December Park

by Ronald Malfi

  “You interested in law enforcement all of a sudden?”

  Because Charles had been a good student, a football player, a soldier, and because my father had had a closer relationship with him than he had ever had with me, I said, “Yes.”

  “Isn’t that something,” my dad said, and I couldn’t tell if he was pleased or making fun of me.

  “But what do you think? The cops, I mean. What do the cops think?”

  “It’s good thinking on your part. But are these the questions you really want to ask me? Because if you ever want to talk to me about stuff . . . The department has a therapist who’s been speaking to some of the kids at the local schools. If you want, you could speak with her, too.”

  “A therapist?”

  After Courtney Cole had turned up dead, Stanton School had brought in a psychologist to speak to any students who needed to talk. The psychologist, a meaty-armed woman with an alcoholic’s ruddy complexion, spent a few weeks in the front office. A few kids had actually sought her out.

  “She’s just there to listen and to answer any questions or concerns you might have. I’m talking about serious things, Angie, not rumors you and your friends hear in school.” He glanced at me. “Do you have any questions?”

  “Did you ever shoot anybody?”

  He laughed. “I didn’t mean those kinds of questions. I meant about what’s been going on in town. You were friends with the Ransom boy, weren’t you?”

  “Sort of,” I said. I knew him from school, and he had seemed cool enough, but we hadn’t exactly been friends.

  “In case you were worried about things,” my dad went on. “I wouldn’t want you to keep things . . . you know . . . bottled up inside. If you were afraid.”

  I looked out the passenger window and watched the shadows peel away from the trees as we drove by.

  “Are you afraid?” he asked.

  I looked at him. After a time, I said, “No.”

  “Because it’s okay if you are,” my dad said.

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “Okay. But you’ll talk to me if you get afraid? Or if you just want to talk?”

  “Sure,” I said, considering. “But did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Ever shoot anybody?”

  He squeezed my knee. “Would it disappoint you if I said no?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, then I’ve shot . . . let’s see . . . maybe a hundred perps. No, no—that’s not right. It’s more like two hundred. Yeah, that’s it. Two hundred perps. Maybe more. You lose count after the first fifty.”

  I smiled and he tousled my hair. As we drove out of the woods and hit one of the darkened beach roads, my dad fired the cigarette butt out the window. The houses here were small duplexes with overgrown yards and boat trailers in the driveways.

  “Do you guys have, like, a suspect list or anything?” I asked eventually.

  My dad arched one of his eyebrows. “A suspect list, huh?”

  “How do you figure out who to put on that list?” I asked.

  “It’s not necessarily a list of suspects. Remember the man we saw walking down here on New Year’s Eve?”

  “Chester somebody,” I said.

  “Yes. Chester Vaughn. He was out here so we needed to find out why. We needed to make sure his answers made sense and that he had an alibi. You know what that is, right?”

  “Sure. It’s an excuse for where he’s been.”

  “Right. But it’s an excuse that can be verified.”

  “His excuse was verified?”

  “Yes. That’s why we let him go.”

  “Have there been other people you’ve questioned like Chester Vaughn?”

  His lips went firm, and I thought he wouldn’t answer my question. “Yes,” he said finally, “we’ve spoken to quite a few people.”

  “How come the newspapers haven’t mentioned that?”

  “Because we try to keep that info away from the press.”

  I watched the houses give way to sloping black lawns dripping with moonlight. “Do you think that Cole girl was killed in December Park?”

  My dad patted down his shirt, probably looking for another cigarette that he didn’t have. “We don’t really know, buddy. It’s one of the things we’re considering.”

  “Not the police,” I said. “You. What do you think?”

  He exhaled greatly through flared nostrils. “It seems to make the most sense.”

  “Is that why you don’t want me hanging around down there?”

  “One of the reasons. You haven’t been playing down there, have you?”

  The lie jittered out of me. “N-no.”

  My father cut the wheel, and we took one of the nameless gravel roads toward the beach. On the incline, the bay opened up before us—dark velvet rippling with stars. A white mist roiled across the beach.

  My dad eased down on the brake, then shifted the sedan into Park. “I’ll just be a minute,” he said, climbing out. He already had his flashlight on. I watched him advance over the dunes and toward the beach. With his shoe, he turned over empty beer bottles in the sand. When he shined his light down the length of the beach, the mist swirled in the beam like smoke.

  He had left the driver’s door open. A cool breeze entered the car, causing me to shiver. I peered out the open door, across the gravel roadway toward the incline of trees that ran along the cusp of the beach. Their branches waved in the wind.

  I imagined someone standing just beyond that line of trees, staring right at me. Because the door was open, the interior dome light was on, casting me in conspicuous yellow light. All of a sudden, I felt vulnerable and naked. I leaned across the driver’s seat, gripped the door handle, and slammed the door.

  My dad’s flashlight jerked in the direction of the car. The circle of light widened as he approached. “You okay?” he said, getting back in.

  “Yeah. I was just getting cold.”

  He geared the sedan into Drive, carved a semicircle in the gravel, and headed toward the main road.

