Floating Staircase

by Ronald Malfi

  “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 sen
d.”

  “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?”