December Park

  “Maybe it was just some guy out for a walk through the woods who happened to stumble on this stuff,” Peter said. He sat down on the concrete statue head and rocked back and forth on it.

  “No, man,” Scott said. “A guy just out for a walk wouldn’t start opening up muddy trash bags, would he? It was like he was looking for something.”

  “But nothing’s missing,” I said. “What would he be looking for?”

  “This,” Adrian said. He pulled taut the length of shoelace he wore around his neck. Courtney Cole’s heart-shaped locket twinkled in the sunlight.

  “But how would he know we had it?” Peter asked.

  “Because he’s been following us,” Adrian said. “How else would he know we’ve been hanging around down here?”

  “You’re just trying to give me the heebie-jeebies,” Michael said.

  I looked around, wondering if there might in fact be someone secreted away beyond the depths of trees. A person could hide anywhere. My grandfather’s voice spoke up in my head, talking about shooting snipers down from trees during the war. Unnerved, I glanced up at the treetops.

  “It makes sense,” Scott said, nodding. “If we’ve been doing this right, then we’ve been visiting all the places the Piper would have gone, too.”

  “And there was that day Angie and I were at the Werewolf House,” Adrian said. “Remember those footsteps that came halfway down the stairs?”

  “Yeah,” I said, certain I knew where he was going with this. Because I had already said it to Peter yesterday . . .

  “What if it wasn’t that bully after all?” Adrian said.

  “Keener,” I said.

  “Yeah. What if it wasn’t him? What if that was the Piper instead?”

  “Man,” Michael said, turning toward me with an oddly forlorn expression. “Your English teacher is a homicidal child killer. Bummer. Personally, I was holding out hope it was Principal Unglesbee.”

  “It’s not Mr. Mattingly,” I said. “He’s got a wife.”

  “Serial killers can’t have wives?” Michael said. “They can’t be married? Is that some rule or something?”

  “John Wayne Gacy had two wives,” Scott said.

  Michael frowned. “At the same time?”

  “No, dummy,” Scott said. “And Ted Bundy had a serious girlfriend.”

  “Quit making shit up,” Michael scolded him.

  “It’s not Mr. Mattingly,” I said again, ignoring them.

  “He was at the Werewolf House yesterday,” Peter added, though skeptically.

  “Yeah, but he wasn’t the guy who was down here going through our stuff. So which one is it? They can’t both be the Piper.”

  “What if they are?” Adrian said. He tucked the locket inside his shirt. “Who’s to say the Piper can’t be two people?”

  “Two crazy child killers who happen to be terrorizing the same city at the same exact time?” Peter said, wrinkling his nose. “That sounds highly unlikely.”

  “It would be too much of a coincidence,” I added.

  “Unless it’s not a coincidence at all,” Scott said, already buying into Adrian’s theory.

  Michael said, “What do you mean?”

  “Like, what if they’re working together?” Scott said. “We’ve got a guy down here checking out our stuff and Mr. Mattingly hanging around the Werewolf House. They could both be the Piper.”

  Peter made a sour face that suggested he didn’t believe it was possible. I silently agreed with him.

  “So what do we do about all this?” Michael sat on the ground and crossed one ankle over the other.

  “I don’t know,” Adrian said.

  “We could go knock on the English teacher’s door, tell him we know who he is and what he’s been doing,” Michael said.

  “Yeah,” Peter groaned, “that’s brilliant.”

  “Wait a minute,” Scott said, his eyes brightening. “That’s not such a bad idea.”

  At Scott’s house, we put the plan into action. Among the junk that Scott’s aunt had salted away in the Steeples’ basement were countless magazines, everything from National Geographic and Newsweek to more obscure periodicals with tattooed men and marijuana leaves on the covers. We flipped through them, cutting out letters from the pages, which we then glued to a sheet of typing paper.

  Once we finished, we had something that looked like a ransom note from a movie.