  After a few more stops, my dad slowed to about ten miles per hour as we went by the Butterfield farm. The pens were empty, the cows and sheep having all been brought into the large red barn for the night. Two large grain silos extended over the distant veil of trees, their matching cupolas like dulled arrowheads. As we passed the entrance to the Butterfields’ winding driveway, two carriage lights came on at the house, most likely on motion sensors.

  Then there were the wide fields and the lighted houses far in the distance. There were the bats carving erratic helixes across the face of the moon and the heavy-limbed trees that drooped down into the roadway. There were the power lines bowing along the shoulder and the shimmering white eyes of a raccoon as it stood on its hind legs and stared into the sedan’s headlamps.

  And then there was the Werewolf House. Beneath a full moon and wreathed in ground fog, it looked even more like its namesake than it ever had in the past. It sat a distance away from the road on a weedy patch of land that shone silver in the moonlight. My dad slowed the car, hobbled over the shoulder, and drove onto the lawn. There were No Trespassing signs staked in the ground and more of them posted on the boarded-up windows of the house.

  “Should we be coming out here?” I said.

  “The place is abandoned. No one owns it. The police department put those signs up to keep kids out.” He pointed to a mud-streaked placard nailed to the peeling front door that read Beware of Dog. “That one was my idea.”

  “Oh. Cool.”

  My dad stopped the car in front of a four-foot wrought iron fence that surrounded the house. There was a hinged gate in the front of the fence, but it was ajar and hung at an angle that suggested it was no longer properly attached to the post. Expulsions of weeds sagged over the fence and burst through the rickety front porch. The boarded-up windows looked like the mouths of mine shafts that had been deemed too dangerous for entry. The siding peeled in great curled shavings of wood, and the roof was a patchw
ork quilt of rot, missing shingles, and leprous holes. Half a stone chimney stood against one side of the house, its other half scattered amongst the weeds in ruinous crumbles of mortar and stone.

  “Wait here.” My dad grabbed his flashlight and opened the door. “I’ll be right back.”

  He shut the door on me, probably thinking I had really been cold earlier, and went through the busted gate. As he approached the house, something dark and fairly large loped fluidly through the underbrush. It looked a little bigger than a fox, and I wondered if there were wolves out here.

  My dad walked around the side of the house. He shone his flashlight on the porch balustrades, casting vertical shadows against the rotted siding. When he disappeared from my view, I held my breath. I followed the beam of his flashlight until that, too, disappeared behind the house.

  In the glare of the sedan’s high beams, the house looked fake, like a movie prop. Straw-colored grass rippled in the wind. With the driver’s side window open a crack, I heard an owl hollering forlornly from a nearby tree.

  And then I saw them—the fence posts, the wrought iron staves twined with stiffened brown vines. The spear-shaped heads of each post . . .

  My father came around the other side of the house. His flashlight swept back and forth along the overgrown grass. Shielding his eyes against the glare of the headlights, he stepped over tangles of kudzu and crabgrass, opened the car door, and climbed inside. He clicked the flashlight off and tucked it between the door and his seat.

  “You okay?” he said, looking at me. His eyebrows knitted together with concern. “Something wrong, bud?”

  The release of my pent-up breath fogged the windshield. “I’m okay.” It was all I could do to pull my gaze from the fence and offer him a smile.

  My dad nodded and patted my knee. Then he proceeded to back down the lawn toward the street. Shadows swarmed across the front of the Werewolf House as the headlights pulled away from it. It was like watching a curtain of darkness close on a stage.

  As we headed home, he looked at me one more time. “You sure you’re okay?”

  I felt amphibious with sweat. “Yeah,” I lied. “I’m fine.” But my heart was running a marathon, my breath coming in hard-to-stifle shudders.

  “You and your friends should never play by that house,” he said. “It’s dangerous. The thing should be torn down.”

  “Yeah,” I said, glancing into the rearview mirror where the Werewolf House retreated into the darkness. “No problem.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Werewolf House

  The following morning, Adrian was sitting on the curb between our two houses, waiting for me so we could walk to school together. It was twilight and the air was cool. The lampposts were still on, and the world was as silent as a distant star.

  “Hey.” Adrian stood as I came down my driveway. “I was wondering if you were gonna show. We’re gonna be late for class.”

  “We’re not going to school today,” I told him.

  “How come?”

  “There’s something I gotta show you.”

  We crossed the street and cut through the Mathersons’ yard. I had my headphones around my neck, and I maxed out the volume on my Walkman so we could both hear Mellencamp singing “Small Town.”

  “Where are we going?” Adrian asked as we went through the trees and out onto the bike path.

  “The Werewolf House,” I said.

  “Whoa. What’s that?”

  “It’s a run-down old house on the other side of the woods. We call it the Werewolf House because it looks like the house from a werewolf movie we saw. But there’s something there I gotta show you.”

  “You guys know all the secret ways to get to places.” He looked up through the canopy of trees. Daylight in the form of pink and orange striations had begun to rib the sky. “Have you lived here your whole life?”

  “Mostly. We moved here when I was around three. After my mom died.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know your mom died.”

  “Yeah. She got cancer. I sometimes think that maybe I remember her—like, I can see these blurry images of her in my head—but then I wonder if that’s just my brain making stuff up, you know?”

