Floating Staircase(68)

That’s right, friends and neighbors. Getting f*ck-drunk tonight.

Still clutching the bottle of vodka, I climbed into the tub and winced at the scalding water. With one foot, I adjusted the temperature before settling into the water. The faucet bucked and gurgled and steamed. The hot water felt good; my knotted muscles started coming undone.

The crime scene photos were spread out on the bathroom floor. Their glossy surfaces were hazy with moisture from the steam. Again—crazily—I thought of my old science teacher boiling water in a beaker over a Bunsen burner. Jefferson? Johnson? For the life of me, I couldn’t remember the son of a bitch’s name.

Out in the hallway on the other side of the closed bathroom door, I heard the creaking of floorboards. I thought I caught movement at the crack beneath the door. Laughing, I choked back more of the horrible-tasting vodka and rested my head against the shower tiles. And—

And I was standing outside in the darkness of night. The wind was slamming against me, prickling my skin and freezing the marrow in my bones. The force of the wind caused me to realize I was balancing precipitously on some structure, high above the world. Looking down, I found my bare feet planted on the top riser of the floating staircase—only this staircase was a skyscraper, a monolithic finger jutting straight up toward the blackened, star-littered heavens, not wooden and pyramidal but golden and tubular, spiraling like a corkscrew. A million miles off in the silvery distance, I could see the blinking diodes of light that comprised Westlake.

Directly below me, someone floundered in the black water. I jumped. Hurling through the blackness of space . . . but it wasn’t space at all; it was water. I heard the roaring in my ears as I speared into the freezing, lightless depths. Holding my breath, I swam through the murk toward a shimmer of spectral light. Things impeded my passage: pines. Underwater pines. The whole forest was submerged, and I swam through it toward that swirling light. Evergreens sprung up like fence posts, their boughs impossibly thick and weighted, like waterlogged pillows. Tentacular vines snaked up from brown murk, twining themselves around my ankles. My face scraped against scabrous bark, and clouds of red stained the water.

I swam through a part in the pines, the light now like the glow of searchlights on a sunken battleship, only eerily green. I pushed on, my lungs burning and about to burst, just as my fingers grazed a doughy, pliable object. A body floated by me, its eyes swelling like jellyfish from their sockets, hair a fan of colorless seaweed waving in the current, the corrugated ridges of a purpling brow—

Screaming, I sat up, awake. My heart was like a blender on purée. The bathtub was filled nearly to capacity. The bottle of vodka floated between my upraised knees.

Leaning over the side of the tub, my breath coming in great whooping gasps, I gathered the photos from the floor, wiping away the condensation. I looked at the picture of the policemen trudging up the lawn toward the house, then flipped to the one of Veronica standing between the trees.

The trees.

A laugh tickled my throat.

And then it all came clear as the missing piece of the puzzle finally snapped loudly into place. The sound was nearly deafening.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Adam answered the door in his bathrobe and slippers. His hair was a jumble of tight curls, matted at the back, and I guessed I’d just woken him from a nap. He muttered something—I caught my wife’s name in his garbled intonation—but before he could finish, I stormed past him into the house, my boots leaving wet banana shapes on the hardwood.

“What are you doing?” he said more forcefully, letting the front door slam behind him.

I motored straight into the kitchen. My hair was still wet from the bathtub—I was aware of ice crystals already starting to form in clumps—and I’d simply thrown on my old clothes in an obsessive rush to get across the street as fast as I could.

“Where is everyone?” I said, noting the quietness of the house.

“Jodie and Beth took the kids to a movie. What are you doing here?”

Pulling out a chair, I dumped the stack of eight-by-tens on the kitchen table, then sat down.

Adam glared at me from across the room.

“Sit down,” I told him. “I want to show you something.”

“You’re drunk. I can smell the alcohol coming off you in waves. Do you really think that’s such a good idea?”

“Please. Just sit.”

With obvious reluctance, he pulled out the chair opposite me and eased into it like someone eases into a hot tub. His eyes never left mine.

With both hands, I pushed the photographs in front of him. “Tell me what you see.”

Still staring at me, he picked up the photos, dwarfing them in his big hands. Finally, he averted his gaze and examined the first couple of photographs. There was no expression on his face. “You came here to bring me pictures of your backyard?”

“Keep looking.”

He flipped through a few more, pausing when he understood what he was seeing: crime scene photos from the search for Elijah Dentman. “Where’d you get these?” His voice was practically a snarl.

“Does it matter?” I reached across the table and plucked the photos from my brother’s hands. I set them down between us so we could both see them. “I don’t need to tell you when these were taken. You’re even in one of them.” I drummed a finger on one of the photos. “These are some of the cops walking up from the lake toward the house. All the faces are blurry but this one is you.” I pressed one finger on the second cop from the left. “You can tell it’s taken much later in the day than some of the others because of the positioning of the sun.”