Floating Staircase(67)

“The only solid thing I was able to get from her was that they were a bizarre family. She knew nothing definitive.”

“Well, have we reached an impasse?”

I was still studying those photographs on the refrigerator. “Not quite. I guess there’s one more thing you could do for me, but I’ll be honest—I feel like a heel asking you to do this.”

“Nonsense.”

“I just don’t want you getting into any trouble.”

“I’m a big boy. Why don’t you tell me your little plan, and I’ll decide for m’self just how much trouble I’m lookin’ at.”

So I told him my plan. “Don’t use your real name,” I warned him. “If you can’t think of one on the spot, give them my name. I don’t want you getting jammed up in all this.”

“Hell,” he cooed, then whistled. “You’ve got one hell of a sneaky streak in you, son, don’t you?”

“I’m not holding out much hope on this. In fact, I’m not quite sure what you’ll find or even what it’ll prove until I see it in front of me.”

“I’ll get on it first thing tomorrow,” Earl promised. In the background I could hear one of his dogs whining. I thought of the monstrous wolfhound guarding the credenza in Earl’s tiny double-wide.

“Just be careful,” I said and hung up the phone.



Around eight o’clock I fixed myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a pot of coffee. Carrying the stack of crime scene photos, I sank back into the basement.

I am missing something.

Something important.

The basement was charred, sooty darkness, blank as tar paper. The bulb in the ceiling was dead, and I couldn’t find any replacements. Instead, I located a flashlight and cast its beam into Elijah’s hidden room behind the wall. On the desk, someone had constructed a staircase out of the colored wooden blocks. Holding a coffee mug in one hand and with the eight-by-tens tucked under my arm, I just stared at those blocks, spotlighted in the beam of my flashlight. The coffee burned all the way down to my toes with each sip. Thing about coffee, I thought, is that it forgives you no matter what.

I sat down at Elijah’s writing desk, clicking on the small lamp in one corner. For a while I studied the photographs in my lap. Drank coffee. I ignored the blocks until I could ignore them no longer. One block at a time, I picked them apart Jenga-style, until the structure lost all semblance of form and function. It turned into nonsense. There.

I slid one of my notebooks in front of me, turned to a clean page, and began to write. I wrote as my mouth started to bleed onto the page and then onto my shirt. Bringing a hand up to my lips, my fingers came away smeared with blood. It occurred to me that I’d been chewing on the back of my pencil and hadn’t even felt one of the splinters jab my lower lip. Had I swallowed any without knowing? I imagined a thousand shavings of wood sizzling in the feverish acid of my stomach.

Then I looked at the photograph of the lake. Then down at the page where my spidery handwriting leaned and spiked like waves. Then back down at the photo. I thought, Sometimes we go in; sometimes we go out. And I thought, Something doesn’t add up here.

I focused on the photo of haunted Veronica Dentman standing among the trees. Empty. Blinded. Terrorized. Already dead. Already dead, I thought. I flipped to another photo, this one of a group of police officers trudging through the trees toward the house. A number of them had turned to catch the photographer just as he snapped the picture, their faces blurred from the movement and as indistinct as the faces of passengers glimpsed in the windows of a passing train.

I looked at what remained of the wooden staircase. All the blocks were red. I could have sworn they were multicolored when last I left it. Looking closer, I noticed the newspaper clippings I’d ripped from the papers at the library underneath the blocks. The photo of Elijah Dentman glared up at me, nearly accusatory. His vacant eyes professed a sinister malevolence tonight.

My back creaking as I rose, I gathered my notebooks and the crime scene photos and staggered up the stairs. Bath, I thought, then bed. Before heading to the second floor, I paused by the telephone. Stared at it like it owed me money. Behind me, the clock on the microwave read 88:88. Finally, I picked up the phone and punched in Adam’s number.

On the other end, the phone trilled and trilled and trilled, and no one answered.

Do they have caller ID? Is it possible they’re actually avoiding my calls now?

I stopped at the liquor cabinet and made off like a thief with a bottle of Wolfschmidt.

Upstairs, the hallway was a mine shaft. Slatted blue light pulsed in from windows at the end of the hallway. Up here, Jodie’s perfumed scent still lingered. Absently, I wondered if she’d come back in my absence to retrieve more of her things.

I went directly into the bathroom, punched the light on, and closed the door with one foot. After taking a preliminary swig, I set the plastic bottle of vodka on the counter and stared at my reflection in the mirror. Scraggly, matted beard, sunken eyes, unkempt hair curling down into the fans of my eyelashes. Disgusted, I looked away . . . but the sight of Jodie’s bobby pins beside the sink caused my eyes to burn.

Turning on the bathtub, I watched it fill with water as steam clouded the mirror, eradicating that hideous monster. I took another chug from the bottle, peeled off my reeking clothes, and left them in a smoldering heap on the floor.