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

by A J Grayson

  I should have been more forceful in the car. I should have gone with my gut.

  I notice there is still mud on my shoes.

  ‘Don’t look so glum about it,’ Joseph says, his tone suddenly light. His clutch on my shoulder turns to a friendly tap before he draws his hand away. ‘Haven’t you ever pretended to be someone else? That’s all we’re really talking about.’

  There’s a smile on his face when I look back up to him. Devious. Pleased at the craft of creating a new identity. That’s just like Joseph, finding something amusing at a moment when I want to let out a scream and run away to a different planet.

  ‘Not really,’ I answer, ‘I haven’t pretended like that since I was a kid.’

  ‘Well, it’s not rocket science. You won’t have forgotten how. We just pick new names and use them from now on when we’re in public.’ He thinks for a second, then adds, ‘And maybe best that we use them when it’s just us, too. To get in the habit, so we don’t slip up when there are people around.’

  This sounds reasonable enough. We don’t need to be broadcasting our location to all and sundry. And what can it hurt to try on a few new names while we’re in a town of new adventures? It might make the starting-over nature of our time here all the more concrete and real. Something that can really get under the skin.

  I don’t have any idea what sort of name to choose. But in this, as in so much else, Joseph has a knowing look about him, as if he’s already got it covered. So I ask him the obvious question.

  ‘What should I call you, then?’

  He has a wide grin.

  ‘It’s gotta be something simple, right? Forgettable. Some ordinary name you’d call your best friend.’

  I peer at him, waiting for his choice.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he finally says. ‘I’ve always liked the name Greg.’

  And I shrug my shoulders. That’s that. Joseph is a thing of the past. I am standing with my best friend, one of my only friends, really. I’m standing with Greg.

  66

  Monday

  Greg and I have passed another day in relative calm. Actually, all our time here has been profoundly uneventful, with no external excitement of any kind. It’s only what’s within me that makes it seem otherwise. What can you say of a street that’s beautifully cared for, cleaned and clad with music-themed shops yet still makes you feel that the world is ending and your soul is being consumed, if not that it’s a sign of something eating at you, rather than the street itself? And I’ve had those feelings, on and off, every day. Every hour we’ve been here. They pursue me. Though increasingly, with every hour, I’m less certain why.

  I try, every so often, to rationalize them away. Vivid memories of a horrible story crash into my mind. Joseph (I have to keep reminding myself to call him Greg) was at a house somewhere far away. I was with him, too, but he was so … brutal. Not me. The brutality was all him. Yes, I shot too – but only once. And mine wasn’t a death blow in that macabre scene. Had it just been me there the old man would have had a wounded arm and a badly bruised conscience, and that seems like an entirely reasonable price to exact for the awful things he’d done. It wasn’t me who went further. It was Joseph, Greg, who killed him. Who beat him senseless. Who killed the woman. It was he who had become a savage. If I didn’t feel that our fates had become inextricably interconnected in that moment, I’d flee from his presence right now. Why stay in town with someone who holds that kind of rage within him? When will it emerge again? And when it does, what is to keep it from being aimed at me? He’s already pointed a gun at my face once.

  But then these memories flee. They’re like a poem in my mind: a flash of powerful intensity, overwhelming emotion and crisp visions which then fade, get dismissed, and retreat before the reality that remains after the poem is done. But this poem is truly horrible – one of the worst I’ve ever internally recited. And nothing voids the sense of guilt that looms over my shoulders every time its images come. I was there too. I played my part. And when I fail to catch my mind before it wanders too far, I find myself wondering if there will ever be another moment in my life when I don’t see blood on my hands.

  I allow myself a moment to appreciate this irony. I’m in Nashville, spiritual home of a genre of music built around the unshakeable principle that life just sucks, no matter what you do about it, and the sorrow of life is always following just behind you, like the flatbed of your pickup truck. That’s always seemed absurdly defeatist to me – until now. Now it seems surprisingly realistic. Maybe Nashville has a force to it that breeds this kind of sentiment into the minds of any who pass through.

