Floating Staircase

by Ronald Malfi

  In the interrogation room, Strohman closed his notebook.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Adam dropped me off that evening. Weakened, spiritually fatigued, I entered the house with no greater designs other than to crawl beneath the stream of a warm shower and wash the tiredness from my marrow.

  Jodie was standing at the foot of the stairs, half-cloaked in shadow.

  The look on her face immediately froze my blood. “What?”

  “I think . . .” She looked around—a blind child suddenly given the gift of sight. “I think . . . someone was in the house.”

  “What are you talking about? Were you asleep?”

  “Yes. But noises woke me. Thumping noises. Like an animal in the attic or trapped behind the wall. I got out of bed to see what it was. I thought maybe you’d come home and I hadn’t heard the front door. So I called your name.” I watched as a chill zigzagged through her. “Oh, Jesus.”

  “What? Jodie . . .”

  “I called your name, and then I heard someone run across the living room and slam the front door.”

  “Babe.” I went to her, embraced her. “You were dreaming.”

  “No. I was awake.”

  “There’s no one here. I just unlocked the door now. It was locked.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I swear it.”

  “Jesus.” She laughed nervously against my collarbone. “Oh, Jesus.”

  In the morning, Adam showed up with a document for me to sign. It looked very official and said Consent to Search at the top. “Strohman wants your permission for us to dig up your lawn once the ground thaws a bit.”

  “He thinks Elijah’s buried in the yard?”

  “He thinks if David Dentman could brainwash his sister so easily to lie to the police the first time, what’s to say any of what was said last night was the truth.”

  “Are you serious?”

  He handed me the consent form and a pen. It was serious, all right.

  “They’ve both been charged.”

  “With lying to the cops?”

  “With murder,” Adam said. “David’s still at the station. He’s being charged as an accessory. Veronica’s being shipped to a hospital over in Cumberland this afternoon. She’s been practically catatonic all night.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “What is it? You look sick.”

  Truth was, I felt sick. “It feels wrong.”

  Taking the signed form from me, Adam folded it in halves, then slipped it into the back pocket of his chinos. “Vindication’s a little harsher than you’d hoped, huh?” He went to the door.

  “Hey, you really think they’re going to find the body buried in the yard?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” Adam said and left.

  I called Earl and told him everything I knew. He would be the first to break the story.

  “What do you do now?” he asked me after I’d given him all I had.

  “Nothing,” I told him. “My part in this is over.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  February was angry and eager and shook us to our souls. Once again, the whole world seemed to freeze. But by early March, the snow had receded, and the gray slope of our lawn rose as if out of ash. The blustery winds grew tame and warmed up. We celebrated Jacob’s eleventh birthday, and he dazzled us with card tricks. Jodie finished her dissertation and looked forward to receiving her PhD in May. She had verbally accepted the full-time teaching position at the university, and although it wouldn’t start until the fall, she went out one afternoon with Beth to shop for a whole new wardrobe.

  Sales for Water View continued to climb. The whole Dentman ordeal nearly a month behind me now, I began to feel the writing bug edge closer and closer again. That was good; like the parent of a child gone away to summer camp, I had been eagerly awaiting its safe return.

  Jodie surrendered the upstairs office to me. I stocked it full of my writing implements, fresh heaps of notebooks, word processor, and lucky ceramic mug. I wrote there in the mornings before Jodie woke up, downing cup after cup of overpowering Sumatra coffee. Sometimes when I knew Jodie was still sound asleep, I would open the single window and smoke a cigarette, my head poking halfway out into the chilly morning air.

  Having aborted the story of the Dentmans and the floating staircase, I resumed the partially finished manuscript of which I’d already sent sample chapters to Holly Dreher in New York. It was coming smooth and good and honest. As with every other book, it was important to write it honestly.

