The Boy in the Park: The gripping psychological thriller with a shocking twist

by A J Grayson

  It’s beneath a leaf; just an edge, a corner. I reach down to grab at it with muddied fingernails. The leaf falls away.

  A slip of paper. Printed. A receipt.

  A receipt.

  I look over its contents. The words sink into my understanding, the shock coming all at once.

  And now I know the boy is talking to me.

  15

  Taped Recording Cassette #021D

  Interviewer: P. Lavrentis

  ‘What the hell are you talking about, “the boy”?’ Joseph’s voice emerges from the speakers the instant the play button is pressed and the back side of the cassette rotates into motion.

  ‘You promised me you would think before you answered,’ Pauline replies. ‘Try to control your anger. Please, think about the question.’

  The sounds of agitated fidgeting: plastic chairs bending, feet scraping and tapping over a concrete floor. Gruff breath.

  ‘I don’t need to think. I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I want you to reflect again, Joseph, on what I told you before. About the person you killed.’

  ‘My wife,’ Joseph quickly recollects.

  ‘That’s what you’ve said. But I want you to go back in your mind. Take full account of what I’ve told you.’

  It is hard, listening again to the circuitous route Pauline had had to take with him. But she’d known then, and remains certain now, that it was the right one. Too direct a path, and the usual roadblocks would stop everything.

  On the recording, Joseph senses the circular path, too.

  ‘Your nonsense about my marriage,’ he says, harking back to Pauline’s earlier words. ‘The lies you want me to accept, right when I’m finally ready to tell you the truth.’

  ‘The fact that you’ve never been married, Joseph. That you’ve never had a wife. I want you to think about that, then look back again at the killing.’

  Silence.

  ‘Thinking doesn’t change what happened.’

  Pauline’s voice is a shade more tender. ‘No, but it can change how we remember what happened. What actions we’ve taken.’

  ‘It’s like you said before, killing is traumatic. You don’t forget those things. My memories are fresh. It happened exactly like I told you it happened, and you’ve got to accept that and help us all figure out what’s supposed to happen next.’

  ‘We can’t really do that, Joseph,’ she answers, ‘until you’re able to come to grips with some things that so far you’re refusing to accept.’ Firmness. Necessary, but delivered without too sharp an edge.

  ‘I’m not refusing anything,’ he answers defiantly.

  ‘Perhaps not refusing, no. Maybe that was the wrong word. But you have, as yet, been unable to enter into the reality of your circumstances.’

  ‘You’re playing mind games again.’

  The briefest hesitation. Pauline had faced a dozen choices, at that moment, as to how to react to his loaded choice of words. ‘It’s funny you should phrase it like that, Joseph. What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean you’re messing with my head. That’s all this is. Messing with my head and playing games.’

  ‘Tell me about the boy.’ The command is abrupt. Pauline’s ability to shift instantly between softness and firmness is a tool she’s honed just as finely as the investigators whose work generally led people here.

  ‘I don’t know a boy!’ Joseph shouts. ‘Why the hell do you keep talking about a boy?’

  ‘The boy who was so wounded, so brutalized.’ Pauline’s words are strong, evocative.

  Joseph snorts: the sound of a staggered, shocked intake of breath.

  ‘Wait, you’re suggesting … you’re asking …’ His breathing comes in sudden, jerking heaves. ‘Fuck you! I would never kill a child! I’d never want to kill a child! You’re a hell of a lot sicker than I’d imagined. And you’re supposed to be the one here to help!’

  ‘You did kill him, Joseph. That’s really the point, isn’t it?’

  ‘Listen here, I don’t have to take this—’

  ‘Everything else, all the other anger, the other actions, all your rage. They ultimately lay behind your killing that child, didn’t they, Joseph?’

  ‘You’re a fu—’

  ‘They soaked him in blood, Joseph. They soaked that little boy in blood, and he died. Isn’t that what really happened? Isn’t that what you really want to tell me?’

