December Park by Ronald Malfi
Acknowledgments
Any writer worth their salt has inside them at least one good book about their childhood. This one is mine. Thanks to D.G., D.S., S.S., J.T., and C.S. for a great childhood and a lifetime of great memories.
Thanks to my gracious and dedicated editor, Lorie, and the staff at Medallion Press. Thanks to my family and friends for putting up with me during the course of writing this book; I know what a chore that can be. And thanks to my wife and daughter, who give me new memories on top of all the old great ones.
My grandfather passed away during the writing of this book. I loved him very much, which made the sections about my protagonist’s grandfather particularly difficult to write. Yet I felt my grandpa’s hand on my shoulder guiding me through to the end, much as he guided me in real life, and his spirit made it possible to complete this work.
—RM
9/6/2013
Arnold, MD
Book One
Welcome to Harting Farms
(October 1993–January 1994)
In the fall of 1993, a dark shadow fell over Harting Farms. Newspapers called him the Piper, like the minstrel of Brothers Grimm lore who lured all the children away. There were other darker names, too—names kids whispered throughout the halls of Stanton School and carved in the wooden chairs of the library like dirty, fearful secrets. The cafeteria rumbled with talk of escaped mental patients from Sheppard Pratt and lunatic mariners, lustful for child blood, who ported in Baltimore and found their way to our sleepy bayside hamlet.
In homeroom, Michael Sugarland drew pictures of werewolves with dripping fangs and claws like bayonets until Mr. Johnson, shaking his head and looking terminally exhausted, told him it was disrespectful of the missing. No one referred to the children as dead because none of them were found—not at first, anyway. They were the Missing, the Disappeared. The first few were even thought to be runaways.
But all that changed soon enough, and my friends and I were there to see it happen.
Chapter One
Winter Came Early That Year
We stood at the intersection of Point and Counterpoint, cigarettes dangling from our mouths like we were serious about something but too cool to show it, and shivered against the wind. Farther up Counterpoint Lane, the rack lights of police cars painted the trees with intermittent red and blue lights.
It was early October, but a premature cold spell had overtaken the city, coming in off the Chesapeake and freezing the water around the fishing boats down at the docks. The flower stands along the highway had traded in their potted plants and bristling ferns in favor of Indian corn and shiny orange pumpkins. Though it was still too early in the season for snow, the sky looked haunted by it.
It had been Peter’s idea to skip out after lunch period, and we’d gone directly to Solomon’s Field to smoke cigarettes and skim rocks across Drunkard’s Pond. Neighborhood kids called it that due to the derelicts who drank whiskey beneath the overpass of Solomon’s Bend Road. Its actual name was Deaver’s Pond, named after a former constable from the 1970s, according to my father, who knew about such things.
Peter, Scott, and I watched the conga line of police cars that had sidled up Counterpoint Lane. On the other side of the guardrail, the embankment dropped into the swell of the woods that buffered the street from the vast park below. These woods were known as Satan’s Forest, and some people said they were haunted. Most of the trees had already shed their leaves, though what foliage remained burned an almost iridescent orange, as if the tops of the trees were on fire.
An ambulance idled on the shoulder, too, its lights off. Twin sawhorses outfitted with flashing orange lights prevented traffic from turning onto Counterpoint Lane. A lone police officer stood behind the sawhorses, gazing at the detouring traffic, a look of abject boredom on his face.
“We shouldn’t hang around,” I said. “It looks like something important is going on.” Which meant my dad might be here, and I didn’t want him to catch me loitering on the sidewalk, smoking.
“Do you think another car went down there?” Peter said. He stared at the twisted remains of the guardrail and the deep grooves in the mud made by skidding tires.
Two days earlier, a college student named Audrey MacMillan, driving home drunk from Shooter’s Galley on Center Street, went off the road, through the guardrail, and down into the woods. She was lucky to have come away with nothing more serious than a broken leg. Before a tow truck could hoist the shattered vehicle out of the woods, the county sent some guys down there to cut away a few of the bigger trees. It had been a fiasco.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but they’ve got the road closed for a reason.”
“No chance another car went down,” Peter said. “I mean, two in one week?”
“I don’t see any new skid marks or tire tracks,” I said.
“Check your underwear,” Peter said, smirking. He was the oldest by just a few months, though the extra weight he carried afforded him a youthful, almost cherubic look. His pale green eyes were almost always alert, their color and intensity complemented by a shock of unruly red hair he kept too long in the back. He had been my best friend since we had unwittingly been dumped together in the same sandbox over in the Palisades all those years ago.