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.”
“All right. So you come home. Then what?”
“Just like I said—just like she said. She told me what I’ve told you now.”
“And did you believe her? That the boy had just vanished into thin air?”
Dentman didn’t respond.
“Are you going to answer the question?”
“My sister, she’s very delicate.”
“I understand. We’ve been over that already. Are you going to answer my question?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Then what do you think happened?”
“I don’t know. But whatever it was, it was an accident.”
“I think I know.” Dentman grinned. “Yeah?”
“These blackouts—”
“I know what you’re getting at. She didn’t do anything to deliberately hurt that child.”
“Okay. But accidentally, maybe—”
“Stop it. You’re putting words into my mouth. I didn’t say that.”
“Then tell me how we’ve got to this place. Tell me how we’re hearing this story from you now when back in the summer we heard a completely different one—that you’d been home watching the boy and that Veronica had been in bed with a headache. It’s obvious you concocted that to protect her at the time—you didn’t want her answering any direct questions, sure—but look where it’s gotten the both of you.”
Quick as a jackrabbit, Dentman stood. His chair went skidding backward on the floor, causing the two uniformed officers to fumble into one another in an attempt to catch it. His chained hands planted firmly on the tabletop, David looked about ready to spit fire.
At the opposite end of the table, Strohman could have been watching an old black-and-white movie on AMC.
“Down!” instructed one of the uniformed officers, clamping a hand around one of Dentman’s massive shoulders.
The second officer quickly shoved the chair against the backs of Dentman’s knees. “Sit down!”
Like a ship sinking into the ocean, Dentman slowly lowered himself down on the chair.
“Your temper calls into question everything you’re telling me,” Strohman said. “I’m beginning to think we’re all wasting our time here.”
“You wanted a fucking statement. I gave you one.”
“What happened after you got home and your sister told you Elijah had disappeared? After you searched the house and couldn’t find him?”
“You want me to say it, don’t you? You’re going to make me say it.”
“Yes,” Strohman said, “I am.”
Dentman leaned closer to Strohman over the table and said, “I thought she might have hurt him real bad and that she hadn’t realized it.”
“Hurt him?”
“Killed him,” Dentman said. It was like an absolution.
At that moment, I realized I was holding my breath.
“I kept asking Veronica what she did, but she said she couldn’t remember, that she had blacked out while looking around for him. I asked her if it was possible something happened to him by the water. She just cried and said he’d hit his head. She said this over and over again, too. So I went down to the water. I called Elijah’s name. I searched the surrounding woods and then waded into the lake. I couldn’t find him . . . but I saw the blood on the step.”
“How long did you search for him?”
“A long time. Maybe thirty minutes. I couldn’t imagine where he’d gone. If he’d . . . if he’d gone under and gotten stuck somewhere, I had no way of knowing and no way of finding him, of pulling him out.”
“Then what?”
“I went back to the house. I told Veronica to go upstairs and change into fresh clothes. She did. I took her wet and bloody housedress and tossed it in the basement furnace.”
My heart leapt. The blood pumping through my veins sounded like a freight train in my ears.
“Then I told her we needed to call the cops because if Elijah was under the water, I couldn’t get to him. We needed the cops to get to him. She was fading in and out fast, and I thought she was going to have another attack. I had her sit down on the couch as I called the police. When I hung up the phone, I went over to her and let her curl up in my lap. I rubbed her head and told her exactly what to say to the police when they arrived—that she’d been asleep the whole time, up in bed with a migraine, and that I had been downstairs looking after the boy. ‘Let me take care of it,’ I told her. I promised her.”