December Park

by Ronald Malfi

  “But what if it leads us to the Piper first?” Scott countered. “Isn’t that what this whole thing is about?”

  Peter ran a hand through his hair. When he met my eyes, I saw his features soften. “I’ll leave it up to you, Angie. Your dad’s a cop. We can tell him what we found . . . or we can keep doing what we’re doing while that sicko is still out there going after kids.”

  I looked from him to Scott, then over to Adrian, who was staring at me with Scott’s matched intensity. I surprised myself when I said, “I think we should keep this to ourselves. Let’s keep doing what we’re doing and find the Piper on our own.”

  If it had been anyone else but me who had said this, Peter would have continued with his argument—and it certainly was a good argument—but he always trusted my opinions and had my back. Always.

  “Okay,” he said flatly, and I could tell he agreed with me against his better judgment. It made me feel as though I had just doomed all five of us. “So what do we do with the bike? Just leave it here?”

  “We can write another note to your English teacher,” Michael suggested, “telling him we found the bike.”

  “No. Mr. Mattingly didn’t move into town until August. Jason Hughes disappeared in June. Mr. Mattingly’s ruled out.” I felt much relief at saying this.

  “If we take the bike, the Piper will know we’ve been here,” Scott said.

  “He’s going to know we were here, anyway.” It was Adrian’s small voice, and for a second I had forgotten he was with us. He let his flashlight play along the floorboards, our footprints as obvious as mortar blasts stamped into the layer of ancient dust.

  “We should go,” Michael said, glancing at one of the smudgy windows. “It’s getting dark.”

  It had also grown chilly, though I didn’t notice until I stopped moving and looked out one of the windows, too. And it was still an hour’s bike ride home. I didn’t want to be here any longer.

  We headed toward the door. In that musty-smelling and awful place, my friends were suddenly nothing more than ghosts all around me in the darkness, marshaling through swirling motes of dust and accented by the occasional flashlight beam. I watched their silhouettes and was overcome by a certainty so unwavering, so undeniable, that its power nearly brought me to my knees . . .

  We would end this. In our own way. We.

  Outside, one of the falcons screamed, and we all cried out in unison.

  Book Four

  The Piper’s Den

  (July and August 1994)

  The peasants wanted their monster. Distrust among lifelong friends and neighbors became a palpable thing. In a display that suggested defeat, police requested random people come to the station for questioning. Rumor had it that the cops were talking to anyone who possessed a criminal record, no matter how benign. (Even Peter’s stepdad was called down to speak with officers because he’d apparently amassed quite a collection of unpaid parking tickets.)

  The homeless derelicts who generally loitered around Solomon’s Field were also rounded up and interrogated, then finally pressured out of town. Come July, none of these grizzled, unwashed transients could be found in the cooling shade of the underpass or languishing beside the scummy water of Drunkard’s Pond.

  To satiate the public, the HFPD brought in an FBI profiler who cobbled together an enigmatic sketch from thin air: the Thief of Children was an adult male, most likely in his midtwenties to midthirties, and considered to be both “organized” (due to the lack of forensic evidence) and “disorganized” (due to the assumption that he operated off impulsivity and opportunity)—a nebulous assessment right out of the gate.

  The profiler suggested that the discovery of Courtney Cole’s body—the only body to be discovered—was deliberate, and it was the Piper’s way of communicating something to the police or the general public or both. The profiler even suggested that leaving the body to be found was a cry for help, and there was a chance the Piper wanted to get caught. It’s debatable whether or not anyone believed this.

  In the days leading up to the town’s annual Fourth of July celebration, men and women alike roved the streets, the alleyways, the woods, the beaches, the abandoned lots, the empty parks. They didn’t call it a manhunt, but they could have been wielding pitchforks and torches for all its subtlety. Each night, after the streets had grown dark, tea lights would blink in the windows of many of the neighborhood houses as a sign of unity and perseverance against the faceless monster that had brought horror to our working-class bayside community.

