Floating Staircase

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Honest writing, much like honest people, comes without wanting anything in return. I found myself on an exploration of characters—characters that begot story; story that begot emotion—traversing through Edenic pastures and Elysian fields where dead boys frolicked in barefooted bliss on the dew-showered plains, and terminal skies reflected the roiling slate seas instead of the other way around.

I was out back chopping firewood when Adam came over. I heard his boots crunching through the crust of snow before I actually saw him emerge from the trees.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.” I went on chopping. The goddamn furnace was still uncooperative, so Jodie and I were going through several logs a day in the fireplace. It hadn’t snowed for days, but it was still deathly cold.

“Haven’t seen you in a couple days. I popped in yesterday, but Jodie said you’d gone out somewhere. Some book research or something.”

“Yeah.”

“You ever take any of that stuff to Veronica Dentman? I never heard how it went.”

“I did,” I said, splitting another log.

“And . . . ?”

I rested the axe head in the snow and leaned on the handle. I was out of breath and sweating despite the cold. “I brought her a box. She was . . . standoffish.”

“Understandable. You probably gave her one hell of a shock showing up like that.”

“Then David came home, and he gave me one hell of a shock. He thought I was a cop.”

Adam chewed his lower lip. “Nothing happened, did it?”

“What would happen?”

“Never mind.”

“Did you guys know he has a criminal record?”

Adam looked away from me. His nose was red and one nostril glistened. “Don’t tell me that just came up in conversation with him.”

“No. I found that out on my own.”

“How?”

“That’s not important,” I said, not wanting to get Earl and his elusive sources mixed up in all this. “Did you know?”

“About David’s past? If you’re questioning the PD’s investigative techniques, that’s really none of your business.”

“It’s just a simple question.”

“Of course we knew. We ran a background on him. What do you think, we’re a bunch of Barney Fifes out here, tripping over our shoelaces and shooting ourselves in the foot?”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s all I wanted to know.”

“To know for what?”

“Forget it.” I hefted the axe over my shoulder.

“I happened to talk with Ira Stein yesterday. It’s the reason I came over yesterday looking for you.”

Fuck, I thought, dropping the axe in the snow. I glared at him. “What are you doing, trying to set me up or something? Catch me in a lie? Yeah, I spoke with Ira.”

“He said you’re writing a book about what happened to the Dentmans.”

“That’s not what I told him. He was drunk by the time I left and he’d misunderstood.”

“He said you asked a lot of questions about them. You upset his wife at one point, too.”

“Jesus Christ, she got upset when her husband started talking about her dead dog. I told them I was interested in the history of Westlake. We got sidetracked and started talking about the Dentmans. It was completely incidental.”

“So then it’s not true? You’re not writing a book about the Dentmans?”

I stared at him and counted my heartbeats. When I spoke, I surprised myself with how even and steady my voice sounded. “I don’t have to answer any of your questions. We’re not in one of your fucking interrogation rooms.”

“Fine. You don’t have to answer shit. But let me give you a little brotherly advice. This is a small town and gossip travels fast. You want to keep yourself out of trouble, you’ll stop poking around.”

“Fucking unbelievable,” I howled. “Now you’re threatening me—”

“I’m not threatening you, asshole. I’m warning you. You’ve got a nice setup out here, and your wife deserves it. Don’t muck it up for her and embarrass her by acting like a fool.”

I blurted out, “I think David Dentman killed his nephew.”

“Is that so?”

“The pieces don’t fit. Things don’t make sense.”

“Really? And what evidence do you have? Aside from some assault charges for which he’d never been prosecuted?”

What was my evidence? The overall weirdness of the whole thing? The fact that David had looked like he wanted to punch me in the throat when he’d come and found me in his home with his mentally disturbed sister? I knew what my gut was telling me, but those gut feelings didn’t translate well into actual facts.

My silence at this point was condemning.

“We deal in facts,” said my brother. “Murderers have motives, innocent people have alibis, and you can’t lock someone up behind bars because pieces don’t fit. Sometimes in real life, things don’t fit. This is real life, not one of your books.”

But what if it is? I thought.

“There was no body,” Adam said. “Those people never got any closure. Leave them alone.”

Still fuming, I kicked my boots off on the front porch and tossed my jacket over the sofa as I entered the house. On the coffee table in front of the sofa, Elijah’s colorful wooden blocks were stacked into a pyramid.

Upstairs, I stood in the doorway to the office. Jodie was hunched over her desk before a display of psychology textbooks and reams of photocopied journal articles. She had one finger looped through the handle of a steaming mug of what smelled like chamomile tea.

“Working hard?” I said.

“Thy feelest the crunch upon thee.”

“Did you set up those blocks on the coffee table downstairs?”

“What blocks?” Her nose was buried in one of her books; she didn’t turn around to look at me.