  There is a sound of metal slamming violently into concrete: a table upturned and thrown into a wall. A brief rattle of plastic – of the recorder crashing to the floor.

  The cassette ends.

  16

  Monday Afternoon

  The receipt is for something that can only relate to my current predicament. Neatly printed, though smudged under a bit of forest-floor grime, are the words: ‘Child’s Juice Box – $3.95.’

  Child’s juice box. I know – I rationally, intellectually know – that other children drink from juice boxes, that this isn’t the exclusive prerogative of the boy I’ve watched by the water (and whom I’ve never seen drink anything, from a box or otherwise). And yet something in me screams out, Dylan, it’s his. The boy’s. He left it for you!

  I can’t explain the feelings that come into one’s head when absolute certainty collides there, somewhere in the frontal cortex, with absolute doubt. They don’t always make rational sense. They don’t have to. They connect As to Bs in ways that otherwise might not occur to you. And they come with a powerful, assaulting force.

  I find myself leaning on the boy’s stick now, rather than simply holding it, as these feelings course through me. The stick bends beneath my weight – it’s a boy’s stick, it isn’t meant for supporting grown men. But I need a support, something to prop me up and reassert firm reality in this surreal moment when the whole world feels monumentally stranger than it did a few seconds before. Than it ever had since I first saw him, all those months ago, and every day since. Week after week. Like clockwork.

  I remember that early on I’d found his presence increasingly distracting. To be frank, he was a little creepy. I mean, what sort of boy hikes to an inner-city pond just to stand by the water and stare at it? Maybe he’s … I don’t know what the acceptable word is these days. Slow? Simple? I’m not sure forty-six is yet old enough for me to have a ‘my day’, but I still feel that ‘in my day’ children didn’t behave like that. I imagine my childhood to have been filled with more rambunctiousness and tomfoolery (two very good, poetic words) than slow, deliberative pondering by ponds.

  The kid certainly has never been quick, in the most literal of terms. I can’t think I’ve ever seen him move, not more than to step out of the foliage; then, some time later, back into it. No playful motions in between. Not up until the events of these past days.

  Creepy.

  But I can’t be too weirded out by the boy. This is San Francisco. If it isn’t creepy and strange, it doesn’t belong here. We send that sort of thing over to Berkeley where they can pretend it’s rebellious. Here, we live in the great modern-day paradox in which the odder a thing is, the more we all join together in pretending it’s absolutely, unremarkably normal. You want to surgically introduce plastic inserts into your tattooed head so you develop ridges over your scalp like a lizard? We have a shop for that (actually, many; and we’ve conveniently assembled them all together over in the sad remains of Haight-Ashbury, where poetry once had a Mecca). You want to run your earphone cable through your six nose rings in a criss-cross, shoelace pattern? Why not? It’s hardly that radical nowadays, and you’ve got to store that cable somewhere. We would have a nudist beach if that wasn’t terribly passé and Victorian. We do, however, have men who stand naked at stoplights in the Castro, performing aerobics as police officers drive casually by and ignore this particular form of free-thinking personal self-expression. And we have a whole series of salons that offer ‘Asian Face Slapping’ as a rejuvenating health option – a fact I haven’t even had to make up, though every time I walk
by one of the signs (‘Face Slapping: $45’) I think I’ve lost my marbles.

  So in the bigger picture of things, a boy who spends a few minutes each day staring blankly at the water isn’t that strange. Maybe he comes here for the same reason I do. To not see all that – even for just a few moments. To find a scene of peace, where normal is what water does when left alone. Lapping quietly, without slapping anything.

  But why have I never been able to see his face? Why does he always stand just there, where shadow obscures, where the sun doesn’t reach?

  And when I ask these questions, why can’t I breathe?