  One evening, Shelby la Cruz ran screaming from her house and pounded on her neighbor’s door, exclaiming that the Harting Farms Piper was in her yard. When Shelby’s neighbor, armed with a flashlight and a Louisville Slugger, went to investigate, he found the “Piper” was actually his scarecrow that had fallen over and now leaned against the fence that overlooked Shelby’s yard.

  On another evening, Kathy Choone spotted a swarthy-looking man hanging around the bridge off Solomon’s Bend Road, and her description to a police sketch artist resulted in a sexually ambiguous figure with long, stringy hair, vacuous eyes, and a noncommittal slash for the mouth. This rudimentary scarecrow of a man appeared in every newspaper and even flashed occasionally on the nightly news as if to say, This is me, and I look like no one and everyone at the same time. Come find me! He appeared capable of flitting instantly out of existence while simultaneously stealing you away with him.

  Come find me . . .

  And summer boiled our souls.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The Celebration

  The Fourth of July celebration had been held in Market Square every year since I was a toddler. My earliest memories consisted of wending hand in hand with Charles through the labyrinth of booths, where vendors as boisterous as carnival barkers peddled their wares. The sky was always dotted with kites, the streets teeming with face-painted children, and dogs alternately barked and whimpered behind the chain-link fences on Third Avenue.

  We munched on salted peanuts, guzzled fountain drinks, and got our clothes messy with soft-serve ice cream. Then we met up with our friends and spent whatever change we had remaining at the game booths. Come evening, we watched the fireworks by the waterfront with my dad and grandparents. Afterwards, Charles and I loaded our bikes into the back of my father’s car, then we all climbed in together and drove home while I was rocked into a gentle sleep with my head on my grandmother’s cushiony arm.

  This year, the mood was different. For starters, there had been some discussion whether or not there should even be a celebration this year. Fireworks meant people had to stay outside in the dark, and curfew would have to be lifted. The children and teenagers of Harting Farms held their collective breaths. In the end, it was decided that the town would move forward with the celebration.

  That morning, I luxuriated over a breakfast of sausage links, scrambled eggs, paprika-salted potato wedges, and a tall glass of orange juice prepared by my grandmother. Callibaugh had closed the thrift shop for the holiday, so I had nothing to do except hang out with my friends and enjoy an evening of fireworks, hot dogs, and cotton candy at Market Square.

  When my father came down, he was dressed in a suit and tie. Not stopping for breakfast, he filled up his travel thermos with coffee, then dug a book of matches out of the junk drawer. His expression was grim.

  “You have to work today?” I said.

  “No rest for the wicked,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  His grim expression turned into a weary smile. “Everyone’s just on high alert, that’s all.” He sipped some coffee. “What are your plans for tonight?”

  “Me and the guys are gonna go down to Market Square and watch the fireworks.”

  “I know the city curfew has been lifted for tonight, but I’d still like you in by nine.”

  I set my fork down. “But the fireworks don’t even start until a quarter till. I’ll miss the whole thing.”

  “There’s plenty to do do
wn there without staying for the fireworks.”

  It was blasphemous. “It’s the Fourth of July. All my friends had their curfews lifted for tonight. Everyone else will be staying out later.”

  “Ah. That old ‘everyone else’ defense.” My dad patted down his jacket pockets, presumably for cigarettes.

  “At least give me till ten,” I bargained.

  “This isn’t up for debate. I’ve got enough on my plate without worrying about my kid in the process.”

  “You won’t have to worry about me. I’ll be with the guys.”

  “No good.”

  “What if I’m just hanging out at someone’s house? This way we—”

  “Damn it, Angelo, I said no. If you don’t like it, you can stay in all goddamn day.”

  “It’s not fair,” I yelled.

  My father looked at me. The vertical crease between his eyebrows deepened. “That’s right. The world’s not fair, is it? I can give you a list of everything that’s not fair about it.”

