Floating Staircase (12 page)

At the information desk an elderly woman with a kind, grandmotherly face smiled at me from behind a pair of bifocals. She was massaging a dollop of Purell into her hands.

“Hi,” I said, “I was hoping to search through some back issues of the local newspaper.”

“That would be the Westlake city paper?
The Muledeer?”

“The city paper, yes.” Thinking:
What a perfectly backwoods name for this town's rag.

“How far back do you want to search? If it's roughly within two years, we'll have the newsprint copies in the storage room. Beyond two years, you'll find it on microfiche.” She adopted an apologetic tone and added, “I know the microfiche is a tad outdated, even for out here on the tip of the devil's backbone, but the library hasn't gotten around to transferring all those files onto the computer yet.”

“It's no problem,” I assured her.

Though there was no one else around to overhear, she leaned across the desk and whispered conspiratorially, “Truth is, I don't like computers. Don't trust them. Too many buttons, too many things to go wrong. Anyway, I'm an old woman, and I'm not about to learn the tango and the two-step, if you know what I mean.” She smiled, her powdered cheeks flushing red. “Lord, I must sound like the perfect paranoid fool.”

“Not at all,” I said. “I prefer to do all my writing by hand. And I don't think I'll need the microfiche. I need to go back to last summer or thereabout.”

“Well,” she said, “you'll need the unicorn.”

I blinked. “The what?”

The librarian sifted around in a shoe box she'd produced from beneath the counter and came up with a set of keys. Dangling from the key chain was a rubber unicorn figurine. Its paint worn away and its hindquarters decorated with what appeared to be teeth marks, the little rubber figurine could have been a hundred years old.

“This way,” said the librarian, and I followed her around the front desk and through a maze of bookshelves. “Lord knows why Vicky insists on locking the door. It's not like someone's going to break in and rob us of all our old newspapers.”

“What was that comment you said before? The one about the devil's backbone?”

“The tip of the devil's backbone,” she repeated. “Something my mother used to say. It means the middle of nowhere. Like out here in Westlake.”

“I like it.”

“Oh, don't get me wrong,” she said. “It's a wonderful little town.”

I'd meant I liked her mother's saying but didn't see the need to explain myself.

We arrived at a nondescript door at the rear of the library. There was a poster on the door depicting a fuzzy orange kitten dangling from a tree branch. The caption, strangely misspelled, read, Hang in Their!

The librarian selected the appropriate key and opened the door. She leaned inside and flipped on the light, bringing into view a room no bigger than a water closet. A rack of shelves stood against one wall, sagging with stacked newspapers. There was a table and a chair in there, too, and a yellow legal pad hung from a peg in the drywall.

“That notepad on the wall is the index,” she said and handed me the keys. “There's a key to the bathroom on there as well. Guess Vicky thinks someone's going to come in and steal our toilets, too. Would you like some coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“Well, give me a shout if you need anything. I'm Sheila.”

“Thanks, Sheila.”

When she'd gone, I stepped into the room and shut the door behind me. The air was stale and—of course—heady with the moldy, woodchip scent of old newspapers. I unhinged the legal pad from the peg and scanned the pages. It took a good minute or two to decode the index, but once I figured out the system, I located specific dates without much difficulty.

The Muledeer
was a weekly newspaper, each issue not much thicker than a menu from a roadside diner. I had no specific date for the drowning of Elijah Dentman other than the fact that it had happened last summer, so I started with the first week of June and walked myself through the pages. Because the papers weren't very wordy I didn't think it would take me much time to search, and, anyway, something as profound as a neighborhood child's death would, I surmised, surely command a front-page presence.

Overall, there wasn't much going on in Westlake, Maryland. For the most part, the newspapers were chock-full of human interest stories, reviews of local talent shows, publicity write-ups for local businesses, and the occasional memorial for an elderly resident who had passed on to that great assisted living facility in the sky. While the articles offered very little newsworthy information, they provided a resourceful peek into the heart and soul of the small town I now called home.

Then there it was, the headline staring straight at me—

I felt an icy wave rush through my body. I was rendered paralyzed by the reality of it. I wasn't breathing: I was aware of this but couldn't do anything about it.

Just beneath the headline and to the left of the article was a school photograph of Elijah Dentman. He was fair skinned and towheaded, with a round face and squinty little eyes, but there the similarities between him and Kyle stopped. There was something slow, something underdeveloped about his appearance. It was one of those Kmart portraits with the fake wooded background, so simple and commonplace, yet something in the boy's eyes made me want to break down and sob.

According to David Dentman, the boy's uncle, Elijah had been swimming in the lake that afternoon and playing on the floating staircase while David watched him from the living room window and Elijah's mother slept upstairs. When it began to get dark, David looked up to find Elijah gone. He rushed down to the lake and called for Elijah, but the boy did not answer. He waded out into the lake, still shouting the boy's name, but to no avail. Panic apparently set in when David noticed what appeared to be blood on one of the wooden stairs of the floating staircase. He hurried back to the house and phoned the police.

The cops executed a cursory search of the lakeside and the surrounding woods. They also interviewed neighbors, and there was a quote from Nancy Stein in the article that corroborated David Dentman's story: she'd been out walking her dog and saw Elijah playing on the floating staircase. Then later that afternoon she heard what she thought to be a sharp scream by the water. Nancy Stein hadn't thought anything of it at the time, of course, but now . . .

By the time I read to the end of the article, I felt as though I'd been punched in the stomach, for there was one bit of crucial information Adam had neglected to tell me after the Christmas party at his house: Elijah's body had never been found. The Westlake Police Department had sent a scuba unit into the lake but did not find Elijah. According to the chief of police, the lake was deep during the summer months, and with all the rain they had been having, the sediment at the bottom was churned up, making visibility difficult. They continued to dredge the lake all evening and well into the following morning, but they never found the boy.
They never found the boy.

