December Park

  “Oh, my God,” said one woman. She wandered away from the crowd, her hands to her mouth, her eyes wide and fearful. “Oh, God, Rebecca . . .”

  I approached the crowd, coming up alongside my dad. I spotted something small and dark, shoved up against the curb.

  My dad placed a hand on my chest, arresting my progress. “Stay,” he said, then pushed himself through the crowd. He bent down and examined the thing on the ground.

  I managed to squeeze between two men and saw what he was looking at.

  It was the rum cake. A ceramic plate lay in pieces in the gutter. It looked like someone had tried to kick the smashed cake and the pieces of plate into the sewer.

  My dad stood, went to the nearest uniformed officer, and spoke quietly and very closely to his face. Once he backed away, the uniformed officer addressed the crowd, telling them to step back. More house lights came on farther down the block.

  My dad headed down Bessel toward the Ransoms’ house. I bolted after him, reaching him just as he went around to the driver’s side of his car. “Go on. Get in,” he said without looking at me.

  I jumped in the passenger seat and slammed the door. My dad backed down the block, spun the car around, and gunned it toward Haven.

  I wanted to ask where we were going, but I didn’t. I thought it best that I sat there in the passenger seat and kept quiet. When we hit Haven, I expected him to turn in the direction of Worth Street. Instead, he swung the car around in the opposite direction. The fireworks were in the rearview mirror now. My dad reached down beneath the console and switched on his police radio. Static blossomed in the car. Unintelligible voices spoke in eerily calm tones to each other.

  When my dad took a right onto an unnamed service road that ran through the woods, I knew what he was doing: circling Bessel Avenue on the far side of the woods. The service road was unpaved, and the sedan jounced like a roller coaster as we advanced deeper into the trees. The high beams caused the shadows to shift, and the trees looked alive.

  When the service road forked, my father took the road that led deeper into the woods. He slowed the car to a near crawl and diligently surveyed the darkened landscape all around us. There was a floodlight affixed to the mirror on the driver’s side of the car, which my father switched on. He directed the beam into the trees and manipulated its direction by thumbing a lever on the inside of the window. We drove like this for a while until our mutual respiration fogged up the glass.

  The radio beneath the dashboard came alive with a man’s official-sounding voice. “Intersection of Bessel and Waverly. Possible suspect. Need backup.”

  “Hang on,” said my dad to me. He gunned the car through the trees and took a secondary dirt road. The decline was steep and bumpy, the roadway not designed for vehicular traffic. Tree branches clawed at the sedan’s roof. At the bottom of the hill, the secondary road widened as it merged with a section of asphalt. This was Waverly Street, one of the single-lane beach roads on the far side of the woods behind Bessel Avenue. As the car’s tires touched the pavement, my father placed a bubble light on the dashboard and hit a switch, turning it on. Blue light reflected off the windshield and blazed down the dark street.

  When we took a sharp turn, I saw a police cruiser farther up ahead, the dome lights painting the nearby woods in red and blue. Two men, one of them in a police uniform, stood outside the vehicle. The cop’s gun was still in its holster, but he was resting his hand on the butt, ready to draw at a moment’s notice.

  The other man looked to be about fifty. He had a neatly trimmed beard and wore a puffy brown parka and a Baltimore Orioles baseball hat tugged down on his head, flattening his ears. He held both hands up, though not in the reach-for-the-sky way criminals raise their hands on TV when cops tell them to freeze. There was a casualness to the whole thing that seemed strangely rehearsed.

  My father had his door open before the car was fully stopped. “Stay inside,” he told me and got out. He withdrew his gun as he approached the man in the Orioles hat.

  I rolled down the passenger window so I could hear what was going on.

  “Chester?” my father said, taking two careful steps toward the man. He kept the gun aimed at him. “The hell you doing out here at this hour?”

  “Walkin’.” The man’s voice was indignant. “Just what I was tellin’ your protégé here.”

  “You been drinking?”