  But it’s fair to say that it isn’t just me who’s feeling the pressure. Greg is too. The more we try not to do anything, to be anyone, the more oppressive it all feels. I don’t know how others manage going into hiding, but I’ve not found it the simple ‘just put on the airs of someone else and lay low’ craft I’d presumed it would be. It’s difficult to abandon yourself, almost physically painful to give up the someone you’ve always known yourself to be and become no one – even for reasons of necessity. When you’re a child and you amuse yourself by playing pretend, part of the joy is knowing that it’s all just that: pretend, and that when you’re done being a knight or soldier you get to go back to being your real self. But when you’re putting on a new personality and aren’t sure when, or even if, you’ll be able to go back to your real identity, suddenly fun is no longer a part of the game.

  It’s Greg, though, not me, who finally reaches the tipping point.

  ‘You know, Allen,’ – that’s what he decided he would call me – ‘I think we need to get out.’

  ‘Out?’ I dread the thought of another lengthy car ride. ‘I thought Nashville was far enough away. Where do you suggest we go?’ Travel any further east and we start getting to bigger and bigger cities, and that seems a foolish move.

  ‘No, not out of the city,’ he answers, ‘out, as in “let’s go out”. Out for a drink. A bit of fun.’

  The word ‘fun’ seems absurd to me.

  ‘You know,’ he continues, ‘blow off some steam and relax a little. We’re both under stress.’

  It’s another one of those comments that makes me want to slap Greg across the face. There are so many moments like these, where his levity is just inappropriate to the situation and clashes with my internal fears. And yet there’s always something marginally sensible about his suggestions. We are stressed, that’s absolutely true. And if there’s a way to relax, to unclench the muscles that feel like they’ve been held in a state of constant tension for over a week, we would probably benefit from it.

  In the process of my analysis I must be shrugging my shoulders positively, since Greg smiles in approval at my apparent agreement. He slaps my shoulder again: a solid, friendly slap between friends.

  ‘I saw a bar a few streets back that looks like just the right sort of place,’ he says. ‘You up for something like that?’

  ‘A bar?’ He knows I’m not a fan of bars.

  ‘Don’t think of it as just a bar,’ he answers, ‘think of it as an experience. You like country western, and you can’t have country western without a saloon and a few bar-stools, right?’

  It’s my turn to smile. It’s to be an experience, then. And it doesn’t sound bad. ‘All right. Let’s give it a try.’

  ‘Fantastic.’ Greg turns on his heels so he’s facing back the way we came. ‘Let’s go back to the motel, catch a nap till the sun goes down, then come back and have a proper night of it.’

  He’s grinning. He looks genuinely happy with the plan. And who am I to disagree?

  67

  Monday Evening

  The time has come for us to make our entry back into the world of social exposure and living encounters with other people. Greg and Allen, our new cloak-and-dagger identities, intent on not remaining in hiding forever. And as darkness has spread out over the city and streetlights and neon signs have burst to life, I have to admit that I’m glad Gr
eg has thought up this plan. I’m not sure I could have handled another night holed up in that motel room with only the sound of evening television and lust-inflamed grunts through the wall of the room next door. Time seems to stand still there, the present coming to bear an increasingly mystical, disjointed relationship to the past.

  The bar Greg has found is as perfect as he said it would be, and he’s absolutely right: it’s a postcard picture of the ‘genuine’ experience. The sign saying Jake’s Hitching Post is in tangerine neon with blue accents, and the moment we walk in I feel we’ve found the ideal spot. The best bar in Nashville. Every stereotype I could have hoped for is here: raw wood floors, vinyl-topped bar-stools and an old-fashioned jukebox that still uses records rather than CDs or digital files. And there is country paraphernalia on the walls in abundance: a mounted deer’s head (a twelve-pointer, by my count), a rope lasso in a glass case, even a pair of rodeo chaps that have been signed – illegibly – by some hero of the arena.

