December Park

by Ronald Malfi

  “Don’t you plan to go to college eventually?”

  “I guess,” I said. “The community college.”

  Mr. Mattingly rubbed at the cleft in his chin. “What does your father think about it?”

  “He said it’s up to me. Whatever I wanted to do.” Which sounded like absolute bullshit, especially to anyone who knew my father. Thankfully, Mr. Mattingly did not.

  “Maybe he could come in after school one day? The three of us could sit down and discuss it.”

  Not a chance, I thought, knowing damn well my father would kill me if he found out I’d been shucking an opportunity to advance to an AP class.

  “You know, he’s pretty busy,” I said, and it sounded so impossibly weak I expected him to laugh in my face.

  “I’m sure he’d make the time for something this important.”

  I sucked at my lower lip. It was decision time. “Okay, sign me up for the class. Might as well give it a shot.”

  Mr. Mattingly nodded and seemed suddenly pleased with himself. When he slipped back into his classroom, it occurred to me that the son of a bitch had called my bluff. For a few extra seconds I watched him through the doorway as he shoved papers into his briefcase and swept the blackboard with a big fuzzy eraser.

  I thought of Michael’s list of potential murderers and how Mr. Mattingly had been on it. It had made some sense at the time, because he was fairly new to our school and to Harting Farms, but standing here now and watching the man go about his daily routine, the notion seemed utterly preposterous.

  “How come you don’t want to take AP English?” It was Rachel Lowrey, who had materialized like a ghost beside me.

  “What do I need with AP classes?” I said, moving across the hall to my locker. The place was mostly cleared out by now, though a few students remained shouting at each other at the far end of C Hall.

  “I think you’d be good at it. I read that short story you wrote for the school magazine last year. The one about the girl who falls off the ladder.”

  This surprised me. My friends hadn’t even read it, though in fairness, I hadn’t told them it had been published, and they never picked up copies of the school magazine. “Oh yeah?”

  “I thought it was really great.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Do you like to write?”

  I pulled my books from my backpack and stuffed them into my locker. “Sometimes.”

  “I think that’s really cool.”

  “Really? Well, thanks.”

  “I write some poetry but it’s pretty horrible. I’d never let anyone read it. I’d be too embarrassed to ever have it published. Not that anyone would actually publish it.”

  “I’m sure it’s not that bad.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know.”

  “I feel that way about my stories, too. But I thought it would be cool to see one in the school magazine, so I sent it in. I mean, they publish anything they get, but it was still neat.” Thinking I sounded like a blathering idiot, I willed myself to stop talking.

  “Well, I still thought your story was way cool.”

  “Let me read some of your poems,” I said. “I’ll tell you if they’re horrible.”

  Rachel laughed.

  I remembered kissing her during the Kiss War. I wondered how much different it would be to kiss her now. Her face was narrow and soft, her eyes dark around the edges from the fullness of her lashes. I couldn’t help but look at her lips, too—small, pink.

  “You’d really do that for me?” she said.

  “Read your stuff? Sure.”

  “No,” she said. “Tell me if it’s horrible.”

  “I’d give you my honest opinion about it, if that’s what you mean. Besides, what does it matter what I think? I’m not a poet.”

  “That’s not true. You were a poet in that story. Anyway, have a good weekend.”

  “Later, skater,” I said and watched her go.

  My friends were waiting for me in the quad. Scott and Peter were smoking cigarettes while Michael and Adrian sat cross-legged in the grass playing Uno.

  “What happened?” Adrian said. “You get in trouble or something?”

  “No, it’s cool.” To tell them that Mr. Mattingly wanted me to transfer to AP English next year was to invite unrelenting ribbing. Michael might even start calling me Poindexter instead of Adrian. So I kept my mouth shut about it. “He just wanted to go over one of my papers. No big deal.”

  “We still gonna head to the library?” Scott asked.

