The Boy in the Park: The gripping psychological thriller with a shocking twist
Page 9
So I call up the map on my phone, find my way to the roads that ring the town and start this newly conceived phase of my investigation. I have a renewed sense of optimism about me. There are houses out here – farmhouses, remote houses, some trailers – set at a distance from the heart of this small outpost of civilization. The kinds of places where kids play in nature, where not washing your clothes for days doesn’t set you at odds with neighbours. Where there aren’t neighbours, at least not the kind it doesn’t take deliberate travel to visit.
These are the kinds of places such a boy would live. If I’m going to find him, it’s going to be out here.
23
The Boy in the Park, Stanza 4
A lingering stain
When the play is gone;
A home unkept, unwanted.
Where fire burns at timber’s edge,
Stretch townsfolk’s grasp
past neighbour’s reach –
Where games are ended
And rage alone can find you.
24
Thursday Afternoon
I’ve been driving in loops and circles for hours. It’s a stop-start kind of game. I can’t just pull up to houses, remote on the outskirts of town, and go knocking on doors. ‘Hey, have you got a kid? About this tall? Wears overalls?’
Why the fuck do you want to know? would probably be the nicest of the answers I’d receive. There would probably be fists. Or guns.
So I’m forced to take a different approach. Some of the houses I see, off on their own little plots outside Redding, aren’t candidates. They just look wrong. The sorts of places that wouldn’t have children at all, or where I can immediately see a different lifestyle in evidence than the sort this boy evokes in me (and I’ve learned that not all small-town country homes are dumps: some of these are remote palaces. But this boy doesn’t come from a palace).
When I spot a house that has the right balance of run-downness, with signs of childhood presence like a swing set or some overturned toys in the yard, I park at a good distance and wait. Better to watch and wait than confront, though this takes time. Suddenly I’m happy I have my multi-day booking at the Ramada. Two days might not even be enough.
Sometimes the wait is brief. I parked at a distance from a double-wide trailer home as my first stop: a plastic jungle gym crumpling beside it and a massive trampoline behind. I was there only twenty minutes before a man emerged, kissed his wife tenderly on the add-on wooden porch before driving away, presumably to work. Two minutes later, three small girls emerged. They wore flowered summer dresses and made for the trampoline en masse. The mother followed a few seconds later, a glass of something in her hand, and took up a perch on a folding chair to watch them play. Pretty little family. But no boys.
Sometimes the wait is much longer. My third stop this afternoon had real potential. A farm-style house, the kind with a wrap-around covered porch and a hanging bench swing. A large maple tree overhangs the front yard, and there’s even a tyre hanging from one of its sturdier branches. I could almost feel my anticipation rising.
I sat in my car a good 500 yards down the road for over two hours, waiting for any signs of life. I was just about to give up and leave when a yellow school bus emerged from a bend behind me on the road and overtook my parked location. I glanced at my watch and saw the time was 4.11 p.m. – the right sort of time for a school bus to be returning children home.
This one stopped in front of the perfect house, a red STOP sign swinging out into the centre lane from a hinge so squeaky I could hear it from my car, and out the kerbside door emerged two girls and a boy. I lurched forward in my seat, straining to see. He was the right height, the right general build. My pulse sped up. But just as fast as it came, hope vanished. This boy’s hair was a dark black, sprouting out from beneath a baseball cap.
The boy does not have black hair.
I waited until they had gone inside, then started my engine and drove off. The adrenalin spike was making my skin itchy, but the close encounter was enough to have me riveted. I needed to find another house.
I’m parked now beside a large, unploughed field. It’s mostly dirt, a few weeds staking their claim along the gentle ridges that are the lingering remains of its last planted season. I think I remember that farmers allow fields to lie fallow every so often, to gather back minerals depleted from previous plantings and make themselves ready for their next working run. This must be one of those fallow fields. I can’t help but make a poet’s mental note, that ‘fallow fields’ sounds romantic and beautiful, but in reality they’re ugly things: dust patches with weeds that look uncared-for and unloved.
I’ve positioned my car next to one, however, because just down the road, sitting adjacent to this field in a grassy patch between it and the fully planted field beyond, is another candidate house. Not as picture perfect as the last one (there is no porch here, but there are still play things in the yard), though definitely a possibility.
I’ve been here for forty-five minutes. The light is starting to turn that slanted orange colour that precedes sunset, making all the greens seem a little more intense, the browns rusty and in general the whole earth more vivid. I imagine that I have only another twenty minutes before the sun goes down, and after that less than fifteen before things go truly dark. Thirty-five minutes in total before I have to write off this activity until tomorrow.
I’m doing these mental computations when I notice that bending my fingers (embarrassingly, I still use them to count when doing up sums) is causing me pain. That it’s causing me too much pain is what kicks the adrenalin into gear once again. Another blast of it. I’m almost getting used to the sour taste in my mouth.
The pain is fierce, intense, shooting through my arm.
I’m panic-stricken even before I swivel my head to look at the arm. It’s the right, not the left one that bothered me before. I can’t see anything, but my eyes are starting to water from the agony. With my other hand I undo the button at the cuff and roll up the sleeve – and then I see why.
