Floating Staircase(53)

“Veronica,” I said.

“She’s spent her life in and out of mental health facilities. Most recently she spent some time in Crownsville back east before they closed the place down a number of years ago.”

“How much time?”

“Six months, though my sources may not be completely accurate.”

I didn’t bother asking who his sources were.

“And I’ve got no record of who was watching her kid all those times,” Earl continued before I could ask that very question, “though my guess is it had been David.”

“Not the kid’s father?”

“Don’t know who the father was. But I had my source run a background on Veronica. Her record came up clean.” He tapped the printout of David’s criminal record, which I’d laid on the table, and said, “That place in West Cumberland listed as his address? Same as hers. And before that, they were both apparently living together in Dundalk. A brief residency in Pennsylvania—”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Same address.”

He set both his hands down flat on the vinyl table-top and leaned close enough to me so that I could smell the beer on his breath. “Those two have been living together their whole lives. She must have been one unbalanced nutcase in order for her brother to have to take care of her is my guess.”

“Taking care of her and her kid,” I said. “What does David do for a living, anyway?”

“He’s in construction. I found his information with the state carpenters’ union.”

I thought of the makeshift little rooms throughout my basement and the prison-like bedroom hidden behind a wall of Sheetrock. I let this all sink in while Earl got up and retrieved two fresh beers from the refrigerator.

“So you can see why I don’t want some of this stuff getting out beyond these walls,” he said, sitting down and handing me another beer. “I’ve been playing reporter for just over a decade now, and I may not be Woodward and Bernstein as I sometimes like to joke, but I do know how to be a journalist. I’ve cultivated my sources over that time. The last thing I’d want to see is someone close to me lose their job simply for appeasing the whimsy of a nutty old man.”

I took a long, hard pull on the fresh beer. The chill of it raced down my throat and triggered a pleasant tingling sensation just above my buttocks. Something suddenly occurred to me.

“You knew something was fishy from the very beginning,” I said. It was not a question. “Otherwise, why would you have had your sources run background checks on David and Veronica?” It was my turn to lean toward him across the table. “I believe you’re a good journalist. I do. Something about this case didn’t sit well with you from the start, either. Am I right?”

Earl set his beer on the table and, holding one finger up like a schoolmarm, rose once again with some difficulty. He returned to the credenza and riffled through more paperwork. From over his shoulder, he said, “Keep talking. I think you and I are on to something, all right.”

I told him about the basement bedroom and how all of Elijah’s things had been left there, sealed up behind the wall. I told him of the unsettling supposition made by Ira Stein about Elijah digging up his wife’s dead dog and slinking away with it like some grave robber in an old Universal monster movie. Lastly, I told him of my visit to the Dentman house in West Cumberland (at which time Earl suspended his search through the paperwork, turned halfway around, and offered me an astonished yet envious grin) and of my unsettling confrontation with David following a brief and utterly uneventful discourse with Veronica.

“The fact that she’s been institutionalized half her life doesn’t surprise me in the least,” I said. “Talking to that woman was like talking to one of Jack Finney’s pod people.”

“You sure she wasn’t just in mourning over her son?”

“I thought she was at first, but then I could tell something was . . . well, off. She seemed terrified of her brother.”

“Here,” Earl said, finally locating what he’d been searching for. He hobbled over and gave me a stack of eight-by-ten color glossies.

As I looked through them, I was aware of the old man’s hand coming to rest on my shoulder. I felt a pang of sadness for him and couldn’t help but wonder about the backstory between him and his estranged son.

I flipped through several photos before I recognized the location. “This is my backyard. I’ve never seen it in summer, the leaves on the trees and all the bushes and flowers in bloom. You took these?”

“Annie Leibovitz, remember?”

One shot was of the lake behind my house, the foliage around the lake as heavy as a shroud. There were police officers gathered around the cusp of the lake, and two divers were rising out of the water in scuba gear. Another photo had the front grille of a police cruiser in the foreground, parked down in the grass of the sloping hillside. There were a couple of shots of David speaking with police, but his face was mostly blocked by police hats. Lastly was a photo of Veronica standing by herself and halfway concealed by trees. Her face had that same vacuous, haunted expression she’d had when I’d knocked on her front door.

“That’s the shot,” Earl said from behind me, looking over my shoulder. “That’s the one that gave me chills for nights afterward. Just like you said—that goes beyond a mother in shock, beyond a mother in mourning. In fact, how would you say she looks to you? You’re the writer. How would you describe her?”