Floating Staircase

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Fortified against the cold in a heavy, fur-lined parka and a pair of wool gloves, I parked in one of the visitor spaces outside the Frostburg Medical Center’s broad brick façade. Beside me on the passenger seat, a small leafy plant vibrated to the tune of the car’s engine.

From the outside, the building looked like an ancient cathedral, all winding spires and Gothic architecture, the wing safeguarded behind a black cyclone fence crowned with spearheads. There was a long gravel driveway that trickled like an estuary up to the automatic doors beneath a reinforced portico. Its windows were small and barred, insulated with mesh wiring. The brick face was sterile and white, like bone heated in a kiln. A stand of pine trees loomed behind the building, immense and towering and dusted with snow. From where I parked, I could see a large weighted birds’ nest nestled above the mezzanine, all sticks and bony branches. Two large falcons stood guard at either end of the mezzanine.

I climbed out of the car. The air was sharp and scented with winter. Craving a smoke, I produced a pack of Marlboros and popped one into my mouth, then chased the tip of it with my lighter, my hand cupped around it to keep out the wind.

The main thoroughfare of the hospital was shaped like a uterus. The carpeting was an institutional shade of brown orange (that specific brown orange only hospitals seem capable of duplicating), and large sodium lights fizzed above my head.

Following the numbered plaques on the walls, I turned down a long, claustrophobic hallway. There was surprisingly little lighting, and the staff was practically nonexistent. There was no receptionist at the bank of desks at the end of the hall, either. This wasn’t the section of the hospital someone came to for a routine checkup or for any type of surgical procedure. This was where people came for good when they knew they were never going to leave again. There were no checkout procedures here.

Before locating the room number Earl had given me yesterday evening over the phone, I ditched into a men’s restroom and saddled up to the sinks. That morning I’d showered hastily but hadn’t shaved or washed my hair. My face was pallid and sunken at the cheeks, where bristling black hairs like spider’s legs corkscrewed out from the flesh. Purplish crescents hung beneath my eyes, and my eyes themselves appeared bloodshot and shellacked. In brown corduroys, a thermal knit shirt with a flannel vest, and my ski parka, I looked like a vagrant who had shuffled in off the street.

“I could have at least shaved,” I muttered to my reflection. I turned on the water at one of the sinks, washed my face, and matted down my too-long hair as best I could, pulling the knots out with my fingers.

I was startled when someone exited a stall behind me. The man nodded in quiet recognition, then left without washing his hands. He must have heard me talking to myself and figured it was safer risking potential bathroom-borne disease.

Taking a deep breath, I reexamined myself in the mirror. I thought of Jodie saying, I was you, and a burning ember briefly winked into existence at the small of my back.

I was you.

Room 218 was the closed door at the end of the farthest hallway. Carrying the potted plant in both arms, I approached the door, expecting all the while to feel a hand clap me on one shoulder and ask me who I was and what I was doing here. But that never happened.

I summoned a mental picture of Althea Coulter, and what I projected was a weak, elderly woman, her charcoal eyes blazoned with milky cataracts, her lips perpetually twisted into a bitter snarl. Her hands would be like claws—the serrated hooks of a carnivorous bird—and her head would be thick and unmoving and simply there. The room was going to smell of sour breath and medication and the ghostly traces of urine. She would be asleep. And I wouldn’t be able to wake her, to ask her even a single question, and even if she was awake, she would be so far gone into a land of her own that the answers she provided (given that she provided any at all) would be of the fuzzy, make-believe, nonsensical variety. I pictured Althea Coulter as an ancient, mummified manikin, whose skin was scorched cloth and whose brain was a ball of string.

What the hell am I doing here?

Pausing outside the door, uncertain if I should knock or simply allow myself entry, I swallowed a hard lump that seemed to stick in the back of my esophagus.

I am standing on the line between fiction and reality.

I opened the door and stepped inside.

The woman in the bed was perhaps sixty, though with her sunken features, cobwebby wisps of hair, and blighted countenance, she looked like she could have been a hundred-year-old mummy rolled out on display.

I entered the room as silently as I could, careful not to let the door catch the latch too loudly as it shut. The room was dark and musty. There was an amalgam of odors clinging hotly to the air, each of them distinct and clinical: the reek of ammonia; the acrid underlying stench of urine; the insipid redolence of Althea Coulter’s stale, immobile body beneath the paper-thin hospital bedsheets. There was another smell, too—though more like the hint of a smell rather than a smell itself—and I knew without a doubt that it was the smell of impending death.

She was awake, her frail body propped up on a cushion of pillows. As I moved farther into the room, she turned absently away from the single window beside her bed (it was covered by venetian blinds, impeding any actual view of the outdoors) and acknowledged me with only the subtlest of glances. Then she returned her gaze to the sheathed window.

