December Park

by Ronald Malfi

  “It’s not hard. I can teach you.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. Watch.” I strummed a G-C-D progression, calling out the chords as I hit them.

  “That sounds familiar,” he said.

  “It’s just like every single song ever written. Do you see how I move my fingers?”

  “Yeah, but I couldn’t do something like that.”

  “Of course you could. It’s not hard. I taught Michael.”

  Adrian sat on the bed beside me. I slid the guitar into his lap, and it suddenly looked like an oversized novelty instrument. I reached over and finagled Adrian’s fingers onto the strings so they approximated the fingering for G major.

  “That’s a G chord,” I said, handing him the pick.

  “What’s this?” he said, pinching the pick awkwardly between two fingers and holding it up to his face.

  “It’s to help you strum. Go ahead. Try it.”

  He dragged the pick down through the strings. Some of them made stunted plunks while others rang out sourly.

  “That doesn’t sound like what you did,” he said equally as sour.

  “It just takes practice.” I got off the bed and went to my desk. As I gathered up the typed manuscript pages of my story that was slowly expanding into novel territory, Adrian continued down-strumming the guitar. “Yeah, you’re getting it.”

  “What’s that?” he said as I set the manuscript down on the bed beside him.

  “It’s the story I’m writing.”

  “You wrote this? Like . . . you made it up?”

  “Yeah.”

  He set the guitar aside. “It’s like a hundred pages. I thought you just wrote short stories and stuff for the school magazine.” He flipped through the first few pages. “What’s it about?”

  “Well, it’s sort of about what we’ve been doing all year. You know, going after the Piper. Only in the story, I call him the Chesapeake Bay Butcher. He hacks people up with a machete, like Jason Voorhees.”

  “Neat.”

  “I thought maybe we can use this story idea for your comic book.”

  “Comic books don’t have this many words.”

  “Well, maybe we can do a bunch of comic books. Like a whole series of them.”

  “Or maybe I can draw pictures for your story,” Adrian said. “I could read it and draw scenes from what you wrote.”

  “You could do that?” But I had already seen what he could do, and I knew it would be easy for him.

  “Yeah, it would be fun.”

  “Does your mom get like this a lot?” I’d asked the question before I realized what I was doing.

  “She used to do it a lot after my dad killed himself. Now it’s only every once in a while. Sometimes I lock myself in my bedroom, but last time she broke the lock on the door.” His tone sounded so easy and casual and collected that he could have been discussing box scores or the plot to the latest comic book he’d just read.

  “Does she . . . like . . . hit you?” I said, trying hard to sound equally as collected. I wasn’t sure I pulled it off.

  “Not really. Like, not on purpose. Sometimes she throws stuff and I get in the way, but that’s about it. Mostly, she just wants to hug me until she cries and falls asleep. It usually doesn’t bother me, but I didn’t feel like dealing with it tonight.” He hoisted his small shoulders and stared at the manuscript in his lap. “I guess I feel bad for her.”

  I flopped down on my bed.

  Adrian stood and put the manuscript on my desk. Then he picked up the guitar and looked at the way the strings were wound into the tuners, as if to divine some secret into how the instrument might be conquered.

  “You can stay more than one night, if you want,” I told him. “Like, if you need to.”

  “Thanks. But just tonight should be fine. She’ll be okay by tomorrow.” He propped the guitar against the wall.

  “Come on,” I said, rolling off the bed. “I’ll get you some clean clothes and show you where the shower is.”

  We stayed awake for hours that night, side by side in my small bed, telling ghost stories and hypothesizing about the Piper. The more we talked about the Piper, the less he seemed like Mr. Mattingly. The less he seemed to be real at all. And in that cold, black witching hour, it was almost possible to convince ourselves that we had made him up and that he was no different than the bogeymen we saw on the big screen at the Juniper Theater.

  I fell asleep with images of the Piper’s unknown face flashing through my subconscious while in real life the Piper was taking his next victim.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The Brubaker Girl

  The circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Tori Brubaker echoed those of William Demorest and Jeffrey Connor in that she wasn’t known to have gone missing until nearly a full day later.

  This was because fifteen-year-old Tori had lied to her parents about spending the night at her friend Madeline Probst’s house. In reality, she had planned on spending the evening with her seventeen-year-old boyfriend, Zach Garrison, because his folks were out of town. But Zach and Tori got into an argument, and Tori walked home along the banks of the Magothy River at some point in the night. What happened after that has been left to speculation.

  Police were dispatched. Zach’s parents were contacted and hurried home, cutting their vacation short, so they could be present when the police questioned Zach. In the meantime, the surrounding woods and the banks of the river were searched. One of Tori Brubaker’s slip-on shoes was discovered in the mud along the river. Fears mounted.

  Detectives questioned Zach Garrison over and over again (and I believe my father questioned him, too). Ultimately, he was released into the custody of his petrified parents. There was videotape of Zach coming out of the police station with his head down, his parents hurrying him down the sidewalk toward the family car.

  Interim Chief of Police Michael Solano gave a press conference at the Cape while divers dredged the marrow-colored waters of the Magothy and the Shallows. Though it was a horrifying sight, no one actually believed that Tori Brubaker had drowned.