I chortled. “Come on. The blocks on the coffee table.”

She turned around in her chair. Her face looked plain without makeup, almost puritanical. “I’m trying to work here. What are you getting at?”

“Someone stacked a bunch of toy blocks on the coffee table downstairs.”

“You look different,” Jodie said, her gaze lingering on me a bit too long. She was reading me. I felt nude standing there in the hallway. “Are you okay?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. You haven’t seemed like yourself for the past few days.”

“Who have I seemed like?” I said, and I couldn’t help but recall the night Jodie had said she’d gone into the bathroom in the middle of the night and it was my reflection staring back at her from the mirror. I was you.

“You know what I mean,” she insisted. “No, I don’t. Tell me.”

Jodie sighed. “Why don’t you go shower and shave, clean yourself up a little bit? You’ll feel better.”

“I feel fine.”

“You look haunted.” Her words chilled me. “Maybe you’re working yourself too hard on this new book. Take a few days off.”

“All right,” I said, not wanting to prolong this conversation any further.

“You’re stressed out. That’s why you’ve been having those nightmares.”

“What nightmares?”

“I don’t know.” She drew her eyebrows together. “You sort of whimper like a puppy in your sleep.”

“Do I?”

“It’s stress,” Jodie said, returning to her schoolwork.

“What about those blocks?” I questioned the small of her back again.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I don’t play with blocks.”

I went downstairs and gathered the blocks, carried them into the basement, and returned them to their plastic blue pail. With a huff I sat at Elijah’s tiny writing desk, my knees crammed beneath it at awkward angles, and opened one of my writing notebooks.

Staring up at me were Earl’s eight-by-tens, the top one the shot of Veronica partially hidden behind a stand of junipers. Once again I felt that needling insistence that something was trying to jump out at me from the photos, waving its arms like a drowning man to come to my attention. Yet just like before I couldn’t figure out what it was.

Let the writing hunt for it, I thought, grabbing a pen and setting the photos down beside one of my open notebooks on the desk.

In college I’d had a creative writing instructor who’d once said, “Quite often fiction is the best reality; cruelties are so much easier to swallow when they’re dressed up and capering about like circus clowns.”

So I let the writing hunt for the missing puzzle piece, printing lengthy descriptions of what I saw in each of Earl’s photographs, describing the leathery gray water, the crenellated staircase rising from its glassy surface, the police cars and the fullness of the summer trees, and the scudding cumuli on the horizon. I described the vacuous look in Veronica’s eyes and the blurry, almost nonexistent face of David behind a wedge of policemen’s hats.

(Although I couldn’t be certain, I swore—throughout the entirety of the writing—that someone had come up behind me, slight and hesitant, and began stacking the wooden blocks on the floor. I was aware of this only distantly and through a mental fog, the way drunks remember bits and pieces of their escapades after waking up the next morning with a hangover.)

I was writing and studying the photographs with such intensity that I hadn’t heard Jodie come down the basement stairs. She nearly sent me through the roof when she cleared her throat in deliberate irritation.

“Jesus,” I croaked, my heart pumping like a piston.

“What’s going on here?” She leaned against the cutout in the wall, her arms folded across her chest. Whether it was subconscious or not, she hadn’t taken a step into the room.

“What do you mean?” I quickly set one of my notebooks down over the photos.

“This room,” Jodie said. “This stuff. I thought you called someone.”

“I did.”

“And what happened?”

I thought about lying to her.

But before I could think of what to say, she interrupted my train of thought. “You’re scaring me. Something’s not right with you.”

“Hon . . .”

“Don’t shut me down. Have you looked in a mirror lately? You look like shit.”

“I know. I know. But I’m right on the verge of something here.”

“The verge of something,” she echoed. “It’s more like you’re obsessed.”

“I’m just trying to figure something out.”

She touched a pair of fingers to her chin. She looked on the brink of tears, and when she spoke again, her voice trembled. “Adam said you’ve been going around the neighborhood asking people about that boy who died.”

“Adam doesn’t get it,” I said, and it was a chore keeping my voice calm. What I wanted to do was call him a son of a bitch who couldn’t keep his nose out of my business. “What happened to that boy wasn’t an accident. He was killed.”

I didn’t like the way Jodie was looking at me—like I was a stranger and she was trying to understand how I got here.

“Adam’s worried about you,” she continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “So am I.”

“There’s nothing to be worried about. I swear it.”

“I’m just afraid you’re doing it again . . .”

“Doing what again?”

“What you did after your mom’s funeral. The depression that followed, the days you wouldn’t get out of bed. Your obsessive behavior. You’re becoming that same person again.” Her voice cracked. “You’ve been sitting in this depressing goddamn coffin of a room down here scribbling stories about dead boys in your notebooks. It’s scaring me.”

