Floating Staircase

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Adam answered the door in his bathrobe and slippers. His hair was a jumble of tight curls, matted at the back, and I guessed I’d just woken him from a nap. He muttered something—I caught my wife’s name in his garbled intonation—but before he could finish, I stormed past him into the house, my boots leaving wet banana shapes on the hardwood.

“What are you doing?” he said more forcefully, letting the front door slam behind him.

I motored straight into the kitchen. My hair was still wet from the bathtub—I was aware of ice crystals already starting to form in clumps—and I’d simply thrown on my old clothes in an obsessive rush to get across the street as fast as I could.

“Where is everyone?” I said, noting the quietness of the house.

“Jodie and Beth took the kids to a movie. What are you doing here?”

Pulling out a chair, I dumped the stack of eight-by-tens on the kitchen table, then sat down.

Adam glared at me from across the room.

“Sit down,” I told him. “I want to show you something.”

“You’re drunk. I can smell the alcohol coming off you in waves. Do you really think that’s such a good idea?”

“Please. Just sit.”

With obvious reluctance, he pulled out the chair opposite me and eased into it like someone eases into a hot tub. His eyes never left mine.

With both hands, I pushed the photographs in front of him. “Tell me what you see.”

Still staring at me, he picked up the photos, dwarfing them in his big hands. Finally, he averted his gaze and examined the first couple of photographs. There was no expression on his face. “You came here to bring me pictures of your backyard?”

“Keep looking.”

He flipped through a few more, pausing when he understood what he was seeing: crime scene photos from the search for Elijah Dentman. “Where’d you get these?” His voice was practically a snarl.

“Does it matter?” I reached across the table and plucked the photos from my brother’s hands. I set them down between us so we could both see them. “I don’t need to tell you when these were taken. You’re even in one of them.” I drummed a finger on one of the photos. “These are some of the cops walking up from the lake toward the house. All the faces are blurry but this one is you.” I pressed one finger on the second cop from the left. “You can tell it’s taken much later in the day than some of the others because of the positioning of the sun.”

Adam would not look at the picture.

“Then there’s this one,” I went on anyway, turning to the shot of Veronica and her blank stare. “She’s looking toward the lake in this shot, probably just catching the photographer as he snaps the picture. It’s evident the photographer’s down by the water shooting up at her. You can tell by the angle, and if you’d walked the perimeter of the lake and glanced toward my house—”

“Travis . . .”

“Just look at them.” I turned both photographs around so that he could view them right side up. But he didn’t look down.

Eerily calm, my brother said, “I don’t believe this. I swear to God I don’t believe this.” He regarded me with such abject disappointment, it was all I could do not to get up and flee from his house like a crazy person. “When I opened the door a minute ago, I guess I had some hope that you’d come to your senses and were here to see your wife.”

“You’re missing the point. Look at the photos. Look at the trees.”

“I don’t—”

“Just look at them, damn it!”

Tiny beads of perspiration had popped out along Adam’s upper lip. Finally, he looked at the photos on his kitchen table. He said nothing, waiting for me to continue.

I said, “What do you notice?”

“About the trees?”

“Yes. What do you notice?”

“I see . . . I see trees.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s right. Trees. A ton of them. A goddamn shitload. It’s the middle of summer, and the whole goddamn yard is infused with trees.”

“Your point being?”

“My point being David Dentman’s statement to the police is bullshit. He said he was watching the boy swim in the lake that day from the house. It’s his eyewitness testimony that claims when he could no longer see the boy, he ran down to the lake to find him. That’s when he noticed he was gone.” Again, I tapped both pictures. “But that’s bullshit. You can’t see the back of the fucking house through the trees, which means you can’t see the goddamn staircase from the house. You can hardly even tell there’s a lake back there in the summer, I’ll bet.”

Adam scowled. “What are you talking about? I’ve seen it from your house. You and Jodie marveled about the lake the day you moved in. You can see it out your bedroom window.”

“Sure,” I said, nodding. “In the winter. And even then you have to look through a meshwork of tree branches. When spring comes and those branches fill up with leaves, you probably can’t see a single drop of water from my bedroom window. Or any other window of the house.”

Adam sighed and leaned back in his chair. I couldn’t tell if he was working over what I’d just told him or if he was about to tell me to get the hell out of his house. His expression was unreadable.

“You were there that day.” I pushed the photo of the cops closer to him across the table. “You couldn’t see the house through those trees, could you?”

“You’re asking me to remember trees?”

“Christ, why are you being so obstinate about this? It’s not just about the fucking trees; it’s about what Dentman said.”

“So this makes David Dentman a liar,” he stated.

“It does.”

“Irrefutably?”

“W-well, sure,” I stammered, trying to think of any holes in the story before Adam could point them out. “He lied to cover up what really happened.”

Adam folded his arms across his chest. “So what really happened?”

I slumped against the chair. “I’m not exactly sure. I mean, I haven’t worked everything out in my head . . . just a . . . a . . .”

“Just what?” That classic Adam Glasgow condescension was in his voice, an uneasy serenity in the face of all I’d just showed him. At that moment I realized that I would never stop feeling like his younger brother—his subordinate, his weak and guilty little brother.

“You’re refusing to put the pieces together.” I slammed one hand down on the table. The photographs fluttered.

“Don’t do that,” he said, glancing at my hand.

