Floating Staircase(28)

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 She adopted an apologetic tone and added, “I know the microfiche is a tad outdated, even for out here on the tip of the devil’s backbone, but the library hasn’t gotten around to transferring all those files onto the computer yet.”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—





L


OCAL


B


OY


D


ROWNS IN


L


AKE


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.