  “Is that a crime all of a sudden?”

  My father spoke to Chester in a low voice. I caught only a few words, among them Aaron Ransom’s name.

  Chester’s expression changed from indignation to outright disbelief, then to something akin to horror. When he lowered his hands, the uniformed officer instructed him to keep them up.

  “Turn around, Chester,” said my dad.

  When the man turned around, my father holstered his gun. I held my breath. My dad patted down the sides of Chester’s parka, the pockets of his dungarees. They were still engaged in conversation, but I couldn’t hear a word of it until Chester turned back around and said, “I’ve already told him that.”

  “Come on,” my dad said. There was a pleading quality to his voice that sounded very informal given the situation. “Help us out here, okay?”

  Chester sighed, waggled his hands like they were coming loose at the wrists, then placed them behind his back.

  The uniformed cop closed in and handcuffed the man.

  “I ain’t talking to no one but you, Sal,” Chester said as the cop led him into the backseat of the police car.

  “I’ll be there right behind you,” said my dad. He got in the sedan, breathed warmth into his cupped hands, then smiled wearily at me. A nerve jumped below his left eye.

  “Who is that guy?” I asked.

  “Chester Vaughn. He works down at the piers.”

  “Is he being arrested?”

  “No. I’ve asked him to cooperate and he agreed.”

  “How come that cop put handcuffs on him?”

  “To be safe. You don’t trust anyone.” My father pulled away from the curb and drifted slowly past the police car.

  The officer was in the front seat, talking on a radio. In the back, Chester Vaughn gazed at us. His eyes were bleary red holes in the doughy whiteness of his face. The cop had removed his baseball hat, and his wiry hair stood up in uncombed whorls.

  “It’s freezing out there,” my dad said, despite the beads of sweat glistening on his forehead. “Roll that window up.”

  I rolled it up, then turned around in my seat. Through the rear window I watched the blue and red lights of the police cruiser alternating through the trees. Then the lights went dark.

  “Shit.” The word dripped from my father’s mouth with undeniable defeat. He looked at me, and I thought I saw him trying to offer me another tired smile. But this time he couldn’t manage it. Instead, he dug a Kleenex from his coat pocket and handed it to me. “Wipe your nose.”

  I blew my nose, then wiped my eyes, abruptly aware but not all that surprised that there were tears at their corners. The car’s heater was blasting hot air, but my entire body was shivering.

  Ten minutes later, we were driving down Haven Street. The radio continued to squawk until my father switched it off. The clock on the dashboard read 1:32 a.m.

  “Was it the Piper?” I said. “What happened to Aaron, I mean.”

  My father didn’t answer.

  “What’s gonna happen now?”

  “I’m going to drop you off, then head down to the station to talk with Chester.”

  “I want to stay with you.”

  “Your grandparents are probably wondering what’s going on. I need you to stay home with them.”

  “No,” I said. “I want to come with you.”

  “I’m working now, Angie. This isn’t a game.”

  I turned away and stared out the passenger window. The houses along this section of Haven Street were dark, with even the outdoor Christmas lights unplugged at this hour. Only the blue flicker of television ligh
ts could be seen in some of the upstairs windows. There were no more fireworks in the sky.

  We turned onto Worth Street and glided up to our house. The porch lights and the kitchen light were on. As we idled at the curb, I saw the curtain whisk away from the window and a face peer out.

  My dad looked at me. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “I’ve got to go.”

  I nodded, opening the passenger door and stepping out into the street. My hands in my pockets and my head down, I walked around the front of the car and up the driveway. Before I was even halfway to the porch, my grandfather opened the front door. Once I was safely inside, my dad drove away.

  They didn’t find Aaron Ransom. Chester Vaughn was questioned but ultimately released, his alibi having checked out. Apparently, a midnight walk around the beachfront was typical for Mr. Vaughn, particularly after knocking back a few drinks.

