Floating Staircase

by Ronald Malfi

  “Sorry to wake you,” I said. “It’s Travis.”

  “Shoot,” he garbled, “I was awake. What’s the news on Althea?”

  “She’s a sweet old woman who’s dying a painful death. I felt horrible for her.”

  “What did she say about the Dentmans?”

  I relayed to him the story of Elijah’s mysterious two-day illness and the boy’s response that he “went away” for those two days. I told him, too, of the dead animals the boy had been collecting and how Uncle David did not approve of such behavior. “Just how much he didn’t approve,” I appended, “is the million-dollar question.”

  “Did you tell her your theory? About David having murdered the boy?” There was a youthful exuberance that ran through the old man’s voice.

  “The only solid thing I was able to get from her was that they were a bizarre family. She knew nothing definitive.”

  “Well, have we reached an impasse?”

  I was still studying those photographs on the refrigerator. “Not quite. I guess there’s one more thing you could do for me, but I’ll be honest—I feel like a heel asking you to do this.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “I just don’t want you getting into any trouble.”

  “I’m a big boy. Why don’t you tell me your little plan, and I’ll decide for m’self just how much trouble I’m lookin’ at.”

  So I told him my plan. “Don’t use your real name,” I warned him. “If you can’t think of one on the spot, give them my name. I don’t want you getting jammed up in all this.”

  “Hell,” he cooed, then whistled. “You’ve got one hell of a sneaky streak in you, son, don’t you?”

  “I’m not holding out much hope on this. In fact, I’m not quite sure what you’ll find or even what it’ll prove until I see it in front of me.”

  “I’ll get on it first thing tomorrow,” Earl promised. In the background I could hear one of his dogs whining. I thought of the monstrous wolfhound guarding the credenza in Earl’s tiny double-wide.

  “Just be careful,” I said and hung up the phone.

  Around eight o’clock I fixed myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a pot of coffee. Carrying the stack of crime scene photos, I sank back into the basement.

  I am missing something.

  Something important.

  The basement was charred, sooty darkness, blank as tar paper. The bulb in the ceiling was dead, and I couldn’t find any replacements. Instead, I located a flashlight and cast its beam into Elijah’s hidden room behind the wall. On the desk, someone had constructed a staircase out of the colored wooden blocks. Holding a coffee mug in one hand and with the eight-by-tens tucked under my arm, I just stared at those blocks, spotlighted in the beam of my flashlight. The coffee burned all the way down to my toes with each sip. Thing about coffee, I thought, is that it forgives you no matter what.

  I sat down at Elijah’s writing desk, clicking on the small lamp in one corner. For a while I studied the photographs in my lap. Drank coffee. I ignored the blocks until I could ignore them no longer. One block at a time, I picked them apart Jenga-style, until the structure lost all semblance of form and function. It turned into nonsense. There.

  I slid one of my notebooks in front of me, turned to a clean page, and began to write. I wrote as my mouth started to bleed onto the page and then onto my shirt. Bringing a hand up to my lips, my fingers came away smeared with blood. It occurred to me that I’d been chewing on the back of my pencil and hadn’t even felt one of the splinters jab my lower lip. Had I swallowed any without knowing? I imagined a thousand shavings of wood sizzling in the feverish acid of my stomach.

  Then I looked at the photograph of the lake. Then down at the page where my spidery handwriting leaned and spiked like waves. Then back down at the photo. I thought, Sometimes we go in; sometimes we go out. And I thought, Something doesn’t add up here.

  I focused on the photo of haunted Veronica Dentman standing among the trees. Empty. Blinded. Terrorized. Already dead. Already dead, I thought. I flipped to another photo, this one of a group of police officers trudging through the trees toward the house. A number of them had turned to catch the photographer just as he snapped the picture, their faces blurred from the movement and as indistinct as the faces of passengers glimpsed in the windows of a passing train.

  I looked at what remained of the wooden staircase. All the blocks were red. I could have sworn they were multicolored when last I left it. Looking closer, I noticed the newspaper clippings I’d ripped from the papers at the library underneath the blocks. The photo of Elijah Dentman glared up at me, nearly accusatory. His vacant eyes professed a sinister malevolence tonight.