  I stare at the receipt again. It’s printed on the usual, flimsy paper. The ink is an off-blue, almost purple, with a faint stripe of pink along one edge indicating that it had come somewhere near the end of the roll. The leaf under which it was resting has left a few speckles of sap that make the paper stick to my hand, and the dirt from my skin smudges it further with every motion of my fingers.

  But I can read the text with its words that are so strangely cataclysmic. Child’s Juice Box – $3.95.

  And then I notice the date. Yesterday. I check my phone just to be sure, but yes, the date printed on the date is yesterday’s. The time, 10.44 a.m.

  I move my thumb. The name of the shop is all in caps: MO’S MARKET. And there, just beneath it – yes. I smudge away the dirt. It’s what I think it is. A token.

  An address.

  The name of a town.

  17

  The Boy in the Park, Stanza 3

  Little boy weeping, blood on your arm

  Trees bow and hollow;

  The games we sing, the songs

  we play—

  The crying wind, the fighting day.

  The waters burn, the quiet flees

  The blood on your arm …

  The blood on your arm …

  18

  Monday Evening

  The name of the town printed on the receipt is Redding, California, and it’s not a place with which I have any direct familiarity. I’m gazing over its statistics on the Internet, now, trying to change that. The receipt compels me. I feel that prompt learning is necessary.

  The town sits 220 miles north of San Francisco, about a four-hour drive if one pushes on the pedal a little more than one should. Nothing spectacular, nothing eminent or noteworthy, at least that I can make out online. A strip of cheap hotels alongside the interstate (Super 8s, Red Lions, Ramadas, that sort of thing), the requisite town historical museum. Some connection to old railways and older mining. It looks like any one of a hundred towns in the countryside, out where urban sprawl and the gated communities of plastic suburbia give way to the rustic farm towns of which California was once made up, and in most places still is. The sort of place anyone might call home. Anyone, that is, who falls into that modern-day ‘Western’ mix of driving a pickup truck and wearing leather boots, but still sipping a Starbucks latte while talking into a smartphone. God, I love country folk. Too old-world for the nonsense of big city livin’ – a fact routinely shared on what they call ‘social media’ while walking between a saddle store and an organic soap supplier.

  I’ve already scanned the online edition of the local Redding paper, the Redding Record Searchlight, for any mention of a missing child. Nothing. The police station’s website has two notices of recent thefts – one of a car, the other of something called a ‘Self-Propelled Broadcast Seeder’, which I take to be some kind of farm equipment. I guess people will steal anything. But nothing about a child. No abductions. No losses. No notices from worried parents.

  And it’s a bit discouraging that Google Maps has no named listing for Mo’s Market in Redding. I wasn’t expecting that. But I type in the address from the receipt and a pin drops onto a corner about a mile from the town centre, so at least the address is valid. I switch the view from map to satellite mode. The resolution is grainy; Redding apparently isn’t the kind of place that warrants the higher resolution optics of a Los Angeles or a London. But the pixellated, rough outlines are clear enough. The intersecting streets look fairly wide. A residential neighbourhood. Yes, the building at the corner does look like it might be a shop.

  It happens. I feel a strange charge within me. An impulse, someone might say, though it’s more focused than that. A drive. Yes, a compelling drive, almost like a silent, felt command.

  I look down at my fingers. They’ve moved the trackpad cursor. They’re typing. Up on the monitor I see a small box emerge above the pin for Mo’s Market’s address, and in the ‘Directions To Here, From:’ field characters are appearing.

  6414 Gales Road, Diamond Heights, CA.

  I’m typing my address.

  But I suddenly have to stop. I don’t get to my zip code. A pain overtakes me – dramatic, immediate, unexpected. My left hand seizes up, my fingers agonizing with every motion. I can’t explain it. I would think heart attack, but it’s the wrong kind of pain. I’ve been told the signal of The Coming Doom is a deep, core pain radiating out to a limb. This isn’t that. It’s as if my arm is raw. Like it’s been tenderized, beaten, scraped.

