December Park(110)

“What people?”

“Just some people.”

“Was it cops?” I said. “Did you tell them about what we found, what we’ve been doing?”

“Heck, no,” Adrian said, glaring at me. “I’m not stupid, you know.”

“So who was it?”

“Just some doctors.”

“For a whole week?”

“They’re specialists.”

“For what? Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. My mom just gets weird about stuff. They’re not real doctors, anyway. They’re, like, psychiatrists and stuff.”

“Like that lady they brought into school to talk to kids about what’s been going on in town?”

“Sort of like that. But it has nothing to do with the Piper. This was about my dad.”

“Oh.”

“My mom gets all freaked out and wants to make sure I’m not upset about it or anything.”

“About his . . . his suicide, you mean,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Are you?” The words were out of my mouth before I knew what I was doing.

“Not really. Not anymore.” He put the comic book down. “Do you want to see some pictures of him?”

“I guess so. If you want to show me.”

Adrian rolled off the mattress and dug through one of the cardboard boxes shoved against the wall, pulling out random items and dropping them to the floor until he found a small scrapbook with a dark blue vinyl cover. He brought it over to the mattress and sat down beside me again.

“Here,” he said, opening the scrapbook. There were photos pasted to the pages, and I could tell by the clothing and the hairstyles that even the most recent were at least a decade old. Adrian pointed to one photo of a smiling man with a dark moustache and kind eyes who held a toddler on his lap. “That’s my dad. And that’s me.”

What struck me was that Adrian’s father looked like a regular guy. In my head, I had made him out to be a lunatic, a social outcast who had taken a zombie for his wife, then ended his life by sucking on poisonous fumes in the family car. Yet the man in the photos could have been a baseball coach, a high school guidance counselor, a scoutmaster.

There were photos of Adrian’s mother, too. She was a different woman in these photos—prettier, more alert. Absent were the dead eyes, the frazzled hair, the parchment-colored flesh.

We were only a few pages in when a shadow appeared beneath Adrian’s bedroom door. Adrian noticed it, too. A floorboard creaked.

Adrian closed the scrapbook, got up, and stuffed it back into the box. When he turned around to face me, he said, “Wanna read some comics for a while?”





Chapter Twenty-One


Courting a Killer





The next day was Saturday, and Michael had no summer school, so the five of us convened at the Quickman around noon. When Michael arrived and saw Adrian, he raced up to the smaller boy and enveloped him in a bear hug that lifted him clear off the floor. Adrian laughed.

“We thought you were dead, Poindexter,” Michael said, once we were all seated at a window booth. We had ordered nothing but Cokes, which we now sipped at our leisure. “We were really starting to think the Piper got you.”

“Where the heck have you been?” Scott asked.

I wondered how Adrian would tell it since, to the best of my knowledge, he had never spoken of his father to the guys.

“My mom sent me to a hospital, so some doctors could talk to me, ask me questions,” he said.

“Doctors?” Peter said.

“My mom overreacts. After my dad died, she had me talk to doctors all the time. Now it’s just every once in a while, whenever she thinks I need to talk to someone.”

“You can talk to us about stuff, too,” Scott said.

“Thanks,” Adrian said. “But I’m not really upset about anything anymore.”

It was the anymore I thought my friends would key in on. But if they did, they didn’t ask him about it. Part of me was grateful while another part of me felt uncomfortable being the only one who knew what happened to Adrian’s father.

“We gotta tell you about yesterday,” Michael said and proceeded to describe the man he and Scott had come across in the woods, going through our stuff.

When he finished, Peter took over and explained how we had gone to the Werewolf House looking for him and had run into Mr. Mattingly.

Adrian looked at me. “Our English teacher? What was he doing out there?”

“Walking his dog,” I said.

“Did he recognize you?”

“Of course.”

“He’s been on the suspect list from the beginning,” Michael reminded us.

My apprehension and suspicion about running into Mr. Mattingly yesterday afternoon had worn off. “Mr. Mattingly’s not the Piper,” I said.

“How do you know?” Michael said. “We can’t rule anyone out. And it’s pretty f*ckin’ strange that he was hanging around that old house.”

“So were Keener and his friends, remember?”

“Keener could be the Piper,” Michael offered.

Peter tossed a balled-up napkin at him. “You think everyone’s the Piper.”