December Park

by Ronald Malfi

  Peter filled Michael in about the dead girl and how we’d watched the cops carry her body out of the woods. Michael listened with uncharacteristic solemnity, nodding when it seemed appropriate.

  “This changes everything,” Michael said once Peter had finished the story. “Now that they’ve found a body, they’ll be looking for a killer. It’s not just about kids who’ve gone missing anymore.”

  “The body might not have anything to do with those kids who’ve gone missing,” I said. I found I very much wanted to believe this.

  Michael nodded, then shrugged.

  It occurred to me that we had all kept quiet about the dead girl until it was just the four of us, as if to speak about it around anyone else would be to corrupt what we had seen.

  Michael took the can of root beer from Scott, downed the last of it, and unleashed an impressive belch. “I’m freezing my balls off out here,” he commented, climbing to his feet.

  Ten minutes later, Peter and I coasted back through town in Ed the Jew’s pickup, simultaneously laughing and groaning at Peter’s stupid elephant jokes while playing cassette tapes too loud.

  When we pulled up to my house, I saw my father’s unmarked police car in the driveway.

  “Shit. I thought he’d be out all night,” I said, turning down the tape deck and glancing at the digital clock on the dashboard. It read 11:36, which meant I was an hour and a half past my curfew. “Lights.”

  Peter snapped off the truck’s headlights. He shut the engine down, too, and allowed us to coast up to the curb. If my father was asleep, I didn’t want to wake him.

  “Are you gonna be in trouble?” Peter asked.

  “Probably.”

  “Want to stay at my place?”

  My gaze scaled the house, observing the darkened windows and simmering silence in which it sat. Was it possible he had come home and gone to sleep? I felt more equipped to deal with any chastisement in the morning as opposed to right now. “No,” I said finally, knowing from past experience that it would do more harm than good to avoid coming home altogether.

  “You sure?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay. Take care, man. Glad you came out.”

  “Yeah,” I said and hopped out of the truck. I made my way to the rear, popped the tailgate, and took out my bike.

  Seconds later, I nodded to Peter as he turned over the ignition and spun the pickup around, the headlights still off, and sped down the street.

  Shivering against the cold, I rolled my bike to the side of our house where I buried it within the wall of lush ivy, then decided to enter through the rear porch instead of the front door. It would be quieter. I’d done this before and knew the ropes.

  I crept around back and mounted the porch steps. They creaked just slightly beneath my weight, as I’d expected them to—I had braced myself by wincing as I stepped on each one—but their protestations weren’t loud enough to rouse anyone within the house. I fumbled for my keys, and, as I slipped the appropriate key into the dead bolt on the back door, I heard my father clear his throat.

  Startled, I nearly dropped my keys. I took an instinctive step backward as my breath caught in my throat. Then I froze beneath the darkness of the porch awning, trying to adjust my eyes to the shapes all around me. I noticed my father sitting in one of the wicker chairs, so silent he could have been nothing more than part of my imagination.

  “Dad,” I uttered, my voice pathetic, “I didn’t see you there.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  For one split second I almost convinced myself that I was out here alone talking to shadows and that it had been nothing but my imagination playing tricks on me after all. But then I saw him shift position in the wicker chair and heard him sigh in his exhausted, meditative way.

  “Grandma said you were called out tonight,” I continued, mostly because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Also, I couldn’t bear the silence. But then I realized it sounded like a confession, and I immediately clamped my mouth shut before I could dig my grave any deeper.

  “Where were you?”

  “Just out with the guys,” I said, desperate to sound casual. I smelled cigarette smoke on me—in fact, I smelled nothing but cigarette smoke. Surely my father could, too. “Peter got his driver’s license so he drove me home in his stepdad’s truck.”

  My father made a quick humming sound.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” I blurted. “I lost track of time.”

  “Sit down for a minute,” he said.