  (Once, at a writers’ conference in Seattle, I’d had a few drinks with a best-selling novelist. Like teenagers confused about their sexuality, this author’s novels traversed that blurry and often fatal line between genres, and he drank expensive scotch and listened to jazz records in his hotel room because he thought those things made him more writerly. We must have talked for hours that evening at the hotel bar, but the only thing I took away with me was his comment that all good books were honest books and that all the rest could suck a fat one. I took half of that sentiment and filed it deep down in the writing center of my brain and have used it ever since. All good books are honest books.)

  So I wrote, and it was strong and good and honest.

  One afternoon, I heard the bumping sound. It was the same sound Jodie had heard that night when I’d come home from the police station—I was certain of it. The first time I heard it, I was alone in the house and standing in my underwear in the kitchen about to pour a fresh cup of coffee. It sounded like it was coming from upstairs. But when I reached the top of the stairs, the sound stopped.

  The next time I heard it, I was lying in bed at night. Beside me, Jodie was sleeping the sleep of the blissfully innocent. I could hear it across the hall, and for one insane moment, I imagined a dozen tiny elves walking on the keyboard of my word processor, finishing my book for me. I got out of bed and crossed the hall, flipping the light on in the office. The sound had stopped. I stood there holding my breath, listening for a very long time, but it didn’t start up again.

  The third and final time, it happened on the day a big yellow bulldozer appeared in my backyard to dig up patchy sections of my lawn. A few officers milled about, and even Strohman made an appearance. Tugging on some clothes, I met Strohman outside, and we both smoked cigarettes without talking to each other. The smell of the bulldozer’s diesel exhaust was cloying.

  Back in the house, I started making lunch. Jodie was at the movies with Beth and the kids, and despite the racket in the yard, I knew that I could finish the first draft of the new book today. The thought made me happy. Alone, I ate lunch on the front porch until the clouds of bulldozer exhaust crept over the roof and settled down around me like nuclear winter.

  I showered, shaved, and dressed in clean clothes. I sat in the office and fired up the word processor, smelling its electric body, feeling the keys as they hummed lightly beneath the pads of my fingers.

  Then the thumping started again. It was right behind the desk against the wall.

  Dropping to my hands and knees, I slid the desk away from the wall with little difficulty. Instantly, I felt foolish. The culprit, of course, was the cubbyhole door. It had come ajar, and as the wind rattled the eaves, the door had been thumping against the back of the desk.

  I pushed the cubbyhole door shut but didn’t stand up right away. Outside, I heard the bulldozer’s gears grinding and someone shouting.

  There was a gooseneck lamp on the desk. I yanked it down and switched it on. The light was dull but it would serve its purpose. With one hand, I pushed the cubbyhole door, and it popped open on its hinges. Cold air breathed out.

  I thought of Elijah telling Althea Coulter that he had gone away.

  I thought of Veronica in the interrogation room saying, When I came back . . . gone . . .

  Bending over, I shoved the lamp into the cubbyhole and peeked inside.

  It was just a tiny square box, a space for storage, with wooden struts and pink insulation for wa
lls. The frayed baseball was still inside. So were the Matchbox cars and the Scrooge McDuck comic book. A child’s secret hiding place. I thought about the time Adam and I treaded water beneath the double dock, hiding from the rifle-toting lunatic marching on the boards above us. Hiding, I thought. Children hide.

  When I came back . . . gone . . .

  But of course, there was nothing here. The cubbyhole was empty. I’d known that—I’d known it since that first day I’d opened the door and found the shoe box full of dead birds. Just what had I expected to find?

  And then I smelled it.

  Sickeningly sweet, like day-old chamomile tea. Borne on the cold air, it grew more and more pungent with each inhalation. I craned the neck of the lamp farther into the cubbyhole and squeezed my head and shoulders inside. By no means am I a big man, but the opening was too tight for me to slip in past my chest. I recalled my nightmares from so many weeks ago—being squeezed to death in a constricting wall. Sweat suddenly sprung out along my brow.