“Ms. Coulter?” I said. My voice was amplified in the empty room.

She didn’t say anything. In the silence, I could hear the labors of her breathing. The cogs were winding down, slowing with time.

I tried again: “How are you feeling?”

“Not hungry,” she practically croaked, her voice strained and tired. The sound was like guitar strings wound too tight.

“Oh,” I said, “I’m not with the hospital.”

Like a wooden puppet, her head slowly rotated on her thin neck until her attention settled back on me, this time with greater scrutiny. She was black, but her skin was as pale as ash, her lips white and blistered. I imagined one of the nurses attempting to draw blood from this living scarecrow only to be awarded with a puff of ancient dust as the needle broke through the dying woman’s flesh.

She didn’t need to speak; the question was in her eyes.

“My name’s Travis Glasgow. My wife and I just moved to Westlake last month. We’re in the old Dentman house.” I didn’t know where to go from here, and the woman’s urgent stare was unrelenting. I grasped at a straw. “The Steins send their regards. They wanted me to give you this, actually.” I made a gesture as if to extend the flowered plant to her, although I knew she would be unable to physically accept it.

Something in her face alerted me to the fact that she no longer remembered who the Steins were. At this, I felt a sinking loss drop through my body. This trip, it appeared, was going to be a bust.

Althea grimaced, scrunching her lips together to start up the motor of speech. When she spoke, her voice was the creaking sound of a coffin lid. “Set it down over here, son, where I can smell the flowers.”

I walked around the side of the bed and placed the potted plant atop a small nightstand piped with industrial steel. The only other thing on the night-stand was a picture of a handsome young boy in a dark blue cap and gown. I wondered if it was her son Earl had spoken to on the phone.

“What’d you say your name was again?”

“Travis Glasgow. I hope I’m not disturbing you, ma’am.”

With fossilized hands, she smoothed out the blankets on her lap. There was an IV attached to one broomstick arm. “I look busy to you?”

I offered her a crooked smile. “No, ma’am.”

Her lower lip quivered as her face folded into a frown. “You say you live where, now?”

“The old Dentman house in Westlake. The one on the lake.”

“The old Dentman house,” she said. In her condition, it was impossible to gauge the tone of her voice.

“You used to tutor the Dentman boy, didn’t you? Elijah Dentman?”

Despite her illness, Althea was no less perceptive; she picked out something unsettling in my question and hung on to it in temporary silence, perhaps going over my question and the reasons for why I’d be here asking such a thing. I listened to her wheezing respiration and did not hurry her. Eventually, she said, “You a friend of the Dentmans?”

“Not really, ma’am. I didn’t even know anything about them until I moved into their house.”

“So why’d you come here? I appreciate the company, Lord knows, but I don’t understand it. All this way to bring me someone else’s plant?”

This made me smile a nervous smile. It made Althea smile, too. She had the yellowed, plastic-looking teeth of a skeleton, a corpse.

My hands, the traitors that they were, had been unraveling a thread from my parka. Suddenly aware of this, I started to unzip my coat but paused halfway. “Would you mind if we talked for just a bit?”

“Only person comes to see me is Michael,” she said wanly, “and he certainly don’t bring me plants. So you’re welcome to stay . . . provided I don’t get too tired on you.”

I took my parka off and draped it over the back of a metal folding chair that stood next to the night-stand. I sat down in the chair, my gaze returning to the framed picture of the handsome young man in the cap and gown. “This is Michael?”

“My son, yes,” Althea said, and this time there was no mistaking the emotion in her voice. “My only baby. He’s a good boy, this one. Got his demons like everyone, sure, but he’s a good one.”

“He’s a handsome kid. Athletic.”

“This here’s his college graduation picture. See that? First in my family to graduate college. On a scholarship. How you gonna like that?”

“Good for him.”

“He just needs to find himself a better job. It’s tough today, kids out of school trying to find jobs.”

“Does he come to see you much?”

“Used to. It gets hard for him. I don’t blame him.”

“My mom died of cancer several years ago. Breast cancer. She hung on for a while. It was rough on her. On my brother and me, too.” This, of course, made me think of her funeral and how Jodie had dragged me out of Adam’s house in a fit.

“Mine’s the stomach,” said Althea. “They been cutting little pieces of me away, a bit here and a bit there, snip-snip, but it really ain’t the pain that’s so bad. It’s the sick. I get really sick in the mornings. Hard to eat food. Sometimes, too, I can’t even sleep at night.”

“There’s nothing more they can do for you?”

