Floating Staircase(96)

Two officers took photographs of the carpet and the enlarged opening the cops had cut into the wall in order to access the crawl space.

A third officer’s black boots poked out of the mouth of the cubbyhole as he backed out. “It’s a tight fit in there,” he said, sweat causing him to glisten like an eel. “Goes all the way through the wall and behind the stairs. There’s a bunch of junk, too. Kid must have used it as a clubhouse or something.”

No, I thought. Not a clubhouse. That’s where he hid when he was afraid. Or when he was hurt.

Adam put a hand on my shoulder. “You were right, you know.”

“Maybe,” I said. “About some things.”

“No,” Adam insisted. “You were right all along. You said it yourself—that the proof was in the staircase. Well, this crawl space goes behind the wall, behind the staircase in the hallway. That day on the lake, you just had the wrong staircase.”



Driven by some imprecise loyalty, I telephoned Earl and told him to bring his camera and best writing pad. When he arrived at the scene, he snapped photos of the spot where police busted through the upstairs wall and even took snapshots of the passage between the interior walls and the outer shell of the house, where Elijah’s body had been hidden.

Before Earl left, he hugged me with a surprising amount of emotion behind it, then held me at arm’s length while he grinned. “You’ll be leaving after this,” he said.

“We can’t stay.”

“Thank you for giving this to me.”

“You helped make it happen,” I told him.

It looked like Earl wanted to say something heartfelt and poignant. Maybe if we’d had more time to get to know each other, he would have. But as it was, we were pretty much strangers, and in the end he settled for shaking my hand firmly and nodded. “You keep hold of my phone number,” he told me. “Stay in touch, now.”

I promised that I would. “Take care,” I said, watching him trudge through the thinning snow to his Oldsmobile.

(His news story would get picked up by papers throughout the state, landing him his first and only syndication. And I did keep in touch with him . . . until a massive stroke took him in the night some eighteen months later.)

When he left, I felt empty.



Adam arrived home sometime around midnight. The rest of the house was asleep, including Jodie on the pullout couch in the living room. I was propped up in a chair in Adam’s kitchen, the lights off, the small television set flickering in the darkness, the volume low.

“Hey. You weren’t waiting up, were you?”

“Are you kidding?”

“Jodie?”

“On the couch. She’s all right.”

“How about you?”

I held up one hand to show him how badly it shook. “Ready to perform surgery.”

Adam flipped on the light above the kitchen sink and turned on the water. He scrubbed his hands with dishwashing detergent.

“You hungry?” I asked. “I’ll throw together some sandwiches.”

“Yeah. That sounds good. Thanks.”

I went to the refrigerator and produced some sliced turkey, mayonnaise, half a head of lettuce, and two cans of Diet Pepsi. There was a loaf of French bread on the counter. I sawed off two sizeable pieces, then cut them both down the middle. I asked Adam if he was a lot hungry or a little hungry.

“A lot,” he said, drying his hands on a dish towel. “I can’t remember the last meal I ate.”

I loaded the bread with mounds of sliced turkey and shook some pepper on it. I rinsed the lettuce in the sink and laid several leaves on top of the turkey. Then I lathered mayonnaise on the underside of the bread. Setting the plates down at the table, I watched my brother stare out the window over the sink and at the pinpoints of light across the cul-de-sac and through the woods. The cops had left the porch lights on across the street.

“It’s not a pretty thing,” Adam said, still looking out the window.

“I want to know.”

“Cause of death was due to severe head trauma. Heavy fracture at the back of the head, consistent with the fall Elijah would have taken off the staircase on the lake. We’ll have more specifics once the autopsy comes back, of course, but it’s pretty evident what happened.”

He turned around and sat at the table. Together we ate.

Several minutes passed before Adam spoke again. “There’s no way a grown human being could fit in that crawl space. Not even Veronica and especially not David.”

“I know.” I wasn’t surprised. I’d known all afternoon, it seemed. “He must have crawled in there after Veronica took him to the house. When she turned her back on him, he went up the stairs and hid in his special place.” I was talking but I wasn’t listening to myself. Instead, I was remembering the story Althea Coulter had told me that day at the hospital—about how she’d come to the house two days in a row and never saw the boy. How David had answered the door, an oddity in itself. How, on the third day, Elijah had simply admitted to Althea that he had just gone away.

“The DA dropped the charges against David and Veronica,” said Adam. There was mayonnaise at one corner of his mouth. “David still could have been prosecuted for lying to the police, but both the DA and Strohman figured this thing was already such a f*ckup they just wanted to sweep it under the rug and be done with it.”