  I love the place from the second we arrive. I’d been leery of our outing until just this moment, but now I’m finding myself truly excited about the evening ahead. The past immediately feels a little further away. Another continent and another world.

  The music, too, is just the sort that I expect, and it does my heart good to hear it. The kind of proper country western you would have heard in the Eighties – Vince Gill and Holly Dunn and Dwight Yoakam – not the half-pop nonsense that passes for country today. I glance at Greg’s face as we walk towards the bar and I see he’s smiling at the music, too. So we share our taste in music, at least nominally. It’s nice to see him, for a moment, looking happy.

  At the bar we take stools side by side and prop our elbows on the highly polished surface. My wallet is thick in my back pocket. We’d stopped at an ATM along the way to charge up on cash for the evening ahead. I’ve always felt it’s better to tip bartenders in cash than on a card. You get better service in return, and it’s nice to throw down the bills every so often and feel the tinge of showmanship that comes with the act.

  It’s funny, but for all that Greg and I have shared on our journey to this place, for all that we’ve gone through together, I realize in this moment, as we sit side by side, that we still really don’t know each other. The conversations I was so keen to have, about events and families and fears, they’re important things. We’ve even covered some ground with them. But you can’t rush getting to know a person. I might know that Greg is an only child who had trouble with his parents, but until this instant I didn’t know what sort of music he liked, or which spot at the bar, or whether he props his feet on the metal ring of the stool or on the bar itself. The unimportant things. The things that make a person a personality. Circumstance has attached us at the hip, but we’re still essentially strangers.

  I’m not sure what causes me to notice the little television perched above the bar. It’s in black and white, its picture a little hazy, and for an instant I’m reminded of a television I’ve seen somewhere else, perched high, just like this. It feels like it wasn’t long ago. The memory brings bad feelings into my stomach, but in this instant I can’t place their origins. My stomach rumbles.

  It’s hard to make out the audio over the music and tumult in the bar, but I lean in and can just catch the words. The image is of a uniformed police officer – a navy-blue shirt covered in a badge, medals and various stripes – before a podium, surrounded by other official-looking figures. A subtitle on the screen identifies him as Lieutenant Donald Rogers of the Shasta County Police Force in California. ‘PRESS CONFERENCE’ is marked out in bold letters just above his name.

  I feel strangely as if I should be reacting to this. Like something in my stomach wants viscerally to feel something. Fear. Trepidation. But in this setting I can’t really connect to those emotions. These things are taking place in a different world, and I’m in a new environment. I even have a new name.

  A multiple homicide in northern California on 14th June, seven days ago, is believed to have been committed by a person or persons who have since fled the jurisdiction of the County, and likely have crossed state lines.

  The officer on the screen reads from a written report. His voice is matter-of-fact, and he looks uncomfortable standing before cameras and reporters. Homicide is an ugly word. He doesn’t seem to like saying it.

  We are coordinating with the FBI to track down the whereabouts of the prime suspect in the case, an 18-year-old male named Thomas Warrick. The victims are the suspect’s parents, and local investigators believe the homicides may have been revenge killings for what neighbours describe as decades of home abuse.

  I feel an immediate sense of relief. This name means nothing to me. Though my palms are sweating and I can feel my heart thumping, it’s clear this report is nothing to do with me. With us. I do know that I feel guilty, deeply guilty about my recent actions; but the details are all a blur. I’m sure it’s being here that’s causing the haze – Nashville. The bar. With a new name. With a new friend. My memory’s gone a little cloudy. Though I don’t really know my new friend that well. A bit of the pace to my pulse returns.

  Thomas Warrick is considered extremely dangerous, and as the two weapons that forensics have determined were used in the attack, a .22 calibre rifle and a .38 handgun, have yet to be recovered, is presumed still to be armed.