  My grandfather came in, a fat greenish-white cantaloupe in each hand. He set them on the table and narrowed his eyes at me. “Strange to have planted a bunch of squash only to find cantaloupes in my garden.”

  I kicked my chair back and stomped across the kitchen where I dumped my plate into the sink.

  “Don’t cop an attitude,” my dad said, jabbing a finger at me.

  Under my breath, I grumbled, “What do you care? You’re never around.”

  Like a bull, his nostrils flared as he exhaled. “Yeah, I’m out there playing. I’m out there having a wonderful goddamn time.”

  “You just don’t trust me.”

  “This has nothing to do with me trusting you.”

  “It does. You were never like this with Charles. It’s only me.”

  My father said nothing. I could no longer read what was going on behind his eyes. Since Charles’s death, we had built a wall that prohibited us from using my brother as a weapon in our battles. My words had just obliterated that wall, and there was nothing but naked vulnerability on the other side of it.

  My father walked out of the room.

  I was still staring at the spot he had been standing when I heard the front door slam and, a moment after that, his car start up. As he backed out of the driveway, I glanced at my grandfather, who stood beside the table, each hand resting on a cantaloupe. He looked away from the windows and at me.

  I cleared the table, dumping the dirty glassware into the sink and putting the milk and orange juice containers into the refrigerator. I felt his eyes on me as I rinsed the dirty dishes, then filed them away into the dishwasher. As my face began to burn and my vision blurred, I struggled to maintain my composure. Yet when I eventually faced him, I saw that he, too, had gone.

  Upstairs, I showered and dressed quickly. The game plan was to meet at Echo Base, where Scott had salted away a bag of firecrackers we intended on letting off this evening, then head over to the Quickman for a bite before footing it down to Market Square. Following the discovery of Jason Hughes’s dirt bike, we had spent the past week taking turns riding out to the depot—in pairs, of course—to keep an eye on it. If it had once been one of the Piper’s hangouts, there was no sign of him that week.

  As for Mr. Mattingly, I felt an overwhelming embarrassment for what we had done to him. The discovery of Jason Hughes’s bike pretty much solidified the fact that he had been the Piper’s first victim back in June of ’93. Since Mr. Mattingly and his wife hadn’t moved into the neighborhood until August, that ruled him out as the killer. Even though Mr. Mattingly had no possible reason for assuming I had been involved in depositing that letter on his doorstep, I feared he would be able to read the guilt in my eyes the next time we crossed paths.

  Intending to light up a cigarette, I went out the back door instead of the front but was startled by the presence of my grandfather. He was leaning back in one of the wicker chairs smoking a pipe.

  “Hey,” I said, realizing I had my cigarette tucked behind my ear. I snatched it and stuffed it into the pocket of my shorts.

  “Gorgeous day for the parade,” he commented, looking out across the backyard.

  “Are you and Grandma going?”

  “I think we’re gonna skip it. It’s too much walking, and your grandmother’s knees are acting up. Not to mention I’ve been feeling a lazy streak coming on.” He winked at me through a screen of bluish smoke. “How many war stories have I told you since you were a boy?”

  “Jeez, I don’t know. Hundreds?”

  “At least, I’ll bet. Not to mention you always made me tell your favorites over and over again.”

  My favorites included stories about crazy-eyed Rocko, who rode around the campground on a stolen motorcycle with no clothes on, and the aboriginals in New Guinea who electrocuted themselves when they touched a live power line that had come down in a storm. I also liked the one about the mess hall chef who dropped raisins into holes drilled in coconuts to ferment the coconut juice so he could get drunk.

  “All those stories,” said my grandfather, “but did I ever tell you about the day I left home for the war?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I was about your age. I lied about my age so I could join the National Guard. I wanted to box and they had a good program. Did I tell you I was going to be a prizefighter?”

  “You said Grandma made you give it up, that she didn’t want to be married to a guy with cauliflower ears.”

