December Park

by Ronald Malfi

  I sifted through the rest of the paperwork until I located a blue case file at the bottom of the briefcase. There were no labels on the cover, though there were a lot of pages filed inside it. It was the file my father had been reading earlier that evening. I opened it and instantly recoiled at the sight of the dead, ruinous face of Courtney Cole.

  I redirected my gaze toward the soft tube light humming above the stainless steel kitchen sink. A sour breath exhaled through my flared nostrils. When I looked back down at the photograph, it was still just as gruesome, yet somehow I was able to look at it now without horror.

  The photograph had been taken while Courtney Cole was still in the woods; I could see that her head, cocked strangely on her neck, still lay among a bed of sodden black leaves. Her two gelatinous eyes reminded me of automobile headlights after they had become foggy with moisture. Mottled black-purple bruises ran from temple to jawline on the right side of her face.

  I turned to the next page, which showed another photograph of the dead girl, this time with the head wound as the subject of the shot. I examined it in all its stark and morbid detail.

  Dented, I thought again, same as I had on the day I saw the cops pulling her up the embankment, although I now found the word to be foolishly inadequate. It was a horrible, vivid gash, the skin busted apart and fringed in congealed black blood. At the center, whitish triangles of skull protruded through a terrible divot. Bits of dirt and little pebbles were stuck in the blood. There was a yellow ruler beside her head, measuring the diameter of the wound.

  Similar photos followed. There were others taken at the morgue, for she was now splayed out on a stainless steel table with a white sheet draped to just below her collarbone. She looked more lifelike somehow under the fluorescent lights, though the discoloration of her flesh was more prominent. The photos toward the end were of the surrounding woods, but I couldn’t identify what purpose they might serve the police.

  I flipped to the next tab in the case file to find a stack of coroner’s reports and various handwritten notes. I skimmed the typed parts and skipped the illegible handwritten notes. Blunt force trauma, it read in one of the boxes.

  The sound of someone moving around upstairs caused me to freeze. I held my breath, listening. It had sounded like the groaning of bedsprings or possibly one of the noisy floorboards at the top of the stairs. I waited, anticipating the all-too-familiar sound of my father’s tendons popping as he descended the stairs. But that sound did not come.

  For a moment I considered closing the file and creeping back up to my room. But in the end, I decided to comb through the rest of it, pausing only to read the boldface type in various reports.

  The final packet of papers contained more handwritten notes as well as a single-spaced typed sheet of paper. I realized that I was reading the statements made by Courtney’s parents, Byron and Sarah Beth. There was no revelation in either statement—their daughter had simply failed to return home one evening—until I reached the end of Sarah Beth’s. It was a simple recounting of the clothing her daughter had been wearing on the day she disappeared—a purple sweater, jeans with sequins on the rear pockets, a white knit coat, white tennis shoes.

  And a heart-shaped locket.

  I stared at the words until my eyes burned from not blinking. When another creaking sound from above filtered down the stairwell, I closed the file and stuffed it, along with the rest of my father’s paperwork, into the briefcase. I set the briefcase back in its place on the floor, then took the stairs up to my bedroom. Given the strength of my beating heart, I knew sleep would be a long time coming.

  Chapter Ten

  The Rebels of Echo Base

  My revelation about the heart-shaped locket convinced them all. How could it not? Adrian beamed, and Scott joined him in crowing as if it were some victory. Peter and Michael shared matching looks of amazement. And then, of course, they wanted to go to the woods and see what else might have been left behind, what clue may have been overlooked by the police. They wanted to search.

  The following Saturday morning, we all arrived at Scott’s house around nine o’clock to collect supplies. The Steeples’ basement was a cornucopia of items scavenged from yard sales, stockpiled by Scott’s crazy aunt Willa who had stayed a full summer with the Steeples while she sank deeper and deeper into the quagmire of dementia. When she began bringing home stray cats, Scott’s parents had sent her to a home, but the stuff in the basement had remained.

