where a fire burned and the display of glass-fronted bookshelves where numerous leather-bound volumes, their spines perfectly intact and absent of creases, were filed. Everything smelled of mahogany and pencil shavings and the memory of old cigars, like the meeting room of an ancient fraternity.

  It’s because they don’t have children, said a voice in the back of my head that sounded very much like Jodie’s.

  “Wow,” I said. “This is a beautiful place.”

  A white Maltese sitting in front of the fireplace on a satin-covered ottoman raised its head and scrutinized me with leaky black eyes. In the background, an old Victor Victrola phonograph popped and crackled as one orchestral number ended and another took its place.

  Ira went immediately to an elaborate bar beside a set of sliding glass doors that led out onto the back deck. He opened the bottle of pinot noir and poured some of the bloodred wine into two glasses. He handed me one, then offered me a seat in a wingback chair piped with brass tacks. I sat as he sat opposite me in an identical chair before the fire.

  The Maltese was still eyeballing me, a fluffy white pharaoh with its eyebrows triggering quizzically back and forth.

  Nancy’s voice filtered down the hallway, call
ing her husband’s name.

  “In here.”

  She appeared in the doorway, just about as frail as I remembered her from the Christmas party. She wore brown corduroys and a sweater that looked disconcertingly identical to her husband’s. The Maltese began its high-pitched yapping, to which she told it to hush, be a good little Fauntleroy and hush now, hush.

  “You remember Mr. Glasgow from next door, don’t you, hon?”

  Nancy nodded in my direction, her face chilly and unsmiling. I noticed Audubon prints on the wall behind her. “Mr. Glasgow.”

  “Please,” I said. “It’s Travis.”

  “I met your wife at the Christmas party. Lovely woman.”

  “Yeah, she’s all right. I’ll keep her around.” I was joking, of course, but Nancy didn’t seem to have much of a sense of humor.

  “He brought wine,” Ira informed her, an uncharacteristic garrulousness in his voice that hinted at possible alcoholism. “I could pour you a glass.”

  “Not before dinner,” she said firmly. “Well, I’ll leave you men to it.” She turned and disappeared down the hallway.

  “Ahhh,” Ira said, leaning his head back against the chair as the record changed songs. I wasn’t sure, but it sounded like a Duke Ellington number. “Listen to that, will you?”

  I looked out the glass patio doors where, through the naked arms of the winter trees, I could make out the frosted sheen of the lake. There was a large Canada goose on the wall beside the doors, poised so that it appeared to be flying straight out of the lacquered wooden shield that held it to the wall.

  Ira must have thought it was the goose I was admiring, because he said, “Do you do any hunting?”

  “Not really.” Crazily, I thought of the dead birds I’d found in the shoe box last month.

  “Shot that one over on the Eastern Shore two summers ago,” Ira commented, peering at the bird from over his shoulder. The goose stared back at us with dead eyes. “I used to hunt all the time with my father when I was a boy. I hardly ever get out anymore—I’ve got the gout something terrible these days—but I try to do it at least once a season.” He examined his wineglass. “This is good wine.”

  It was cheap table wine, much cheaper than the stuff he was probably used to drinking, but his comment had cemented my original assessment: Ira Stein was an alcoholic.

  “I’ll confess to an ulterior motive for coming here today,” I said after Ira had refilled both our glasses and changed the record on the phonograph.

  “How’s that?”

  “I’m writing a book about the history of small towns. Westlake in particular.” I didn’t feel comfortable jumping straight into an interrogation about the Dentmans, so I chose this avenue as a way to possibly sneak up on the subject without appearing too obvious or overzealous. “It’s my understanding you and Nancy have lived here for many years.”

  “For almost twenty-five years now. We were one of the first couples to move into town. We’d come up from Pennsylvania after I accepted a position at the university. English lit.” Ira gestured to the fireplace with one hand, indicating the neighborhood beyond. “I remember when there were only two houses on Waterview, and with the exception of Main Street, everything else was forest.”

  “I’m assuming the two houses would have been yours and the Dentmans’?” It was a logical deduction: all the other houses were on the opposite side of the street, each one a cookie-cutter replica of the next. Our house and the Steins’ were the only ones with any individuality.

  “That’s back when they built good, solid houses. Not like this clapboard stuff they put up today.” He lowered his voice and addressed me like someone with whom he’d been planning a bank robbery. “You and I have got more acreage between our two properties than the rest of the folks on this street combined. Just look at them. They’re wedged in there, for Christ’s sake! You can’t take a shit in any of those houses without your neighbor balking at the stink.”

  “Ira,” Nancy said, having once again materialized behind us. “Lord.” She shook her head and moved into what I assumed, based on the sounds of pot and pans clanking, was the kitchen.

  “It’s the truth, anyway,” he concluded, more conscious now of the volume of his voice. Then it shot up again: “Nan, get the album! Nan!”

  “You don’t have to shout,” she shouted back. “What is it?”

  “The boy wants to know about the history of the town. Where’s the album?”

