Ronald Malfi - Floating Staircase

“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.

“Who interviewed Nancy Stein?”

“My partner,” Adam said. “Douglas Cordova. You met him at the Christmas party, remember?”

I did vaguely: giant barrel-chested guy with a pleasant, almost childlike face. “Sure,” I said. “Were the Dentmans ever suspects?”

“Not officially.”

“But you guys had some question about them?”

“No. But when a kid disappears . . .”

“You look to the parents first,” I finished for him. “Or in this case, the mother and the uncle.”

“It’s not unusual to search and search and never find a body,” Adam said.

I thought, Yeah, if they happen to drown in the Atlantic fucking Ocean. I got the distinct impression that he was trying to convince himself, not me. “And what about the kid’s bedroom I found hidden in the basement? It’s the single creepiest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Sure is.” Noncommittal. I’d lost him somewhere along the way.

“But let’s forget about the room for a second. Veronica Dentman left all that stuff behind on purpose, packed away back there and hidden like a dirty secret.”

“That’s not unusual,” Adam said.

“Children’s books, baseball hats, woolen knit gloves, sneakers, clothes, toys . . .”

“Everybody deals with death in their own way. For Veronica Dentman, maybe that was the only way she could deal with it—to get out quick and leave everything behind.”

“Just seems a bit callous and insensitive. Strange.”

Adam groaned. “What about Mom and Dad?”

I sipped some beer and said, “What about them? They had their little period after Kyle died, but they didn’t erase his memory. There were still pictures in the house, still some of his things around. It took them almost a full year before they cleared out his bedroom, for Christ’s sake.” And thinking of this caused the vivid memory to rise through the murk again: finding Matchbox cars under Kyle’s bed after his death. I blinked repeatedly and had to clear my throat with another sip of beer.

“That’s exactly my point,” said Adam. “Everyone deals with it in their own way. Mom and Dad dealt with it in their own solitary ways. Fuck, I became a cop because maybe I felt some subconscious drive to help those who can’t help themselves.”

I felt him staring at me, but I wouldn’t look at him. I was still thinking of those Matchbox cars, and the safest place to look was my beer.

“You went and wrote a bunch of books about him,” he said finally.

“One book,” I said. “Just one book. And anyway, Alexander Sharpe wrote that one, not me.”

I could see Adam’s reflection smirking in the mirror behind the bar. He squeezed my shoulder. As if I were an accordion, I felt the wind wheeze out of me. “Little brother, I hate to break it to you, but you’ve written four novels, each one about someone who drowns or almost drowns or an apparition rising out of a lake. You mean to tell me you’ve been blind to what you’ve been doing this whole time?”

His words shook me to my core. This had never occurred to me in the slightest. But just hearing him say it enforced the truth of it, and suddenly, like a great explosion just over the horizon, I could see it. Even the goddamn titles professed a similar theme that had eluded me until this very moment: The Ocean Serene, Silent River, Drowning Pool, and Water View. Not to mention the title I’d scrawled on the cover sheet of the manuscript pages I’d sent to Holly before leaving London— Blood Lake.

Fuck, had it been so obvious to everyone else? Was I truly that blind? I bit my lower lip and refrained from admitting to Adam that the tentative title I’d given my most recent work—the outline for the story about Elijah Dentman and the dysfunctional family who’d lived in my house before me—was Floating Staircase.

“So you’re saying you became a cop because of what happened to Kyle?” I said, anxious to change the subject. My voice shook the slightest bit, but I didn’t think my brother, who’d had twice as many beers as I had, noticed.

Adam rolled one big shoulder. “Maybe. I don’t know. I mean, I’d be surprised to think Kyle’s death had nothing to do with it. That’s like saying we’re unaffected by all that goes on around us, all that happens to us. Our kid brother died; of course it had a significant impact on both our lives.”

I wanted to ask him if he ever woke up in a pool of sweat, gasping for air and feeling like invisible ghost hands were dragging him down to a watery grave. I wanted to ask him if he’d ever sat up in bed in the middle of the night because he thought he heard footsteps in the hallway—footsteps that conveniently fell silent the moment you held your breath and waited for them, waited for them, waited for them. These were all the things that had tormented me as a child . . . but lately they’d resurfaced, coming back to haunt me like an old ghost, and I wondered what powers my new house held. What ghosts haunted those hallways?

The thought sent chills down my spine.

“Anyway,” Adam went on, “from a professional investigator’s point of view—that would be me, by the way—I’d say you jumped to some conclusions pretty quickly with that room you found in your basement.”

“Yeah? What conclusions would those be?”

“For starters, you assume that room you found had been Elijah’s bedroom just because you found his bed and all his stuff in it.”

“And that’s a poor assumption?”

“It’s a fair assessment, but that doesn’t make it fact. You’ve got to eliminate all other avenues before coming to one solid conclusion. One other avenue being that Veronica and the kid’s uncle, David Dentman, moved all that stuff down there after the kid died. Just like Mom and Dad moved Kyle’s stuff out into the garage.” He rubbed his thumb around the rim of his pint glass. “And you guys don’t have a garage.”

“Shit,” I said. For the second time in less than five minutes, Adam was easily poking holes in my sense of reality. And the bastard was drunker than I was. “I guess you got a point. I hadn’t thought of that.” There was a rapidly deflating balloon in my stomach. The excitement I’d felt in writing about the make-believe Dentman family seemed to blacken and shrivel, and I feared the fog of writer’s block would roll back in and cover up the city.

“Still . . .” Adam’s voice trailed off.

“What?”

“Well,” he said and proceeded with what I perceived to be, even in his inebriated state, careful steps, “it’s just that even if that wasn’t the kid’s bedroom, one question still remains.”

“What’s that?”

“What was that room used for in the first place?”

I let this sink in. Maybe we both did, because Adam didn’t say anything for several drawn-out seconds.

“Fellas,” Tooey said, sweeping past the bar and winking at us like a conspirator. “We doin’ okay?”

I raised a hand at him. “Doing fine, thanks.”

Behind us, someone brought up a Johnny Cash tune on the jukebox.

“I want to confess something,” I said after too much silence had passed between us. I told Adam about how I’d thrown away my old notebooks, the ones with my early writings about Kyle, after we moved to London. “I didn’t fully understand why at the time, but I think I do now.” I waited for Adam to say something, to at least ask why I had finally come to this realization, but he didn’t say a word. Instead, I cleared my throat and said, “It was because I felt horrible about what happened between us after Mom’s funeral. I acted poorly, and it wasn’t fair to you or Beth. Or even Jodie.”