  I moved across the porch toward him, all too aware and terrified of the odor of smoke wafting off my skin and my clothes, and sat directly in front of him in one of the other wicker chairs. I could see by the bluish light of the moon the weathered and hardened features that melded together to comprise the face of my father. It was a patchwork of lines, the dual pits beneath his formidable brow only hinting at the place where his eyes were. I was shocked by how old he looked.

  He still wore his dress shirt and necktie from work, as the moonlight reflected off the tie clip and the gold badge at his hip, and this caused me to hang my head and fold my hands between my knees, shamed. I never felt more childish than when I was confronted by my father.

  “Where’ve you been?” he said casually, evenly.

  “Out with the guys. Just like I said.”

  “Specifically,” he said.

  “The Shallows.” It came out before I could come up with a suitable lie. My dad didn’t like me going down there at night since he knew that was where kids often got drunk, smoked dope, and had sex.

  “I heard you and your friends were there when they took that girl out of the woods today.”

  “Yes,” I said, wondering if my grandmother or one of the cops had said something to him. Either way and for whatever reason, I felt guilty.

  “I’m sorry you had to see it,” he said.

  “Has she been . . . identified yet? Like, do you know who she . . . she is?”

  “Courtney Cole,” he said.

  I didn’t recognize the name. Nonetheless, having a name to go along with the body I’d seen only deepened the reality of it. I had been picturing her broken face and dented head ever since this afternoon. “Did she go to Stanton?”

  “No, she was from the Palisades. She went to Girls’ Holy Cross. She was fifteen. I guess you probably wouldn’t have known her.”

  The Palisades was the southernmost part of Harting Farms. My grandmother had taken me there as a child to play, and my limited memory resurrected an image of a glistening field of grass and stately tamaracks, where swans carved paths through the mirrored surface of a beautiful man-made lake. To think of someone from the Palisades—someone my age, no less—having been murdered was almost beyond my ability to comprehend.

  I just sat there, trying not to let my leg tap, trying not to pick at my fingernails. “Do her parents know? I mean . . . well, you found her parents?” I wasn’t sure why this question jumped into my head, though I wondered if it had something to do with the man in the navy-blue sweater who had been talking to Mr. Pastore at the deli.

  “Yes.” Again my father shifted in the darkness.

  “So . . . what happened to her?” This was what I really wanted to know. And for a moment I actually thought he was going to tell me. But I should have known better.

  “Someone did something horrible to her,” he replied, his voice low. “It’s a sick and terrible thing. You don’t need to know the details.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “When you go out,” my father said, “you’re always with your friends, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. That’s good. You should stay with your friends.”

  “Dad,” I began, and my voice cracked. “Does this have anything to do with those other kids who went missing? The person everybody’s calling the Piper.”

  “It’s too early to tell. But you’re old enough to know the facts. I don’t have to sugarcoat anything for you anymore, do I?”

>   “No, sir,” I said, my voice terribly weak.

  “There’s something going on around here. Something bad. When you go out, stay with your friends in populated areas, preferably at their houses. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “You stay away from remote places—the woods, the locks down at the poorer end of town, the bike path, and all the parks after dark. Stay away from those empty cabins along the Cape and the Shallows and the old railway station at the end of Farrington Road. And that bridge by Deaver’s Pond where the homeless go in the winter. I don’t want you hanging around by that underpass, not with your friends and certainly not alone. You understand me?”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  “I’m being serious, Angelo. I want you to understand.”

  “I understand,” I told him. “I promise.”

  “I’m telling you this because I want you to be careful and be aware.”

  “I know,” I said.

  His nod was almost imperceptible in the darkness. “Good. Now get up to bed.”

  For a second I thought it was a trick. I had anticipated a shouting match or at the very least a stern reprimand about breaking curfew.

  My father must have registered my uncertainty; when I didn’t immediately get out of the chair, he pointed at me and swiped his finger toward the door, as though I were a dog in need of specific instruction.

