December Park

by Ronald Malfi

  It was true that it had been creepy, but we had gotten used to the presence of law enforcement all over town this past year. Sadly, it had become commonplace.

  As we walked our bikes, Peter and I told them how we had run into Mr. Mattingly outside the Werewolf House.

  “He scared the shit out of us even worse than that cop,” Peter said. “I still don’t understand what he was doing all the way out there.”

  “He was going after his dog,” I said, though I didn’t think I was completely convinced of this, either.

  “Mr. Mattingly at the Werewolf House and some strange guy going through our stuff in the woods,” Scott mused. “It can’t just be a coincidence.”

  We all looked at him.

  “One of them must be the Piper,” he explained.

  “Where’s the logic in that?” Peter asked. “I’m not saying you’re wrong. I just don’t know how you made that connection.”

  “We’ve been going to all the places the Piper goes,” Scott said. “The Dead Woods, where the Cole girl’s body was found. The Werewolf House where that fence post thing came from. Not to mention the statue head. Maybe it was only a matter of time before we crossed paths with him. Which was sort of the point of this whole thing, right? To figure out who the killer is?”

  Michael cleared his throat and said, “I think you guys are just trying to scare the shit out of each other.”

  “I’m not scared,” Scott said.

  “Yeah? Well, then you’re scaring the shit out of me. Cut it out. I don’t like talking about the Piper once it starts getting dark.”

  When we reached the intersection of Point and Counterpoint, we waited for a break in traffic before pushing our bikes across. Behind the Superstore plaza, we climbed on our bikes.

  Scott said, “What if the Piper had nothing to do with Adrian’s disappearance? What if his whacko mother actually did something to him? That would explain why his mom hasn’t reported him missing. Right?”

  We all looked at him for a long time. Doreen Gardiner was certainly strange, but was she capable of that? I couldn’t fathom it.

  Could you fathom someone’s father poisoning himself in the family car? a voice spoke up in my head. And what about that hideous scar on her neck? What awful things have happened to Doreen Gardiner? Were they things that could have warped her mind so terribly, so completely, that she would do something unthinkable to her own son?

  “Okay, enough of this,” I said. “I’m going over there tomorrow and asking Adrian’s mom where he is.”

  They nodded, the relief evident on their faces. It was as though they had been waiting for me to make this suggestion all week.

  Chapter Twenty

  Where Adrian Went

  As it turned out, there would be no need for me to confront Doreen Gardiner.

  That night, while clearing the table after dinner, I saw through the kitchen window the Gardiners’ car pull into their driveway. Doreen Gardiner got out and skulked to the porch. Then the passenger door opened and Adrian climbed out.

  At the sight of him, I was momentarily overcome by disbelief. I went to the window and watched his small fragile-looking silhouette follow his mother into the house. It wasn’t until the Gardiners’ front door closed and lights came on in the windows that I felt myself relax. I expelled a shaky breath against the windowpane.

  My dad and grandparents were sitting on the back deck with some of my grandfather’s friends, drinking wine and telling war stories.

  I poked my head out and said I was running next door for a minute. “Adrian came back,” I finished.

  “Right next door,” said my dad. “No place else.”

  I agreed, then ran through the house and out the front. As I crossed the lawn, I saw lights come on at the back of the Gardiner house. Someone was in the kitchen. Adrian’s silhouette appeared in the window. I felt that he was looking right at me. Then the curtain swished back into place, and my friend’s silhouette moved away.

  The Gardiners’ backyard was overgrown and buggy. Clay flowerpots were scattered about a concrete slab in front of the back doors, and a hollowed bamboo wind chime hanging from the eaves clinked in the wind. A garden hose lay unspooled in the grass like a cobra.

  I went up to the porch doors and knocked lightly. The blinds had been swept to one side, and I could see the whole kitchen—the dishes stacked on the counter, the pots in ranks and towers on chairs, unopened cardboard boxes under the table. Something went zzzt-zzzt in the bushes nearby. I was about to knock again when Adrian came to the door in a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers that looked like bear feet, claws and all. He popped the lock on the door and whooshed it open.

