Floating Staircase(95)

Back in the house, I started making lunch. Jodie was at the movies with Beth and the kids, and despite the racket in the yard, I knew that I could finish the first draft of the new book today. The thought made me happy. Alone, I ate lunch on the front porch until the clouds of bulldozer exhaust crept over the roof and settled down around me like nuclear winter.

I showered, shaved, and dressed in clean clothes. I sat in the office and fired up the word processor, smelling its electric body, feeling the keys as they hummed lightly beneath the pads of my fingers.

Then the thumping started again. It was right behind the desk against the wall.

Dropping to my hands and knees, I slid the desk away from the wall with little difficulty. Instantly, I felt foolish. The culprit, of course, was the cubbyhole door. It had come ajar, and as the wind rattled the eaves, the door had been thumping against the back of the desk.

I pushed the cubbyhole door shut but didn’t stand up right away. Outside, I heard the bulldozer’s gears grinding and someone shouting.

There was a gooseneck lamp on the desk. I yanked it down and switched it on. The light was dull but it would serve its purpose. With one hand, I pushed the cubbyhole door, and it popped open on its hinges. Cold air breathed out.

I thought of Elijah telling Althea Coulter that he had gone away.

I thought of Veronica in the interrogation room saying, When I came back . . . gone . . .

Bending over, I shoved the lamp into the cubbyhole and peeked inside.

It was just a tiny square box, a space for storage, with wooden struts and pink insulation for walls. The frayed baseball was still inside. So were the Matchbox cars and the Scrooge McDuck comic book. A child’s secret hiding place. I thought about the time Adam and I treaded water beneath the double dock, hiding from the rifle-toting lunatic marching on the boards above us. Hiding, I thought. Children hide.

When I came back . . . gone . . .

But of course, there was nothing here. The cubbyhole was empty. I’d known that—I’d known it since that first day I’d opened the door and found the shoe box full of dead birds. Just what had I expected to find?

And then I smelled it.

Sickeningly sweet, like day-old chamomile tea. Borne on the cold air, it grew more and more pungent with each inhalation. I craned the neck of the lamp farther into the cubbyhole and squeezed my head and shoulders inside. By no means am I a big man, but the opening was too tight for me to slip in past my chest. I recalled my nightmares from so many weeks ago—being squeezed to death in a constricting wall. Sweat suddenly sprung out along my brow.

Sometimes we go in; sometimes we go out.

In, I thought. He went in.

I reached out and fingered a curled bit of insulation paper. The Pink Panther’s face smiled slyly at me. Slowly, I peeled the curl of paper away from the wooden struts. I expected to find Sheetrock behind there, the back of the office closet. But what the light from the gooseneck lamp brought into view was a narrow cavern between the eaves and the back of the closet, a slender vertical cut behind the wall. This wasn’t just a cubbyhole; this was a crawl space.

Bringing the lamp closer to the narrow sliver of darkness, I held my breath and felt the sweat run down my face.

Sometimes we go in, I thought.

Holding my breath.

I saw him.





CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Unseasonably cold weather had practically preserved it, keeping the body from stinking up the whole house. This was the medical examiner’s inference, anyway. It was also the opinion of the police officers who for several hours occupied the rooms and hallways (and walls) of 111 Waterview Court.

I stood on the front lawn as they removed Elijah Dentman from the house. It required only two officers to carry the body to the ambulance, although I estimated one could have done it without breaking a sweat. They carried him on a flat wooden board with handles on either side. A white sheet covered his emaciated frame. His profile looked like a distant mountain range. Some neighborhood dogs came sniffing around, and it took another officer to chase them away.

By this time, a crowd had formed in the cul-de-sac, and the more brazen onlookers stepped on the front lawn and even pooled around the side of the house. They all watched in horror as the body was exhumed and taken away in the ambulance. When the ambulance departed, it did so with its lights and siren off.

Upstairs, I stood in the doorway to the study. I was instructed not to touch anything in the room. My impression of crime scenes (admittedly acquired from too much television) was that they were always sterile, sober environments, and the officers were always stern and emotionless and wearing ties tucked into their buttoned dress shirts.

Here, though, everyone kept the atmosphere as casual as possible, even at its most somber moment when the body was extricated from the crawl space via a fresh opening cut into the hallway wall. There was no yellow police tape anywhere. The cops wore uniforms. They did not look like they had everything under control nor all the answers, though nothing ever got out of hand. They looked so young and seemed to be learning as they went along, much as I was. These officers were not all-knowing, all-powerful beings; they were regular guys doing their job and they wore their emotions on their sleeves. It was as real as it could get.

All these years, I thought, I’ve been writing crime scenes wrong.

Adam appeared beside me. “You look green,” he said.

“Yeah? So do you.”

“I feel it.” He surveyed the room.