Floating Staircase (21 page)

His arms laden in refuse, Earl nodded toward two lawn chairs folded against one wall. I put my notebooks on the circular table, then set up both chairs around it. A single paper lantern hanging from a cord above the table was the only immediate source of light. I sat in one of the chairs as Earl returned with an accordion folder and two bottles of beer, caps off.

He handed me one of the beers, proclaimed, “Cheers,” and clinked the neck of his bottle against mine. Then he sat down heavily in his chair and placed the accordion folder neatly at the center of the table. “Before we begin, I want your word that much of what I show you tonight stays between us.”

“I'm not even sure what this is all about, but okay. You've got my word.”

Earl motioned to my notebooks. “What are those?”

“Notes for a new book.” After a pause, I said, “But I think they're more than that, too.”

He said nothing but watched me as he chugged his beer.

“It sounds stupid, but I've been plotting out this story based on what I already know about the Dentmans,” I said, sensing I needed to explain myself. “I'd been suffering this lousy writer's block, and it wasn't until I learned about Elijah's drowning that my creative spark returned. I've been writing like a madman for the past couple weeks.” Almost apologetically, I added, “There's a third notebook but I must have misplaced it.”

“I'm a wannabe reporter for a small-town community newspaper, so I won't pretend to comprehend the inner workings of a genuine creative mind,” Earl said. “But do you mean to tell me you're actually writing a book about the Dentmans?”

“Not exactly. It's difficult to explain.” For a moment I felt myself on the verge of telling him about Kyle—a realization that shook me to my foundation, because not even Jodie knew the truth, and I'd just met this man two days ago—but chickened out. “It started that way, but then the story turned into something else. The characters took on lives of their own based on the parameters I'd set. But now . . .” My voice trailed off. I didn't know how to finish the thought.

“The following is based on a true story,” he said, chuckling. “Names have been changed to protect the innocent and all that jazz . . .”

“Exactly,” I said, but oh, did I feel like a heel lying to this old man: I hadn't changed a single name; my notebooks were rife, were polluted, with the good citizens of Westlake, Maryland. Even down to Tooey Jones and his gut-wrenching tonic.

Earl exhaled heavily out of flared nostrils. “Before we get into this, I want to show you something.” He shuffled over to a credenza overburdened with stacks of papers and unopened mail. Humming beneath his breath, he sorted through one of the piles, his back toward me.

I was startled to spot an Irish wolfhound lounging silently beside the credenza, shaggier than the carpet itself and roughly the size of a grown man. From beneath its fringed bangs, it eyed me with soulful black eyes. Somewhere in the shadows, a space heater whirred to life.

“Ah, here it is,” Earl said and returned to the table. The sound he made when he dropped into the chair was like an old bicycle horn.

He handed me a grainy photograph of a man in cutoff jean shorts and a tank top, dragging a washrag across the windshield of a yellow Firebird. The man was perhaps in his midforties, although the picture was somewhat out of focus, making it impossible to tell for sure.

“Who's this?” I said.

“My son.”

I had no idea where this was going, so I slid the picture back to him without saying anything.

“A careless affair in the days of my youth,” Earl said, taking the photo from me and looking at the photo with what I assessed to be a mixture of longing and regret. “It's not necessary to go into that. I just wanted to show it to you because, for whatever reason, you sort of remind me of him. Not that you look anything like him, and to tell the God's honest truth, I've never spent any time with the boy to know if you two share any of the same mannerisms. I guess maybe you're how I sometimes think he might be.” He set the photo on the stack of papers atop the credenza. “I'm sorry.”

“It's okay,” I told him, though I still had no idea why he'd showed me the picture.

“That was my roundabout way of explaining why I'm about to show you this stuff. Because I feel a bit of a kinship to you, I guess, which means I trust you not to exploit me. You say you're writing a book, and that's just dandy, but I can't have what I'm going to show you go beyond these walls.” He rattled a cough into one fisted hand before resuming. “I know you're a stranger to me, and I may just be an old fool, but something is telling me I can trust you to keep that promise. That internal voice ain't never steered me wrong in all my years. I hope you won't be the one to prove it wrong.”

