As Adam weaved through the dark streets, I watched the shapes of the trees whip by on the shoulder of the road.
“So let’s say Dentman did cover up for his sister,” I said to the passenger window. “Let’s say she killed her son and he knew nothing about it, had nothing to do with it. What sort of charges is he looking at?”
“Obstruction, false statements, conspiracy, aiding and abetting. Christ, I don’t know.”
“Jesus,” I mused.
“Don’t tell me you’re having some change of heart. Not after all this.”
“No,” I said. “I’m just trying to digest the whole thing.”
Adam choked on a laugh. “Are you kidding me? You’re the only one who had any clue. Imagine how Paul fucking Strohman feels right now.”
“But I was wrong. It was Veronica, not David.” I thought about this, my mind racing. “What did you mean, David won’t say a word?”
“He refuses to talk. He won’t give a statement. No one’s heard him open his mouth since we brought him in.”
We, I thought. Since we brought him in. This is fucking surreal.
“Would Strohman consider dropping the charges against David in exchange for a statement?”
Adam’s face was a ghastly green in the glow of the dashboard. “That would be up to the DA, not Strohman. Besides, what makes you think Dentman would agree to that? He lied for his sister the first time around. I doubt he’ll be willing to toss her in the fire for some reduction in charges.”
“That’s not what I’m thinking,” I said. “Not exactly.”
He glanced at me. “What is it?”
“It’s just . . . I’m just thinking. Any chance you can get Strohman to feel out the DA?”
“About dropping Dentman’s charges in exchange for some incriminating confession against his sister?”
“Not a confession,” I corrected. “A statement. I don’t think Dentman’s got anything to confess.”
“Well,” he said, not without some brotherly con descension. “That’s certainly a change in your tune.” He turned the wheel, and the cruiser crawled onto Main Street. Ours were the only headlights on the street. “Anyway, if we’re talking first degree murder, the DA’s going to want someone to do jail time.”
“And it won’t be Veronica, will it?” I said.
“You’ve seen her, talked to her,” said Adam. “There’s not a jury on the planet who’ll put that woman in prison, no matter how gruesome the crime. Not that we even have a body,” he added sternly, as if this were somehow my fault. “Given her background, even a court-appointed defense lawyer will push for insanity and will probably get it. The only bars that woman will see will be on the windows of a sanitarium.”
I let this sink in.
“Do you think we’ll ever find out exactly what happened to Elijah?” I said as we pulled onto Waterview Court.
Adam seemed to chew on this for a second or two. “I can’t say. But we’re one step closer, aren’t we?”
The headlights pierced the darkness of our street. The streetlamps were out, and it was like driving along the floor of the deepest ocean.
“You scared the shit out of me that day on the lake,” Adam said out of nowhere. “When I saw you pick up that axe . . .”
“I scared myself,” I admitted, surprised by my own candor. “I just had to know.”
“How did you know?”
In my head, Althea Coulter spoke up: Nature does not know extinction. It knows that when life is snuffed out and the soul vacates the body, it must, by definition, go somewhere. And if you don’t believe in God or a god or in heaven and hell, then where do souls go?
“Ghosts,” I said as we came to a slow stop in the cul-de-sac. “Do you believe in them?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Jodie was propped up in bed, reading a Louis L’Amour paperback illuminated by a reading lamp over the headboard.
Kicking off my shoes and crawling into bed on top of her, I kissed up her neck and chin to her lips.
“Quit keeping me in suspense,” she said. “What’s it all about?”
“I don’t know how much I’m actually supposed to say.”
“Just tell me.”
“I think they arrested David and Veronica Dentman,” I said.
“Did they find out what happened to the little boy?”
“No.” My head on her chest, I was talking to her breasts.
“What did they need your help with?”
“Information.” I couldn’t go into it all now, not now. Out of nowhere, exhaustion had clunked me smartly over the head. “Details. Stuff I’d uncovered in my research.”
“My smart writer.” She kissed the top of my head. “Wow. My stinky writer, too.”
“I’ll shower.”
In the bathroom, I peeled off my clothes and stood beneath the hot spray until it turned cold. Back in the bedroom, the reading lamp had been extinguished, and Jodie’s light snores could be heard over the ticking of the clock in the hallway.
The figure of a small boy stood in the doorway of our bedroom. It was too dark to make out any details, but I knew it was Elijah.
“What is it?” I whispered. “What else do you want?”
The shape drifted soundlessly out of the doorway.
I went out into the hall, the staircase to the first floor empty except for the puddles of moonlight coming in through the far windows. Standing at the top of the stairs, I peered down into the well of shadows that made up the foyer. The hallway clock ticked louder, louder.
Elijah moved through the depths of the foyer, a black shape against a background of black shapes.
I descended the stairs, the floorboards cold under my bare feet. I was wearing only a pair of sweatpants, my body still wet from the shower, and my chest broke out in goose bumps.
“Elijah!” It was a shouted whisper through clenched teeth—the way a stern parent might reprimand a child in church. “Where are you?”
The boy had vanished among the sofa and end table, the lamps and television and armchairs. Upstairs, the hallway clock still ticked, the only sound available to mingle with my hesitant respiration.
But no . . . not the clock . . .
It was the sound of the wooden blocks being stacked on the coffee table. It was too dark to see them but I could hear them, less than five feet in front of me—clack, clack, clack. Slow and precise.
Crouching down so that I was able to frame the coffee table against the curtained glow of the front windows, my breath caught in my throat. The blocks formed a pyramid, its silhouette solid and black against the windows, and as I looked on, I could make out one of the blocks settling down on top of the others, as if having floated there from the ceiling.
I was unafraid. Instead, a liquid calm filtered through me, causing my joints to tingle and my legs to go wobbly. I sat down hard on the floor. Beside me, one of the heating vents whirred to life: the sound of a foghorn out at sea.
The definitive shape of a child moved across the front windows: there and then gone.
My heartbeat caught in my throat. Althea yammered on in my head—One afternoon I was out playing in the palmetto grove when I saw a little girl—and the memory of her words caused me to spring to my feet.
I could hear him now, moving behind the sofa, the highboy, the swooshing of his bare little feet on the shag carpet. He was moving fast.
I called his name in rapid fire, my breath rasping through clenched teeth. Blind, I lurched forward in the dark toward the sounds, but each time I reached the spot where I’d heard him, he made a noise in another part of the room. He flitted like a tormented bird that had gotten trapped in the room, desperate and panicked to find a way to the outside world.