  Adrian nodded, his gaze trained on the ground now.

  “My grandparents moved down from New York to help my dad take care of Charles and me. It’s been like that ever since.”

  “So you lost your mom and your brother,” Adrian said.

  “Yeah.” It was a different feeling having lost Charles, but I didn’t possess the words or the desire to explain that to him. I hardly understood it myself.

  “My dad killed himself.”

  I looked at him.

  “He didn’t do it in a messy way, like you sometimes hear about,” Adrian went on. “Some people take their heads off with shotguns or swan-dive out of an office building or something. Or open up their wrists.”

  Inwardly, I cringed. Open up their wrists. I thought of Dennis Foley again and how he’d cut himself with a scalpel in freshman biology. I thought too of how much Adrian reminded me of him.

  “He turned the car on in the garage and just, like, sat in it. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning. It’s the least painful way to do it, I guess. That’s why we moved here. My mom wanted to get away from Chicago and our old house and all.”

  I thought of Doreen Gardiner’s haunted eyes and expressionless face, of the zombielike way she moved, and wondered if this explained it. What drives a man with a wife and a son to take his life? I wanted to know but I couldn’t ask. Anyway, I wasn’t sure Adrian would know the answer.

  We walked the rest of the way through the woods without talking, content listening to the Mellencamp tape on my Walkman. By the time we stepped into the large field that flanked the road, it was as if we’d left the ghosts of our dead parents behind us among the trees.

  “There it is,” I said, pointing at the decrepit remains of the Werewolf House. “Creepy, huh?”

  “Wow. You’re right—it looks like something out of those hockey mask movies.” It was what Adrian called the Friday the 13th franchise.

  “I’ve ridden my bike past this place like a billion times,” I said as we walked toward it, “but it wasn’t till last night when I came out here with my dad that I noticed it.”

  “Noticed what?”

  “Come on,” I said and broke into a jog.

  “Hey! Wait up!”

  The overgrown grass whisked against my shins as I ran. By the time I reached the wrought iron fence surrounding the property, Adrian was only halfway across the field, struggling to maintain a steady pace with that overburdened backpack weighing him down. When he finally joined me, he was out of breath.

  “We shouldn’t be here,” he said, no doubt reading the No Trespassing signs.

  “Don’t worry about those. Look.” I closed my hand around one of the iron staves in the fence; it was loose and I rattled it like a saber. Then I motioned to the top of the stave, where it was capped in an iron fleur-de-lis.

  “That’s . . . ,” Adrian began. He dropped his backpack on the ground at his feet and rooted around inside it. He produced the matching fleur-de-lis that he had found in the tunnel beneath the highway. He held it up against one of the others, and we both saw that it was a perfect match.

  “How could one of these make it all the way into the tunnel?” he said.

  “Someone would have had to bring it down there,” I said. There were plenty of staves missing from the fence, and some of the ones that remained had their fleur-de-lis missing. “I think we should look around inside.”

  Adrian studied the house. I did, too. It somehow seemed less ominous now, almost inviting . . . but it was a false front, a subterfuge. As if it were saying, See? I’m just a harmless old house. You two boys are on the right track. Why don’t you both come inside? I promise not to bite. I promise not to have my roof cave in and crush your little skulls. I promise not to have my floor fall away under your feet and swallow you whol
e . . .

  I swung my backpack around and took a flashlight from the front pocket.

  “Do you think there’s really a dog?” Adrian said. I didn’t know what he was talking about until I realized he was looking at the Beware of Dog sign nailed to the front door.

  “No. My dad put that up. The police want to keep kids away from the place.”

  “Smart thinking,” he said and didn’t seem any less apprehensive. “How do we get in?”

  “Let’s try the front door.”

  I went through the opening in the fence, where the gate hung lopsided from its rusted and broken hinges. Adrian followed close behind me. The ground was a cushion of matted weeds, and the porch steps were so overgrown that they hardly existed anymore. The porch slanted toward its center where a gaping hole bristling with tall yellow weeds was visible.

  I was contemplating the best way to mount the porch when Adrian came up beside me and said, “Why don’t we go to the back and see if that would be easier?”

  We circled around to the rear of the house much in the same way my father had the night before. The yard was festooned with spiny-looking bushes, the boughs weighted down by countless birds’ nests. Much of the siding had rotted away, exposing weather-blackened boards and bent carpentry nails. Nests made of dead leaves and twigs burst from between the boards like stuffing from an old car seat. They weren’t birds’ nests, I knew, but probably some mammal, like that fox-like thing I’d glimpsed arcing through the underbrush last night.

  There was a rabbit hutch—a rectangular box of unpainted two-by-fours standing on a quartet of splintered wooden legs. Wire mesh covered the front of the hutch, though its corners had been pulled away from the frame, most likely so some animal could come and go as it pleased. The floor of the hutch was a mat of sodden brown hay topped with bird feathers and graying turds roughly the size and shape of shotgun shells. In the grass sat a large rusted contraption that reminded me of the pump handle on an artesian well, like the kinds they had on the Butterfield farm.