  “Hey,” he said, the word coming out slow and disinterested. It was as if we’d just hung out yesterday.

  “Where the hell have you been?” I blurted.

  He stepped aside and waved me into the house. “Come on in.”

  I entered, surprised that after all these months the air still smelled stale and there were unpacked boxes shoved against the walls in the adjoining hallway.

  “Where’ve you been?” I said again. “Me and the guys have been trying to get in touch with you all week. We thought something bad might’ve happened. We went looking for you.”

  Adrian leaned forward on the balls of his feet and peered through the doorway and down the hall. “Come on upstairs,” he said in a low voice, and I followed him down the hall and into the foyer.

  “Adrian?” It was Doreen Gardiner’s voice, funneling down the stairwell. It cracked on each syllable and sounded like the noise a large bird might make when agitated. “What are you doing?”

  “I have a friend over, Mom,” he called. We were at the bottom of the stairs now. I paused but he proceeded up them.

  Doreen Gardiner appeared at the top of the stairs in a bathrobe. Her hair looked like a bird’s nest that had been struck by lightning, and her eyes were outlined in purplish circles. Her mouth was nearly lipless, a firm and bloodless gash bisecting the lower half of her face. “What friend is this?”

  Adrian paused midway up the stairs. I was behind him but still standing in the foyer. “It’s Angelo from next door.”

  “Who?”

  “Angelo Mazzone,” he repeated. “From next door.”

  She seemed to waver, and for one horrifying moment, I was certain she would take a header and topple down the stairs. “Shoes,” she said.

  “We’re not—”

  “Shoes, Adrian.”

  I realized she was staring at me. I was, after all, the only one wearing shoes.

  Adrian turned and brushed by me on his way to the foyer. “Come on,” he said, kicking off his bear slippers in what could only be an exercise of solidarity. “Take your shoes off.”

  “Sure.” I climbed out of my sneakers and left them by the front door next to his slippers. My hackles rising, I followed him up the stairs.

  His mother was still there watching us, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed over her chest like she had something to be pissed off about. Her robe was open enough at the top so that the puckered pink scar that circumnavigated her neck was all too visible. When we shrugged past her I caught a whiff of stale cigarette smoke and unwashed flesh. She eyed me distrustfully. I braced myself for one of her claws to reach out and clutch at me. Blessedly, nothing happened.

  Adrian led me to his bedroom and shut the door behind us. It was the first time I’d been in his room. There was a mattress on the floor, moving boxes bursting with clothes shoved against one wall, his Incredible Hulk backpack tucked in one corner, and several stacks of comic books arranged in a hopscotch grid around the grimy carpet. There were more comic books tacked to the walls in protective Mylar sleeves, the characters on the covers completely alien to me. Some of the comics looked very old, and they were probably worth some money. Holes had been punched in the drywall, and the light switch hung from wires like an eyeball dangling from a socket. The smell—Christ, it was like a locker room.

 
“Is your mom okay?” I asked, marveling over the warped rationale of having to take my shoes off in order to stand on a stained carpet crusted with dried bits of food.

  Adrian dropped to his knees and sifted through a mound of smelly clothing. “Yeah, why?”

  “No reason.” I faced him. “Where have you been all week?”

  He pulled a three-ring binder out from beneath the clothes, then sat on the mattress. “I want to show you something.”

  I dropped down beside him on the mattress.

  “Promise you won’t laugh.”

  I touched my nose. “I promise.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Why do you touch your nose like that when you promise?”

  “It’s just something stupid me and the guys used to do when we were kids. But don’t worry, I promise. I won’t laugh.”

