Floating Staircase(93)

“Then what?”

“I went back to the house. I told Veronica to go upstairs and change into fresh clothes. She did. I took her wet and bloody housedress and tossed it in the basement furnace.”

My heart leapt. The blood pumping through my veins sounded like a freight train in my ears.

“Then I told her we needed to call the cops because if Elijah was under the water, I couldn’t get to him. We needed the cops to get to him. She was fading in and out fast, and I thought she was going to have another attack. I had her sit down on the couch as I called the police. When I hung up the phone, I went over to her and let her curl up in my lap. I rubbed her head and told her exactly what to say to the police when they arrived—that she’d been asleep the whole time, up in bed with a migraine, and that I had been downstairs looking after the boy. ‘Let me take care of it,’ I told her. I promised her.”

Dentman had been talking too fast for Strohman’s pen to keep up; the chief of police had simply set it aside midway through Dentman’s statement and merely listened, his hands in his lap, one leg over the other. After a moment, Strohman had Dentman repeat the story, which he did verbatim, before suggesting they bring in Veronica to corroborate it.

“You’ll have to wait in holding while we talk to her, of course,” said Strohman, closing his notebook.

“Then she won’t talk to you.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because the last thing I said to her was to say she’d been sleeping. Until I sit with her and tell her otherwise, that’s all you’ll ever hear from her.”

A small chuckle began to rumble up through the chief of police. A similar rumbling could be heard from his men throughout the viewing room.

“That’s a neat trick,” Strohman said after his chuckling had subsided. “You know we can’t have you two—”

“Bring her in here now. With me. With all of us. I’ll sit right here and tell her to tell the truth.”

Strohman sucked on the inside of his left cheek. Then he clapped, startling everyone except Dentman, and said, “All right. Let’s do it. But I need to take a piss first.”



Outside on the front steps, a group of us burned through cigarettes and shuddered against the cold.

“Coldest f*cking winter in a decade,” McMullen said, digging around in the seat of his pants. “Miserable godforsaken place.”

Five minutes later, we were all gathered in the viewing room as Veronica was brought in, unshackled, and placed in a chair midway between her brother and Chief Strohman.

Flipping to a clean sheet of notebook paper, that goddamn pen beginning to jitterbug in one hand, Strohman started asking Veronica questions.

Her responses, never changing, started out almost comical . . . then turned sad and somewhat frightening. “I was asleep.”

“Veronica, your brother just told me you—”

“I was asleep.”

“You need to understand—”

Pulling her hair and shouting like a child: “I was asleep! I was asleep! I was asleep!” She slammed her hands down on the table, her nails digging audibly into the wood.

A good number of us cringed.

“Fuck’s sake,” Strohman uttered.

“Wait,” said Dentman. With surprising tenderness, he clasped one of his sister’s skeletal hands in both of his. The sound of his thumbs rubbing along the back of her hand was like the crinkling of carbon paper. “Darling,” he said quietly, “it’s time to tell the truth now.”

Trembling like a day-old fawn, Veronica drank her brother in, scrutinized him, as if he were a stranger she was supposed to know. A second before the tears came, I could sense their arrival. They began streaming down her sallow, colorless cheeks, her lipless mouth quivering. The tendons in her neck stood out like telephone cables. “He . . . hit his head . . . on the stairs . . . on the lake . . . blood . . . on me, on him . . . carried him back to the . . . the house . . . blood everywhere . . . went to . . . went . . . turned my back . . . when I came back . . . gone . . .”

No one said a word. All eyes were locked on the fragile woman who was breaking apart right in front of us. Her words suddenly didn’t matter. Her brother’s words, either. It was on her face, all of it. I prayed for someone to say something—anything—and only hoped that until they did the silence wouldn’t crush the life out of me.

In the interrogation room, Strohman closed his notebook.





CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Adam dropped me off that evening. Weakened, spiritually fatigued, I entered the house with no greater designs other than to crawl beneath the stream of a warm shower and wash the tiredness from my marrow.

Jodie was standing at the foot of the stairs, half-cloaked in shadow.

The look on her face immediately froze my blood. “What?”

“I think . . .” She looked around—a blind child suddenly given the gift of sight. “I think . . . someone was in the house.”

“What are you talking about? Were you asleep?”

“Yes. But noises woke me. Thumping noises. Like an animal in the attic or trapped behind the wall. I got out of bed to see what it was. I thought maybe you’d come home and I hadn’t heard the front door. So I called your name.” I watched as a chill zigzagged through her. “Oh, Jesus.”