“What’s to do? What’s left? Look at these things,” she said, extending her arms with great care. They were as thin and as shapely as the cardboard tubing inside rolls of toilet paper. A network of veins, fat and blue-black, was visible beneath her nearly translucent skin. “Scrawny things. Jab me full of needles, drain me like a sieve.” But her tone wasn’t bitter. In fact, there was almost a sense of humor in it. Then she sighed. “We can put people on the moon and send radio pulses and whatnot into outer space, but we’ve yet to completely explore the mysteries right here on Earth, the mysteries right here inside our own bodies.”

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “If I’m disturbing you, I’ll go.”

Althea looked like she wanted to wave a hand at me. “Death is the disturbance. People are just passing road signs along the way. But listen to us, sharing cancer stories, trading them like baseball cards. Who wants to talk about cancer?”

“Not me.”

“Me, either.” She looked at me, then the picture of Michael. It was like she was desperate to find some sort of similarity between us, although she would be hard-pressed to find it. “You said you were married, I b’lieve. You got any children?”

“No, ma’am.”

“You wanna stay and chat, you best quit being so damned polite, boy. I ain’t your mamma. It’s insulting.”

“Sorry. I’ll try to be ruder.”

Althea cleared her throat, and it was a rather involved process. Aside from the scratchy, phlegm-filled rattle in her chest, her eyes also watered up, tracing tears down the contours of her face. It was disturbingly easy to make out her skull beneath that thin veil of stretched skin. Finally, after her throat was cleared and she’d wiped away the errant tears with the heels of her hands, she said, “So how come you’re visiting some strange lady you ain’t never met before?”

I’d had a whole song and dance routine prepared, no different than the one I’d performed for Ira and Nancy, as a way of greasing the wheels . . . but looking at this woman, I was suddenly certain she would easily see through such a lie. She can see straight down to the pit of my soul, I thought without a doubt.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” I hadn’t known what I was going to say until the words were already out of my mouth. It had been a question I’d been dying to ask someone since moving to Westlake, but until now, I did not think I’d found the person who’d be able to answer it.

“Ghosts?” Althea said, as if she’d misheard me.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know it sounds crazy.”

“You’re not a police officer, are you?”

“No,” I said, thinking, You a cop? Strohman send you here? “I’m a writer.”

“A writer who wants to ask an old woman about ghosts?”

I smiled warmly and rubbed my hands together between my knees. “Do you know about what happened to Elijah Dentman? That he drowned in the lake behind their house last summer?”

“Read about it in the papers.” She stared at her twisted fingers atop the bedclothes. Her knuckles were like knots in a hangman’s noose.

“I’m bothered by that,” I told her. “I’m bothered by the fact that he died and they never found his body. I’m bothered by what I think was a slipshod investigation by Westlake’s finest. I think something happened to that little boy, and it was not an accident. But I’ve got no way of proving that, so I’ve come here to talk to you.”

“And what is it you think I can tell you?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe nothing. But maybe you know something that you don’t realize is important, something that when added to everything else I’ve uncovered will help complete the puzzle.”

Althea merely looked at me without a change of emotion. If she felt anything—anything at all—on the heels of what I’d just said her face did not betray such emotion. “Be a dear and open those blinds, please,” she said finally, her voice still sedate.

I stood and crossed to the window. There was a plastic length of tubing the width of a pencil hanging vertically from one side. I turned it until the blinds separated, then pushed them all to one side. Outside, there was no bright sunshine, no dazzling blue sky, only a lazy drift of cumulous clouds. Everything looked hollowed out and the color of old monochromatic filmstrips. I could see my car in the parking lot. Above it, the two falcons I’d witnessed nesting in the mezzanine earlier were circling in the air, waiting like buzzards for my Honda to die.

When I turned back around, Althea was looking once again at her son’s photograph on the nightstand. “What do you write?”

“Novels.”

“What sort of novels?”

“Dark ones. Horror novels. Mysteries. People chasing old ghosts, both figurative and literal.”

Disinterestedly, she managed to lean to one side and adjust herself on her pillows. I could tell the act was not without pain. “Personally,” she said, “I’ve always preferred romances. Do you ever write anything romantic? A love story?”

“They all start out that way,” I answered, meaning it.

Althea glanced out the window. I could not tell if she was disappointed at the weather or if it was exactly what she’d expected. With Althea Coulter, I found I could assess very little.

“I don’t know what it is you’re hoping I can tell you,” she said after a time.

“How long did you tutor Elijah?”

“For just over a month. I was sent there through a service with the county. I guess someone found out there was a little boy there who’d not been going to school. The county got after his mother.”

“Veronica.”

“Yes. Veronica.”

“Did you know Veronica’s father, Bernard Dentman? It’s my understanding Veronica and her brother, David, came back to Westlake to take care of him before he died.”