  “Really,” I began. “It’s not necessary.”

  “It’s inside the ottoman,” Nancy said.

  “There we go.” Ira pulled himself out of his chair and went over to the ottoman where good little Fauntleroy was catching up on his beauty rest. “Up!” Ira shouted at the dog, clapping.

  “Don’t yell at the dog.”

  “Up!”

  Disgusted, the Maltese looked at Ira Stein with more emotion in his muddy little eyes than I would have thought capable of a dog and hopped down onto the carpet. He wasted no time curling up into a ball directly in front of the fire.

  Ira opened the ottoman, shifted around inside, and produced a vinyl photo album that he dropped unceremoniously onto my lap before sitting back down.

  “What’s this?” I said, opening the cover. The plastic on the pages stuck together.

  “Old photos from when we first moved in.”

  I turned the pages and desperately feigned interest, as many of them weren’t of Westlake at all but Ira and Nancy in their younger years, as well as a slew of complete strangers who must have been friends or relatives.

  “We’ve been lucky, though, even with the new developments,” Ira said. “We’re still pretty underdeveloped, which is fine by me.” Then he made a sour face. “Why in the world would you want to write a book about Westlake?”

  “I guess I’m fascinated by its secrets.”

  “What secrets are those?”

  “Whatever secrets it has.” I leaned forward in my chair, balancing the photo album on one thigh while cradling the wineglass between my knees. “How well did you know the Dentmans?”

  “Not very well.”

  “When did they move into town?”

  “Lord knows.” He finished his wine, pushed himself out of his chair, and strode over to the bar. “They were here long before us.”

  “So the Dentmans were the first family to move into the neighborhood?”

  “Depends on your definition of family. It was just the old man and his daughter. Bernard, his name was. The son—he was a bit older than the girl, maybe sixteen or seventeen back then—came and went. The girl couldn’t have been older than thirteen when Nan and I first moved here.”

  “What happened to the kids’ mother?”

  Ira returned to his chair. He sat down while simultaneously expelling a great burst of air, as if the whole process had exhausted him. “Never knew of any mother.”

  “What kind of man was Bernard Dentman?”

  “He was a hermit. Lived in that house until he died last year, and I don’t think he’d been outside more than a dozen times in all those years. Isn’t that right, Nan?”

  I turned around to find Ira’s wife standing in the doorway again, cradling a mug of something hot and steaming in her hands. She looked infinitely bored. “What my mother would have called a haunted soul,” she said, and the phrase triggered a shiver of queasiness through me.

  “What about the children?” I asked. “David and Veronica?”

  If Ira was surprised by my knowledge of their names, he did not let it show. “Like I said, the boy came and went. Maybe he was going to school somewhere.”

  “Or off getting into trouble,” Nancy added.

  Ira executed a hesitant shrug, which conveyed he didn’t completely disagree with his wife’s assessment.

  “And the girl?”

  “An odd duck,” opined Nancy. She had a voice like an out-of-tune violin, and each time she spoke I felt my skin prickle. “Pale as a ghost, too. Hardly ever came out of the house, exc
ept to go to school, but even that stopped after a while. She was teased horribly from what I understand.”

  “So the kids grew up and moved out,” I said, trying to keep them on track.

  “Well,” Nancy said, holding a hand to her throat. “The boy came back for a while, remember, Ira? Stayed at the house. I assumed he returned to help his father raise the sister.”

  “And after that?” I prompted.

  “They left,” Ira stated. Again, he got up to refill his glass, which wasn’t even empty. Behind me, I heard Nancy sigh disapprovingly. “Hadn’t even thought of those kids till they came back here last year when the old man got sick.”

  “It’s January,” Nancy corrected. “That would have been two years ago.”

  Ira waved a hand at her without looking up. He poured himself another glass, then carried both his glass and the bottle over to the fireplace. He refilled my glass and set the near-empty bottle down between the two wingback chairs on an antique end table.

  “Hardly recognized them,” Ira continued. “Of course, the girl had her own little one in tow by that time.”

  “Elijah Dentman,” I heard myself say, and it was like reciting a prayer. Self-consciously, I set my wineglass down on the antique end table before I broke it in my hand.

  The Maltese lifted his fuzzy head off the carpet and whined.

  “Bitsy-bitsy-bitsy,” Nancy cuckooed, adopting a ridiculous baritone that made her sound mentally unstable. “Poop-a-doop bitsy!”

  Ira, who was undoubtedly accustomed to such nonsensical outbursts, hardly seemed to notice. “When the old man died, I figured those kids would move out soon after. Sell the house, make some money. But they didn’t. They stayed. Probably would have stayed forever had that kid not—”

  “Be kind,” Nancy said, and I wasn’t quite sure if she was talking to Ira or the dog anymore.

  “There was something wrong with that boy,” Ira said. “They never sent him to school. Had a woman come by and try to homeschool him but that didn’t last too long.”

  “Althea Coulter,” said Nancy. “She lived over in Frostburg. I remember her. We spoke sometimes when we ran into each other in the court.”