  Adrian opened the binder. The first page was a detailed drawing of five superheroes, slightly foreshortened as they flew straight out of the center of the page. They wore elaborate costumes with twirling capes and masks that tied around their eyes, like the kinds the Ninja Turtles wore. The detail was remarkable, and their expressions were not only realistic but identifiable.

  “Wow. Is this us?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “All five of us. It’s the cover page. I haven’t thought of a title yet.”

  “A title for what?”

  “The comic.” He flipped to the next page. It was divided into a series of square panels in which the superheroes posed in a variety of heroic positions. “I’m drawing a comic book about us.”

  “Holy shit.” I slid the binder from Adrian’s lap and pulled it in front of me. “These are incredible. How’d you . . . ? I mean, how the heck . . . ?” I didn’t have the words. Adrian Gardiner had rendered me speechless. “This is really great, man.”

  “Thanks. I can draw, but I don’t really know how to write a story for it. I was wondering . . . maybe you would want to work on it with me?”

  “Really? Yeah, that would be great.” I looked at him. “Why would you think I’d make fun of you for this?”

  “I don’t know.” Adrian raised one small shoulder, then took the binder back from me, shut it, and slid it beneath the heap of clothes on his mattress.

  “Is that where you were all week? At art school or something?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then where’d you go?”

  “I had to talk to some people.” He got up, went to a stack of comic books, and selected one from the top. He dropped back down on the mattress and flipped through the pages.

  “What people?”

  “Just some people.”

  “Was it cops?” I said. “Did you tell them about what we found, what we’ve been doing?”

  “Heck, no,” Adrian said, glaring at me. “I’m not stupid, you know.”

  “So who was it?”

  “Just some doctors.”

  “For a whole week?”

  “They’re specialists.”

  “For what? Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. My mom just gets weird about stuff. They’re not real doctors, anyway. They’re, like, psychiatrists and stuff.”

  “Like that lady they brought into school to talk to kids about what’s been going on in town?”

  “Sort of like that. But it has nothing to do with the Piper. This was about my dad.”

  “Oh.”

  “My mom gets all freaked out and wants to make sure I’m not upset about it or anything.”

  “About his . . . his suicide, you mean,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you?” The words were out of my mouth before I knew what I was doing.

  “Not really. Not anymore.” He put the comic book down. “Do you want to see some pictures of him?”

  “I guess so. If you want to show me.”

  Adrian rolled off the mattress and dug through one of the cardboard boxes shoved against the wall, pulling out random items and dropping them to the floor until he found a small scrapbook with a dark blue vinyl cover. He brought it over to the mattress and sat down beside me again.

  “Here,” he said, opening the scrapbook. There were photos pasted to the pages, and I could tell by the clothing and the hairstyles that even the most recent were at least a decade old. Adrian pointed to one photo of a smiling man with a dark moustache and kind eyes who held a toddler on his lap. “That’s my dad. And that’s me.”

  What struck me was that Adrian’s father looked like a regular guy. In my head, I had made him out to be a lunatic, a social outcast who had taken a zombie for his wife, then ended his life by sucking on poisonous fumes in the family car. Yet the man in the photos could have been a baseball coach, a high school guidance counselor, a scoutmaster.

  There were photos of Adrian’s mother, too. She was a different woman in these photos—prettier, more alert. Absent were the dead eyes, the frazzled hair, the parchment-colored flesh.

  We were only a few pages in when a shadow appeared beneath Adrian’s bedroom door. Adrian noticed it, too. A floorboard creaked.

  Adrian closed the scrapbook, got up, and stuffed it back into the box. When he turned around to face me, he said, “Wanna read some comics for a while?”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Courting a Killer

  The next day was Saturday, and Michael had no summer school, so the five of us convened at the Quickman around noon. When Michael arrived and saw Adrian, he raced up to the smaller boy and enveloped him in a bear hug that lifted him clear off the floor. Adrian laughed.

  “We thought you were dead, Poindexter,” Michael said, once we were all seated at a window booth. We had ordered nothing but Cokes, which we now sipped at our leisure. “We were really starting to think the Piper got you.”

