December Park(125)

“If we take the bike, the Piper will know we’ve been here,” Scott said.

“He’s going to know we were here, anyway.” It was Adrian’s small voice, and for a second I had forgotten he was with us. He let his flashlight play along the floorboards, our footprints as obvious as mortar blasts stamped into the layer of ancient dust.

“We should go,” Michael said, glancing at one of the smudgy windows. “It’s getting dark.”

It had also grown chilly, though I didn’t notice until I stopped moving and looked out one of the windows, too. And it was still an hour’s bike ride home. I didn’t want to be here any longer.

We headed toward the door. In that musty-smelling and awful place, my friends were suddenly nothing more than ghosts all around me in the darkness, marshaling through swirling motes of dust and accented by the occasional flashlight beam. I watched their silhouettes and was overcome by a certainty so unwavering, so undeniable, that its power nearly brought me to my knees . . .

We would end this. In our own way. We.

Outside, one of the falcons screamed, and we all cried out in unison.





Book Four


The Piper’s Den



(July and August 1994)





The peasants wanted their monster. Distrust among lifelong friends and neighbors became a palpable thing. In a display that suggested defeat, police requested random people come to the station for questioning. Rumor had it that the cops were talking to anyone who possessed a criminal record, no matter how benign. (Even Peter’s stepdad was called down to speak with officers because he’d apparently amassed quite a collection of unpaid parking tickets.) The homeless derelicts who generally loitered around Solomon’s Field were also rounded up and interrogated, then finally pressured out of town. Come July, none of these grizzled, unwashed transients could be found in the cooling shade of the underpass or languishing beside the scummy water of Drunkard’s Pond.

To satiate the public, the HFPD brought in an FBI profiler who cobbled together an enigmatic sketch from thin air: the Thief of Children was an adult male, most likely in his midtwenties to midthirties, and considered to be both “organized” (due to the lack of forensic evidence) and “disorganized” (due to the assumption that he operated off impulsivity and opportunity)—a nebulous assessment right out of the gate.

The profiler suggested that the discovery of Courtney Cole’s body—the only body to be discovered—was deliberate, and it was the Piper’s way of communicating something to the police or the general public or both. The profiler even suggested that leaving the body to be found was a cry for help, and there was a chance the Piper wanted to get caught. It’s debatable whether or not anyone believed this.

In the days leading up to the town’s annual Fourth of July celebration, men and women alike roved the streets, the alleyways, the woods, the beaches, the abandoned lots, the empty parks. They didn’t call it a manhunt, but they could have been wielding pitchforks and torches for all its subtlety. Each night, after the streets had grown dark, tea lights would blink in the windows of many of the neighborhood houses as a sign of unity and perseverance against the faceless monster that had brought horror to our working-class bayside community.

One evening, Shelby la Cruz ran screaming from her house and pounded on her neighbor’s door, exclaiming that the Harting Farms Piper was in her yard. When Shelby’s neighbor, armed with a flashlight and a Louisville Slugger, went to investigate, he found the “Piper” was actually his scarecrow that had fallen over and now leaned against the fence that overlooked Shelby’s yard.

On another evening, Kathy Choone spotted a swarthy—looking man hanging around the bridge off Solomon’s Bend Road, and her description to a police sketch artist resulted in a sexually ambiguous figure with long, stringy hair, vacuous eyes, and a noncommittal slash for the mouth. This rudimentary scarecrow of a man appeared in every newspaper and even flashed occasionally on the nightly news as if to say, This is me, and I look like no one and everyone at the same time. Come find me! He appeared capable of flitting instantly out of existence while simultaneously stealing you away with him.

Come find me . . .

And summer boiled our souls.





Chapter Twenty-Five


The Celebration





The Fourth of July celebration had been held in Market Square every year since I was a toddler. My earliest memories consisted of wending hand in hand with Charles through the labyrinth of booths, where vendors as boisterous as carnival barkers peddled their wares. The sky was always dotted with kites, the streets teeming with face-painted children, and dogs alternately barked and whimpered behind the chain-link fences on Third Avenue.

We munched on salted peanuts, guzzled fountain drinks, and got our clothes messy with soft-serve ice cream. Then we met up with our friends and spent whatever change we had remaining at the game booths. Come evening, we watched the fireworks by the waterfront with my dad and grandparents. Afterwards, Charles and I loaded our bikes into the back of my father’s car, then we all climbed in together and drove home while I was rocked into a gentle sleep with my head on my grandmother’s cushiony arm.

This year, the mood was different. For starters, there had been some discussion whether or not there should even be a celebration this year. Fireworks meant people had to stay outside in the dark, and curfew would have to be lifted. The children and teenagers of Harting Farms held their collective breaths. In the end, it was decided that the town would move forward with the celebration.