“That’s my understanding as well, though I didn’t know the elder Dentman. He had passed before I got there.”

“Why’d you stay only a month?”

“Because my illness was beginning to get the better of me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Also, there was very little I could do for that child.”

“How’s that?”

“He was different.”

My mind returned to Adam’s description of the boy on the night of the Christmas party: Veronica had a son about Jacob’s age. Elijah was slow and homeschooled . . .

“I doubt he was ever officially diagnosed,” Althea continued, “but my guess is he was autistic.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I could just tell. He had trouble communicating, trouble expressing himself, and his overall skills were way below the average ten-year-old. He spoke in fits and starts, like a tractor engine trying to turn over in cold weather. We’d go over simple math problems, and he’d become frustrated and hide under the kitchen table. Sometimes he could be lured out with cookies, but other times he would stay under there until after I’d left for the day. In fact, that’s sort of how we got our relationship going, the boy and me, and I would bring him candies and dole them out to him at the beginning of each session.”

“How was his relationship with his mother?”

“She loved him very much. But she was a shattered person herself—I’d always thought something traumatic had happened to her at some point, perhaps when she was a child—and she had difficulty rearing Elijah.”

“What about David Dentman, Elijah’s uncle? How was his relationship with the boy?”

“I hardly saw the man,” she said. “I came by weekday afternoons, mostly when Mr. Dentman was out at work.”

“But you’d met him before?” I said.

“Yes.” There was a timorous hitch in Althea’s voice. “Two days in a row, toward the end of my month at the Dentmans’ house, David Dentman answered the door after I’d knocked. I knew who he was of course—little Elijah had spoken of his uncle to me on a number of occasions—but this was the first time I’d seen the man.”

She expelled a bout of air, the sound like someone squeezing an old accordion. Then she frowned, wrinkles like estuaries running from every direction down her face. “He was very cold to me. He just opened the door and said, ‘Elijah’s not feeling well today.’ I had my mouth half-opened to ask whether or not the boy’s illness was a serious one that required his uncle to stay home from work, but he shut the door in my face before I had a chance to ask the question.”

“That sounds about right,” I agreed. “You said it happened twice?”

“The next day I returned to the house and knocked on the door. Once again, Mr. Dentman answered and spoke the same exact words to me through the crack in the door—that Elijah was not feeling well. He said it like he was reciting dictation from memory. But this time I was ready for him, and I was able to speak before he closed the door on me. ‘I’m sure you’re aware the county only allows for a minimal number of days for a child to be ill if he’s going to receive a home tutor,’ I said. This was only half true—the kid could have his sick days just like anyone else—but something in that man’s presence alarmed me. After that first day, I’d spent the whole night thinking about the boy. When Mr. Dentman said the same thing on that second day, I knew something was wrong, and I wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easy.”

“What’d he say?”

“He looked me over from that crack in the door. And not until he opened the door wider did I realize just how big he was. Broad shoulders and thick arms. I realized, too, that he had almost a baby’s face, tender and soft in places, which didn’t seem to fit with the rest of his body. Something about his face made me feel sorry for him, I remember.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve met him.” Although unlike Althea, I’d recognized nothing in David’s face that had made me feel sorry for him.

“He told me to come back tomorrow, that Elijah would be feeling well tomorrow. ‘I’ll certainly be back,’ I told him. ‘Elijah and I have a lot of catching up to do.’ See, I’d intended for those words to hold more meaning, and maybe they would have for someone brighter than Mr. Dentman, but I don’t think he understood the message I was tryin’ to send.”

“That’s probably a good thing. My impression is he wouldn’t take well to veiled threats.”

“Needless to say, I came back the next day, and it was like the previous two days had never happened. David was gone, and Veronica answered the door when I knocked. Elijah was there, and we went through his lessons with the same practiced replication we’d done every day beforehand.”

“How did he act?”

“Quiet and introverted as he always did but not the least bit under the weather.” She knew where I was headed and said before I could ask my next question, “Looked him over quickly for bruises, too, of course. We’re taught to do that if we feel something may be unusual. Even if it’s just supposition.”

“Did you notice anything?”

“Not a thing,” she said, and I felt a sinking sensation at the core of my being.

“But I was still curious,” Althea went on. “Before the day was over, I said to Elijah, ‘Well, it seems like you’re feeling better. Were you sick the past two days?’ He just stared at me with those big eyes of his and didn’t answer, which wasn’t unusual if you knew the boy. He would sometimes ignore you deliberately. It wasn’t his fault; as I’ve said, he was beyond my ability to help. He should have been seeing a specialist.”

“Did you ever suggest that to anyone?”

