Nancy turned her head and returned our stare. I thought she would smile but she didn’t.
“What happened to the Dentmans?” I said again.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered, waving one hand. “Really. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“No,” I said. “What—”
“Really, really,” Ira said and actually stuck out his hand for me to shake.
Perplexed, I didn’t take it right away.
“It was careless. Never mind. It wasn’t my place and I apologize. Travis, it’s good—it’s good to meet you.”
I watched him join his wife against the wall. They talked with their faces very close together, the uniform arcs of their backs and bends of their necks forming, as is occasionally depicted between lovers in cartoons, a crude heart between them.
Jodie bustled by me, burdened with a tray of desserts. “Some shindig,” she crooned without stopping.
I hardly heard her; I was still staring at Ira Stein from across the room.
After everyone had left, Adam and I smoked cigars on the back porch. Surrounded by darkness and the deep sigh of wind through the pines, I never felt farther away from London, from D.C., from all the places I’d always pictured myself living and growing old.
“What happened to the Dentmans?” I asked.
Adam looked sidelong at me, and for a moment I couldn’t tell if he was going to smile or scowl. In the end, he did neither. Adam had always been tough. Somehow, perhaps through some cosmic interference, he had always known what to do, what to say. Now I felt I was getting a firsthand view of a different side of my older brother—the Adam who was just as lost and vulnerable as every other human being who had ever walked the Earth.
“Hey,” I went on, “what’s the big neighborhood secret?”
“I’m assuming someone said something at the party,” he said, turning away from me.
“Ira Stein mentioned it, but he didn’t go into any detail. He seemed embarrassed about bringing it up. What happened?”
“Ira Stein,” my brother muttered under his breath. His tone suggested he did not completely approve of him.
“Come on, man.”
“An old hermit owned your house for like a billion years, long before Beth and I ever moved here. Bernard Dentman. I can’t say anyone in the neighborhood even really knew the guy, although I guess Ira Stein and his wife may have known him better before he’d gotten ill. The Steins have been here for pretty much their whole lives, so they know what goes on behind every door.” Again, that nonspecific tone of disgust.
“When we first moved here, the neighborhood kids used to scare Jacob by saying the old man was really a ghost over two hundred years old and he haunted that house. I finally convinced him that Bernard Dentman was just an old man and nothing more.
“Last year Dentman got sick, and his two grown children moved in with him. David and Veronica.” Adam shrugged. “They were equally as weird. Veronica had a son about Jacob’s age, but none of the kids around here played with him or even saw him except when he’d play in the yard. Elijah was slow and home-schooled. I don’t think he was, you know, retarded or anything like that. Autistic, maybe. Anyway, Veronica and David stayed on at the house and took care of their father until he died.”
Adam sucked on his cigar, then pulled it from his mouth to watch the ember glow red. “Elijah drowned in the lake behind your house last summer. That’s why Veronica and David moved out in such a hurry and why the place was such a steal. I guess it was too hard on them. They needed to get the hell out of there.”
I felt my palms go clammy. I couldn’t speak.
“You probably noticed the floating staircase, the one coming up through the lake.”
I nodded. “What is it?”
“An old fishing pier. A storm came through a few years ago and uprooted it, tossed it on its side. No one ever knew whose pier it was, so no one ever had it removed. Neighborhood kids congregate around it in the summer, dive off it, whatever. Last summer Elijah was out there playing on it.” Again, Adam shrugged. We could have been talking about the weather or the worsening economy. “We worked the investigation and concluded he fell off the staircase, injured his head, and drowned.” His voice had taken on an eerie monotone, as if he were trying hard to sound disinterested in the whole story. “Someone should have been watching him.”
“Christ. Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“Because I didn’t want to ruin this move for you guys. The last thing I wanted to do was burden you with this morbid fucking thing. It’s a nice house, a nice neighborhood. What happened to that little boy is not your cross to carry. And anyway, I know how your mind works.” He sighed and sounded like he could have been one hundred years old.
Again, I thought of our father. I thought of the way he’d beat me with his belt after Kyle’s funeral service, then disappeared into his study where I could hear his great heaving sobs through the closed door.
“What do you mean you know how my mind works?”
“Fuck me.” Adam pulled the cigar from his mouth and examined it as if he’d never seen a cigar before. “Are you really going to make me say it?”
I didn’t need him to say it. I knew the reason he hadn’t told me about Elijah Dentman was because of what had happened to Kyle. It didn’t take a brain surgeon. Nonetheless, I was a irritated at his overprotection. I wasn’t a little goddamn kid anymore. “Do you think I wouldn’t have bought the house if I’d known?”
He looked at me. His eyes were hard and piercing. Sober. “Would you have?”
I shook my head in disappointment and gazed out at the black woods. “Sometimes I think you don’t know me at all.”
“I’m worried about you.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m your older brother. It’s my job.”
“Stop doing it.” A thickening silence simmered between us for the length of many heartbeats. “Smells like Christmas,” I said finally, eager to shatter the silence and change the subject. “The air. It’s smoky here.”
“It’s the pines.”
“We used to have a real tree every year in the house at Christmas when we were kids. Remember?”
“Of course.”
“Jodie and I, we started putting up a fake tree every year in London. It became its own tradition. Or some bastardization of tradition, I guess. A fake tree . . .”
Adam chuckled. “We got one now, too.”
“They don’t smell the same.”
“Not like Christmas,” Adam said.
“Not at all,” I said. “Don’t tell Jodie about it, okay? The drowned boy?”
“I wouldn’t.”
“You’re right. It’s not our baggage to carry.”
“I’m glad you think so,” he said and put a hand on my shoulder.
Ahead of us, the blackness of night seemed to make up the entire world. For all we knew, at that moment we could have been the only two people on the cold, dark face of the planet.
PART TWO:
THE BEAUTY OF THE MYSTERY
CHAPTER EIGHT
Christmas came and went. We celebrated the New Year with Adam’s family at Tequila Mockingbird, Tooey Jones’s pub off Main Street. A heavy snowfall blanketed the town of Westlake that first week of January, and old-timers propped up on stools at Tooey’s bar or at the local barbershop proclaimed this to be the coldest winter they’d seen since they’d been young boys which, by the look of the lot of them, must have been approximately three hundred years ago.
With the exception of a less than reliable heating unit in the basement, the new house gave us little worry. The day after New Year’s, someone from the gas company examined our heating system. After toiling around with the heating unit, the technician said there appeared to be nothing wrong with it. He then examined the thermostat upstairs, which registered at an even sixty-eight degrees. “Could be the thermostat’s busted,” he suggested. “You’ll have to make an appointment to have someone else come out.”