The final determination was located on the front page of the following week's paper. Police deduced that the boy had fallen off the staircase and struck his head on one of the stairs, knocking himself unconscious and ultimately drowning. DNA proved the blood on the stair was, in fact, his. The scream Nancy Stein allegedly heard had most likely been Elijah as he fell off the staircase before he struck his head on the step. And just like that the case was closed.

I read and reread the article, unable to comprehend it. The lake was large, sure, but it was a self-contained body of water. How had they been unable to find a body? Had the kid fallen in and been swept away that quickly? It made no sense.

“Brought you some coffee, anyway,” Sheila said, causing me to launch out of my skin. Deep in concentration, I hadn't even heard the door open. Sheila set down a Styrofoam cup on the table beside the newspapers. Peering over my shoulder, she examined the headline, then shook her head as if gravely disappointed. “I remember that. A horrible tragedy.”

“They never found the body,” I said, my voice paper-thin and incredulous.

“Always such a tragedy when something like that happens to a person so young.” Then she frowned, her face collapsing in a cavalcade of wrinkles. “Why would you want to read about such a terrible thing?”

“My wife and I just moved to town, and I heard about what had happened.” I offered her a wan smile. “I guess I was just curious.”

“A young man like you shouldn't be curious about such morbidity. You should be thinking about football and fishing and spending time with your wife.”

“I'm a horror writer. Morbid curiosity is my bread and butter, Sheila,” I confessed, picking up the cup of coffee and taking a sip.

She beamed like a proud mother at my use of her name. “So, what do you write? Short stories?”

“Novels.”

“Really? That's fantastic! Have any of them been published?”

“All of them.” I've always hated this question.

“Well! Would we have any here at the library, then?”

“In fact, you've got one of my books right out there on the shelf. Filed under
G
for Glasgow.” I suddenly wanted to get rid of her and figured this might be the way to do it.

“Now isn't that something? Glasgow, did you say? Like the city in Scotland?”

“The very same.”

Sheila's smile grew so wide I thought it might just cleave her face in half. “Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to find the book and have you autograph it. I hope you don't mind. I'll put up a nice little local author carousel by the front doors.” She clasped her hands against her bosom. “It's like having a celebrity in the neighborhood.”

As Sheila scuttled off, I replaced the yellow legal pad on the wall peg. Before leaving, however, I surrendered to a sudden compulsion and flipped back to the newspaper articles about Elijah Dentman. Casting a cursory glance over one shoulder, I tore the pages out of the newspapers and hastily folded them into the back pocket of my jeans.

“W
hy the hell didn't you tell me they never found Elijah Dentman's body?”

It was Adam's day off, and we were sitting at the bar at Tequila Mockingbird, plowing through beers. The ‘Bird, as it was known to the regulars, was a gloomy, rustic pub, with smoked brick walls and floorboards as warped as the nightmares of a madman. A splintered bar clung to one wall and faced an arrangement of circular tables. An old jukebox collected dust beside the restroom door, and exposed ceiling joists, all blackened and unreliable, spoke of past grease fires gone horribly out of control. With all its ghosts and vapors, it was no different than every other small-town bar throughout America.

The only exception was the one wall comprised not of smoked bricks but of a giant assembly of mahogany shelving on which sat hundreds—perhaps thousands—of leather-bound books. Spines cracking and flaking, many of the embossed titles worn illegible, the books occupied every possible slat and crevice of the wall-length shelves. Some were wedged horizontally while others were driven vertically between neighboring volumes and evidently pounded into place with a forcefulness that made retrieving them about as difficult as extracting nails bare-handed from a length of wood. Framed reproductions of various panels from William Blake's
Songs of Innocence and Experience
hung on the walls, the colors behind the glass sharp and brilliant and completely out of place in the midst of this dreary rural pub.

“What are you talking about?” Adam said. “I told you the whole story.”

“No. You told me he drowned. You never said his body was never found.”

He flicked at the foamy head of his beer with one finger and looked suddenly bored. “Okay, yeah. We never found him.”

“How is that possible? It's a self-contained lake.”

“A very big, very deep lake.” Adam sighed and rubbed his face. “No one actually saw the kid fall in, so we had no real time of death. The only thing we had to go by was Nancy Stein's statement about hearing what sounded like a scream. By the time we showed up on scene, that scream took place over two hours ago. Do you know what happens to a body that's gone underwater for two hours?”

“Hey,” I said, holding up both hands in mock surrender, “I'm not criticizing.”

My brother's eyes narrowed. “What have you been doing, anyway? Asking around about this stuff?”

“I went to the library and looked at some old newspaper articles.”

“For what reason?”

I tried to appear cavalier. I didn't want him to know I was writing a book. “Curiosity, I guess.”

“Yeah, right.” The tone of his voice said he didn't believe me.

“Were you there that day? Part of the search?”

“Yes.”

“What was it like?”

“It was horrible. It made me sick.” Adam placed both his palms down flat on the bar top. “Out here, the biggest things we got going on are the occasional vandals on Main Street and the rowdy bunch of teenagers who decide it'll be funny to take a dump on the steps of the post office.”

“So you guys weren't prepared for an investigation into what happened to Elijah?”

“We're good cops, if that's what you're insinuating. We know how to do our jobs, and we do them well.” He looked hard at his beer. “We lost a guy over in Iraq. Left the force on a whim, said it was some calling and he had to answer. Fuck.” He stared off into the dimness of the bar. “We're a good police force is what I'm getting at.”

“I have no doubt.”

“Fuck,” he said again and finished half his beer in one swallow, then ordered another round.