“I did,” she said quickly—so quickly, in fact, that she had to gasp for breath before continuing. “I went straight to the supervisor of the board. But before any next step could be taken, the cancer had different plans for me, and I had to withdraw my tenure. By that time, summer was already here. That’s a bad time to get things passed through the board, seeing how they enjoy their summer vacations as much as—if not more than—the students. And before the next school year—”

“He had died,” I finished, already familiar with the timeline.

“Yes. I remember reading about it in the newspapers, like I said. I felt so horrible for the little boy, of course, but also for his mother. She was such a lost soul herself, I often felt like she and her son were equal halves of the same whole. Almost like incomplete people holding on to one another for fear that if they let go, they’d both blink out of existence.”

I nodded, shaken by the power of her insight. “Did you ask anything more of Elijah that afternoon?”

“I certainly did. You see, I had already started down the path, and my curiosity had bested me.” Althea raised one hand and gripped my wrist, and I imagined I could feel the cancer boiling her blood beneath her flesh. “Sometimes when you follow something, you eventually end up chasing it.”

I thought, Sometimes we go in; sometimes we go out.

“I asked him again if he’d been sick,” she continued, “and once again he only stared at me without answering. So I approached it from a different avenue, asking him if he’d gotten in trouble in the last couple of days.” She lowered her voice, as if the Dentmans were actually in the next room and she didn’t want them to overhear our conversation. “If you coach children and tell them how to answer certain questions, they will typically answer those questions exactly in the way they’d been coached. But if you address them from different angles—angles they hadn’t been prepared for—you’ll find the answers you’re looking for.”

“What answers did you find?” I said, my voice as equally hushed.

“He said his uncle had yelled at him about the animals. He’d gotten in trouble about the animals.”

“What animals?”

“The dead ones,” Althea said. Her voice caused a muscle to jump in my right eyelid. “He told me about his pets—how he collected them when he found them in the woods and brought them back to the house. He told me about the rabbit and the squirrel—he’d found them both out in the yard that spring—but he said he’d gotten yelled at for the dog. ‘Because it was too big and I couldn’t hide it,’ he said.”

“The dog . . . ,” I said, my voice trailing off.

“I had no idea what the poor child was talking about, and I told him so. That was when he got up from the table and very calmly asked me if I wanted to see some of his pets. Elijah said he’d kept some hidden, and his uncle hadn’t been able to find them. I said okay, and he left and went upstairs for a time. I sat by myself at the kitchen table, and I could feel the cancer moving around in my stomach like something alive. The boy’s mother never sat in on any of our sessions, but she was always hovering somewhere close by, like a ghost, and I could sometimes hear her through the walls.

“When Elijah came back, he was clutching an old shoe box to his chest. I asked him if his pets were inside, and he nodded and set the box on the table. I asked him if I could open it, and he nodded again. Are you beginning to understand what it was like talking to that child?”

“Yes,” I said. I thought of Discovery Channel specials I’d seen on feral children growing up in condemned buildings in Europe and in the forests of South America, raised by wild dogs.

“So I opened the shoe box—”

“And saw birds,” I finished. There was almost an audible snap as one of the puzzle pieces fell into place. “Dead birds.”

Althea stared at me as if I’d just professed some secret of the universe. Then her chalky eyes narrowed, and her thin, bloodless lips pressed tightly together. For one hideous, depressing moment, I could actually hear her heart thudding behind the shallow wall of her chest.

“You know about the birds,” she said, and she was not asking me a question but merely stating fact. If she was curious as to how I knew, she never asked. “In the end, he replaced the lid of the shoe box and climbed back up in the kitchen chair. I asked him if he knew the birds were dead, and he didn’t say anything. I asked him how he found them, and he told me he would sometimes go off into the woods and find them at the foot of the trees, hidden under the brush and half buried in the dirt.”

“In other words, you wanted to know if he was killing them,” I suggested. I couldn’t stop thinking of that time I’d squeezed the baby birds and the frog that popped in my hand like some windup toy. In all my therapy sessions after Kyle’s death, I’d never spoken of that incident to the therapist. Distantly, I wondered what she would have said.

“Yes,” Althea said, “but he wasn’t killing them. He only found them that way, same as he’d found a rabbit one time and the squirrel.”

“You mentioned a dog, too.”

“Elijah said he found it buried in the woods by the lake. When he brought it to the house, he said his uncle yelled at him and told him to drag it back down to the woods and leave it there. ‘Is that when you got in trouble?’ I asked him. Elijah didn’t nod or shake his head—didn’t say anything, either, of course—so I asked him one last time if he’d really been sick the past two days. The child finally said, ‘I went away.’ Course, I asked him what he meant, but he only repeated the phrase—he’d gone away.”

“Gone where?” I said.

