Floating Staircase

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Several miles outside of Frostburg, the setting sun torched the land below, casting trails of golden light across the frozen hillsides. Small black birds sat on power lines like semicolons. In the fading afterglow of my meeting with Althea, my mind returned to the events of the past two months at 111 Waterview Court—the mystery I had begun to unravel, which revolved around my gradual understanding that David had murdered his nephew, as well as the more inexplicable events that had plagued me since that first night in the house when I’d heard bare feet padding down the hallway.

Althea’s story of the ghost girl did not so much frighten me as it caused a hot serpent of misunderstanding to coil at the base of my guts. Was I misinterpreting those nightly sounds, the handprint on the basement wall, the strange splotches of water on the concrete floor that too closely resembled a child’s footprint? We have been taught by popular culture that ghosts are restless beasts, hungry for vindication and revenge on those who have wronged them. But was this all just nonsense? I couldn’t help but replay Althea’s words over and over in my head—I like to think that maybe she realized how lonely I was that summer. How much I needed a friend. If that was true, was I missing something with this whole Elijah-David scenario?

Inevitably, my mind returned to Jodie. I was you. My interest in the Dentmans had frightened her badly enough to send her across the street to my brother’s house. I hated myself for it.

Can’t I just forget the whole thing? Can’t I throw in the towel on this murder-mystery fiasco? Call the haulers to come get Elijah’s stuff out of the basement and burn my goddamn writing notebooks? Can’t I just shake this thing and let Jodie and me move on with our lives?

But I didn’t think I could do it. Moreover, I didn’t think I was supposed to do it.

When I reached the outskirts of Westlake, I eased behind a small queue of cars at a traffic light. Leaning over, I popped open the glove compartment and rooted around until I found a pen and a curl of paper, which was actually an old Office Depot receipt. On the back of the receipt I wrote, It has been said that nature does not know extinction, knowing that it would make the perfect opening line for my Floating Staircase novel if I ever actually finished it.

The light changed, and the driver behind me laid on the horn.

Nervous and jittery, I felt like a bullet shot from a gun. I was on the verge of revealing some great and hidden truth—I knew this without question, though I had no concept of how I knew—and I floored the accelerator the rest of the way home.

The house was a dark shell. Warmer temperatures had caused the snow to start its retreat, and I could see the grayish lawn at the edge of our property. I drove up the gravel driveway as evergreens rushed in on either side of the car. Some small part of me was holding out hope that Jodie would be home, but the realistic part of me knew that wouldn’t be the case. She was hard-headed; she would stick to her guns.

Climbing out of the car, I stood staring at the house as if it had just appeared in front of me out of thin air. The front porch slouched under the weight of melting snow. The windows looked pebbly with grit.

I am not willing to lose my marriage over this bullshit, I thought. I’d already decided that I would call the junk haulers tomorrow to get Elijah’s stuff out of our basement. Then I would go over to Adam’s house and see Jodie.

I walked to the rear of the house and wended through the naked trees on my way to the lake. The neighboring pines whispered their conspiracies all around me. I paused as the lake came into clear view. Much of it was now unfrozen, save for a Texas-shaped panel at the lake’s center. It was the first time I’d actually seen the water. The lake trembled in the moonlight.

Find an anchor, the therapist piped up.

“Shut the fuck up,” I told the voice, turning and walking back to the house.

Inside, it was cold as hell. Darkness pressed against the windows. I turned on very few lights. From the basement I retrieved Earl’s crime scene photos. I stuck them to the refrigerator with magnets, sat on the floor, and studied them, my back against one kitchen wall and a plate of cold chicken in my lap. I was missing something in those photos, something important, but it remained elusive.

Find an anchor.

There was one last thing I could do; oddly enough, it had been something my brother had said to me the other day while I was chopping firewood in the backyard. Murderers have motives, innocent people have alibis, and you can’t lock someone up behind bars because pieces don’t fit. I grabbed the telephone and punched in Earl’s number. It rang a number of times before his sleep-heavy voice growled a rough hello into the receiver.

“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 submerged, 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.