  Over lunch we had decided to go to the public library and pull up all the newspaper articles on Courtney Cole to glean some insight that might better direct our next course of action. Scott had already tried to look them up in the school library, but they didn’t have any newspapers older than a couple of months, and none had been archived on microfilm.

  We headed down Broad Street, then turned onto Solomon’s Bend Road. School buses farted by, their brakes squealing as they approached the intersection. At the bottom of Solomon’s Bend Road, we took a shortcut through the underpass and cut directly across December Park. As we entered the mouth of the underpass, its black cobblestones still glistening from yesterday’s downpour, I wondered if Courtney Cole had come this way the day she was approached by the killer. The thought gave me chills.

  Scott and Peter stopped walking as they exited the underpass. Michael quickly followed suit.

  I glanced up to where they were looking and felt my stomach sink. Beyond a rickety wooden fence and a line of trash receptacles that separated December Park from the Dead Woods sat Nathan Keener’s pickup.

  “Son of a bitch,” Michael muttered. “What the hell is he doing here?”

  “Who?” said Adrian.

  “Nathan Keener,” Peter said. “He’s just about the biggest asshole you’d ever want to meet.”

  “We still owe that bastard for what he did to you, don’t we, Angie?” Michael said.

  “Just forget it,” I said. I felt a needling chill at my spine.

  “What’d he do to you?” Adrian said.

  “Forget it,” I repeated, not wanting to go into it.

  “They clobbered him,” Michael said anyway.

  “Oh.” Then something dawned on Adrian. “Are those the guys who jumped you and beat up your face?”

  Resigned, I uttered, “Yes.”

  “That goddamned guy,” Peter said.

  “I don’t see anybody there,” Scott said. “The truck looks empty.”

  “We owe him,” Michael repeated.

  “No one owes anything,” I said.

  “Says you,” Michael said, then took off running toward Keener’s truck.

  The rest of us didn’t move at first. In fact, Michael was already scaling the wooden fence on the far side of the park before we sprinted after him. We hit the fence simultaneously and scrambled over it like rats, our backpacks doing their best to weigh us down.

  “He’s gonna get himself killed,” Peter shouted.

  We approached Keener’s truck together. The driver’s window was down. I touched the hood and found that it was cold. The truck had been sitting here for a while. There was no sign of Keener anywhere.

  Scott withdrew his butterfly knife from his coat. He twirled it around with impressive dexterity. “We can slash his tires.”

  “Tires are tires. Big fucking deal.” Michael gripped the side mirror and planted one foot on the narrow running board.

  I shook my head. “Mikey, what are you doing?”

  Michael extended one finger, held it straight up in the air. “I love you, Angie. Do you know that? I would die for you, if that’s what it came down to. Shit,” he said, his voice rumbling with laughter, “I would die for any of you guys. You hear me? You dig me? Also, don’t call me Mikey, you shithead.”

  With that, he unbuckled his belt and dropped his pants. Then he hoisted himself up and forced his pasty white ass through the open driver’s side window. “Lucky for us it was taco day in the cafeteria,
” Michael said and proceeded to evacuate his bowels onto the driver’s seat of Nathan Keener’s truck.

  Peter exploded with laughter. He doubled over, clenching his stomach and crying so hard tears wrung from his eyes. His face turned a mottled purple.

  Scott stared in astonishment, his butterfly knife suddenly limp in his hand.

  Adrian clutched both straps of his backpack at his shoulders, his eyes as large as saucers behind his glasses. He uttered a singular laugh that came out like the chirp of a tiny bird.

  I felt a laugh threaten the back of my throat, too. And by the time I surrendered to it, Scott and Adrian had joined in, and soon we were all laughing like lunatics.

  “Socks!” Michael cried when he’d come to the end, tears bursting from the corners of his eyes now, too. “I need socks to wipe!”

  “God!” Peter howled, rolling his back along the grille of Keener’s truck. “Oh please oh God oh stop it please oh please oh God!”