“That’s exactly what I asked him. ‘Where’d you go?’ Elijah didn’t say, just kept repeatin’ it—’I went away.’ I asked him who took him away. Again, he didn’t answer. He was scared—that much was evident—and I knew that if I continued down this path I might lose him and that he’d shut whatever door I’d managed to temporarily pry open. But as I’ve said, sometimes when you start out following something, you end up chasing it. So now I was chasing it. I leaned over the table and rested my hand on top of his. Even this simple gesture was risky; he never liked no one to touch him, not even his mamma, and I knew there was a good chance I’d send him running off into the next room. But I was desperate to reach out to him.”

“Did Elijah run away?”

“No.” Spittle had dried to white globs at the corners of Althea’s mouth. “I asked him flatly if anyone had hurt him—his mamma or uncle or anyone. Elijah just looked at me for a long time. I remember I could hear the wall clock in the silence, the minutes climbing and multiplying. Then the boy slid his hand out from beneath mine and held it against his chest, rubbing it with his other hand, as if I’d burned him. ‘Uncle David was mad,’ he said. ‘I went away.’

“I opened my mouth to speak just as a shadow loomed over us—the boy’s mother stood in the kitchen doorway, looking like the ghost of a woman who’d been thrown off an old pirate ship. There were black circles around her eyes and that scar along the side of her face.” Althea raised one thin arm, the elbow like a knot in the trunk of a tree, and mimed where Veronica’s scar had been down the side of her own face. “It looked bright red against her pale skin. She’d damn near given me a stroke sneaking up on me like that.”

“What did she say?”

“She told me she thought her boy might still be feeling a bit under the weather and it was probably best for me to finish up with the lessons before I caught whatever illness he had. ‘Ma’am,’ I told her, ‘I don’t think there’s a thing in the known world this little boy can give me be worse than what I already got.’ But she said, ‘Go on now,’ and floated out of the room.

“By that point, I’d already made up my mind to go to the board and tell them what had happened. And that look the boy’s mamma had given me . . . well, it just chilled me straight to the bone and made me sicker than any chemotherapy I’d ever had. So I packed up my things and left the house.

“The following week, my stomach had gotten so bad that I called myself out sick. When it didn’t look like I was going to feel any better, I called out for good. I never went back to that house again.”

Without a doubt, Althea Coulter was a tough old woman who wasn’t easily spooked, yet I wondered just how much of a role her stomach cancer actually played in her reluctance to return to the Dentman house, or if it had served as a convenient excuse.

“As far as you know,” I asked her, “did anyone ever report any suspected child abuse?”

“Other than my suggestion to the board that something strange was going on in that house,” Althea said, “I don’t believe so. And understand I never suggested any type of child abuse to the board.” Again, her small eyes narrowed. They were the color of candle wax threaded with reddened blood vessels. “These are strange things you’ve come to ask me, son. You’ve already said you don’t think what happened to that little boy was an accident. Care to tell me what you do think happened?”

“I think he was killed.” The words came assuredly and without reservation. Any doubt I’d been holding on to regarding this scenario was gradually sloughing away. “I don’t know how to prove it, but I think the boy’s uncle did it.”

The old woman raised her eyebrows, and it was almost comical. “Have you gone to the police with your theory?”

“Sort of,” I said, thinking, What theory? All I’ve got are a bunch of innuendoes, hunches, and an unfinished, handwritten manuscript. There is no motive, no hard evidence. “My brother’s a cop. I spoke to him about it.”

“What did he say?”

I smirked. “That I should let things go. That I’m digging around and wasting all this time—chasing what I started out following, as you say—for no reason.”

A wry smile caused Althea’s cadaverous face to look somehow more sinister. Death was breathing down her neck; all of a sudden I caught a whiff of it—the stale, decaying, almost sweet smell of a mummy. Then she shifted in her bed. “You’ve asked me all your questions?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. Because I have one of my own,” she said. “But if I’m gonna ask it, I’m gonna need some water to wet my throat. They’ve got cups at the nurses’ station out in the hallway. Would you mind?”

I went into the hallway. There was now a young nurse, attractive and middle-aged with very brown skin and nice teeth, behind the circular Formica desk. I requested a glass of water for Althea, and she said it would be no problem. Then she asked if I had already signed the visitors’ log. I assured her I had not. To this, she only smiled wider and slid a clipboard in front of me. There was a pen attached to it by a length of string. For reasons that still remain a mystery to me, I printed the name Alexander Sharpe in the appropriate box, then handed the clipboard back to her.

“Even trade,” said the nurse, accepting the clipboard and handing me a Tupperware pitcher half-filled with water and a small plastic cup with the hospital’s initials printed on the side in permanent marker.