  Sometimes we go in; sometimes we go out.

  In, I thought. He went in.

  I reached out and fingered a curled bit of insulation paper. The Pink Panther’s face smiled slyly at me. Slowly, I peeled the curl of paper away from the wooden struts. I expected to find Sheetrock behind there, the back of the office closet. But what the light from the gooseneck lamp brought into view was a narrow cavern between the eaves and the back of the closet, a slender vertical cut behind the wall. This wasn’t just a cubbyhole; this was a crawl space.

  Bringing the lamp closer to the narrow sliver of darkness, I held my breath and felt the sweat run down my face.

  Sometimes we go in, I thought.

  Holding my breath.

  I saw him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Unseasonably cold weather had practically preserved it, keeping the body from stinking up the whole house. This was the medical examiner’s inference, anyway. It was also the opinion of the police officers who for several hours occupied the rooms and hallways (and walls) of 111 Waterview Court.

  I stood on the front lawn as they removed Elijah Dentman from the house. It required only two officers to carry the body to the ambulance, although I estimated one could have done it without breaking a sweat. They carried him on a flat wooden board with handles on either side. A white sheet covered his emaciated frame. His profile looked like a distant mountain range. Some neighborhood dogs came sniffing around, and it took another officer to chase them away.

  By this time, a crowd had formed in the cul-de-sac, and the more brazen onlookers stepped on the front lawn and even pooled around the side of the house. They all watched in horror as the body was exhumed and taken away in the ambulance. When the ambulance departed, it did so with its lights and siren off.

  Upstairs, I stood in the doorway to the study. I was instructed not to touch anything in the room. My impression of crime scenes (admittedly acquired from too much television) was that they were always sterile, sober environments, and the officers were always stern and emotionless and wearing ties tucked into their buttoned dress shirts.

  Here, though, everyone kept the atmosphere as casual as possible, even at its most somber moment when the body was extricated from the crawl space via a fresh opening cut into the hallway wall. There was no yellow police tape anywhere. The cops wore uniforms. They did not look like they had everything under control nor all the answers, though nothing ever got out of hand. They looked so young and seemed to be learning as they went along, much as I was. These officers were not all-knowing, all-powerful beings; they were regular guys doing their job and they wore their emotions on their sleeves. It was as real as it could get.

  All these years, I thought, I’ve been writing crime scenes wrong.

  Adam appeared beside me. “You look green,” he said.

  “Yeah? So do you.”

  “I feel it.” He surveyed the room.

  Two officers took photographs of the carpet and the enlarged opening the cops had cut into the wall in order to access the crawl space.

  A third officer’s black boots poked out of the mouth of the cubbyhole as he backed out. “It’s a tight fit in there,” he said, sweat causing him to glisten like an eel. “Goes all the way through the wall and behind the stairs. There’s a bunch of junk, too. Kid must have used it as a clubhouse or something.”

  No, I thought. Not a clubhouse. That’s where he hid when he was afraid. Or when he was hurt.

  Adam put a hand on my shoulder. “You were right, you know.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “About some things.”

  “No,” Adam insisted. “You were right all along. You said it yourself—that the proof was in the staircase. Well, this crawl space goes behind the wall, behind the staircase in the hallway. That day on the lake, you just had the wrong staircase.”

  Driven by some imprecise loyalty, I telephoned Earl and told him to bring his camera and best writing pad. When he arrived at the scene, he snapped photos of the spot where police busted through the upstairs wall and even took snapshots of the passage between the interior walls and the outer shell of the house, where Elijah’s body had been hidden.

  Before Earl left, he hugged me with a surprising amount of emotion behind it, then held me at arm’s length while he grinned. “You’ll be leaving after this,” he said.

  “We can’t stay.”

  “Thank you for giving this to me.”

  “You helped make it happen,” I told him.