  I feel my pulse start to return to normal. It’s the repetition of the name that does it. Thomas Warrick is a name I’ve never heard before. And I know names change, and we’ve been changing ours. But Greg was Joseph before he was Greg, just like I was Dylan before I was Allen. He wasn’t Tom, or Thomas. This story isn’t about him. It’s nothing to do with us. Nothing to do with us. Our lives are, I think, connected to that house and that horror, but the police are not after us.

  If located or if any information in your area is forthcoming, approach the subject only with caution. Accomplice or accomplices a possibility. The brutality of the crimes makes him, or them, the highest possible threat. We advise contacting our office or your local FBI station office prior to any direct action.

  The press conference may or may not go on. I don’t know. I’ve lost interest, and my attention is back at the bar.

  I look to my essentially-stranger friend. For an instant there is a real fondness in my heart. The world out there is so terrible, home to so much turmoil – the police report on the television is a case in point – that it’s nice to have found someone keen to join you in a bar and escape from it all together. And it’s pleasing to see that we share so much in common (not just the music; I notice in this instant that we both have our feet locked onto the metal rings of our bar-stools. I make a mental tally of this meaningless point of personality that draws us closer together). And our shared tastes become even more surprising when we find ourselves ordering the same drink.

  ‘A double Jaegermeister, straight up,’ we say, in an almost comical unison, as if we’d been practising the act.

  I immediately laugh and turn to face him. ‘You’re joking. You like it too?’

  Greg grins back. ‘I can’t say I really like it. It’s just … well, to be honest, I’ve never had it before.’

  ‘You’re kidding me!’

  He looks slightly embarrassed. ‘Just never had the opportunity, I guess.’

  ‘No, I mean you’ve got to be joking. Neither have I! What are the chances?’ I’m shaking my head in amused disbelief. ‘I mean, you’re young, so it isn’t really a surprise you haven’t tried it.’ I realize as I’m saying this that it’s puzzling the bartender hasn’t carded him. Greg doesn’t look twenty-one by any stretch, but the bartender apparently isn’t asking any questions. Maybe that’s just how things roll in Nashville.

  ‘But for me,’ I continue, ‘it’s a bit more unusual. I’ve been drinking for a lot of years.’

  ‘But still never tried the stuff?’

  I shake my head. ‘I guess it’s a night for firsts.’

  It feels satisfying to say this. The bro
wn, herbally scented stuff arrives and Greg raises his small glass towards mine.

  ‘Here’s to firsts.’

  We slam back the drinks in another act of spectacularly accidental synchronicity. The Jaegermeister burns and has a bitterness I wasn’t expecting, but it’s wild and wonderful at the same time, filled with berries and flowers and barks and spice. I’m strangely thrilled by it.

  A few moments later we order two more. And then, later, another two. The longer the night goes on the more at ease we both feel. Maybe drink really does bring strangers together. Every so often I can almost feel Joseph’s – Greg’s – thoughts. Our minds, I think, must echo each other’s after what we’ve been through. An aftereffect of seeing the same horrific sights. Of having our hands together in them. But now, with that behind us … why shouldn’t we relax and find relief together?

  But then there are moments when I find myself feeling suddenly fearful; and I look to my left and see Greg with the same look of fear in his eyes. In the worse, as in the better, we are of one mind. We slam back another drink. New, true friends.

  And it’s that sense of friendship, of brotherhood, that bursts my whole being into a panic when I see him start to convulse and fall to the ground.

  68

  Monday Evening

  Greg is on the floor in under a second, and it looks like he is hyperventilating. He’s overtaken, by what I don’t know, and his chest begins to flutter. His skin appears clammy, even in the dark bar light. He hadn’t appeared even remotely ill a moment ago, and I have no idea what may have overtaken him. But once again, in this shocked instant, I realize that I don’t know Greg all that well. There’s so much that I can’t explain. Maybe it’s the alcohol – I’m not feeling entirely well myself – or maybe it’s a condition or a disease he’s borne his whole life. Maybe it’s just panic. I am helplessly uninformed.