  We sifted through the junk like archeologists. Michael donned an old World War II helmet, tied a fringed afghan around his neck like a cape, and climbed on a chair. He assumed a posture reminiscent of Washington crossing the Delaware in that famous painting. “I’m totally wearing this helmet today. In fact, I may never take it off again.”

  We uncovered some pitted canteens that looked like they had been used during the Civil War, a pair of rubber galoshes, a pair of binoculars. I picked up the heavy binoculars and peered through them. Everything was blurry. I asked Scott if he knew how to work them.

  “There’s a dial on the top,” he said. “Turn it to adjust the view.”

  I cranked the dial slowly counterclockwise, and it immediately brought the wood-grain pattern of the far wall into detailed relief. “Holy shit. These are way cool.”

  “Bring ’em along,” Scott said. “I’m sure we can use ’em.”

  There were flashlights, too, though when we put batteries in them, only one of them worked. Peter found what looked like an ancient transistor radio with a hand crank on one side. He turned the radio over in his hands looking for the battery compartment.

  “It doesn’t take batteries,” Scott informed him. “It works off something called a dynamo.”

  “Yeah. That sounds made up.”

  “Seriously. Turn the crank.”

  Peter did, his tongue poking through his lips like someone taking a difficult math exam. The sound seemed to swell up inside the transistor radio like something in slow motion gaining normal speed until an AM station came through in surprising clarity. A disc jockey’s disembodied voice crackled out of the speaker.

  Peter stared at the machine with a look of astonishment. “That’s awesome,” he said, still turning the radio over in his hands and looking for the battery compartment like someone trying to find the hidden panel in a magician’s magic box.

  “What about these?” Michael held up a pair of walkie-talkies. They were the size and shape of bricks and looked equally as heavy. “Do they work?”

  “I have no idea,” said Scott, “but you have to charge them up first to find out. There should be chargers somewhere around here. I saw them once before.”

  “What do they look like?”

  “Like plastic cradles that plug into the wall.”

  “Cool.” Michael tossed me one of the walkie-talkies. I had been correct in estimating its weight. “Help me look, Mazzone.”

  I helped Michael search, pausing only when I came across a package of unopened typewriter ribbon. Spools of ribbon were becoming harder and harder to find, particularly after Second Avenue Stationery had closed, and the one on my typewriter at home had begun to fade months ago. I held up the package and called over to Scott, “Hey, man, do you mind if I take these?”

  He frowned. “What are they?”

  “Ink ribbons for my typewriter.”

  “Shoot, you’re still using that old thing? I’ve got an extra word processor up in my bedroom. You can have it if you want it.”

  It was like telling an antiques collector to get rid of all his junk in order to make room for brand-new things. When I wrote, I entered a fantasy world. That old typewriter was the machine that took me there and brought me safely back. I didn’t know if I could get there from someone’s spare word processor. Moreover, I thought that once you stopped writing words and started processing them, those wonderful fantasy worlds became harder and harder to visit.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll stick to the typewriter.”

  S
cott hoisted his shoulders. “Suit yourself. Sure, go ahead and take ’em.”

  The entire morning, Adrian sat on the basement steps, Martha Dooley’s yearbook open on his lap, and scrutinized Courtney’s school photo. As I stared at him, he looked up and met my gaze from across the room. Magnified behind the thick lenses of his glasses, his eyes looked like two searchlights beaming into the fog of a wintry midnight.

  After a hasty meal of pizza rolls, microwaved salami sandwiches, and Kool-Aid, we were on our bikes heading across town to the Dead Woods. We rode beneath the sun of midday, our backpacks heavy with items from Scott’s basement, the air warming up all around us with the oncoming spring. With Adrian perched once again on my handlebars and the binoculars swinging from my neck by a leather strap, their weight oddly comfortable, I pedaled twice as hard as my friends just to keep pace.

  “Go, go, go!” Adrian shouted, clutching the handlebars.