My right arm is covered in a massive, black bruise. It’s as if my flesh has been replaced by a swirl of mottled, vanquished skin that’s turned the colours of bleakest night-time. I try to move my wrist, to reposition my arm, but the agony is so fierce I let out a cry and freeze before I move another inch.
The blood comes to my attention a second later. My left arm, the same as two days ago. Two days ago in what I’d convinced myself was a bad dream. It’s seeping out of the cuff of my sleeve again, sponging its way through the cloth all the way up to my elbow. Dark, crimson. I can smell it, metallic and pungent. It drips down onto my lap. My eyes are watering from the grief, both arms immobile. I am terrorized.
And I look up, and it’s him. My vision is blurry, but it’s him. Not at the house I’ve been scoping out, but on the hilltop to the right, outside my passenger-side window, beyond the fallow field. It’s the boy, standing in his overalls and his white shirt. His hair is dancing in the breeze, shimmering gold in the evening light.
25
Thursday
Despite my agony, my skin freezes the instant I see him. I can’t believe it; as much as I’ve been hoping to chase down his trail, actual sight of the boy, here, so far from the park, seems momentarily impossible. It simply cannot be. But his features are unmistakeable: the same clothes. The same dishevelled hair.
I cannot restrain the explosion that takes place in my mind as I catch sight of him. The eruption of emotions is automatic, outside my control. Apart from the day I saw him abducted, there has been only one other occasion on which the sight of the boy truly troubled me – horrified me. In this instant, as it horrifies me again, my mind launches back to that place, sixteen months ago. The one time I’d been afraid of the boy.
I had that day completed a poem, so there was a special joy I’d carried with me into the park. I wrote out the final stanzas in the early morning; it was as if the last verses, the verses I’d been striving so hard to locate over the previ
ous weeks, had woken me up and called me to attention. It was that intense. Creativity is sometimes like that: a force that emerges from within a person, like an erupting volcano or exploding geyser, rather than some well-honed skill that we polish and sharpen. The last lines of my poem burst out of me, out of nowhere, and I managed to do all that a poet really ever needs to do: be there to catch them and translate them onto the page.
I don’t often finish poems. I’ve always found them easier to begin than to conclude, and I’ve imagined that this is because poems are generally so emotional, and emotion never really ends, does it? It’s far easier to speak of a glimmering moment of love, a chance encounter with beauty, than it is to wrap these things up nicely with a little bow, a final full stop and an implied ‘The End’. Maybe authors of stories and books have an easier time coming up with endings, but the vast majority of my poetry is the unfinished sort. Were I ever to sell out and publish any of what I’ve written, it would be under the title Unfinished Works. I decided on this some time ago. It’s a title that’s poetic in its own right, with the added benefit of being accurate.
But this tendency makes actually completing a poem, arriving at its ultimate and final stanza, something that brings me a real and unusual joy. I knew it wasn’t true, but I was able to convince myself that the sun was shining brighter that day because of it. The ducks in the park were swimming more merrily. The breeze was of exactly the right strength, direction and temperature. The birdsong was more symphonic. That is what finishing a poem will do to you.
I hadn’t even brought my notebook with me to my bench. What would have been the point? I wasn’t going to start in on a new poem so soon after reaching such a milestone, and I certainly didn’t need my pages to remember the one I’d just finished. All poems are inscribed first and forever on the poet’s heart. The version on the page is merely for other people.
There were plenty of them – people – around my pond that day. There usually are on a good, sunny day; though I was perfectly willing to imagine they were also there to rejoice with me, with my accomplishment. But there was, of course, only one person with whom I really wanted to celebrate. The little boy, who for two months had been my companion at this spot. My lunchtime partner in the beauty of that secret place. Maybe he’s home-schooled; that’s the only reason I could think that he would have such predictable lunchtime freedom, the ability to come to the park each day to relax. Good parents, the kind that provide for their children like that.
I wanted to think he would be pleased for me, with me, at the day’s poetic marker. Of course we’d never spoken, so this was a silly wish. But we were connected by the pond, and the pond stirs up so many of my poems. I like to think there’s a bond.
As he emerged from the brush at his usual spot, I felt a smile edging its way onto my face. Of course he’d come, like always, and of course I was pleased to see him.
He moved to the water’s edge. He planted the tip of his stick in the water.
I’ve done it, I mentally willed him to hear. I’ve finished my poem. It’s a good day.
And this was where things went wrong. This is where the unexpected happened – and on my good day.
The boy did what he never does: he turned to face me squarely. He was in the shadows, as always (the sun never seems to shine in that little cove of the pond), and I could not directly make out his expression, but I could sense his anger. He was overwhelmingly, infuriatingly, angry. Rage broiled within him. I don’t know how I knew this, it was more a feeling than an observation. But his shoulders shook, his body seemed almost to vibrate. And then he lifted his stick out of the pond, held it perpendicularly in front of him with both hands and raised a knee. Before I could shout out to stop him, he slammed the stick down over his knee. It broke in half with a crack that echoed over the water. He held up both halves, high above his head. I could feel his fury, his defiance.