  “That’s the truth of it,” he said, his eyes suddenly fierce and alive. “But that was much later. Back when I was your age, I still had those dreams, and I was a pretty good fighter. I already did my time fightin’ in the streets—you didn’t grow up in Brooklyn, so you don’t know how it is—and I thought boxing in the National Guard was maybe the next rung up the ladder.

  “But then, see, one Sunday while I’m sittin’ in church, the priest announces that Pearl Harbor had been bombed by the Japs. I’d never heard of Pearl Harbor in my life. Yet the next thing I know Roosevelt’s got us in the war, and now they’re talking about sending me and my friends overseas.

  “My family didn’t know I’d signed up to the Guard. But seeing how I was gonna be shipped out to Fort Dix sooner than later, I had to tell them. So I told them over dinner a few nights before I had to meet the boat at the docks.”

  “They must have been upset,” I said.

  “Upset don’t quite cut it,” my grandfather said. “My mother and my sisters cried, but my father, he got up from the table and sat in his room all night. And the next morning, he went straight to work and didn’t say a word to me. He was furious. He was downright out of his mind with what I’d done.

  “Night before I was to ship out, I went to him. After dinner, he took to sitting in the den, listening to the radio and just bein’ by himself. I tried to talk to him but he wouldn’t talk. He wouldn’t say nothin’. So I turned around and left.

  “Next morning, I got up early and grabbed my bags. I had packed a small satchel, but it wasn’t much—they didn’t want you taking too much with you—and my mother had wrapped me up some dried salami in wax paper. It was still dark when I left the house and went down to the corner to catch the bus.

  “As you know, my father—your great-grandfather—owned a breakfast and sandwich shop in town, and he left for work before sunrise every morning. He’d already left that morning, but as I stood waiting for the bus, I see this figure coming toward me. It was my dad, wrapped in a thick wool coat and a fur hat—ah, it was ungodly cold that morning! He was a small man, my father, and very compact, and he had a bum leg that pained him in cold weather. As he came up the block, he sort of . . . well, it wasn’t quite a limp. He sort of waddled.” My grandfather smiled at the distant memory.

  “Under his big coat he still wore his white apron from the store. I remember he had the small black nub of a hand-rolled cigar crooked in one corner of his mouth. He didn’t say a word to me—just looked me over, like a butcher appraising a cut of
meat. I didn’t say nothin’, neither. See, I’d grown a little angry at him, I guess for no other reason than he had been angry at me.

  “Eventually the bus comes and those doors hiss open. I give my dad a hug, then get on the bus. I look around, and the seats, they’re filled with boys just about my age. They all got their bags with ’em, and they’re all on their way to Fort Dix.”

  “I bet they were scared,” I said.

  My grandfather waved a hand at me. “Scared? You would have thought we were going on vacation. What did we know? We were kids.”

  My grandmother’s face appeared behind the screen door. She smiled at me, then wrinkled her nose at the smell of my grandfather’s pipe before withdrawing into the house.

  “I grabbed an empty seat on the bus,” my grandfather said, “and when I looked up, there’s my dad, limping down the aisle toward me. I slid over just as he sat down beside me. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him.

  “‘Came to see my boy off,’ he said.”

  My grandfather crossed his legs and puffed on his pipe. He stared out over the yard again. I knew he wasn’t finished yet; like an ancient scribe, he was merely dipping his pen before finding the page once more, and much of what I learned about storytelling I learned from him.

  “It was a few hours to Dix. We didn’t say much on the trip. After a while, the other boys got quiet, too. When we finally arrived, all the boys got off the bus. My dad got off with me, his bald head beaded with sweat, his heavy winter coat damp and drooping with perspiration. ‘I guess I gotta go now, Pop,’ I tell him, and my dad, he just nods. He was crying . . . and he sort of smiles at me, saying we’re okay . . . and . . . well . . .”

  My grandfather blinked rapidly and made a soft hitching sound way down in his chest. In all my sixteen years, I had never heard my granddad make such a sound. “It’s just something to think about when you’re up in arms with your father,” he said, then went silent. This time, I knew he had finished.