  The wind whipped my face and burned my skin. I hunched behind Adrian’s Incredible Hulk backpack to avoid the slipstream. Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes and carved burning paths toward my temples. Go, go, go, I thought, echoing Adrian’s sentiment. Go, go, go. I pedaled harder.

  At Woolworth Avenue, Michael’s rattling Mongoose came up alongside us. His jacket billowed in the wind, and he still wore the World War II helmet. Without saying a word, he turned and grinned at me, his eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses. It was the biggest, stupidest grin he could muster, and I burst out laughing. Arching his eyebrows above the frames of his sunglasses, he gave me a thumb’s-up.

  We coasted down the street toward the highway, the spires of St. Nonnatus jutting up beyond the skyline like a medieval parapet. The binoculars thumped weightily against my breastbone.

  At Augustine Avenue, Peter and Scott began singing Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Run through the Jungle” off-key. Peter was wrapped in a neon green ski jacket and had headphones on. He pedaled hard, his ass off the seat of his bike, his strong legs working like the wheel arms of a locomotive. Despite the chill in the air, Scott wore only a flimsy Orioles Windbreaker over a tattered T-shirt. He had headphones around his neck, and his shoulders were burdened with the weight of his JanSport backpack.

  We didn’t need words between us. We rode, our little quintet, and in that moment we were the only living creatures traversing the streets of Harting Farms.

  When we hit the road behind the Generous Superstore plaza, Scott motioned toward the ravine on the side of the road. We fell into a straight line and veered one by one off the road and down the embankment into the rocky ravine. On my handlebars, Adrian jolted like someone being pumped full of electricity. At one point, just as we struck a particularly aggressive rock, he shouted something that sounded perplexingly like, “My coolie!”

  As we approached the highway intersection, I shouted, “Hang on!” and didn’t slow down a bit. Neither did my friends. Scott, who was leading the charge, knew the highway’s traffic lights better than the county workers who repaired them; he had timed our arrival so the lights changed in our favor just as we hit the intersection. We blasted through it at top speed to the accompaniment of bleating car horns and shouts from open windows.

  On the opposite side of the highway, we dipped down a second small embankment, whipping through scraggly underbrush and cattails that rose like tiny minarets from the muck. Scott and Peter launched up the embankment toward Counterpoint Lane, and Adrian and I followed. Close at my back, Michael whooped like a loon. Our bike tires printed wet streaks on the asphalt as we cruised toward the intersection of Point and Counterpoint.

  When we reached the busted section of guardrail, we all skidded to a stop. The intersection was eerily clear of cars. Adrian dropped off my handlebars and, his legs wobbly, walked to the middle of our circle of bikes. His backpack looked like it weighed two hundred pounds easy.

  “I’m vibrating like a live wire,” Michael said.

  “What was it you said when we went down that first ravine?” I asked Adrian.

  “Coolie,” Adrian said.

  “What’s a coolie?”

  “It’s my butt,” he said, reddening.

  I laughed.

  “So where exactly do we start looking?” Peter asked, peeling the headphones from his ears and dropping them around his neck. I heard the tinny resonant drone of John Lennon issuing through the orange foam earpieces.

  “They took her out of the woods here.” Scott wheeled his bike to the cusp of woods and peered over the guardrail.

  “Okay,” Michael said, “so let’s get down there first.”

  We rolled our bikes through the twisted rent in the guardrail and carefully descended toward the bottom of the woods, where the tree trunks grew thickest and the kudzu, even in winter, was a Gordian tangle of brownish vines. This time, Adrian led the charge.

  “The Dead Woods,” Peter marveled, suddenly right beside me. He was breathing heavily. “Satan’s Forest.”

  When we reached the bottom and the ground leveled out, we simply dropped our bikes into the foliage and continued following Adrian deeper into the woods.

  My friends and I were no strangers to Satan’s Forest, of course. We had spent much of our summers here, smoking on tree stumps and catching brine shrimp in the shallow rust-orange water of the creek. By midsummer, the trees were so thick and full it was impossible to see to the bottom from the streets above, and sometimes we secreted ourselves down there from early morning until dusk when the mosquitoes and black flies finally drove us home.