  I stood and went to the door, turned the knob carefully. My grandparents’ bedroom was on the ground floor, and my frequent nighttime escapes from the house over the years had schooled me in the proper technique to avoid the moaning hinges: turn the knob and pull up, lifting the door in its frame, then push inward. Silent as a nun’s prayer.

  “And don’t think I’m letting you slide on breaking curfew,” my father called after me.

  “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry for coming home late.”

  “No, you’re not,” he said. Then he sighed again. He sounded ancient. “We’ll talk about that tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” I said. I couldn’t move, couldn’t take my eyes from his darkened, hunched shape across the porch. “You coming in, too?”

  “In a bit.”

  “Good night,” I said, and crept inside.

  Later in bed, despite the heaviness of sleep pressing down on me in the dark, I forced myself to stay awake until I heard my father’s leaden footfalls thumping down the hallway. When I heard his bedroom door creaking at the opposite end of the hall, I finally shut my eyes. Hot and gummy tears slid away from them, coursing down my temples. Their arrival shocked me.

  I replayed the scenario from earlier that day—the cops carrying the stretcher out of the woods, the girl’s body covered in a white sheet until a gust of wind lifted it and exposed her broken face to me. That face.

  I tried to distract my mind with a myriad of safer things—music and girls and horror movies—but, like a hungry wolf, the visage of that broken and bloodied face pursued me into my dreams. Only in my dreams, it was the face of my brother.

  Chapter THREE

  Mischief Night

  Daughter of Byron and Sarah Beth Cole, older sister of seven-year-old Margaret, Courtney Cole had been an attractive fifteen-year-old soccer player at Girls’ Holy Cross in the Palisades. In the newspaper picture, which appeared to be a yearbook photo, she had thick black hair, stunning eyes that were surprisingly seductive for a girl her age, and the sort of half-crooked, memorable smile that resonated behind your eyelids like the afterimage of a flashbulb.

  The account of her death in the Caller was cursory at best. Courtney had been visiting friends in a neighborhood near Stanton School, then walked home with Megan Meeks sometime in the late afternoon. According to Megan, they had split up just as they reached December Park. Megan turned down Solomon’s Bend Road, and Courtney, who lived in the Palisades, cut through the park.

  But Courtney Cole had never made it home. She’d had her head staved in by an unknown assailant, and two days after her parents had reported her missing, her body was found by two county workers who had been in the woods cleaning up after Audrey MacMillan’s automobile accident.

  Prior to the discovery of Courtney’s body, there was speculation as to what had become of the three other Harting Farms children who had simply vanished over the past two months—thirteen-year-old William Demorest in late August and sixteen-year-old Jeffrey Connor and thirteen-year-old Bethany Frost in September. Without evidence of foul play—and without actual bodies—the police seemed most confident that they were a series of unrelated runaways. Of course, the parents of the missing children wanted the police to consider the prospect of abduction.

  Before Courtney Cole’s disappearance, Chief of Police Harold Barber was quoted in several papers, stating, “What is more probable? That some nameless, faceless Pied Piper has come to our town to systematically lead our unwitting children off into the sunset, or that we are looking at a few unrelated instances of kids running away from home?”

  Thus, Chief Barber gave a name to the faceless monster, and that seemed to make the menace all the more real. The Caller adopted the name and ran with it. Soon thereafter, the television news reported on the existence of a possible child abductor known as the Piper stalking the residents of Harting Farms.

  Nevertheless, it wasn’t until Courtney Cole’s body was discovered that the people of Harting Farms began to truly panic. The newspapers and TV news suggested that the Cole girl’s death was related to the three disappearances over the past two months, and all four incidents may in fact be the work of a single individual.

  “Are they talking about a serial killer?” I asked my grandfather.

  “It’s sensationalism,” my grandfather advised me, looking somewhat agitated in his recliner. The television cast an eerie blue light over us both. “Yellow journalism and scare tactics to rile the public. It’s nothing you need to worry about. Sells newspapers and brings up the television ratings. That’s all it is.”