Back in the room, I filled the cup with water and handed it to Althea. She accepted it, holding it with two hands like a child, and I watched her with some trepidation, certain that she would either spill the water all over herself or begin choking on it at any moment. But she did neither.

“Ahhh.” She sighed, emptying the cup. She seemed much weaker than she had just moments ago—the death clock, clicking one more minute closer to demise. “Good, good.”

I took the empty cup from her. “More?”

“Not unless you want to buzz someone in here to change these sheets in about three minutes.” Althea waved a brittle hand at me, and I set the cup down beside the photograph of her son. “Stuff goes through me like lightning nowadays.” She blamed the medication she was on for thinning her blood.

Sitting down in the chair, I folded my hands between my legs and leaned closer to her. “What is it you wanted to ask me?”

“Earlier you mentioned ghosts.”

“Yes. I asked if you believed in them.”

“Did I give you an answer?”

“No.”

“Would you like to hear one?”

Feeling that she was toying with me, I couldn’t help but grin. I said, “If it suits you.”

Jangling like a newborn colt, the old woman raised her arms and flattened out her wrinkled bed-sheets. She sucked in a shallow breath as her eyes began to tighten with what I believed to be deeper scrutiny of my character. But as she began to speak again, I realized she was going back to her youth, retracing those fading footprints down the path of her own childhood.

“In the summer of my sixth year,” she began, “my mother took odd jobs throughout the county. You see, my father had run off the previous summer with some woman he’d met down at Orville’s drugstore—this was in Louisiana, where I grew up—and my mother wasn’t going to let her only child starve because of him. He left her with nothing but the clothes on our backs and the ramshackle little tar paper hovel over in Cameron. We’d needed a car soon after he’d left, and I remember going with my mother to the used auto dealer off Best Street where, for one hundred and seventy-five dollars, she bought an old Chrysler the color of a house fire and about as reliable as the man my mother cursed the whole drive back to Cameron.

“The jobs my mother took consisted of housekeeping services for a rotation of regulars in the upper-class section of the city—great big gabled mansions with white columns and gardens so rich and thick you could actually get lost in ‘em. She hit each house on her rotation once a week, and since I was too young to be left on my own and because there was no sense in payin’ a babysitter more than my mamma was probably making cleaning those big houses, she dragged me along with her.

“Mostly, I would sit in the living room on some expensive couch, my hands firmly in my lap while I watched the television for hours. My mamma wouldn’t even let me have a drink or a snack or anything like that, for fear I’d spill it on the couch. Other times I would sit and draw pictures at the kitchen table and leave them for the homeowners. You might think these home owners saw us as help and nothing more, and for the most part you’d be right, but it would be a lie to say I didn’t go into some of those homes to find my artwork on their refrigerators, just as if I was their own child.”

Her eyes twinkled with the memory, and I could tell it was a very important one to her.

“My favorite house belonged to the Mayhews, a handsome couple who had three older children away at college. The house was a beautiful bit of architecture—it certainly took my mamma all day to clean—but the best part was the sloping green lawn and surrounding gardens that dipped toward a lush palmetto grove that separated the Mayhews’ backyard from the house directly behind them.

“One afternoon I was out playing in the palmetto grove when I saw a little girl, perhaps just slightly older than me, through the trees in the other yard. She was a skinny, pale-faced little thing with eyes like hen’s eggs and very delicate features. Even at my young age, I recognized an intimate fragility in her. She wore a head scarf of floral design over what appeared to have been a bald scalp. When she waved at me, I giggled and waved back. Then she took off across the yard and into the grove where she hid behind the palmetto stalks. We played hide-and-seek all afternoon until my mamma called me from the back porch that it was time to go home.

“During one of our drives to the Mayhew home one morning, my mamma asked me what I did playing in that grove all day, and I told her about the little girl. I told her about the head scarf, too, and how she looked like she might be bald under there. My mother said the little girl was probably ill and I should be careful not to get her too wound up when we played together. ‘What’s her name?’ my mamma wanted to know, and it occurred to me that I’d never asked her name. In fact, we hardly ever spoke with each other—we’d only hide in the narrow boles of the trees or behind large fans of palmetto leaves, and we would certainly laugh, but we’d never exchanged names.

“So mamma planted a seed. That afternoon, when the little girl came running through the trees to find me hiding beneath a moss-covered log, I said, very prim and proper, ‘Hello. My name is Allie Coulter. What’s your name?’ That’s how my mamma always told me to speak to folks for whom she worked. And even though my mamma didn’t work for this girl’s family, they were neighbors to the Mayhews, so I figured that was good enough.

“The girl did not answer me. Her smile faded, and then she just turned and ran back through the trees. I watched her go, I suppose, or maybe I called out to her—as vivid as this whole memory is for me, I’ve lost many of the details over the years—but she just kept going.