“I swear it,” I said. “What you tell me stays between us.”

Earl slid the accordion folder in front of him. “It ain't so much as what I'm gonna tell you as it is how I came across what I'm going to tell you.” He undid the string and opened the folder. A ream of multicolored papers bristled from inside. He took out a slender stack of white paper held together with an industrial-sized paper clip and gave it to me.

I scanned the front page, seeing David Dentman's name right off the bat, as well as his West Cumberland address and other personal information—social security number, telephone number, date of birth. “What am I looking at?”

“David Dentman's criminal history.”

I peeled back the pages, skimming them as I went. “How did you get this?”

“I'm not going to say. It's probably illegal, me just having that stuff, and I ain't about to rat anyone out.”

“Then I won't ask again.” I paused to read one of the pages more closely. “He's had three arrests. If I'm reading this correctly, I mean . . .”

“Oh,” said Earl, “you're reading it just fine.”

“Two for aggravated assault, another for—what's ‘A and B'?”

“Assault and battery.”

“Jesus Christ.” I read closer. “What does ‘nol pros' mean?”

“Latin for
nolle prosequi.
Means he was arrested but wasn't prosecuted.”

“So he got off on all three charges?”

“So it says.”

“How come?”

Earl shrugged and rubbed his stubbly chin with one of his big grizzly bear hands. “Could be for a number of reasons. Not enough evidence against him. Or maybe the victims dropped the charges.”

“Who're the victims?”

“I have no idea.”

I reread the pages. “The most recent arrest was only three years ago. That was the assault and battery. Are we talking bar fights here or . . . ?”

“No way to tell.”

“Is there a way to decipher . . . I mean, who were the arresting officers on these?”

“Can't tell by reading that gobbledygook,” said Earl.

“So David Dentman has a criminal record,” I said. “Surely the cops looked into this after Elijah disappeared?”

“I'll bet they knew about it. Sure.”

“So the guy's nephew allegedly drowns, the body's never recovered, and his statement's the only thing they have to go on? Sounds awfully slipshod, doesn't it?”

“There's the woman, too,” Earl suggested. “She saw the boy down by the water and later heard a scream. Don't forget.”

“Right. Nancy Stein. I spoke with her and her husband a few days ago. It was only after being interviewed by the police that she said she'd heard a scream. A wail, she called it.” I frowned, shook my head. “But she had reservations when I spoke with her, as if she'd been thinking about that wail and her subsequent statement to the cops for many nights since that day. I think
she
thinks that maybe they talked her into saying she heard Elijah scream.”

Earl was dragging a set of fingernails down the bristly side of his neck; he froze upon hearing my words and glared at me from across the dimly lit table. “Are you talking about a police cover-up?”

“No, no, nothing like that. I just think that maybe whoever questioned Nancy might have accidentally put words in her mouth and thoughts in her head. Think about it. You hear a noise like someone crying out but think nothing of it. Later a bunch of cops show up at your doorstep and tell you the neighbor's kid is missing and that he probably drowned in the lake. They ask you if you heard anything, maybe a shout or a struggle or a scream. And of course your mind returns to that one lone cry you heard—or thought you heard—earlier that day. Then all of a sudden you're certain you heard it, and that's what the police write down in their little notepads.”

“Sure,” Earl said. “I'll buy it.”

“Did you interview David or Veronica for the newspaper articles you wrote?”

“No. Police wouldn't allow it.”

“So who gave you all the details?”

“The officers at the scene. Later on, Paul Strohman's office issued an official release that I used to check my facts.”

“Paul Strohman?” I had heard the name but couldn't remember where.

“He's the chief of police. Wait . . .” Earl dove back into his folder and thumbed through several more papers before he produced a newspaper clipping.