  While the nightly news was ordinarily saturated with shootings and murders in Baltimore and D.C., Harting Farms was a quiet middle-class suburb where the weekly crime blotter generally consisted of graffiti on the side of the local Generous Superstore or the occasional bout of mailbox baseball. Murder was something our community was unaccustomed to, and there were a multitude of reactions.

  For starters, the community initiated the Courtney Cole Memorial Charity and elected a chairman. However, no one seemed to know the purpose of the charity aside from using donations to pay for the girl’s funeral, and it wasn’t long before my grandfather chastised the organization for defrauding the good and grieving people of our community.

  The Elks, of which Courtney’s parents and grandparents were members, planted a blue spruce in her memory on the lawn of their chapter house. Similarly, a bronze plaque engraved with her name and some quote from a semi-famous local poet was affixed to the wall outside the confessionals of St. Nonnatus.

  Although Courtney had never set foot in our hallways, Stanton School erected a memorial bulletin board secured behind a glass enclosure in the main lobby. The memorial consisted of numerous pictures of the girl, mostly clipped from various newspapers, as well as the articles recounting her death. The whole thing was in poor taste, somehow made worse by the garland of pink and white flowers that hung beneath the largest of the photos, giving it a wholly incongruous Hawaiian flair.

  Our school published a monthly newsletter of poetry and short fiction, spearheaded by Miss McGruder’s creative writing class. That year, the Halloween issue detoured from its usual assemblage of ghost stories and poems concerning decapitated heads and button-eyed zombies returning from the grave. Instead, its pages were filled with overindulgent sentimentality about flowers wilting in the winter air and butterflies bursting forth from cocoons in a dazzling exhibition of colored wings.

  Of course, a bout of gallows humor followed the tragedy. The most tasteless yet inventive one came in the form of a limerick on the wall of one of the bathroom stall
s:

  There once was a man called the Piper

  Who’d see a nice girl and he’d swipe her

  The girl was found dead

  With a hole in her head

  As though she’d been shot by a sniper

  Perhaps the most disturbing thing was the circulation of an alleged love letter Courtney had given to a boy who attended Stanton School. According to the date scrawled in the upper margin of the first page, it was written roughly one week before her death. Whether or not the letter was authentic did not lessen the impact of seeing it, holding it.

  In science class, I was tapped on the shoulder and handed the folded sheaves of ruled notebook paper like someone being presented with the Dead Sea Scrolls. I read the first few lines and realized, with a rising sense of unease, that it must have been real, because it was too unimpressive, too mundane, to be a forgery. Had it been a fake, the author would have included some less-than-subtle foreshadowing of Courtney’s death or the irony of a profession of true love mere days before her life was snuffed out. The handwriting was bubbly and looping, the tone simple and without pretense. I couldn’t finish reading it and passed it along to pimple-faced Mark Browmer who sat beside me, hoping someone more virtuous than me might dump it in the trash before the day was through.

  The Harting Farms Police Department felt the impact, too. Chief Barber went on TV and said there was no evidence to show that Courtney’s murder had anything to do with the disappearances of the three other kids. Unhappy with Barber’s statement, the other kids’ parents were often seen on the television news, giving their own opinions.

  I registered this tension mostly from afar, just like any bystander, but it soon came home to me. On the nights my father made it home in time for dinner, he sat mostly in silence and would only speak when spoken to. And even then, it was in some foreign and guttural tongue, hardly intelligible. In the evenings, he sat on the back porch, sometimes with a glass of wine or a cup of coffee, and smoked countless cigarettes.

  My father stayed up late and wore out the floorboards of the upstairs hallway like a ghost sentenced to haunt for eternity. I never slept on these nights, and I frequently heard his creaking footfalls pause outside my bedroom door. I remained silent in bed, staring at the ceiling, holding my breath as I waited for him to start walking again.