“That night when I told my mamma what happened, she said maybe the little girl was scared of me because I was new to her—which I later came to learn was my mother’s way of saying I was black and the other girl was white and maybe our differences were becoming apparent to one another. But back then I had no concept of that.

“The following week, I was playing in the palmettos again. The girl with the head scarf appeared through the trees, watching me with those big, sad-looking eyes. I waved to her and she turned and ran—not away from me this time, but just as she always ran when we played, with a big smile on her thin face, her knotted knees pumping like pistons. We played our games all afternoon, and I never once asked her name again.”

Something behind Althea’s eyes grew cloudy, like splotches of ink spilling into a glass of water. “One night on the drive home after leaving the Mayhew place, my mamma said she asked about the little girl. ‘Mr. Mayhew said the family who lives there used to have a little girl, but she died of leukemia several years ago,’ she told me. This was so many years ago—decades and decades—but my memory is that my mamma was scared something terrible on that drive home. I remember her knuckles as white as pearls on the steering wheel and her skin was darker than mine. ‘You’re to stay in the house from now on when we go out there,’ my mamma said. ‘If that little girl wants to play with you, let her come find you and knock on the door.’

“I cried about it that night—not because I understood what my mother had told me but merely out of sorrow that I would no longer be allowed to run with the little girl through the palmetto grove. And next week when we went back, I stayed inside and sat by the windows that looked out into the yard, waiting—and hoping—for the little girl to knock on the door and set me free. But she never came. And I never saw her again.”

There was an unease not unlike seasickness that trembled through me in tiny waves.

“As I’ve said,” Althea said, her voice hoarse now from too much talk, “my memory is faulty, going back so far into my childhood, but I can recall with certainty that the little girl always wore the same clothes. And there were times during our play, when she would hide and I would seek her out, that I was never able to find her. I recall one time in particular when I gave up and went to the porch, feeling small and miserable. I caught a glimpse of that floral head scarf—I know I did!—and chased it down through the trees . . . but again, when I’d reached the spot, the girl was gone.”

“Is it possible you were playing with a different girl? That the girl with leukemia had simply been someone else?”

“Of course,” Althea rasped. I poured her another glass of water, but she didn’t drink it immediately. “Anything’s possible. But that’s not what I believe.”

“If she was a ghost,” I said, “why were you able to see her?”

“Perhaps that is the bigger mystery.” Two skeletal hands wrapped around the plastic cup, she sipped noisily before setting it down on the nightstand. “I like to think that maybe she realized how lonely I was that summer. How much I needed a friend.” She smiled weakly. Horrifically, hers was the face of a jack-o’-lantern gone to rot. “Ghosts are no different than anything else in this grand universe. Why shouldn’t they exist? Are they not the spirit, the part that gives the body life? So that spirit must reside somewhere after the person has died. Every schoolchild is taught the old scientific adage—that matter cannot be created or destroyed, correct?”

“Okay, sure.” It was something I’d been taught as early as sixth grade, and I remembered our frumpy old science teacher, with the electrical tape on his loafers and his comical toupee, boiling water in a glass beaker over a Bunsen burner.

“It’s true. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. So why should the soul be exempt from such laws of the universe?” Then Althea said something that I would carry with me for many, many years—something so profoundly simplistic that its clarity resonated through me like the clang of a bell. She said, “Nature does not know extinction. It knows only change. Metamorphosis. It knows that when life is snuffed out and the soul vacates the body, it must, by definition, go somewhere. And if you don’t believe in God or a god or in heaven and hell, then where do souls go?”

“Here,” I said, and it was like she had drawn the word right out of me. I hadn’t even paused to think.

“They stay right here with us.”

“As ghosts,” she said.

“As ghosts,” I repeated, smiling in spite of myself.

Returning the smile, Althea shut her eyes and let her head ease all the way into her pillow. I could tell she was in pain, but I could also tell she was trying to hide her discomfort from me. Finally, just when I thought she had fallen asleep, her eyes opened and she sought me out, as if she’d forgotten where I’d been sitting.

“I’m going to leave now,” I told her, getting up and grabbing my parka. “You’re tired.”

Her watery eyes fluttered shut.

“Are you in pain?” I whispered.

“Always in pain . . .”

“Do you want me to get a nurse?”

“To do what? Tell me I’m dying? I already know that.”

Pulling on my coat, I headed to the door. “I appreciate your time, Althea. I wish we could have met under different circumstances.”

“Make me a promise,” she said from the bed, her voice no stronger than the rustling of tissue paper.

“Anything,” I told her and waited for her to speak again. But the next thing I heard was the labored grinding of her respiration as she faded off into unconsciousness.