  In all that time, none of us had ever ascribed to these woods the preternatural sense of power I felt in being here now. It was as though we’d crossed a great and secret threshold, and things—important things—were finally being set into motion. I wondered if the others felt it, too.

  “We should set up camp.” Adrian paused beside an oak tree. “Like a home base or something. You know, a place where we can set up our base of operations.”

  “The statues,” Peter and I said at the same time.

  Adrian grinned. “Right.”

  We walked deeper into the woods toward the clearing with the statues, the spot I had taken Adrian on that first evening.

  “What about an ambush?” Michael said from the rear of the line.

  “What do you mean?” Peter said.

  “Like, what if he’s still down here? What if this is his home?”

  “The Piper?”

  “Yeah. If you were a crazed serial murderer, where else would you hide?” Michael glanced up at the treetops, his army helmet sliding back on his head. “You ever hear of nut bags living in the forests in camouflaged tree houses and things like that?”

  My father’s voice from so many months ago resonated in my head: 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.

  In a town like Harting Farms, with all its honeycombs and shadowed, forgotten places, a serial murderer could hide literally anywhere.

  Scott produced his butterfly knife. He flipped it open in one graceful swipe. “I’m prepared in case of an attack.”

  “Terrific,” Michael commented. “I feel safer already. If the Piper comes after us, you can give him a nice shave.”

  When we reached the clearing, we stopped and looked around. I thought, Yeah, this is right. This is the perfect spot.

  Adrian dropped his backpack onto the ground. Sunlight speared through the trees in narrow shafts, creating golden pools of light along the dead, wet leaves that carpeted the earth. Scott, too, set down his backpack. He was still twirling the butterfly knife, his dark eyes sharp and alert.

  Michael stepped around the clearing while looking down, as if to examine the gr
ound for booby traps or evidence of enemy armies. He removed the army helmet, and his hair fell down in that perfect right-sided part. His sunglasses hung from the collar of his University of Maryland sweatshirt, which was about two sizes too small and stippled with holes.

  I sauntered over to one of the headless concrete statues hidden beneath the underbrush. I felt around for it with my foot. Thud. I practically collapsed onto it, suddenly taken aback at the strength of my exhaustion. I took the binoculars from around my neck and dropped them at my feet.

  Peter joined me on the statue. His exhaustion was evident in the drawn-out expulsion of air that issued from his lungs. Sweat beaded his forehead.

  Adrian remained standing, his back toward us, his backpack sinking into the muck at his feet. The outline of his frame was silvered in sunlight and veined with the shadows of interlocked tree limbs. There was nothing but an endless wealth of trees ahead of him, but he seemed focused on something the rest of us could not see.

  Scott knelt down and dove into his backpack. I watched him withdraw the canteens, the walkie-talkies (we had found the chargers in Scott’s basement, and the handhelds worked commendably), a spiral-bound notebook with a ballpoint pen clipped to the front cover, some items wrapped in tinfoil, an alarm clock, and the dynamo-powered radio. He caught me staring at him, smiled, then tossed something white in my direction that I originally mistook for a baseball. When I caught it I was surprised by the sponginess of it. It was a pair of gym socks rolled up into a ball.

  “I brought some for everyone. I figured the ground would be wet. No reason to catch frostbite, right?” Scott tossed balled-up socks at the other guys.

  “You should have been a Boy Scout,” Peter told him.

  “I’m too smart to be a Boy Scout.”

  “Hey. I was a Boy Scout,” said Michael, catching the pair of gym socks that Scott launched at him.

  “Yeah,” Scott said coolly. “See what I mean?”

  Michael flipped him the bird.

  In the end, Scott was left holding the remaining pair of socks that was meant for Adrian because Adrian was still staring off into the trees. Scott eventually dropped the socks into his backpack, then shrugged when he caught my eye again.