December Park(117)

When I heard my father’s sedan pull into the driveway, I refolded the newspaper and placed it back on the table, as if I’d never touched it. As if I’d been doing something wrong.





While dragging the trash cans to the curb after dinner, I heard my dad talking on the phone.

I went over to the open kitchen window and crouched beneath it, eavesdropping. It was a work call; I could tell by the tone of my father’s voice. Much of what he said was difficult to hear, but I managed to glean what may have been the most important bit of information to date in the investigation into the missing teenagers: the cops had found what they believed to be the Piper’s footprints in the mud down by the river.





Chapter Twenty-Three


The Abandoned Railway Depot (Part One)





On a cool afternoon near the end of June, Peter and I biked down Farrington Road, an unused and forgotten strip of asphalt that eventually dead-ended at the defunct railway depot.

Folded up in the back pocket of my shorts was the recent article about Jason Hughes from the Caller. Peter and I planned to see what we could learn about his disappearance. If Hughes had been the Piper’s first victim, then there was a pretty good chance he had run into the Piper on the day he had come into town to buy cigarettes for Tommy Orent and his friends. It was possible that the folks at Lucky’s might have seen something. Since the police had never spoken with Orent or his buddies, they might not know that Hughes had been out this way the day he disappeared. If that was true, our intel put us one step ahead of the police.

It was a long ride to Lucky’s, and we had wanted to leave earlier, but I’d spent the morning at Secondhand Thrift, organizing Callibaugh’s shelves as part of my new summer job. In the short time I’d been there, I had already managed to knock over a display case, punch in the wrong digits on the security alarm, and clog the ancient-looking toilet.

Before we reached the outskirts of town, we spotted the tar paper shack that was Lucky’s Sundries, so we cut through the woods and came out on the winding B&A bike path. Lucky’s sat in a gravel parking lot between the bike path and the road, its back lot corralled within a scrim of spindly trees. With its slouching placard over the entranceway that read Lucky’s Sundries in painted red script and its warped wraparound porch complete with hitching posts, it looked like something out of an old John Wayne western. Beneath the placard, some wit had spray-painted the phrase B-more girls give Natty Boh jobs.

Peter and I propped our bikes against one of the posts and went inside. A handful of men in blue jeans and sleeveless T-shirts hung around by the register, one leaning on the countertop while the others sat in canvas-backed folding chairs. They glanced at us: a jigsaw of wiry beards stained piss yellow from chewing tobacco and swarthy black eyes crowded beneath the creased bills of camouflage baseball hats. On the wall above the men’s heads, and matching their vacuous expressions, taxidermy animals stared down at us. The air was clotted with cigarette smoke and the headier stench of unwashed bodies.

Peter and I slipped down the first aisle, feigning interest in a row of toilet paper. With the possible exception of Secondhand Thrift, never in my life had I seen such a confused assortment of items jammed together in one store—household items, camping gear, auto parts, canned goods, cheap toys, a rack of clothing that looked like it had been rejected from the Salvation Army. There was even a whole shelf dedicated to pet products, where small bored-looking fish floated in plastic cups.

“Check it out,” Peter whispered, snagging a copy of Penthouse from a nearby magazine rack. Normally pornographic magazines were packaged in cellophane, but this one was loose, and Peter wasted no time flipping it open to the centerfold. His eyes bugged out comically, and then he turned the magazine around so I could see the tri-panel photo of a nude woman with breasts like cantaloupes and a stripe of dark pubic hair.

When someone cleared his throat farther down the aisle, Peter nearly dropped the magazine.

“He’p you boys?” a man drawled. He was potbellied, with a wide, whiskered face and hands like clubs. There were fish silk-screened to the front of his T-shirt.

“Uh, we were looking for someone,” I uttered while Peter stuffed the magazine back on the rack.

“Yeah? Like who?”

I produced the newspaper article from my back pocket and handed it to the man. “He’s a friend of ours but he disappeared.”

A lump formed against the inside of the man’s cheek, either from his tongue or a ball of chewing tobacco. “Been happenin’ a lot lately.”

“We thought maybe you might have seen him,” I said.

A nerve jumped in the man’s right eyelid. “How would I have seen him?”

“He used to come here and buy cigarettes,” I said.

The man gazed down at the paper. Then he thrust it back at me. “Not this boy. Too young.”

“Well, maybe you’ve just seen him around the store,” I said. “This would have been around last June when he—”

“I ain’t never seen this boy.”

“Well, I mean, he sometimes—”

“Ain’t sold no smokes to a kid that young.” It sounded like there were stones rolling around in his throat. “Ain’t let no underage boys come in this store.” His eyes narrowed. “Boys like you.”