  However, word got out that he had been questioned by the police, and rumors circulated. It was common knowledge that some of Chester Vaughn’s neighbors, emboldened after a night of drinking down at Shooter’s Galley, arrived on the Vaughns’ front porch, shouting for Chester to come out. Chester called the cops, who threatened to arrest them for trespassing and assault if they didn’t go home, which they all did, albeit reluctantly. Two days later, Chester and his wife thought it might be a good time to visit relatives in San Antonio.

  The day after Aaron Ransom’s disappearance, I told my friends about it. Even though I did my best to relate to them all that had happened and how it had made me feel, I was powerless to really get it through to them. There were things I couldn’t tell them, like how I hadn’t realized I’d been crying until my father handed me a Kleenex and how my father had stood there holding his gun on someone. It wasn’t just him pulling the gun and patting the man down; it was the beads of sweat that had clung to his forehead when he’d climbed into the car and that awful smile he had summoned for me, no doubt in an effort to give me comfort. But it had been a horrible smile, devoid of any trace of humanity let alone comfort.

  Aaron Ransom’s picture appeared in the newspapers, and his mother gave a tearful speech on television. I read in the Caller that the police had located the boy’s estranged father, Henry Carlson, who lived in Milwaukee. On several past occasions Carlson had allegedly threatened Ransom’s mother about snatching the kid and taking him to Canada. But after Carlson was apprehended by federal agents, he was cleared of any suspicion.

  Some residents started up a neighborhood watch. My father joined, and sometimes he drove around the streets at night looking for anything—or anyone—unusual. I often asked to go with him, but he told me it wasn’t something I needed to worry myself with. It didn’t matter what he said; after seeing the Cole girl’s broken skull followed by that sickening night on Bessel Avenue, things worried me.

  Another search was conducted in the woods off Counterpoint Lane and in the surrounding park. Peter and I rode our bikes to December Park and watched the cops, along with countless neighborhood volunteers, comb the area for Aaron Ransom’s corpse. Rebecca Ransom was there as well, propped up like a mannequin in the backseat of a police cruiser. We wanted to be there in the event they happened to find Aaron’s body. But, of course, they didn’t.

  Chapter Seven

  The Combination Lock

  Returning to school after the holidays was like resuming a death march after a brief respite to catch your breath. The halls had grown cold in our absence, the ancient furnace no match for the weather. Time itself seemed to get mired down in molasses, and even the clocks appeared to tick more slowly. Each footfall was duller; each gloomy corridor was somehow less hospitable. Stanton School was a mine shaft hundreds of feet below the surface of the earth. And it was haunted by Aaron Ransom’s ghost.

  As it always was, the first week back in class was torturous. Mr. Mattingly’s class was the last one of the day, and when the final bell rang that Friday, it was like the report of a starter’s pistol. The cacophony of desk chairs skidding across the scuffed tile floor was followed by a rush of students heading for the door.

  “Angelo.” It was Mr. Mattingly. “Do you have a couple of minutes?”

  I swung my backpack over one shoulder. “Sure.”

  The remaining students filed into the hallway, Adrian Gardiner bringing up the rear. He walked quickly and with his head down, his backpack looking like something an astronaut would wear. He merged with the rest of the foot traffic in the hallway and disappeared.

  Mr. Mattingly got up from his desk, smoothing out the wrinkles in his slacks. He went to the door and shut it. “Have a seat,” he told me, nodding toward the chair directly in front of his desk.

  I sat and he perched opposite me on the edge of his desk, the way cops on TV sometimes did when they were pretending to be sympathetic to a perp.

  “Have you been enjoying the class?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Have you started thinking about college?”

  “No. It’s still a few years off.”

  “Understandable. But do you have any notion of what you’d like to study in college? Where you’d like to go?”

  “Not really. I mean, I haven’t given it that much thought.”

  “Right.” He prodded the cleft in his chin with one thumb. “I know you’ve been here only a short time.”