  “Tori Brubaker was last seen walking through the woods toward the river, presumably toward home.” Solano was dark and tight jawed and looked somewhat cunning in his dark suit, unlike his predecessor, Barber, who was a nervous-looking individual possessing the ruddy, gin-blossomed complexion of a career alcoholic. “While nothing has been ruled out at this point, we are certainly aware of the concerns of this community, and we will close no doors on any possible leads until they have been exhausted to my personal satisfaction.”

  For a moment, my father was visible in the background of the televised broadcast, a slender, dark-suited man speaking with one of the uniformed police officers on the beach.

  Tori Brubaker’s body was not recovered. Her name was added to the list of missing children, and her parents were seen on TV begging futilely for the safe return of their beloved daughter. It was terribly reminiscent of Rebecca Ransom’s televised pleas.

  Speculation abounded throughout the media. What had caused the brief respite in abductions only to have them start up again, with the Holt boy and the Brubaker girl vanishing within two weeks of each other?

  Like some great forest beastie, I imagined the Piper hibernating throughout the long, cold winter, tucked away in an underground burrow far below the panicked streets of my hometown, gnawing on the bones of Aaron Ransom, Bethany Frost, and the rest. Other suppositions were more practical: Scott suggested that perhaps the Piper didn’t want to leave footprints behind in the snow. Regardless of the reason, the Piper hadn’t moved on. He had been hiding among us all along.

  Two days later, a torrential downpour kept us holed up like prisoners in our homes. The storm had also made things difficult for those involved in the search for Brubaker, and there was concern that if the girl had drowned, it was possible the storm had washed her body out to the bay by now. Regardless, her body was not recovered from the river, and the search ultimately ma
de its way out into the open gray waters of the Chesapeake Bay.

  Adrian had gotten roped into doing some chores for his mom, Michael was still in summer school, and Scott was held hostage on a family outing, so it was just Peter and me that afternoon in the woods, chucking rocks into the flooded creek and smoking cigarettes. The dynamo-powered radio was wedged into the V of a maple tree, and the sounds of Springsteen singing “No Surrender” made us both feel like we were wrapped in some invisible blanket of comfort.

  “You think a person could actually die from fear?” he asked, staring into the woods and watching the rainwater drip off the sagging green leaves. “Like, have a heart attack or whack themselves out because they’re so scared of something?”

  “I don’t know. I guess maybe it’s possible.”

  “You used to get letters from Charles when he was overseas, right?”

  “Yeah.” It was weird hearing him bring up Charles. I couldn’t remember my brother coming up in a conversation among my friends since the funeral.

  “He ever mention being scared?”

  “No. He mostly talked about the people in his squad or platoon or whatever you call it and the people from the villages they went to.”

  “Oh.” Peter sounded disappointed.

  “Also, he talked about home a lot. He kept telling me not to grow up too fast like he did, even though that’s all Dad ever seemed to want me to do. He kept saying he wished he could stay young forever, but he never realized that was his wish until he was too old and it was too late.”

  I could tell by his silence that he wanted to ask me more questions about Charles but didn’t know how. I allowed him the silence because I didn’t like to talk too much about Charles, either.

  After a long while, Peter said, “My sister’s scared.”

  “About what happened to Tori Brubaker?”

  “About all of it. She went to Cape Middle School with Howie Holt, and she’s friends with Tori’s sister. She was crying last night. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “There’s nothing you can do,” I told him.

  “Yeah, that’s just it. I’m completely helpless. My sister’s scared shitless and I can’t do a damned thing.”

  It occurred to me that what had been happening not only affected the victims and their families, but it affected every man, woman, and child who walked the streets of Harting Farms, smiling in the daylight, cowering at night. It affected the police, who had been turned into a joke by the press. It affected my friends and me because we had made it something important and convinced ourselves that we were the only ones who could end it. Somehow we had persuaded ourselves that we needed this. That it was ours.

  “Can you do something stupid for me?” Peter said.

  “You know it.”

  “Promise me we’re on the right track and that we’ll end this thing. Promise me, Angie.”

  “I promise,” I said. Then repeated it: “I promise.”

  Picking up a line from the Springsteen song on the radio, Peter sang, “No retreat, baby, no surrender.”

  When I got home, I found that morning’s edition of the Caller on the kitchen table. It was unfolded, and the smiling faces of the missing kids took up the entire front page. The bold headline asked simply What Is Going On?

  Listed, in order of their disappearance—

  Demorest, William

  Connor, Jeffrey

  Frost, Bethany

  Cole, Courtney

  Ransom, Aaron

  Holt, Howard

  Brubaker, Tori

  The article recapped each teenager’s disappearance in a gruesome highlight reel. The summaries were continued on the next page, along with an eighth photo of a teenage boy with feathered brown hair and a devious smile, which was actually more of a smirk. I didn’t realize who the boy was until I scanned the headline that accompanied the photo:

  Could Missing Glenrock Boy Be Piper’s First?

