December Park(116)

For a moment, my father was visible in the background of the televised broadcast, a slender, dark-suited man speaking with one of the uniformed police officers on the beach.





Tori Brubaker’s body was not recovered. Her name was added to the list of missing children, and her parents were seen on TV begging futilely for the safe return of their beloved daughter. It was terribly reminiscent of Rebecca Ransom’s televised pleas.

Speculation abounded throughout the media. What had caused the brief respite in abductions only to have them start up again, with the Holt boy and the Brubaker girl vanishing within two weeks of each other?

Like some great forest beastie, I imagined the Piper hibernating throughout the long, cold winter, tucked away in an underground burrow far below the panicked streets of my hometown, gnawing on the bones of Aaron Ransom, Bethany Frost, and the rest. Other suppositions were more practical: Scott suggested that perhaps the Piper didn’t want to leave footprints behind in the snow. Regardless of the reason, the Piper hadn’t moved on. He had been hiding among us all along.

Two days later, a torrential downpour kept us holed up like prisoners in our homes. The storm had also made things difficult for those involved in the search for Brubaker, and there was concern that if the girl had drowned, it was possible the storm had washed her body out to the bay by now. Regardless, her body was not recovered from the river, and the search ultimately made its way out into the open gray waters of the Chesapeake Bay.

Adrian had gotten roped into doing some chores for his mom, Michael was still in summer school, and Scott was held hostage on a family outing, so it was just Peter and me that afternoon in the woods, chucking rocks into the flooded creek and smoking cigarettes. The dynamo-powered radio was wedged into the V of a maple tree, and the sounds of Springsteen singing “No Surrender” made us both feel like we were wrapped in some invisible blanket of comfort.

“You think a person could actually die from fear?” he asked, staring into the woods and watching the rainwater drip off the sagging green leaves. “Like, have a heart attack or whack themselves out because they’re so scared of something?”

“I don’t know. I guess maybe it’s possible.”

“You used to get letters from Charles when he was overseas, right?”

“Yeah.” It was weird hearing him bring up Charles. I couldn’t remember my brother coming up in a conversation among my friends since the funeral.

“He ever mention being scared?”

“No. He mostly talked about the people in his squad or platoon or whatever you call it and the people from the villages they went to.”

“Oh.” Peter sounded disappointed.

“Also, he talked about home a lot. He kept telling me not to grow up too fast like he did, even though that’s all Dad ever seemed to want me to do. He kept saying he wished he could stay young forever, but he never realized that was his wish until he was too old and it was too late.”

I could tell by his silence that he wanted to ask me more questions about Charles but didn’t know how. I allowed him the silence because I didn’t like to talk too much about Charles, either.

After a long while, Peter said, “My sister’s scared.”

“About what happened to Tori Brubaker?”

“About all of it. She went to Cape Middle School with Howie Holt, and she’s friends with Tori’s sister. She was crying last night. I didn’t know what to do.”

“There’s nothing you can do,” I told him.

“Yeah, that’s just it. I’m completely helpless. My sister’s scared shitless and I can’t do a damned thing.”

It occurred to me that what had been happening not only affected the victims and their families, but it affected every man, woman, and child who walked the streets of Harting Farms, smiling in the daylight, cowering at night. It affected the police, who had been turned into a joke by the press. It affected my friends and me because we had made it something important and convinced ourselves that we were the only ones who could end it. Somehow we had persuaded ourselves that we needed this. That it was ours.

“Can you do something stupid for me?” Peter said.

“You know it.”

“Promise me we’re on the right track and that we’ll end this thing. Promise me, Angie.”

“I promise,” I said. Then repeated it: “I promise.”

Picking up a line from the Springsteen song on the radio, Peter sang, “No retreat, baby, no surrender.”





When I got home, I found that morning’s edition of the Caller on the kitchen table. It was unfolded, and the smiling faces of the missing kids took up the entire front page. The bold headline asked simply What Is Going On?

Listed, in order of their disappearance—

Demorest, William Connor, Jeffrey Frost, Bethany Cole, Courtney Ransom, Aaron Holt, Howard Brubaker, Tori

The article recapped each teenager’s disappearance in a gruesome highlight reel. The summaries were continued on the next page, along with an eighth photo of a teenage boy with feathered brown hair and a devious smile, which was actually more of a smirk. I didn’t realize who the boy was until I scanned the headline that accompanied the photo:

Could Missing Glenrock Boy Be Piper’s First?



What Michael had found out from Tommy Orent was apparently true: Jason Hughes had gone missing last June, and since no one was looking for a serial abductor back then—and because Hughes had a penchant for running away—it was assumed he had taken off on his own accord. When the boy didn’t return after a week, Glenrock police searched the surrounding areas and interviewed Hughes’s friends. If the Glenrock PD ever made it to Harting Farms to conduct these interviews, the article did not say. Neither had Tommy Orent.