December Park(115)

He dragged the pick down through the strings. Some of them made stunted plunks while others rang out sourly.

“That doesn’t sound like what you did,” he said equally as sour.

“It just takes practice.” I got off the bed and went to my desk. As I gathered up the typed manuscript pages of my story that was slowly expanding into novel territory, Adrian continued down-strumming the guitar. “Yeah, you’re getting it.”

“What’s that?” he said as I set the manuscript down on the bed beside him.

“It’s the story I’m writing.”

“You wrote this? Like . . . you made it up?”

“Yeah.”

He set the guitar aside. “It’s like a hundred pages. I thought you just wrote short stories and stuff for the school magazine.” He flipped through the first few pages. “What’s it about?”

“Well, it’s sort of about what we’ve been doing all year. You know, going after the Piper. Only in the story, I call him the Chesapeake Bay Butcher. He hacks people up with a machete, like Jason Voorhees.”

“Neat.”

“I thought maybe we can use this story idea for your comic book.”

“Comic books don’t have this many words.”

“Well, maybe we can do a bunch of comic books. Like a whole series of them.”

“Or maybe I can draw pictures for your story,” Adrian said. “I could read it and draw scenes from what you wrote.”

“You could do that?” But I had already seen what he could do, and I knew it would be easy for him.

“Yeah, it would be fun.”

“Does your mom get like this a lot?” I’d asked the question before I realized what I was doing.

“She used to do it a lot after my dad killed himself. Now it’s only every once in a while. Sometimes I lock myself in my bedroom, but last time she broke the lock on the door.” His tone sounded so easy and casual and collected that he could have been discussing box scores or the plot to the latest comic book he’d just read.

“Does she . . . like . . . hit you?” I said, trying hard to sound equally as collected. I wasn’t sure I pulled it off.

“Not really. Like, not on purpose. Sometimes she throws stuff and I get in the way, but that’s about it. Mostly, she just wants to hug me until she cries and falls asleep. It usually doesn’t bother me, but I didn’t feel like dealing with it tonight.” He hoisted his small shoulders and stared at the manuscript in his lap. “I guess I feel bad for her.”

I flopped down on my bed.

Adrian stood and put the manuscript on my desk. Then he picked up the guitar and looked at the way the strings were wound into the tuners, as if to divine some secret into how the instrument might be conquered.

“You can stay more than one night, if you want,” I told him. “Like, if you need to.”

“Thanks. But just tonight should be fine. She’ll be okay by tomorrow.” He propped the guitar against the wall.

“Come on,” I said, rolling off the bed. “I’ll get you some clean clothes and show you where the shower is.”





We stayed awake for hours that night, side by side in my small bed, telling ghost stories and hypothesizing about the Piper. The more we talked about the Piper, the less he seemed like Mr. Mattingly. The less he seemed to be real at all. And in that cold, black witching hour, it was almost possible to convince ourselves that we had made him up and that he was no different than the bogeymen we saw on the big screen at the Juniper Theater.

I fell asleep with images of the Piper’s unknown face flashing through my subconscious while in real life the Piper was taking his next victim.





Chapter Twenty-Two


The Brubaker Girl





The circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Tori Brubaker echoed those of William Demorest and Jeffrey Connor in that she wasn’t known to have gone missing until nearly a full day later.

This was because fifteen-year-old Tori had lied to her parents about spending the night at her friend Madeline Probst’s house. In reality, she had planned on spending the evening with her seventeen-year-old boyfriend, Zach Garrison, because his folks were out of town. But Zach and Tori got into an argument, and Tori walked home along the banks of the Magothy River at some point in the night. What happened after that has been left to speculation.

Police were dispatched. Zach’s parents were contacted and hurried home, cutting their vacation short, so they could be present when the police questioned Zach. In the meantime, the surrounding woods and the banks of the river were searched. One of Tori Brubaker’s slip-on shoes was discovered in the mud along the river. Fears mounted.

Detectives questioned Zach Garrison over and over again (and I believe my father questioned him, too). Ultimately, he was released into the custody of his petrified parents. There was videotape of Zach coming out of the police station with his head down, his parents hurrying him down the sidewalk toward the family car.

Interim Chief of Police Michael Solano gave a press conference at the Cape while divers dredged the marrow-colored waters of the Magothy and the Shallows. Though it was a horrifying sight, no one actually believed that Tori Brubaker had drowned.

“Tori Brubaker was last seen walking through the woods toward the river, presumably toward home.” Solano was dark and tight jawed and looked somewhat cunning in his dark suit, unlike his predecessor, Barber, who was a nervous-looking individual possessing the ruddy, gin-blossomed complexion of a career alcoholic. “While nothing has been ruled out at this point, we are certainly aware of the concerns of this community, and we will close no doors on any possible leads until they have been exhausted to my personal satisfaction.”