Floating Staircase(60)

“Sorry. I’ll try to be ruder.”

Althea cleared her throat, and it was a rather involved process. Aside from the scratchy, phlegm-filled rattle in her chest, her eyes also watered up, tracing tears down the contours of her face. It was disturbingly easy to make out her skull beneath that thin veil of stretched skin. Finally, after her throat was cleared and she’d wiped away the errant tears with the heels of her hands, she said, “So how come you’re visiting some strange lady you ain’t never met before?”

I’d had a whole song and dance routine prepared, no different than the one I’d performed for Ira and Nancy, as a way of greasing the wheels . . . but looking at this woman, I was suddenly certain she would easily see through such a lie. She can see straight down to the pit of my soul, I thought without a doubt.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” I hadn’t known what I was going to say until the words were already out of my mouth. It had been a question I’d been dying to ask someone since moving to Westlake, but until now, I did not think I’d found the person who’d be able to answer it.

“Ghosts?” Althea said, as if she’d misheard me.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know it sounds crazy.”

“You’re not a police officer, are you?”

“No,” I said, thinking, You a cop? Strohman send you here? “I’m a writer.”

“A writer who wants to ask an old woman about ghosts?”

I smiled warmly and rubbed my hands together between my knees. “Do you know about what happened to Elijah Dentman? That he drowned in the lake behind their house last summer?”

“Read about it in the papers.” She stared at her twisted fingers atop the bedclothes. Her knuckles were like knots in a hangman’s noose.

“I’m bothered by that,” I told her. “I’m bothered by the fact that he died and they never found his body. I’m bothered by what I think was a slipshod investigation by Westlake’s finest. I think something happened to that little boy, and it was not an accident. But I’ve got no way of proving that, so I’ve come here to talk to you.”

“And what is it you think I can tell you?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe nothing. But maybe you know something that you don’t realize is important, something that when added to everything else I’ve uncovered will help complete the puzzle.”

Althea merely looked at me without a change of emotion. If she felt anything—anything at all—on the heels of what I’d just said her face did not betray such emotion. “Be a dear and open those blinds, please,” she said finally, her voice still sedate.

I stood and crossed to the window. There was a plastic length of tubing the width of a pencil hanging vertically from one side. I turned it until the blinds separated, then pushed them all to one side. Outside, there was no bright sunshine, no dazzling blue sky, only a lazy drift of cumulous clouds. Everything looked hollowed out and the color of old monochromatic filmstrips. I could see my car in the parking lot. Above it, the two falcons I’d witnessed nesting in the mezzanine earlier were circling in the air, waiting like buzzards for my Honda to die.

When I turned back around, Althea was looking once again at her son’s photograph on the nightstand. “What do you write?”

“Novels.”

“What sort of novels?”

“Dark ones. Horror novels. Mysteries. People chasing old ghosts, both figurative and literal.”

Disinterestedly, she managed to lean to one side and adjust herself on her pillows. I could tell the act was not without pain. “Personally,” she said, “I’ve always preferred romances. Do you ever write anything romantic? A love story?”

“They all start out that way,” I answered, meaning it.

Althea glanced out the window. I could not tell if she was disappointed at the weather or if it was exactly what she’d expected. With Althea Coulter, I found I could assess very little.

“I don’t know what it is you’re hoping I can tell you,” she said after a time.

“How long did you tutor Elijah?”

“For just over a month. I was sent there through a service with the county. I guess someone found out there was a little boy there who’d not been going to school. The county got after his mother.”

“Veronica.”

“Yes. Veronica.”

“Did you know Veronica’s father, Bernard Dentman? It’s my understanding Veronica and her brother, David, came back to Westlake to take care of him before he died.”

“That’s my understanding as well, though I didn’t know the elder Dentman. He had passed before I got there.”

“Why’d you stay only a month?”

“Because my illness was beginning to get the better of me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Also, there was very little I could do for that child.”

“How’s that?”

“He was different.”

My mind returned to Adam’s description of the boy on the night of the Christmas party: Veronica had a son about Jacob’s age. Elijah was slow and homeschooled . . .

“I doubt he was ever officially diagnosed,” Althea continued, “but my guess is he was autistic.”

“Why do you say that?”