  WE know who YOU are & what you HAVE done

  Wearing a pair of rubber dishwashing gloves, Scott folded the letter and tucked it inside a plain white envelope. He wet a sponge at the kitchen sink, then daubed the glue strip with it to seal the envelope. With more than just a hint of pride, he grinned at us, claiming to have seen it in an old black-and-white movie. Probably Hitchcock.

  “What the hell are you dweebs doing?” Kristy, Scott’s older sister, stood in the doorway. She was twenty and home from college for the summer. She wore black leggings and a satin blousy thing that clung to the contours of her breasts. She was attractive in a dark and devious way—what some people might misconstrue as slutty—and, like her brother, was unpredictably intelligent.

  Her voice startled the five of us. We were seated around the table like conspirators. Scott yanked the envelope off the table and hid it in his lap.

  “Seriously,” she said, snapping gum. “What are you bozos up to?”

  “None of your business,” Scott shot back. “Get lost.”

  “You can’t bullshit me. You’re up to something.” She looked around the table. “You,” she said to Adrian. “I don’t know you. What’s your name?”

  “Adrian.”

  “You part of this sordid cabal now?”

  Adrian said, “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  Scott scowled at his sister. “Don’t you have some pituitary case you should be humping in the back of a car somewhere?”

  “You’re fucking puerile.”

  “Hey, Kristy,” Michael said. “Show us your tits.”

  “You’d have a heart attack, you spaz.” She went to the fridge, grabbed a can of Diet Coke, then stalked out of the kitchen.

  “She’s your sister?” Adrian said. He remained staring at the doorway, as if in anticipation—or hope—that Kristy would return for an encore performance.

  “Unfortunately,” Scott grumbled.

  “Aw,” Peter cooed. “Our little buddy’s got a crush.”

  Adrian blushed. “I do not.”

  “You’re right,” Michael jumped in. “He does. Look—he’s turning red as a tomato.”

  “They grow up so fast,” I said, adding my two cents.

  “I don’t,” Adrian insisted. “I don’t have a crush. No way.”

  “Cut it out, guys. You’re making me sick,” Scott said, placing the envelope back on the table.

  Our plan was rudimentary at best. Nonetheless, Adrian, Scott, and Michael were all completely on board. Peter thought we were wasting our time. I had a deeper resignation—namely, that if we got caught perpetrating this foolishness, I could never look Mr. Mattingly in the face again. And I had been kicked out of one English class already.

  None of us knew exactly where Mr. Mattingly lived, so Scott retrieved the most recent Harting Farms phone book from the pantry. However, there was no Mattingly listed.

  Scott went into his father’s study and returned with a pamphlet supplement to the phone book, which some of the neighborhoods released midyear to keep the comings and goings updated. Scott flipped through the pages. “Here it is. David and Tina Mattingly, 1597 Beauchamp Drive, Parliament Village. It says they moved into town on August 5.”

  “When did William Demorest disappear?” Peter asked.

  “It was the end of August. I don’t remember the exact date.”

  Peter moved his lips as if he were chewing something.

  “Okay, we got the address. Let’s do it already,” Michael whined.

  We all got on our bikes—Adrian on my handlebars—and rode out to the section of
town designated as Parliament Village. It was a nice June day, the heat index slowly creeping toward ninety. Kids zipped up and down the streets on bikes. On Beauchamp Drive, four young girls sat on someone’s front lawn around a circular wooden table having a tea party. Amidst all this summertime normalcy, it was almost possible to believe that the Piper was nothing more than a figment of a paranoid town’s imagination.

  We slowed down as the numbers on the houses grew closer and closer to 1597.

  “There it is.” Peter executed a casual arc in front of the driveway, then headed back down the street.

  The rest of us followed suit and came to a stop a few blocks away.

  “So how do we do this?” I asked. This neighborhood had very few nooks and crannies to hide in. I felt like we were overly conspicuous just being on the street corner.

  “We do it like ding-dong ditch,” Michael said, “only we leave the letter behind.”

  “Who goes?” Peter asked.

