“And she won’t,” Dentman said. Astoundingly, I thought I saw the stirrings of a smile. It never materialized, however, and I was somewhat grateful for that, for I feared that smile would have haunted my dreams for decades.
“Tell me what you know,” I said again, leaning closer to the bars of his cell.
He said nothing for a long time. As he rubbed his face, I once again expected to see his eyes grow muddy with tears, but that didn’t happen. When he looked at me, I felt a twinge in my spine, as if he’d speared me with an iron lance. “Tell the chief I’m ready to talk to him,” Dentman said and turned away.
“Come with me,” said Adam.
I followed him down the hall to the same darkened viewing room McMullen had taken me to yesterday. This time, all the folding chairs facing the two-way mirror were occupied, and the room was warm and smelled strongly of bad breath. I clung to the wall beside Adam as the lights in the interrogation room fizzed on.
Through the intercom system, the sound of the door opening was like something from a 1930s radio show about haunted houses. Escorted by two uniformed policemen, David Dentman entered the interrogation room. His hands cuffed in front of him, his enormous size dwarfing the two officers at his sides, he was ushered over to the seat his sister had occupied yesterday.
Strohman came in next and shut the door behind him. He was wearing the same unbuttoned shirt and slacks from our previous meeting, only now he’d thrown a suit jacket over his shirt. He looked like someone recently roused from a fitful sleep. “Okay, David,” Strohman said, sitting in a chair at the opposite end of the table. He placed a large folder on the table in front of him as the two uniformed officers faded against the far wall.
I had been anticipating a certain formality to the interrogation, something direct and witty and straight out of an Elmore Leonard novel, but instead I found myself quickly disappointed with Strohman’s unceremonious approach.
Sleepy-eyed and looking terminally bored, Strohman sat half-slouched in his chair like someone at an AA meeting. Casually, he flipped open the folder and asked Dentman if he understood his rights.
“Yeah,” Dentman muttered. Even in low tones, his voice vibrated the intercom speakers.
Someone from the audience got up and adjusted a volume control knob on the wall.
“Are you ready to give your statement?” Strohman asked.
“Not yet.”
Strohman looked nonplussed. The expression was out of place on his face. “Oh yeah?”
“I want to make something clear first,” said Dentman.
“What’s that?”
“My sister. She isn’t well. She hasn’t been well in a long time. I think you already know that”—his gaze shifted almost imperceptibly toward the two-way mirror, as if he knew we were all behind it, watching him—”but I want it stated for the record anyway.”
“Okay.”
“I love my sister. Now that Elijah’s dead, she’s all the family I got.”
“Understood. Are you ready now?”
Dentman nodded.
Strohman patted his shirt pockets. An arm emerged from the shadows as one of the officers handed him a pen. “Tell us what happened the day your nephew disappeared,” Strohman said.
“I was at work all day. I’m not exactly sure what time I got home, but the sun was starting to go down. I remember that. Veronica was home alone with the boy, just like she was every other day. She was a good mother. She tried to be, even when she was having one of her moments.”
“What do you mean? What moments?”
“Sometimes she draws a blank. Sometimes she just stares and doesn’t answer, and some part of her mind retreats far back inside her, I think. It’s important you understand that part, too.”
“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.