He threw the remains of his stick into the pond. Its glassy top became a storm. The ducks fluttered and kicked away from the disturbance. And the boy turned and stormed off into the woods.
I was left alone, my sense of accomplishment as broken as the stick and my peace as vanished as the boy himself.
And I was afraid.
26
Thursday
I am afraid of the boy now, too – the way he’s suddenly appeared, there on the hilltop. I’m frightened and I’m angry, still in my own agony. But then, in an instant, I forget my own pain, my own inexplicable injuries in the car. I forget them because there, on his hilltop, I can see that the boy still bears his own marks. The marks that first led me after him. There is still the blood on his one arm, the bruise on the other; and though his face is a blur, his eyes concealed, I can still see the swelling on his cheek. The boy who had once turned from me in anger is beckoning me now, calling out to me in his silence.
I can barely breathe. This isn’t possible. I don’t understand what I’m—
But I can’t finish. My eyes have fallen back to my arms, suspended in pain over my lap, but the signs of torment are gone. There is no bruise above my right hand, in place of the rolled-up sleeve. There is no blood on my left – not at the cuff, not seeping through the fabric, not dripping onto my trousers. I curl back my fingers to check my nails, just to be sure, but they’re clean. I can smell the cheap soap from the hotel shower, still fragrant, overperfumed on my skin.
I have no pain as I wiggle my fingers. I don’t understand what is happening. For an instant, I feel completely lost. Without grounding.
But I look back up. The boy is still on the hilltop. That is something I can understand. Resolve overtakes me and I grab at my car door. I’m shaking with nerves, so I have to try for it twice before I get a good grip, pull the lever and thrust it open. I forget my seat belt is still fastened, and nearly choke as I try to lunge out from beneath its restraint. Shit! I mutter the profanity to myself and fumble for the plastic release. A second later I’m standing outside, the door wide open, praying deeply within: Don’t be gone! Don’t be gone!
He isn’t gone. I look up to the top of the hill on the far side of the unploughed field, and the boy is still there. He’s waiting.
I lurch forward, and for an instant I’m startled by my own action. I’m being driven, that’s how it feels – like someone else is at the helm of my craft. But I know it’s just instinct: Go! Follow! My elusive prey (God forbid, calling a child ‘prey’) is there, in the distance. Don’t lose him!
I start to walk towards the hill on which he’s standing. It’s not a high hill, but high enough that I can’t see beyond it. A significant bump in the flatness.
He turns as I walk, and my heart squeezes fear into the depths of me. What if he walks away and out of sight before I have a chance to reach him? What if I can’t find him when I get there? What if it’s like it was by the pond? I begin to walk faster, compensating for my new concern; but the footing of the field is uneven. I can’t run. I want to, but I know not to try. I have to keep glancing down at my shoes with every other step, to make sure they find solid footing and don’t send me flat onto my face; and every time I do, I’m terrified that the boy won’t be there when I look back up.
But the boy doesn’t budge from his spot on the hilltop. He simply turns. He’s not facing in my direction now. He doesn’t quite have his back to me, but almost. He’s gazing outward, down towards whatever lies on the other side. And he’s motionless in his new position, just as he was in his old.
God, my legs hurt. My thighs start to burn. I have to ignore this. I need to get there. Get there before he disappears.
The boy is gone, of course, when I arrive. Somehow, I expected this. It seemed inevitable. I hate that I knew it was coming. I hate that I know so well this child I’ve never met. That I know his movements.
I peak the hill perhaps five or six minutes after starting to make my way towards it. It’s grassy, uncultivated. Purple flowers dance around my knees; there is a fresh scent to the air, the kind fabric softeners try t
o bottle in pastel liquid form.
And there is a breeze that blows gently through my hair.
27
Taped Recording Cassette #041D
Interviewer: P. Lavrentis
The cassette whirs to life with static and motion before the sound settles to a quiet that precedes the beginning of the dialogue.
‘Joseph, I’m glad we’re seeing each other again.’ Pauline’s voice. ‘It’s been several weeks.’
‘I’m here because they’re making me, bitch.’ Joseph’s words are like poison. ‘They’ve got me chained up like a dog, thanks to our last episode together.’
‘You’ve been erratic lately. You became aggressive at the end of our last meeting, if you remember. They felt it was necessary to take some precautions, for your own sake as much as for theirs.’
‘I wouldn’t hurt anyone,’ he snaps back. ‘Not any more. Everyone knows that – or they should, anyway. I wasn’t going to hurt you. I just get angry and I have to let off the steam.’ He hesitates. ‘I’m sorry I threw the table. I know I shouldn’t have done that.’
A pause of fifteen seconds. Pauline doesn’t respond, and the lack of an answer is deliberate.
‘Have you used our time apart to think about our last discussion?’ she finally asks. ‘To reflect on some of what was said, prior to that outburst?’
Joseph doesn’t immediately respond. There is a rattling sound, fingers tapping on a table top.
‘I’ve thought about it, sure,’ he finally answers. ‘Not much else to do in here. Just think and eat, and take a little exercise when they let you.’
‘When you’ve thought about it, how have you felt?’ she presses. ‘Have any memories started to come back to you?’