December Park

by Ronald Malfi

  “Maybe, maybe not,” said Scott. He held the photocopied newspaper article and stared at the dead girl. “This photo looks just like the school pictures we all take. I bet it came from last year’s yearbook.”

  “And do you happen to have last year’s yearbook for Girls’ Holy Cross?” Michael said, chewing on his straw.

  “No,” said Scott, “but I know where I can get ahold of one.”

  For the remainder of the day, I anticipated Adrian’s arrival at school. It wasn’t until last period English with Mr. Mattingly, when Adrian’s desk remained empty, did I finally admit to myself that he wasn’t coming.

  On my walk home, I paused at the foot of Adrian’s driveway and stared at the house. I felt a cold disquiet settle all around me like a shroud. The prospect of knocking on their front door and having it opened by Adrian’s haunted and pale-skinned mother did not sit well with me. Instead, I lingered for a few minutes, kicking pebbles into the gutter, in hopes that I’d catch a glimpse of Adrian in one of the upstairs windows.

  But he never appeared, and I eventually went home feeling strangely empty.

  Scott’s neighbor Martha Dooley went to Girls’ Holy Cross and had been one of Courtney Cole’s classmates. She was a short brunette whose unfortunate complexion resembled, in both hue and texture, the granulated surface of a brick. She also had an unfaltering crush on Scott and therefore did not question his motive when he asked if he could borrow her yearbook for a couple of days. She handed it over without hesitation.

  In her little rectangular yearbook panel that in hindsight seemed all too much like a coffin, Courtney Cole looked very pretty and blissfully unaware that her life was quickly nearing its conclusion. It was the same picture as the one in the newspaper, though much clearer and in color. She wore a black gown cut low at the shoulders, exposing the soft tapered lines of her collarbones. And indeed, she wore a slender chain around her neck, but the charm that hung from it was not a heart-shaped locket; it was a gold crucifix.

  “Well, there you go,” I said. The two of us were in his basement, listening to one of the Use Your Illusion albums on the stereo and chugging cans of Jolt while Martha Dooley’s yearbook sat spread out on the floor between us.

  “I can’t believe it,” Scott said, slowly shaking his head. “I was so sure it would be the same necklace with the goddamn heart locket.”

  “That’s because you’re a morbid little freak show, buddy,” I told him, though admittedly, I was a little bummed about the discovery myself. I had actually begun to psyche myself up about the possibilities: what if it really was her locket? What did that mean for us?

  It had been three days since I told my friends about Adrian’s find and an equal amount of days since I’d seen him. He hadn’t returned to school all week. I still hadn’t summoned the courage to knock on his front door, but things were getting ridiculous. My friends kept asking where he was, and Scott even suggested that perhaps our strange little friend had become the Piper’s latest victim. The rest of us chuckled uneasily, hoping our uncomfortable laughter would turn Scott’s very real concern into a joke.

  Despite my reluctance, I knew I had to march up to Adrian’s front door and knock on it. And if his mother opened it and stood staring at me from the other side like some lifeless crypt keeper, I would have to resist the very natural, very instinctual, very understandable urge to run.

  Finally, after school let out Friday afternoon, the four of us stood at the foot of Adrian’s driveway, staring at the dark and brooding Gardiner house. I was shaking and only partially from the cold weather. We had unanimously agreed that we needed to share the yearbook photo with Adrian, so he wouldn’t go on thinking the locket belonged to the Cole girl.

  “I don’t think we should all go up there together,” Peter said, breaking the silence.

  “How come?” I said. I had Martha Dooley’s yearbook under one arm.

  “He told you about the locket, but he didn’t tell us. Maybe he didn’t want us to know.”

  “Yeah,” Michael said. “You should go alone, Angie. We’ll wait in your backyard.”

  “You guys are just too scared to knock on that door,” I suggested.

  No one disagreed.