  My back creaking as I rose, I gathered my notebooks and the crime scene photos and staggered up the stairs. Bath, I thought, then bed. Before heading to the second floor, I paused by the telephone. Stared at it like it owed me money. Behind me, the clock on the microwave read 88:88. Finally, I picked up the phone and punched in Adam’s number.

  On the other end, the phone trilled and trilled and trilled, and no one answered.

  Do they have caller ID? Is it possible they’re actually avoiding my calls now?

  I stopped at the liquor cabinet and made off like a thief with a bottle of Wolfschmidt.

  Upstairs, the hallway was a mine shaft. Slatted blue light pulsed in from windows at the end of the hallway. Up here, Jodie’s perfumed scent still lingered. Absently, I wondered if she’d come back in my absence to retrieve more of her things.

  I went directly into the bathroom, punched the light on, and closed the door with one foot. After taking a preliminary swig, I set the plastic bottle of vodka on the counter and stared at my reflection in the mirror. Scraggly, matted beard, sunken eyes, unkempt hair curling down into the fans of my eyelashes. Disgusted, I looked away . . . but the sight of Jodie’s bobby pins beside the sink caused my eyes to burn.

  Turning on the bathtub, I watched it fill with water as steam clouded the mirror, eradicating that hideous monster. I took another chug from the bottle, peeled off my reeking clothes, and left them in a smoldering heap on the floor.

  That’s right, friends and neighbors. Getting fuck-drunk tonight.

  Still clutching the bottle of vodka, I climbed into the tub and winced at the scalding water. With one foot, I adjusted the temperature before settling into the water. The faucet bucked and gurgled and steamed. The hot water felt good; my knotted muscles started coming undone.

  The crime scene photos were spread out on the bathroom floor. Their glossy surfaces were hazy with moisture from the steam. Again—crazily—I thought of my old science teacher boiling water in a beaker over a Bunsen burner. Jefferson? Johnson? For the life of me, I couldn’t remember the son of a bitch’s name.

  Out in the hallway on the other side of the closed bathroom door, I heard the creaking of floorboards. I thought I caught movement at the crack beneath the door. Laughing, I choked back more of the horrible-tasting vodka and rested my head against the shower tiles. And—

  And I was standing outside in the darkness of night. The wind was slamming against me, prickling my skin and freezing the marrow in my bones. The force of the wind caused me to realize I was balancing precipitously on some structure, high above the world. Looking down, I found my bare feet planted on the top riser of the floating staircase—only this staircase was a skyscraper, a monolithic finger jutting straight up toward the blackened, star-littered heavens, not wooden and pyramidal but golden and tubular, spiraling like a corkscrew. A million miles off in the silvery distance, I could see the blinking diodes of light that comprised Westlake.

  Directly below me, someone floundered in the black water. I jumped. Hurling through the blackness of space . . . but it wasn’t space at all; it was water. I heard the roaring in my ears as I speared into the freezing, lightless depths. Holding my breath, I swam through the murk toward a shimmer of spectral light. Things impeded my passage: pines. Underwater pines. The whole forest was submerge
d, and I swam through it toward that swirling light. Evergreens sprung up like fence posts, their boughs impossibly thick and weighted, like waterlogged pillows. Tentacular vines snaked up from brown murk, twining themselves around my ankles. My face scraped against scabrous bark, and clouds of red stained the water.

  I swam through a part in the pines, the light now like the glow of searchlights on a sunken battleship, only eerily green. I pushed on, my lungs burning and about to burst, just as my fingers grazed a doughy, pliable object. A body floated by me, its eyes swelling like jellyfish from their sockets, hair a fan of colorless seaweed waving in the current, the corrugated ridges of a purpling brow—

  Screaming, I sat up, awake. My heart was like a blender on purée. The bathtub was filled nearly to capacity. The bottle of vodka floated between my upraised knees.

  Leaning over the side of the tub, my breath coming in great whooping gasps, I gathered the photos from the floor, wiping away the condensation. I looked at the picture of the policemen trudging up the lawn toward the house, then flipped to the one of Veronica standing between the trees.

  The trees.

  A laugh tickled my throat.

  And then it all came clear as the missing piece of the puzzle finally snapped loudly into place. The sound was nearly deafening.

  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.”