Somehow I managed to offer her a meager, harmless little smile. “You said it yourself just ten minutes ago—it’s the stress. I guess I’m stressed out. You’re right.”

She shook her head, her eyes blurry with tears.

“Upstairs, remember? You said I should take a couple days off from writing. Maybe we should get out and do something together—”

Jodie continued to shake her head with mounting vigor. “No,” she whispered. “No, Travis. We had that discussion last night, not ten minutes ago. You’ve been down here almost a full day.”

The absurdity of this caused me to laugh. In hindsight, that laugh probably frightened her more than it helped to ease any tension, but admittedly I wasn’t in the best frame of mind at the time. “What are you talking about?”

“You’ve been down here since yesterday evening.”

“That’s not—” I cut myself off. My mind was spinning like a wheel. Frantically I tried to put the pieces together, to assemble the time and date, but I couldn’t. Was it actually possible? “Jodie . . .” I took a step toward her.

She held up both hands and took a step back.

“No. Stop.”

“Babe—”

“Stop it. I want you to stop it. I want you to snap out of it.”

“I’m not—”

“Because you’re scaring me.”

I stopped walking, one foot over the threshold of the hidden basement bedchamber. Jodie had backed into the washer and dryer, her hands still up in a heartbreaking defensive posture. She was genuinely, visibly frightened. Her fear of me was unwarranted—I’d never struck her or any other woman in my life—and made me tremble.

“Don’t be afraid of me.”

“I’m not afraid of you. I’m afraid for you.”

“Listen—”

“No. Just stop.” She took a shuddery breath. “Listen to me and don’t get angry. I’m going to stay the night with Beth and Adam. I want you to know that I won’t come back to this house until this room is cleared out, all that stuff is carried away, and the wall is sealed shut. Am I understood?”

“You’re overreacting.”

“Am I under-fucking-stood?”

A chill rippled through me. “Yes,” I rasped.

“Okay.” Jodie went for the stairs and was halfway up when she paused and said, “I love you. But I’m not doing you any good pretending nothing’s wrong.”

I listened to her heavy shoes clump up the stairs and tread across the floorboards above my head. There was some rustling around, and then I heard the front door slam. If she was taking any bags with her, they were probably already across the street.

A whole fucking day? I’ve been down here overnight? The sheer implausibility of it caused me to laugh again, the sound of which instantly chilled me to the roots of my soul.

Something was moving around behind me in Elijah’s room. I turned and saw nothing out of the ordinary at first . . . yet on closer inspection I noticed that two of the colored blocks—a yellow one and a green one—now stood on the writing desk, one standing vertically while the other balanced horizontally atop the first. Together they formed a capital T.

When the phone rang upstairs, I literally cried out. I pounded up the stairs and snatched the receiver off the kitchen wall, anticipating Adam’s stern and overbearing voice to shout at me. I answered with a steely determination already seeded in my voice.

“Travis? It’s Earl Parsons.”

I cleared my throat and apologized for my initial abruptness. “I thought you were someone else. Is everything all right?”

“Right as rain,” he said. He sounded like he was eating something. “I found Althea Coulter.”

I felt a measure of triumph rise up through me. “Fantastic. Please tell me she’s still alive.”

“I guess that’s a matter of opinion. She’s got a permanent room in the Frostburg Medical Center’s oncology ward. According to her son, who I spoke with earlier after telling him I was an old friend of his mom’s, she’s coming down to the wire.”

“Cancer,” I said flatly. “Jesus.” Momentary clarity dawned on me. “I can’t go harass a woman dying in a hospital bed.”

“Then don’t harass her,” Earl said peaceably enough. “Go visit her, bring her some flowers, make her feel good. Her son says she’s pretty lonely, even though he tries to see her as much as possible. It might be good for her.”

I took a deep breath and saw Jodie trembling against the washer and dryer again. “I’m being selfish about this, aren’t I?”

“That depends,” said Earl. “Are you doing this for you, or are you doing this for Elijah Dentman?”

“Both,” I said after a very long time.

I jotted down Althea’s room number at the Frostburg Med Center on the palm of my hand then thanked Earl for his help. He asked me to keep him in the loop on any further developments, and I promised I would apprise him of all that I’d learn.

“You really think we may have something here, don’t you?” he said, and even though he inflected the end of the sentence into a question, I knew he felt just as strongly as I did.

Just as I hung up the phone I noticed something on the kitchen table. I went over to it and stared at two sections torn from a newspaper. I did not have to look closely to know the folded bits of newsprint were the articles about Elijah’s alleged drowning that I’d stolen from the public library; they still held the creases where I’d folded them and stuffed them into my pocket. I must have forgotten to take them out of my pants, leaving them there for Jodie to discover when she went through the pockets before dumping my pants in the wash.

Splayed out on the table like evidence in a murder trial, those fragments of newsprint caused something heavy and indescribable to roll over deep down inside me.