  It looked like Earl wanted to say something heartfelt and poignant. Maybe if we’d had more time to get to know each other, he would have. But as it was, we were pretty much strangers, and in the end he settled for shaking my hand firmly and nodded. “You keep hold of my phone number,” he told me. “Stay in touch, now.”

  I promised that I would. “Take care,” I said, watching him trudge through the thinning snow to his Oldsmobile.

  (His news story would get picked up by papers throughout the state, landing him his first and only syndication. And I did keep in touch with him . . . until a massive stroke took him in the night some eighteen months later.)

  When he left, I felt empty.

  Adam arrived home sometime around midnight. The rest of the house was asleep, including Jodie on the pullout couch in the living room. I was propped up in a chair in Adam’s kitchen, the lights off, the small television set flickering in the darkness, the volume low.

  “Hey. You weren’t waiting up, were you?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Jodie?”

  “On the couch. She’s all right.”

  “How about you?”

  I held up one hand to show him how badly it shook. “Ready to perform surgery.”

  Adam flipped on the light above the kitchen sink and turned on the water. He scrubbed his hands with dishwashing detergent.

  “You hungry?” I asked. “I’ll throw together some sandwiches.”

  “Yeah. That sounds good. Thanks.”

  I went to the refrigerator and produced some sliced turkey, mayonnaise, half a head of lettuce, and two cans of Diet Pepsi. There was a loaf of French bread on the counter. I sawed off two sizeable pieces, then cut them both down the middle. I asked Adam if he was a lot hungry or a little hungry.

  “A lot,” he said, drying his hands on a dish towel. “I can’t remember the last meal I ate.”

  I loaded the bread with mounds of sliced turkey and shook some pepper on it. I rinsed the lettuce in the sink and laid several leaves on top of the turkey. Then I lathered mayonnaise on the underside of the bread. Setting the plates down at the table, I watched my brother stare out the window over the sink and at the pinpoints of light across the cul-de-sac and through the woods. The cops had left the porch lights on across the street.

  “It’s not a pretty thing,” Adam said, still looking out the window.

  “I want to know.”

  “Cause of death was due to severe head trauma. Heavy fracture at the back of the head, consistent
with the fall Elijah would have taken off the staircase on the lake. We’ll have more specifics once the autopsy comes back, of course, but it’s pretty evident what happened.”

  He turned around and sat at the table. Together we ate.

  Several minutes passed before Adam spoke again. “There’s no way a grown human being could fit in that crawl space. Not even Veronica and especially not David.”

  “I know.” I wasn’t surprised. I’d known all afternoon, it seemed. “He must have crawled in there after Veronica took him to the house. When she turned her back on him, he went up the stairs and hid in his special place.” I was talking but I wasn’t listening to myself. Instead, I was remembering the story Althea Coulter had told me that day at the hospital—about how she’d come to the house two days in a row and never saw the boy. How David had answered the door, an oddity in itself. How, on the third day, Elijah had simply admitted to Althea that he had just gone away.

  “The DA dropped the charges against David and Veronica,” said Adam. There was mayonnaise at one corner of his mouth. “David still could have been prosecuted for lying to the police, but both the DA and Strohman figured this thing was already such a fuckup they just wanted to sweep it under the rug and be done with it.”

  “So what’s going to happen to them?”

  “I don’t know. I guess they go back to their lives. At least they know the truth now.”

  The idea of that child crawling through the darkness of the crawl space to die, like a wounded animal, was too much for me to comprehend. For some reason, the idea that he had been murdered was easier to swallow.

  “Listen,” Adam said, rising from the chair and tugging up his pants. “Why don’t you go inside and get some sleep?”

  “I will. Not just yet.”

  “That’s my kid brother. Always thinking.” Rubbing his forehead, he suddenly looked so old it nearly brought tears to my eyes. He smiled wearily at me and headed into the hallway. Then he turned around, his face cloaked in darkness. “Does this finally put him to rest for you?”