Ronald Malfi - Floating Staircase

“They’re already gunning for insanity,” one of the officers in the viewer’s room commented.

There were a few assenting murmurs.

“All right,” Strohman told Dentman. “Go on.”

“When I came in the door, Veronica was sitting on the stairs, staring straight ahead at the wall. I thought she was, you know, having a spell again. I called her name a couple times, but she didn’t answer. So I went over to her and sort of lifted her up by the shoulders.” Dentman mimed the motion, awkward with his hands chained together. “That seemed to wake her out of it. She blinked and her eyes came back to normal again. That’s when I noticed she was covered in mud and that her housedress was wet.”

Strohman raised one eyebrow. “Wet?”

“Real wet. From top to bottom. There was water and mud on the step where she’d been sitting, too.” Lowering his voice, he added, “There was blood on her. That’s what scared me right away.”

“Okay.”

“I asked her what happened and she said, ‘He disappeared.’ Just over and over again, that’s all she would say. ‘He disappeared; he disappeared.’ I mean, I knew she was talking about Elijah—there was no one else in the house—so I started going around the house calling the boy’s name. He didn’t answer, but that wasn’t unusual for Elijah—he was special, like his mom—so I did a real thorough search of the whole house before I again started asking Veronica what had happened.

“But she just kept saying the same thing—that he disappeared. Finally, I sat her down at the kitchen table and told her calmly to tell me what happened. She said Elijah was swimming in the lake that afternoon. She was out in the garden, keeping an eye on him. The boy liked to swim, but it was important to watch him. She said he started to climb on that staircase thingy in the water there, and she yelled at him to come down off it. It was dangerous for a boy like Elijah to be climbing it.”

Again, Strohman’s eyebrow arched. “A boy like Elijah?”

“He was special, just like I said,” Dentman reiterated, a bit of irritation in his voice. “He wasn’t like other kids.”

“All right. Keep going.”

“She said at one point she saw him standing at the topmost part of the staircase. She got scared and shouted to him. That was when he fell.”

“The blood on the step,” mumbled someone in the back row of the viewing room.

Strohman leaned back in his chair and whapped the pen against his chin. He seemed content to sit in the increasing silence without prompting Dentman to continue.

“Veronica said he hit his head hard on one of the stairs,” Dentman went on eventually, “and then fell backward into the water. She ran down to him and out into the lake. That’s how her clothes got messy, with the mud and water and all. Anyway, my sister’s pretty small, but she somehow managed to pull Elijah onto land. She said she carried him all the way to the house while he bled from one whole side of his head. She was afraid to look at the wound because it was bleeding so much. That’s how she, you know, how the blood got on her dress.”

“Then what happened after Veronica got Elijah to the house?”

“She brought him inside. He started to moan and his eyelids fluttered. She said she laid him on the floor against the wall at the foot of the stairs and ran into the kitchen. She wanted to get something to clean up the blood, to stop the bleeding.”

“Why didn’t she call an ambulance?”

“Because Veronica doesn’t think that way. All her life she’s only looked toward one person to make things better.”

“That person was you,” Strohman said. He wasn’t asking it, was simply stating it as fact.

“You’d understand if you grew up in our house.”

“Because your father had been mean. Abusive.” He said it in such an offhandeded way, I thought Dentman was going to spring out of his chair and throttle him, handcuffs and all.

“He’d been something, all right,” Dentman said from the corner of his mouth. He shifted in his seat, and his gaze once again ran the length of the two-way mirror.

I felt a chill ripple through my body.

“Okay,” Strohman said, glancing at his notebook. That pen was still tap-tap-tapping away, this time on the corner of the table. It was a wonder he hadn’t driven the entire viewing room mad. “So she didn’t call an ambulance. Then what? Is that when you came home?”

“No. She said she went around looking for bandages and antiseptic. She finally found some under the kitchen sink.”

“Naturally,” said Strohman.

“When she came back to where she’d left Elijah, he was gone.”

Strohman’s pen tapping ceased just long enough for him to jot down a few notes in his notebook. Then he looked at Dentman. “Gone?”

“He disappeared,” Dentman said.

No, I thought, shivering against the wall while watching all this unfold on the other side of the glass like someone watching a stage play. No, that’s not right. People don’t just disappear. Nature does not know extinction.

Exhaling with great exaggeration, Strohman said, “Disappeared.”

“She came back, and all that was left of him was a wet spot on the carpet. Lake water. And blood.”

“This is what she told you?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say she did next?”

The officer in the folding chair closest to me cursed as his cell phone began chirping with a tune that sounded incriminatingly like Britney Spears. Bolting from his chair and rushing out into the hallway, he caused enough of a ruckus for me to miss the beginning of what Dentman said.

“—his name and then started looking around the house. She said she thought he might have gone down to lie on the sofa, but when she looked, he wasn’t there. So then she checked upstairs, the bedrooms and the bathroom, but he wasn’t there, either.”

“He wasn’t in his room?”

“Elijah’s room was in the basement. He would have gone past the kitchen and down the hall to get there. If he’d done that, Veronica would have seen him.”

“But did she check the basement?”

“She looked there last. He wasn’t there.”

Strohman checked his notes. “His bedroom was in the basement, you said?”

“It was a room my father built a long time ago. Elijah liked it. He could hide in it, and it was dark and quiet. Veronica hated that he liked it, but she couldn’t get him to come out. Eventually we just moved his bed and the rest of his stuff down there.”

Strohman rubbed his forehead and looked like he was ready for a nap.

In the shadows toward the back of the interrogation room, the two uniformed policemen shifted soundlessly.

“Okay, David. So Veronica looks and she can’t find him. What did she do next? Did she just sit down on the stairs and wait for you to come home? Because that’s how you found her, correct?”

“No. I mean, yes, that’s how I found her. But that’s not . . . it didn’t happen like that.”

“Tell me how it happened.”

“She said she couldn’t remember it all. It went black for a while.”

Strohman asked him what that meant.

“One of her spells,” Dentman said. “She must have worked herself up real good and had one of her spells.”

“A blackout,” said Strohman. “Like, uh . . .” He snapped his fingers in rapid succession. “Like, hey, nobody’s home. Right?”

Strohman’s glibness about the whole situation stirred something inside David Dentman. Even from my vantage, I could see it simmering and kicking off white sparks just beneath the surface of his eyes.

He may not have killed Elijah, but those are the eyes of a cold-blooded killer, all right.

“Veronica didn’t know how long she’d been out,” Dentman went on, “but when she came to, Elijah was still gone. That’s when she sat down on the stairs and waited for me.”