  Scott and Adrian stripped their socks off and tossed them at Michael. He wiped his ass with them, then pitched them into the open window. By the time Michael hopped down from his perch and tugged up his pants, I was mopping tears from my eyes and my stomach ached from laughter.

  “He ever finds out that was you,” I said after I’d regained some of my composure, “he’s going to end your life.”

  Michael grinned. “Let the games begin.”

  The Harting Farms Public Library was a dark brick building with smoked windows. It catered not only to the residents of this part of town, but it also served as the primary library for students who attended St. John’s on the other side of Center Street.

  On this day in early April, the manicured front lawn was populated by St. John’s students in their pressed khakis and purple polo shirts with the school’s crest embroidered in gold over the breast. Some of them sat on the wall that flanked the curving driveway, and they eyed us with marked suspicion when we arrived. We must have looked awfully conspicuous in our T-shirts, torn jeans, and muddy sneakers.

  I loved everything about the library—from its shelves crowded with books and its uncomfortable chairs of molded plastic to the inspirational posters of astronauts clutching volumes of Shakespeare and Mark Twain. Charles and I had come here often to listen to librarians read Roald Dahl and Beverly Cleary in the Children’s Corner. When I first learned to read, my grandmother helped me fill out a form for my very own library card—a faded yellow bit of cardboard that I still carried in my wallet—and I recalled the relish with which I stalked the aisles, hunting for the perfect book to check out. It was a great adventure, a grand mystery.

  As my friends went to the stacks of local and national newspapers, I wandered over to the Children’s Corner. It was much as I remembered it: beanbag chairs spread out across the maroon carpeting, posters of Judy Blume book covers on the walls, copies of Where the Wild Things Are and The Mouse and the Motorcycle and The Trumpet of the Swan on the shelves. I had checked out all those books as well as countless others.

  Maybe someday my own books will be on these shelves, I used to think once I started writing my own stories. It was a thought I still entertained, though with dwindling certainty. I was already halfway done with high school. College would be next, and then I would have to get a job—a real job, as my dad was fond of saying. Where would the writing go? Would there be time? Some nights, when I closed my eyes, I was terrified to imagine myself in middle-age while my old Olympia typewriter collected dust on a basement shelf.

  I blinked and for a moment could see Charles and me sitting Indian-style on the floor as a soft-voiced librarian read us a chapter out of The Enormous Egg. The ghosts of lost children, indeed . . .

  I joined my friends. Michael and Peter were snickering over an issue of Mad magazine. Scott and Adrian were talking to a librarian who had just handed them spools of microfilm. The librarian, who was a skinny bearded man in an ugly striped shirt, pointed to the three microfilm projectors against the wall. Before departing, he cast a disapproving glance at Michael and Peter, whose snickering had risen slightly in volume.

  Adrian, Scott, and I pulled three chairs in front of one of the projectors and sat down.

  “He gave us a weird look when I asked for last October’s paper, so I told him we were doing a research project for school,” Scott said, loading the film into the projector. He clicked it on, and milky yellow light flooded the oversized screen. He spooled over until the Caller’s masthead appeared.

  I leaned over the back of my chair and waved Peter and Michael over. “Stand behind us,” I told them.

  We couldn’t remember the exact date Courtney Cole’s body was discovered, but we knew it had been on the front page of the newspaper, so it didn’t take long to find it. Her yearbook photo was larger on-screen, and I felt a chill looking at it. Behind me, Peter and Michael stood closer together so no one passing by would be able to see the screen.

  In a low voice, Scott read the article. There were no details in it that we didn’t already know. When Scott came to the end, we continued staring at the screen in deferential silence.

  “Back up,” Peter suggested, “and see if you can find when she was reported missing.”

  It was two days before her body was found. This headline was also on the front page—Local Girl Reported Missing. Again, Scott read the article in a quiet voice while we all leaned closer to the glowing screen. As with the previous article, there was nothing in it that we hadn’t already heard on the news or, for that matter, in the halls of school and around town. The article continued on the next page, but when Scott scrolled over to it, I said, “Wait. Go back.”