  What Michael had found out from Tommy Orent was apparently true: Jason Hughes had gone missing last June, and since no one was looking for a serial abductor back then—and because Hughes had a penchant for running away—it was assumed he had taken off on his own accord. When the boy didn’t return after a week, Glenrock police searched the surrounding areas and interviewed Hughes’s friends. If the Glenrock PD ever made it to Harting Farms to conduct these interviews, the article did not say. Neither had Tommy Orent.

  When I heard my father’s sedan pull into the driveway, I refolded the newspaper and placed it back on the table, as if I’d never touched it. As if I’d been doing something wrong.

  While dragging the trash cans to the curb after dinner, I heard my dad talking on the phone.

  I went over to the open kitchen window and crouched beneath it, eavesdropping. It was a work call; I could tell by the tone of my father’s voice. Much of what he said was difficult to hear, but I managed to glean what may have been the most important bit of information to date in the investigation into the missing teenagers: the cops had found what they believed to be the Piper’s footprints in the mud down by the river.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The Abandoned Railway Depot (Part One)

  On a cool afternoon near the end of June, Peter and I biked down Farrington Road, an unused and forgotten strip of asphalt that eventually dead-ended at the defunct railway depot.

  Folded up in the back pocket of my shorts was the recent article about Jason Hughes from the Caller. Peter and I planned to see what we could learn about his disappearance. If Hughes had been the Piper’s first victim, then there was a pretty good chance he had run into the Piper on the day he had come into town to buy cigarettes for Tommy Orent and his friends. It was possible that the folks at Lucky’s might have seen something. Since the police had never spoken with Orent or his buddies, they might not know that Hughes had been out this way the day he disappeared. If that was true, our intel put us one step ahead of the police.

  It was a long ride to Lucky’s, and we had wanted to leave earlier, but I’d spent the morning at Secondhand Thrift, organizing Callibaugh’s shelves as part of my new summer job. In the short time I’d been there, I had already managed to knock over a display case, punch in the wrong digits on the security alarm, and clog the ancient-looking toilet.

  Before we reached the outskirts of town, we spotted the tar paper shack that was Lucky’s Sundries, so we cut through the woods and came out on the winding B&A bike path. Lucky’s sat in a gravel parking lot between the bike path and the road, its back lot corralled within a scrim of spindly trees. With its slouching placard over the entranceway that read Lucky’s Sundries in painted red script and its warped wraparound porch complete with hitching posts, it looked like something out of an old John Wayne western. Beneath the placard, some wit had spray-painted the phrase B-more girls give Natty Boh jobs.

  Peter and I propped our bikes against one of the posts and went inside. A handful of men in blue jeans and sleeveless T-shirts hung around by the register, one leaning on the countertop while the others sat in canvas-backed folding chairs. They glanced at us: a jigsaw of wiry beards stained piss yellow from chewing tobacco and swarthy black eyes crowded beneath the creased bills of camouflage baseball hats. On the wall above the men’s heads, and matching their vacuous expressions, taxidermy animals stared down at us. The air was clotted with cigarette smoke and the headier stench of unwashed bodies.

  Peter and I slipped down the first aisle, feigning interest in a row of toilet paper. With the possible exception of Secondhand Thrift, never in my life had I seen such a confused assortment of items jammed together in one store—household items, camping gear, auto parts, canned goods, cheap toys, a rack of clothing that looked like it had been rejected from the Salvation Army. There was even a whole shelf dedicated to pet products, where small bored-looking fish floated in plastic cups.

  “Check it out,” Peter whispered, snagging a copy of Penthouse from a nearby magazine rack. Normally pornographic magazines were packaged in cello
phane, but this one was loose, and Peter wasted no time flipping it open to the centerfold. His eyes bugged out comically, and then he turned the magazine around so I could see the tri-panel photo of a nude woman with breasts like cantaloupes and a stripe of dark pubic hair.

  When someone cleared his throat farther down the aisle, Peter nearly dropped the magazine.

  “He’p you boys?” a man drawled. He was potbellied, with a wide, whiskered face and hands like clubs. There were fish silk-screened to the front of his T-shirt.

  “Uh, we were looking for someone,” I uttered while Peter stuffed the magazine back on the rack.

  “Yeah? Like who?”

  I produced the newspaper article from my back pocket and handed it to the man. “He’s a friend of ours but he disappeared.”

  A lump formed against the inside of the man’s cheek, either from his tongue or a ball of chewing tobacco. “Been happenin’ a lot lately.”

  “We thought maybe you might have seen him,” I said.

  A nerve jumped in the man’s right eyelid. “How would I have seen him?”

  “He used to come here and buy cigarettes,” I said.

  The man gazed down at the paper. Then he thrust it back at me. “Not this boy. Too young.”

  “Well, maybe you’ve just seen him around the store,” I said. “This would have been around last June when he—”

  “I ain’t never seen this boy.”

  “Well, I mean, he sometimes—”

  “Ain’t sold no smokes to a kid that young.” It sounded like there were stones rolling around in his throat. “Ain’t let no underage boys come in this store.” His eyes narrowed. “Boys like you.”

  “They shoplift,” one of the man’s cronies shouted, evidently eavesdropping on our conversation.

  “We’re not shoplifters,” I said.

  “Maybe you boys should get on now,” said the man.