“David Dentman has a criminal record,” I trucked on, ignoring him. “David Dentman lied in his statement to the police. Elijah Dentman’s body was never recovered from a goddamn self-enclosed lake!”

Adam breathed heavily through flared nostrils. I found myself temporarily mesmerized by the pores in his nose and the dark sheen of beard that looked painted along his jawline. I couldn’t pull my gaze from him.

“So David Dentman killed his nephew,” said my brother.

“Yes.”

“And these pictures are your proof of that? These”—he gestured at the photographs—”trees? A confused and heartbroken man’s statement taken in the midst of searching for his nephew’s corpse?”

“I know what it sounds like,” I admonished. “But it doesn’t change the fact that—”

“Man, there are no facts.” Adam shocked me by reaching across the table and covering one of my hands with his own. Tenderly.

I fought the electric urge to buck backward as if injured.

“Listen to me, okay? We’ve investigated the matter. It’s not unusual for divers to come up empty, even in what you call a self-enclosed body of water. Do you have any idea how big that lake is? Do you know how many boles or submerged deadfalls or rock formations are on the floor of the lake? How many rocky caves and underground tributaries going out to a hundred rivers? All those places where a body can get lost, get trapped. Forever.” He shrugged. It was a hopeless gesture. “As for these photos, David Dentman says he saw the kid by the lake. Who’s to say he didn’t? And Nancy Stein saw him. Is she a liar, too?”

I pulled my hand out from under his. “Nancy Stein saw him because she was walking her dog by the water. You can’t see the staircase from their house, either. The Steins both said so.”

“Christ, maybe the goddamn wind was blowing, or maybe the trees weren’t as thick—”

“That’s bullshit. Come on.”

“Then where’s the body, huh? If David Dentman killed the kid, you tell me where to find the body.”

The kitchen fell silent. All I could hear was the ticking of the wall clock behind my brother’s head. It sounded like industrial machinery.

“I want you to really listen to me good, Bro, all right?” Adam leaned farther over the table, closing the distance between us. To my horror, he looked close to tears. “This isn’t a book. This is real life. Whatever puzzle you’ve been trying to work out, well, I’m telling you, there ain’t nothing there.”

Angered and frustrated, I could only sit slouched in my chair, my arms folded protectively over my chest, one leg bouncing spasmodically on the floor. Once more I was that punk kid, pouting in the principal’s office.

Adam chewed on his lower lip. It was something he had always done in his youth when he found himself in a difficult spot. “I was putting off saying this to you,” he said eventually, “because I wasn’t sure how to say it. But I’m just gonna say it anyway. Because you’re not getting any better.”

“You make me sound like a heroin addict.”

“You’re acting like one.”

“Go to hell,” I said, kicking my chair back and rising.

“No,” he said calmly. “Sit down. You want to pull the tough-guy routine, fine, but do it after we’re done here. This is important.”

“I’m sick of you telling me what to do.”

Adam took a deliberate breath and said, “Sit down for Jodie’s sake, then.”

Fuming, I sat back down.

“Jodie’s upset. I’m talking really upset. She’s worried you’re falling into another depressive state, just like after Mom died—”

“Jodie’s got her nose in too many psychology textbooks,” I growled.

“—and just like how you were after Kyle’s death.”

“Jodie didn’t know me then.”

“But I did. I saw how it decimated you.”

There was a burning in my face. My eyes itched.

Adam sighed. “You’re making up something because you so desperately need to be the hero.”

Curling my toes in my boots, I turned away from him . . . and found myself staring at a framed photo of us from his wedding sitting on a shelf. I couldn’t wrench my gaze from it. It ridiculed me.

“You’re chasing this thing, hoping that if you fix it, you’ll absolve yourself of your guilt over Kyle.”

I felt my whole body flinch.

“You can’t undo what happened to our brother,”

Adam said flatly. “No matter how many imaginary murders you solve, no matter how many books you write about it, you’re still powerless to change what happened to him.” He paused. “And now you’re letting your marriage fall apart in order to fix your own mistakes of the past. You’re caught in a cycle here. Can’t you see that?”

I couldn’t answer.

“Travis?” he said, and his voice was impossibly distant now. He was talking from the moon.

I turned away from the picture, a noxious soup broiling in my stomach.

Adam stood, stacking the photos into a neat pile. Then he glanced at the wall clock, biting his lip again. “Go home. Think about what I’ve said. If any of it makes sense after you sober up, maybe you should give Jodie a call in the morning. All right?”

Numbly, I nodded. I stood and collected the photos from the table. As I followed Adam to the front door, my boots squelching muddy tracks in the hallway, I curled the photos into a tube. My palms were sweating.

“Go,” he said, opening the door. “Get some sleep.”

I stepped into the dark, my shadow stretching before me in the panel of soft rectangular light that spilled out from the open doorway, and hoofed down the icy driveway. The sound of Adam’s door closing echoed across the cul-de-sac.

I was shaking.

It was a mistake to move here. We should have stayed in North London. My relationship with Adam has always been better by telephone.

Crossing the cul-de-sac, I pulled my coat tighter about my body and strode with my head down against the biting wind. Off to my right, someone flashed a pair of headlights, temporarily paralyzing me in the middle of the street like a deer. I could make out the bracketed shape of an old two-tone pickup idling silently against the curb. I could smell the fetid exhaust pumping from the tailpipe as I approached the driver’s side of the vehicle.

The driver rolled the window down.

Sitting behind the wheel was David Dentman.