Floating Staircase(33)

I thought of Elijah Dentman and how they’d never recovered his body from that silent, dark water. Which meant he was still down there somewhere: a whitish, bloated corpse whose skin had been picked over by fish and whose eyes had sunken into the recesses of his skull. In my mind’s eye I saw blackened fingertips from which the bones poked through and greenish hair waving like kelp off the dome of a gleaming skull in the silt.

Fuck, I thought.

I got up and headed to the liquor cabinet where I replaced the bottle of Chivas, then turned for the stairs.

Something metallic clanked and reverberated in the belly of the house, like someone deliberately striking a wrench to a frozen metal pipe.

I stopped halfway up the stairs, my pulse suddenly picking up tempo.

There issued a second clanking noise, this one startlingly crisp and issuing straight up one of the heat vents. A distant whistle followed, and it reminded me of how a fire engine sounds when it’s still just a bit too far away. Then the sound slowly scaled louder and louder until it became a steady, resonant hum.

I crept down the stairs and got on my hands and knees in the foyer, putting my face very close to the floor vent. I could feel no heat coming up, although it certainly sounded like the furnace had just kicked on. That peculiar, continual humming . . .

It sounded like a voice.

Some fundamental part of my soul responsible for animal insight fired a flare up and over the bow. I pushed one ear against the vent and listened more closely—an indefinite rheeee sound behind which I could just barely make out faint whispering—then the furnace shuddered and died. The winding down of its mechanics was like the fading laughter in a crowded auditorium. My ear still pressed to the metal grate, I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath until now. I exhaled in a trembling wheeze, and a moment later, I thought I heard someone on the other side of the heating vent breathe back.

I bolted upright, my heart crashing like a wild animal against the constraint of my ribs.

In less than ten seconds I was standing at the top of the basement stairs, peering down into that infinite, inky darkness, my hand sweating on the doorknob. “Enough now,” I said, my voice hardly as demonstrative as I would have liked. “This has to stop.”

I waited for a moment, too afraid to admit to myself that I was waiting—and fearing—some sort of response to rise out of the darkness: a furtive shuffling noise or even a pair of glowing eyes to open at the bottom of the stairwell. But nothing happened.

Cold, I went to bed.





CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“I want to take some of Elijah’s stuff back to his mother,” I said.

It was a bright January morning, the smell of mesquite in the air. Adam and I were walking the perimeter of the lake, steaming Styrofoam cups of coffee in our hands. Up ahead, Jacob and Madison darted in and out of trees, flinging clumps of muddy snow at each other. Their laughter was like church bells. It was warmer than it had been over the past few weeks, but the ice on the lake still looked thick and permanent. The newly cleared sky brought into sharp relief the chain of mountains at the horizon.

Adam sipped his coffee, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Why?” He looked at the frozen lake and the fence of black pines at the opposite end. His eyes were the color of steel and looked very sober. A contrail of vapor wafted out from between his chapped lips.

“It’s hard to explain,” I said. “I just feel like it’s something I’m supposed to do. For me and maybe for the kid’s mother, too.”

He hit me with a sharp look.

I quickly added, “It’s about finding that middle ground, remember? The happy medium that we talked about at Tooey’s bar?”

“Why are you even telling me this?”

“Because I’m assuming you know where Veronica Dentman lives now. Or, being a cop, you could at least find out for me.”

His laughter burst like a firecracker.

“What? So now I’m an * for wanting to do something I feel is right?”

“We’ve been over this. Veronica Dentman left that stuff behind for a reason. Whether you approve of her decision or not, that quite frankly doesn’t matter. I thought you said you called a junk service to come get that stuff, anyway.”

“They won’t be around for another week yet,” I said, but that was a lie. This morning I’d called Allegheny Pickup and Removal and cancelled my order. I hadn’t told Jodie, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell Adam . . . but after last night and upon reflection of everything else that had been going on since we’d moved to Westlake, I felt having random strangers come to collect and quite possibly destroy all of Elijah’s belongings wasn’t supposed to happen.

“I think this is a bad idea.”

“You’re wrong.”

“I’m not. I think you’re crossing a line, messing with other people’s lives. That woman lost her son last summer. She knew damn well what she was doing when she left those boxes behind.”

“Well, see, that’s just it,” I countered. “I don’t think she did. I mean, maybe at the time it was the best way for her to cope, but I think now, after some time has passed, she’d be happy to get her son’s stuff back.”

“Who are you, Dr. Phil?”

“I’m being serious. What if she regrets leaving that stuff behind? What if it was all totally reactionary, and now she hates herself for it?”