Floating Staircase(43)

“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.”

“Did she ever say anything about the Dentmans?”

Ira frowned and answered for his wife. “What would she have to say?”

“I don’t know. If they were as strange as everyone seemed to think, I’m sure she would have had some stories from being over at the house. Some little anecdotes, maybe?”

“Well,” Ira said, “I would never have asked, and I’m sure Nancy never did, either.”

“She was a good woman,” Nancy said, addressing her steaming mug. The way she said it made me think Althea Coulter was dead.

“Would have been unprofessional,” Ira went on, as if his wife hadn’t spoken. Then he leaned closer to me, and I could see the bleariness of his eyes as they swam behind his glasses. “Someone should have been watching him that day by the lake.”

The conversation was closing in on the details of Elijah’s death. I felt a giddy sense of elation at that—an emotion for which I would hate myself later, once I had ample time to replay the entire conversation in my head.

“What exactly happened that day?” I asked, and it was like firing a flare into the night sky.

“No one was watching him,” said Ira simply. “He was out there playing on that damnable staircase when he fell and cracked his head and drowned.”

“Did either of you hear or see anything?” Of course, having read the newspaper articles, I already knew the answer to this question. But it seemed the next logical jump, and I wanted to keep them going.

“Nancy heard him cry out.”

“I heard someone cry out,” Nancy corrected.

I asked her what she meant.

“It was late afternoon. It was a cool day so we had the windows open. I’d just started dinner when I heard a high-pitched . . . I don’t know . . . a high-pitched wail.”

“About what time was this?”

“Around five thirty. If I eat dinner too late, I get horrible indigestion.”

“And you’re not sure it was the boy?”

“Honestly, I didn’t think anything of it at the time. As you’ll soon learn, there’re plenty of noises around the lake in the summer—birds, animals, children playing. You can even hear traffic on the other side of town echo out over the water on cool summer nights, and God help us when the loons come back to roost. The thing about the lake is it plays with the sound, twists everything like a riddle, and bends it out of proportion. You think you hear something off to the left, but it’s really a quarter of a mile out on the other side of the lake past the pines.”

“So when did you realize it had been Elijah?”

“I guess after the police came by and asked if we’d heard anything unusual,” Nancy said. “I thought about it long and hard and said I’d heard someone cry out—or thought I did. But I never said with any certainty that it had been that little boy,” she added quickly and in such a fashion that I suddenly knew this poor woman had lost sleep over this many nights. “It’s important to understand that.”

“I understand,” I said. “Did either of you see Elijah out there that afternoon?”

“I saw him,” Nancy said, and it was as if she were confessing to some heinous crime. She looked miserable. Her skin had grown so pale I thought that if she pricked herself with a needle, she wouldn’t bleed. “I’d been out walking Fauntleroy earlier that day by the lake. Elijah was standing on the staircase and jumping off into the water like a diving board. I remember shaking my head and thinking how dangerous it was.”