  “Where the heck have you been?” Scott asked.

  I wondered how Adrian would tell it since, to the best of my knowledge, he had never spoken of his father to the guys.

  “My mom sent me to a hospital, so some doctors could talk to me, ask me questions,” he said.

  “Doctors?” Peter said.

  “My mom overreacts. After my dad died, she had me talk to doctors all the time. Now it’s just every once in a while, whenever she thinks I need to talk to someone.”

  “You can talk to us about stuff, too,” Scott said.

  “Thanks,” Adrian said. “But I’m not really upset about anything anymore.”

  It was the anymore I thought my friends would key in on. But if they did, they didn’t ask him about it. Part of me was grateful while another part of me felt uncomfortable being the only one who knew what happened to Adrian’s father.

  “We gotta tell you about yesterday,” Michael said and proceeded to describe the man he and Scott had come across in the woods, going through our stuff.

  When he finished, Peter took over and explained how we had gone to the Werewolf House looking for him and had run into Mr. Mattingly.

  Adrian looked at me. “Our English teacher? What was he doing out there?”

  “Walking his dog,” I said.

  “Did he recognize you?”

  “Of course.”

  “He’s been on the suspect list from the beginning,” Michael reminded us.

  My apprehension and suspicion about running into Mr. Mattingly yesterday afternoon had worn off. “Mr. Mattingly’s not the Piper,” I said.

  “How do you know?” Michael said. “We can’t rule anyone out. And it’s pretty fuckin’ strange that he was hanging around that old house.”

  “So were Keener and his friends, remember?”

  “Keener could be the Piper,” Michael offered.

  Peter tossed a balled-up napkin at him. “You think everyone’s the Piper.”

  Michael shrugged. “Maybe everyone is. Maybe we’re the only five people in the whole city who aren’t responsible for the deaths of all those kids.” Then his eyes narrowed. “Except you, Mazzone. If I had to guess, I’d say you’re in on it, too.”

  I
jerked a thumb at Scott. “He’s the morbid obsessive, remember?”

  Michael rubbed his chin, his gaze shifting to Scott. “Hmmm . . .”

  “We need to go to Echo Base and see why that guy was snooping around,” Scott said.

  “I’m gonna be pissed if he stole our stuff,” Michael said.

  “It’s mostly garbage we found in the woods,” Peter said. “Why would someone want to steal it?”

  Our waitress swaggered over to our booth, planted both hands flat on the table, and glared at us. “Okay, here’s the deal. You little fuckers always sit here and order sodas or share a plate of fries, then stiff me on the tip. Order some real food and pay for the goddamn service, or go haunt another dive. You get me?”

  Her brazenness shocked us all into temporary silence.

  “I’ve got . . . uh . . .” Michael fished around in his pocket. He tossed a few coins, a plastic army man, and a button that said Eat Bertha’s Mussels on the table.

  “Here,” Peter said, rolling a half-eaten package of Life Savers onto the table.

  “Oh, wait.” Scott beamed. From one pocket he produced a mix tape that was covered in stickers, and from his other pocket he took out a few Pogs.

  The waitress’s expression did not falter.

  I pulled ten dollars out of my pocket and slid it over to her.

  She eyeballed it like it was a trap, then shot her cool glance in my direction.

  “It’s all I got,” I told her.

  “Brilliant,” she said flatly, scooping up the ten-spot as well as the Life Savers before sauntering away.

  Michael examined the army man and the button. “I don’t think these are my pants,” he said after a minute.

  When we arrived at Echo Base, we were surprised to find that our stuff was pretty much how we left it. We checked the trash bags and the nylon beer cooler to see if anything was missing, but it didn’t appear as if anything was.

  Scott walked around the clearing, searching for footprints. But the ground was overgrown with bushes, weeds, and ivy, making it impossible to locate a single footprint in the dirt. Defeated, he gave up after only ten minutes.