  After they’d gone around the back of my house, I took a deep breath and walked up Adrian’s driveway. The windows were dark and partially shaded. The shrubs surrounding the front porch were dead; they looked dangerous and predatory in their prickly leaflessness. On the roof, a large crow peeled one of the shingles away with a sharp black beak.

  I knocked on the door and steeled myself.

  The door opened and Adrian stood on the other side. His glasses were off, and he looked somehow less present without then. I thought of blind baby rodents and the fused eyelids of featherless birds.

  “Hey, man!” I said, overcompensating so that my voice came out sounding nearly maniacal with joviality. “Where’ve you been?”

  “Sick,” he said, a rasp to his voice. “I’m feeling a little better now, though.”

  “The guys have been asking about you.”

  “Yeah?” He hoisted one pointy shoulder and just looked bored. He opened the door more widely. “Come on in.”

  “Is your mom home?” I said, walking through the front door and glancing around. The false joviality was gone, the truer ring of apprehension back in my voice.

  “No. She’s at work.”

  I followed him through the main hallway. Amazingly, even all these months later, very little had been unpacked. Towers of cardboard boxes still lined the hallway and the living room. Clothing remained draped over the stairwell banister.

  In the kitchen, a few pots and pans littered the Formica countertop, and there was a small table with only two chairs by the bay window that looked out onto the backyard. From this window I could see my own house and the three slouching shapes of my friends perched atop the woodpile. Around me, the Gardiner house was infused with that nonspecific staleness in the air, the same that I had registered on that day I’d dropped off my grandmother’s cookies.

  “You hungry?” Adrian asked, rifling through one of the cupboards.

  “Not really.” I looked up and noticed there were no lightbulbs in the ceiling fixture.

  Adrian produced a box of Pop-Tarts from the cupboard. “You didn’t get in trouble the other day, did you? For getting home after dark?”

  “No, man. It’s cool.”

  He ripped into one of the foil packages and had a Pop-Tart in his mouth an instant later. He ate like a starving prisoner. “Whatcha got there?” He nodded toward the yearbook under my arm.

  “Oh.” I hadn’t rehearsed this part. I hadn’t rehearsed any of this. It was all I could do to sound casual. “It’s a yearbook.” I set it on the counter and pushed it over to him. “It’s got a picture in it I think you should see.”

  Adrian looked at the yearbook cover. “Since when did you go to an all-girls’ school?”

  “It’s got Courtney Cole’s picture in it. The dead girl.” When I could tell by his expression that he wasn’t taking the hint, I said, “She’s wearing a necklace.”

  Adrian tossed the box of Pop-Tarts onto the counter, and with the one he’d been eating still protruding from his mouth, he opened the yearbook. Big glossy pages glared up at us as I stepped beside Adrian and looked down at the book with him.

  “What page is she on?” he asked.

  I flipped the book to Courtney’s page, which Scott had tabbed with a yellow Post-it.

  Adrian stared at the photo for a long time, not speaking, not making a sound. Then he looked at me. Without his glasses his eyes appeared too small for his head. “That’s her.” It was not a question but more like hearing someone marvel to themselves over the secrets of the universe.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He returned to the photo. Squinting, he leaned closer to the page. “But she’s wearing the wrong necklace.”

  “I just thought you should know.”

  “That I should know w
hat?”

  “Well, uh . . .” I gestured toward the page. “She’s wearing a crucifix. Not a heart-shaped locket.”

  Adrian blinked at me. “So?” Then he looked past me and out the bay window. “Tell them to come in here.”

  “Who?” For a moment I had genuinely forgotten about Peter, Scott, and Michael in my backyard, though when I glanced up I could see that they were easily visible through the window. “Oh. Yeah.” I fumbled for words. “They thought . . . I mean, we thought . . .”

  “It’s okay. Call them in.”

  I opened the patio door and yelled to the three stooges to come up to the house. They feigned ignorance and surprise before bumbling across the lawn.

  “Hey, guys,” Michael said, coming through the back door. He tried to sound like this whole meeting was purely serendipitous and that they had been shooting the shit on the woodpile in my yard without my knowledge. “What’s going on? Whatcha doin’ here, Angie?”