  Scott scrolled back.

  “There,” I said, pointing at the screen. “The story toward the bottom.”

  The story’s headline read, Car Crash Injures Local College Student, and it summarized Audrey MacMillan’s inebriated slalom off the road and into the woods. The photo that accompanied the article showed a pair of taillights wedged in a net of tree branches.

  “Courtney Cole was killed the night she went missing,” I said. It had been staring us in the face since October, yet no one had connected the pieces. “It wasn’t part of his plan for her body to be found. He was in the woods when that MacMillan girl drove her car off the road. He couldn’t risk taking the body anywhere and being seen with it, so he left it there and ran away.”

  “Holy shit,” Scott said.

  “So maybe it’s true,” Adrian said, “and he was planning to bring her back across the road to the other side of the highway. He would have used the tunnel—”

  “And dropped the locket in the ditch,” Michael interjected.

  “—on his way back to . . .” Adrian’s voice trailed off.

  “Back to where?” Peter said.

  We didn’t know.

  Chapter Fourteen

  After the Storm

  As April progressed, our town was accosted by a torrential downpour that lasted nearly three full days. The sky remained the color of soot, and a furious and unrelenting wind blew shutters off houses and cast small tornadoes of dead leaves down neighborhood streets. My friends and I avoided the Dead Woods, which turned into a swamp as the creek overflowed and flooded December Park, and we got rides home from school for much of the week so we didn’t have to walk.

  Down by the Cape, the tide came in past the locks and rushed up onto the shore where it smashed against the watermen’s shacks, reducing a number of them to piles of sun-bleached wooden boards and flapping sheets of tar paper, and some of them were washed clean out into the bay. Deaver’s Pond swelled like a balloon and flooded the surrounding culverts and ravines, causing a massive clot of dead leaves, fallen tree limbs, and great clumps of trash to clog the underpass beneath Solomon’s Bend Road. Frogs popped out of the swamp grass of Solomon’s Field, for a brief time ruling the world.

  The television news spoke of doom when a grim-faced reporter detailed how one of the massive stained glass windows of St. Nonnatus was struck by
lightning and exploded into a dazzling array of colored blades of glass. Lightning also blew out a transformer on the second night of the storm, cutting the power along Worth and Haven for nearly twelve hours.

  There was concern from the mayor’s office about the rising waters of the Chesapeake. Sewers backed up, bubbling out into the streets. Boats were demolished in the channels and along the Shallows; weeks after the storm passed, pieces of these boats were found scattered as far inland as the Palisades. One kid from Stanton School claimed to have discovered a wooden steering wheel from a pirate ship up in a tree in his front yard.

  On the fourth day, the world finally began to dry up. My friends, agitated at being cooped up inside for half a week, skipped out after lunch period to enjoy the weather.

  I wanted to join them, but I had to give an oral presentation in Mr. Mattingly’s English class. My report was on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which, in my ignorance, I had chosen based strictly on the title that I had apparently interpreted too literally. The book was not about an actual invisible man, like Claude Rains in that old black-and-white movie, but it was a commentary on racism and society. Nonetheless, I had surprised myself by enjoying the book, and I thought my presentation went pretty well. Mr. Mattingly seemed pleased.

  When the bell rang, I was the first one out of the classroom, though, in my haste, I’d forgotten to zip my backpack, and my textbooks spilled out across C Hall like a fan of playing cards. I dropped to my knees and gathered up my books.

  Rachel appeared beside me. “Hey.”

  “Oh. Hey.” I suddenly felt like an imbecile.

  As the rest of the classes let out, C Hall exploded with students eager to evacuate into a brightening day. Some asshole kicked my math book down the hall, and I chased after it like a dog. When I returned, Rachel was there holding my backpack. She had piled all my books into it.

  “Shoot. Thanks, Rachel.”

  “Sure.” She handed over my backpack.

  I stuffed my math book into it, zipped it up, then slung the strap over one shoulder.