  I reach my other hand over to rub at the sore flesh, but the instant my fingers make contact with the fabric of my shirtsleeve I let out an agonized yelp. The pain is magnified a thousandfold.

  The last thing I concretely remember is peering down and seeing the bloody fingerprints. Three of them, where three fingers of my right hand had tried to touch my arm. The blood is not from my fingertips; it does not lie atop the cloth. It is seeping up from underneath. As my vision begins to blur I move my focus to the cuff of my sleeve. There is blood there, too, dripping out from the cross-stitched hem, falling in crimson drops onto my keyboard.

  It glistens strangely in my living-room light, wet and raw. The blood on my arm.

  The blood on my arm …

  REDDING

  19

  Wednesday

  Redding is as unimpressive in the first person as it is on the Internet. Not to speak ill of a fine, small town. I’ve been here the better part of a day and not been treated poorly. The waitresses in the little dive I found for lunch were friendly, and service at the front desk of the Ramada has been unremarkable, which is not a bad thing to say for the modern-day service industry. I mean it as the compliment it is.

  It’s taken me nearly the full day to acclimatize. I’m a city boy, used to the urban hills and general melee of San Francisco. As much as I crave the quiet and solitude of my park, I confess it’s comforting to hear the hum of traffic beyond it, just out of sight. To know that the great mass of civilization is there, just at arm’s length, even if I’d rather not interact directly with any of it.

  It’s something different to find oneself in a farming town. Here it’s the chatter of a road or a shop that’s the oasis, the something different in the midst of a vast landscape of disquieting quietude. The earthy silence of life outside the city is all-enveloping, combatted by open-windowed driving in trucks with radios booming at twice the volume any ears could actually manage pleasurably. I’m convinced the loudness isn’t for pleasure; it’s for warding off the silence of the fields, the hills, the pastures that spread out indefinitely into the distance. The silence that sounds rather romantic in literature, but which haunts city folk, and maybe even country folk, more than they’d like to admit.

  But apart from settling in, my first day has been mostly wasted. I arrived late-afternoon after a lengthy drive through the flats that emerge an hour north of the Bay and continue almost to the Oregon border, where suddenly the mountains reemerge in a display of spectacular natural showmanship. Redding sits right at the conjunction of these two. Stare south and it’s flat as far as your eye can gaze. Turn north and the earth rises up in great heaves towards heaven, as if a tall enough peak could pierce the sky and cause paradise to sag a little closer to earth.

  I found my hotel quickly enough – I’d booked the room in advance, on the road, from my phone. There’s an app for that, and a map that led me rig
ht to it. I’d picked one on the edge of town, which in retrospect was a mistake. When I entered my room for a quick nap after the long drive it was like entering solitary confinement. Sensory deprivation. I couldn’t hear anything; no traffic, no arguing vendors’ voices. Nothing. It was overwhelming and immediately oppressing. I clicked on the television to compensate – just a little background noise would do me – but the help it provided was minimal. Funny that I so often belittle the fakery of city talk and chatter, but when those things themselves are faked, they fail to satisfy.

  I barely slept, though I needed the rest. When finally I shot up off the plaid bedspread (just who is it who picks the patterns for cheap hotel linens?), tired of ‘resting’, it was too late to do much of what I’d come here to do.

  As to that: I can’t fully explain why I’m here. The moment I saw the receipt, the name of this town, something inside took over. I had to take the next step. And then, from the second the blue line connecting Diamond Heights and Redding appeared on my screen, I knew it would be the route I was following. I knew I wanted to see what lay at the end.

  I knew it would relate to the boy.

  I feel foolish thinking like this, here and now. There is nothing here, and there’s no real reason I should be here, rather than home. Hundreds of people pass through my park every day; any one of them could have dropped that receipt. It’s not a real clue. And for his part, the boy is surely a San Franciscan. I’ve seen him there, in the city, every day for a year and a half. That he should have any connection to this place is to take one piece of evidence in defiance of all others. I’m becoming a fool.