  For one sinking moment I thought he was going to ask why I’d been transferred from Naczalnik’s class to his. I had just assumed he’d already known the reason. It seemed that Mr. Mattingly liked me, and I didn’t want to tarnish that with what had transpired between Naczalnik and me.

  “I just want to throw something out there and see what you think.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “I’d like to recommend you for Advanced Placement English next year.”

  His statement caught me off guard. I didn’t speak. Only nerds and members of the school marching band took Advanced Placement classes.

  Mr. Mattingly laughed and rubbed the side of his face. “I see I shocked you a little. Sorry about that.” He leaned over his desk and picked up a small stack of papers that he thumbed through but did not look at. He stared at me. “I’ve been very impressed with your work. You possess exceptional writing skills, and you never have trouble with any of the harder texts. I checked your transcripts and saw that you’ve been acing your English courses since your first semester of freshman year.”

  I shrugged. “I like to read a lot.”

  Again, Mr. Mattingly surrendered a warm laugh. “Yeah, I bet. And you do some writing, too, don’t you?” His gaze shifted toward a copy of the school’s creative arts magazine on his desk. A story of mine had been published in that very issue.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “So what do you think?”

  I shifted in my seat. “You mean about the AP class? I don’t know. I hear those classes are pretty tough.”

  “Not if you’re willing to do the work.”

  “It’s not . . . uh, I mean . . .”

  “I get it. You want to be in class with your friends. Only nerds take AP classes.”

  “Something like that,” I said sheepishly.

  “Listen,” he said. “You don’t have to make up your mind right here on the spot. Go home and think about it, talk it over with your parents. Take some time to figure out what it is you want to do.”

  “It’s just me and my dad,” I said.

  “Then talk it over with your dad.”

  “Okay. I will.”

  “Good.” He clapped. Then he held a hand out for me to shake.

  As I gripped his warm palm, it occurred to me that I had never shaken a teacher’s hand before.

  “Now get out of here and enjoy the weekend,” he said, smiling.

  Out in the hall the crowd had mostly died down. A few stragglers hollered down the corridor, and I had to duck to avoid getting dive-bombed by a paper airplane. I dumped some of my heavier textbooks into my locker, not u
p for hauling them on my back the whole way home.

  Glancing at my new wristwatch, which had been a Christmas present from my dad, I saw that I was too late to meet up with Peter, Michael, and Scott in the parking lot. There was an unspoken pact between the four of us that if someone didn’t show within the first five minutes, it most likely meant detention and the others were free to skedaddle.

  I looked to my left. A few lockers down, Adrian Gardiner glared at his enormous overloaded backpack, which rested on the floor at his feet. After a moment, he turned and looked at me. Those large colorless eyes were like the headlamps on a VW minibus behind the thick lenses of his glasses. There was a blotch of dried ketchup on the front of his sweater that resembled a gunshot wound.

  Because I felt like a deviant just standing there staring at him, I offered Adrian what felt like a conciliatory smile.

  Adrian did not return my smile. He only stared at me, causing a wave of discomfort to rise through my body like steam.

  “Did you do it?” he said, his voice quivering.

  “Did I do what?”

  He pointed down at his backpack. “The lock. Did you do it?”

  I slammed my locker shut, tugged the strap of my backpack over one shoulder, and went over to him.

  “Someone put it on there when I wasn’t looking,” he said. “I don’t know the combination, and I can’t get it open. All my stuff is in there.”

  Someone had locked his backpack by slipping a combination lock through the holes in both zippers.

  “Oh.” Half of me suddenly felt sorry for him while the other half was embarrassed by his weakness, his pathetic nature. “I didn’t do that. Why would I do that to you?”

  “Damn. Fuck.” That second word squeaked out of him, and I wondered if it was the first time he’d ever said it. He glanced sideways at me, as if to see whether or not I was bothered by the curse word.

  Dropping to one knee, I examined the lock and tried to tug it apart. No dice. Instinct told me to flee and leave this little twerp to suffer his own follies, but good sense intervened before I could take to my heels.