  “Scott, you’re the fastest,” I said. “You can knock and run away quicker than any of us.”

  He nodded.

  “What about the rest of us?” Adrian asked. He had dropped off my handlebars and was now sitting on the curb. “We need to hide, but we should be someplace where we can watch what happens.”

  We all looked around.

  Peter pointed at a high fence between two houses across the street. “We can hide behind the fence.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Adrian said. He turned to Scott. “Do you think you can knock and make it all the way back here before Mr. Mattingly opens the door?”

  Scott looked at the fence, then the Mattingly house, gauging the distance. Scott had never been part of an organized sports team in his life, though pretty much every coach at school was after him to go out for their respective teams. “I think I could do it,” he said finally.

  “Just be careful,” I told him.

  We wheeled our bikes across the street and down the narrow strip of lawn that ran between the fence and a two-story Victorian with puke-green aluminum siding.

  Scott came with us, holding the sealed envelope. He kept glancing over his shoulder, perhaps trying to convince himself that he could make the run without getting caught.

  “You gotta wedge the envelope in the doorframe,” Peter told him. “This way, when he opens the door, it’ll fall at his feet.”

  Scott bent one knee and held his sneakered foot against his butt for a few seconds. He repeated this stretch with the other leg. When he finished, he took a deep breath, and both Michael and Adrian clapped him on the back.

  “I’ll be back in thirty seconds,” Scott said, then he was off.

  He jogged up the block toward the Mattingly house, a two-story A-frame with sky-blue siding and charcoal shutters flanking the dormer windows on the second floor. In the driveway was a maroon Subaru with a Stanton School bumper sticker that read Go Cows! in navy-blue lettering on a gold background.

  Scott leaped up the porch steps in one long-legged stride. He tucked the envelope between the door and the frame, then banged the brass doorknocker against the door three times. The sound echoed down the street. Scott turned, jumped off the porch, and sprinted in our direction.

  We watched through slats in the fence. Somewhere a dog barked.

  Come on, come on, come on, I willed Scott.

  “Come on, come on,” Michael whispered. It was as if he were narrating my thoughts.

  Scott hopped the curb, dashed across the lawn, and joined us behind the fence a mere second before the Mattinglys’ front door opened.

  A slim woman with blondish hair piled high on her head came out. When the envelope fluttered to her feet, she stared at it without moving. Then she picked it up and examined both sides of the blank envelope. She looked up and down Beauchamp Drive. For a second, I thought she stared straight at me, capable of locking onto my eyes despite the distance and the fence between us. Then she retreated into the house and shut the door. The brass doorknocker jumped.

  “That must be his wife,” Adrian said.

  I turned to Scott, who was bent over with his hands on his knees. He was breathing heavily, but when he saw me looking, he gave me a calm and confident smile.

  “What do we do now?” Peter asked.

  “We wait and see how Mr. Mattingly reacts,” Adrian said, pushing his glasses up his nose.

  “What if his wife just throws the letter out without showing it to him?” Michael asked.

  Adrian looked at him. “Would you?”

  The five of us sat behind that fence for over an hour, watching Mr. Mattingly’s front door. We expected anything to happen at any minute—Mr. Mattingly to burst out of the house clutching the letter, climb into his Subaru, and peel out into the street while leaving streaks of rubber on the driveway. But that didn’t happen. No one came out of the Mattingly house.

  When a face appeared in an open window of the puke-green house beside us and someone said, “Hey, you kids,” we all got up, gathered our bikes, and took off. As I biked, balancing Adrian on my handlebars, I glanced over my shoulder at the Mattingly house one last time. There was nothing to see there.

  Because Michael had to go back to summer school on Monday, we let him pick what we would do for the rest of the afternoon. He elected to catch The Killer Shrews at the Juniper. Even though the titular shrews were actually mangy-looking dogs donning ridiculous oversized teeth and strands of fake hair woven into their fur, we all laughed and had a great time. For the time being, we forgot about Mr. Mattingly and the Piper, content to lose ourselves in the nicotine-soaked upholstery of the theater seats, the patches of molasses on the floors, and the indiscriminate scatter of popcorn that stuck to the soles of our Adidas. When the protagonists attempted to escape the killer shrews by lugging around old oil barrels on their heads, we shouted and tossed Jujubes at the screen.