  “Cut it out, moron,” I told him.

  “It’s okay that you guys know,” Adrian said.

  “Know what?” Michael said, keeping up the façade until Peter punched him on the arm.

  Adrian carried the yearbook to the kitchen table and sat down in one of the chairs. The rest of us gathered around him. No one said a word, not even Michael. Then, just when the silence was becoming overbearing, Adrian rose from his chair and disappeared down the hallway. I heard his rapid little footfalls on the stairs.

  Peter and I exchanged a look. Michael grew instantly bored and went to the box of Pop-Tarts on the counter. Scott continued to stare at the yearbook on the table.

  “Is he all bummed out?” Peter asked me.

  “I don’t really know. I think he still thinks the locket is hers.” I came up beside Scott and studied the photo again. It was almost unfathomable to think of that attractive young girl as the same one we’d witnessed being dredged up from the woods next to December Park, pale and gray beneath a sheet of white, the right side of her face punctured. Dented. Like a tin can.

  “Poor little buffoon,” Michael commented. I turned and glared at him as he hopped on the counter, half a Pop-Tart poking out of his mouth. He shrugged, then yanked the Pop-Tart from his mouth and gave me his best politician’s smile—wide and toothy.

  After several minutes passed and Adrian still hadn’t returned to the kitchen, we all began to feel restless.

  “Where is he?” Peter asked, peeking down the hallway.

  I stepped into the hall. “Adrian?” My voice reverberated off the barren walls. I started down the hall but froze at the sight of him sitting on the bottom step of the staircase. He held the heart-shaped locket. He wore his glasses—he had probably gone to his room to retrieve them, I realized—and when he looked up at me, I had a hard time dissecting the mixture of emotion in his eyes.

  Peter, Michael, and Scott came up behind me.

  “It could still be hers,” Adrian said, though much of the conviction had been stripped from his voice. I felt responsible for it. “That picture in the yearbook doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Anything’s possible.”

  “Can I see it?” Scott asked, approaching the front of the stairs. His shadow fell across Adrian’s face.

  After a pause, Adrian handed him the locket.

  Scott held it with equal reverence, turning the small silver heart over in his fingers as though it were something unearthed from an archaeological site. “The eyelet is broken, all right.”

  “I think it happened when she was attacked,” Adrian said.

  Scott nodded, as if this made total sense to him. “I can take this home and fix it for you. I just gotta bend the clasp back into place. And if I can’t do that, I can replace it with a new one.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Sure. It’s easy.”

  Adrian nodded.

  “Hey,” said Peter, breaking the tension. “Why don’t we go catch a movie at the Juniper?”

  “Sounds like a good idea,” I said, anxious to get out of Adrian’s house.

  “Count me in,” said Michael.

  “Let me get my coat.” Adrian stood and bounded up the stairs but then paused halfway up. He turned around and came slowly back down. “Can I keep that yearbook for a while?” he asked me.

  “It’s not mine,” I said and looked to Scott.

  “I guess so. I may have to take ugly Martha Dooley to the Quickman for a burger, though.”

  “Scott and Martha sitting in a tree, F-U-C-K-I-N-G,” Michael sang, snapping his fingers like someone out of West Side Story.

  We all laughed.

  Just over a week later, after a Sunday dinner of spaghetti and meatballs, my grandparents retired to the den to watch television while my father remained at the kitchen table, going over stacks of paperwork.

  “How’s the case going?” I asked, grabbing an apple from the fridge.

  He leaned back in his chair and ran his hands through his thinning, graying hair. “We’ve got a lot of people looking at a lot of different angles. I’m just double-checking to make sure all the lines have been connected.”

  I saw that his coffee cup was empty so I took it over to the pot and refilled it for him.

  “Thanks, pal.”

  “Are you guys getting any closer to finding out who killed that girl?”

  He made a face that approximated sad resignation. “I wish I could say we were.”