It was a brief write-up about the Westlake Police Department closing the investigation into Elijah's disappearance, satisfied that it was an accidental drowning. Alongside the article was a granular black-and-white photo of Chief of Police Strohman. Even in the lousy picture, I could tell Strohman was good-looking and well put together. He was wearing a handsomely cut dark suit as opposed to the police uniform one would have expected him to be wearing, and he sported the Cheshire cat grin of a Washington lobbyist. By all accounts, Paul Strohman looked nothing like the police chief of some backwater mountain village.

David's face loomed up into my memory like a ship breaching fog, firing questions at me as I stood in his living room:
You a cop? Strohman send you here?

“Understand that what we got here is nothing definitive. This is just another door, another avenue.”

Another bit of evidence,
I thought.

“In fact,” Earl added, returning once again to his accordion folder, “the entire Dentman family has an equally sordid past. The cheese, in this case, does not stand alone.” He brought out more papers—lined notebook pages cramped with handwriting I recognized to be his—and held them nearly against his nose so he could read them. “David's sister . . .”

“Veronica,” I said.

“She's spent her life in and out of mental health facilities. Most recently she spent some time in Crownsville back east before they closed the place down a number of years ago.”

“How much time?”

“Six months, though my sources may not be completely accurate.”

I didn't bother asking who his sources were.

“And I've got no record of who was watching her kid all those times,” Earl continued before I could ask that very question, “though my guess is it had been David.”

“Not the kid's father?”

“Don't know who the father was. But I had my source run a background on Veronica. Her record came up clean.” He tapped the printout of David's criminal record, which I'd laid on the table, and said, “That place in West Cumberland listed as his address? Same as hers. And before that, they were both apparently living together in Dundalk. A brief residency in Pennsylvania—”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Same address.”

He set both his hands down flat on the vinyl table-top and leaned close enough to me so that I could smell the beer on his breath. “Those two have been living together their whole lives. She must have been one unbalanced nutcase in order for her brother to have to take care of her is my guess.”

“Taking care of her
and
her kid,” I said. “What does David do for a living, anyway?”

“He's in construction. I found his information with the state carpenters' union.”

I thought of the makeshift little rooms throughout my basement and the prison-like bedroom hidden behind a wall of Sheetrock. I let this all sink in while Earl got up and retrieved two fresh beers from the refrigerator.

“So you can see why I don't want some of this stuff getting out beyond these walls,” he said, sitting down and handing me another beer. “I've been playing reporter for just over a decade now, and I may not be Woodward and Bernstein as I sometimes like to joke, but I do know how to be a journalist. I've cultivated my sources over that time. The last thing I'd want to see is someone close to me lose their job simply for appeasing the whimsy of a nutty old man.”

I took a long, hard pull on the fresh beer. The chill of it raced down my throat and triggered a pleasant tingling sensation just above my buttocks. Something suddenly occurred to me.

“You knew something was fishy from the very beginning,” I said. It was not a question. “Otherwise, why would you have had your sources run background checks on David and Veronica?” It was my turn to lean toward him across the table. “I believe you're a good journalist. I do. Something about this case didn't sit well with you from the start, either. Am I right?”

Earl set his beer on the table and, holding one finger up like a schoolmarm, rose once again with some difficulty. He returned to the credenza and riffled through more paperwork. From over his shoulder, he said, “Keep talking. I think you and I are on to something, all right.”

I told him about the basement bedroom and how all of Elijah's things had been left there, sealed up behind the wall. I told him of the unsettling supposition made by Ira Stein about Elijah digging up his wife's dead dog and slinking away with it like some grave robber in an old Universal monster movie. Lastly, I told him of my visit to the Dentman house in West Cumberland (at which time Earl suspended his search through the paperwork, turned halfway around, and offered me an astonished yet envious grin) and of my unsettling confrontation with David following a brief and utterly uneventful discourse with Veronica.