  It was dusk when the movie ended. We biked back home, going our separate ways once we crossed the Superstore plaza. I was exhausted from riding Adrian all over the city, and the two of us walked my bike the rest of the way. We talked excitedly about the movie. Then we talked about what kind of story line I could come up with for the superhero comic book he was drawing.

  “It should be something like the Fantastic Four,” he said. Then added, “Only, you know, with five of us.”

  “The Fantastic Four,” I said. “That’s like with Iron Man and the Incredible Hulk and all those guys, right?”

  Adrian gaped at me. “Are you kidding? No way! You’re thinking of the Avengers.”

  “Oh.”

  “But we can be like the Avengers, too. I can lend you some comics so you can see how the stories go.”

  We hadn’t talked about the Piper for the entire walk home, and it was refreshing. After all, it was summer vacation. It was a time for running wild in the parks and racing bikes in the streets. It was a time for jumping off the docks at the Shallows and swimming out to the barges. It was a time for losing yourself in the air-conditioned darkness of the Juniper Theater, watching public domain horror movies and shouting at the actors on the screen.

  “Do you think I could spend the night at your place?” Adrian asked when we approached his driveway.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “Thanks. My mom’s been in one of her moods lately. She’s been staying home from work, sitting around the house in her robe, drinking.”

  “Do you need to get some stuff from your house?”

  Adrian looked at his house, contemplation etched on his otherwise expressionless face. “I’d rather not.”

  “I think we’ve got a spare toothbrush you could borrow.”

  He wrinkled his nose. “Ew. Borrow?”

  “I mean, you can keep it,” I said and slugged him playfully on the forearm.

  Inside, the TV was on in the den and the smell of my grandfather’s pipe wafted through the open porch windows. My grandmother greeted us in the hallway, a cup of steaming coffee in her hand. “Well, you two look like you’ve bee
n through the wringer. What have you been up to all day?”

  “Not much,” I said, catching Adrian’s sidelong glance in my direction. For whatever reason, I felt very close to bursting out in a gale of laughter. “Can Adrian stay over?”

  “I don’t see why not. Should I heat up some food? There are plenty of leftovers. Your father ate nothing.”

  “Sounds great,” I said.

  Adrian nodded vehemently, a keen hunger in his eyes.

  My grandmother reheated a dinner of veal cutlets and peppers for us, then went upstairs to get clean sheets for my bed.

  As we ate, my grandfather came in, paused in midstride as he saw Adrian shoveling a second helping of peppers onto his plate, then said, “Are we adopting neighborhood children now?”

  “Hi, Mr. Mazzone,” Adrian said.

  “Hi, Grandpa,” I said.

  “I hope you two are aware that you’re eating my lunch for tomorrow.”

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked.

  “He had to drive to Baltimore for work.”

  “Why Baltimore?”

  “Do I look like the chief of police?” my grandfather said, then ambled out of the room.

  After dinner, we played Uno at the kitchen table for an hour or so. We talked about ideas for Adrian’s comic book while we played, but what I really wanted to know was what was going on with Adrian’s mom.

  “I’m sort of writing a story about us already,” I said, laying down a Draw Four card. “Maybe we can work it around your comic book drawings.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I set my cards down. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

  We went past the living room where my grandparents exchanged snores from dueling recliners, then up the stairs to my bedroom. This was the first time he had been in my room.

  Adrian looked around in awe. “Do you know how to play that?” he asked, pointing at my acoustic guitar.

  “Sure.” I picked it up, sat on the edge of the bed, took a second to tune it, and then strummed the first few bars of “Glory Days.”

  “Wow.” He actually leaned forward, staring at my fingers splayed across the frets. “I didn’t know you could play the guitar.”