  “Do you think whoever did that to the Cole girl got those other kids, too? Like Aaron Ransom on New Year’s Eve?”

  “That was a bad night, wasn’t it?” There was compassion in my father’s voice, though I couldn’t help but wonder if he was deliberately avoiding my questions. “I’m sorry you had to be in the middle of it.”

  “It’s okay. I was just wondering about all those kids that nobody’s found. Is it the same person who killed that girl?”

  “It’s hard to tell,” my dad said with a sigh. “We’ve been talking to the other parents and getting as much info as we can. It might seem like too much of a coincidence that these kids seemed to vanish within months of each other, but maybe it isn’t a coincidence at all, if you look at it in another way. There’s always the possibility of a runaway pact or something like that.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Friends conspire to run away from home at the same time. They hide out someplace for a little while before eventually coming back home. Or more likely, a guy runs off with his girlfriend. The Frost girl kept a journal and mentioned a high school boy she had been seeing without her parents’ knowledge. She doesn’t mention the boy’s name, but it could be the Connor kid, who disappeared around the same time. They could have gone off somewhere together.”

  “Oh,” I said. I supposed it made sense to the police, but any kid at Stanton School could have told them that thirteen-year-old Bethany Frost had frequently been spotted sucking face with Tyler Beacham, a Stanton School sophomore, in the woods behind the middle school. Sixteen-year-old Jeffrey Connor probably didn’t even know Bethany existed.

  And then there was William Demorest, who hadn’t been friends with either of the other two. That didn’t explain how Aaron Ransom fit in, either. Wasn’t it too much of a coincidence that all these kids had decided to run away around the same time a girl from town was found murdered? I wondered if my father actually believed this theory or if he was feeding it to me to quell my fears.

  “Well,” I said, “if it is the same person, do you think it’s possible that the other kids, the ones who disappeared, were killed and left in the woods, too?”

  “No. We searched the woods thoroughly with cadaver dogs. December Park, too. There isn’t . . .” My father let his voice trail off. He had gone into cop mode and had temporarily forgotten that he was talking to his fifteen-year-old son. “Listen,” he said, the timbre of his voice more conciliatory now. “As long as you keep away from deserted areas, stick in groups, and get home before it’s too late, you and your friends have n
othing to be afraid of. I promise. Okay?”

  I nodded.

  He winked at me, smiling wearily. Exhaustion seemed to radiate off him in visible waves. “You doing okay otherwise?”

  “I guess.”

  “How’s school?”

  I shrugged. “Okay.”

  “You finish your homework for tomorrow?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good.” Again, that weary smile. He turned back to his ream of paperwork, bringing the fresh coffee to his lips and slurping.

  “Dad?”

  “Hmmmm?”

  “What do you think happened to those other kids? Do you think the same person who got Courtney Cole got the rest of them?”

  He faced me, and I could tell he was debating whether he should pacify me or tell me the truth. “Yes. I think it’s the same person.”

  I nodded. Only vaguely was I aware that I had dug my fingernails into the flesh of the apple while awaiting his answer.

  That night, after everyone had gone to bed, I flipped the blankets off my perspiring body and crept out into the hallway. It took an eternity to get past the traitorous floorboards outside my father’s closed bedroom door and down the stairs. I didn’t turn on a light until I made it to the kitchen, and even then the only light I switched on was the single tube light over the sink; it cast an almost iridescent penumbra across the length of the countertop.

  My father’s empty coffee mug was still on the table. The papers were gone, though I noticed his battered cordovan briefcase with the brass clasps propped up in the doorway. I picked it up, noting how heavy it was, and set it carefully on the table. I covered each clasp while I popped them open, muffling the sound.

  Chewing on my lower lip, I opened the briefcase. Papers bristled out. Manila folders, industrial staples, large metal clasps on stacks of printed pages stared up at me. I thumbed through one of the packets. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. Another stack of pages, this one nearly as thick as a phone book, contained addresses and phone numbers, social security numbers, license plate numbers.