December Park(136)

Chapter Twenty-Seven


What Michael Found





Two weeks into July, a ringing telephone jarred me from sleep. The clock on my nightstand said it was just after four o’clock. Darkness still permeated my bedroom, and I thought the phone had been part of a dream I’d immediately forgotten the second I opened my eyes.

Then I heard the ringing again, followed by my father’s gruff, groggy voice as he answered. His words were muted, but I didn’t have to hear him to know it was work. When he hung up, I heard his heavy feet creaking on the floorboards in the hallway. A moment after that, I heard the pipes shudder in the walls as the shower clunked on.

I rolled out of bed, tugged an old T-shirt over my boxer shorts, then crept downstairs to the kitchen where I brewed a pot of coffee. From the window, the first glimmer of daylight could be seen between the stunted pin oaks and pine trees on the eastern side of the street.

Fifteen minutes later, my father appeared in the doorway, straightening his tie and tugging on a navy-blue blazer. “What are you doing up this early?”

“Phone woke me. What happened?”

“Did you know a girl named Jennifer Vestos?”

I felt my stomach avalanche into my bowels. “She goes to Stanton.”

“She’s missing.”

I said nothing.

He went into the vestibule where he fished his car keys out of the ceramic bowl by the front door. From the window, I watched him drag his tired-looking body into the old sedan, then back slowly out of the driveway. I watched his car go until it hooked a right onto Haven. I could still hear the car’s engine growling even after it had vanished.

I turned the coffeemaker off and went upstairs. Climbing into my bed, I found the sheets cold from my absence. My room was still dark, but I couldn’t go back to sleep and enjoy the few hours remaining until I had to get up to go to work at the thrift store. My father had already referred to the girl in the past tense—Did you know a girl named Jennifer Vestos? That spoke volumes, I thought. My father had finally lost hope.





While I had slept, Rita Vestos had woken around four in the morning to feed the baby. As she always did, she poked her head into Jennifer’s room, only to find the girl’s bed empty. Panic-stricken, she’d awoken her husband, Ford, who eventually discovered that the back door was closed but unlocked. Ford Vestos swore to police that he had locked the back door earlier in the evening and checked it before going to bed.

The final conclusion by the HFPD was that Jennifer Vestos had most likely known her abductor. Jennifer had presumably gone outside to meet this individual, which would explain the pair of sneakers missing from her closet (she would have put them on before going outside) as well as the unlocked back door.

Something Scott had said to us earlier that summer returned to me upon hearing this information: “Adults don’t know all the city’s secrets, all the places to hide. Not like we do. We’re kids and we know, and that’s what we keep bringing to this thing over and over that the cops can’t.”

It was true: there was a secret society of children throughout the city, like an underground network of rebels in a distant and war-torn country. Adults knew nothing about Michael’s penchant for stowing cantaloupes in people’s gardens (just as he had done recently to my grandfather). They had never learned who’d stolen the homecoming cow or of its underwater grave in the Shallows. They weren’t aware that the chain-link fence around the construction site behind the library was never locked, creating a shortcut to the Superstore plaza. Just as these grown-ups were ignorant to the hidden byways and whispered secrets concerning their town, so were they ignorant to the whims of the children who lived there.

This is what we knew about Jennifer Vestos. She hung out with a cadre of loners who smoked pot in the school bathrooms and skipped out of class more frequently than my friends and me. Though she was only a sophomore, she frequently hung out with degenerates from the local community college or the vocational school in Glenrock, guys with facial hair and shiny cars with chrome wheels and tinted windows that looked like spaceships. They would sometimes pick her up from school, their music blasting, their cars belching out clouds of black exhaust that reeked of pot. It was rumored she had gotten pregnant by one of these dirtbags and had had an abortion, though no one ever knew if it was true or not.

Jennifer also held the honor of being involved in one of only two girl fights that had ever graced the Pepto-Bismol–colored halls of Stanton School. During the fight, Jennifer had ripped out the hoop earring of the other girl, spraying blood all down the girl’s cheek and across Jennifer’s shirt. True to form, Jennifer wore that shirt an entire week (after returning from her suspension), the arc of blood droplets across the front like a badge of honor.

Every night after her parents had gone to bed Jennifer would sneak out onto her back porch and smoke pot. It explained the missing sneakers; it explained the unlocked back door. The rear of her house faced the side of the Lambeths’ house, and the Lambeth twins frequently bemoaned their inability to sleep with their windows open in the summer because of the fat, pug-faced Vestos girl who was out there every night, smoking like a goddamn chimney.

The Lambeth twins said that the police questioned them about the night Jennifer disappeared. No, they hadn’t heard anything. No, they hadn’t seen anything. Did they tell the cops about Jennifer’s penchant for sneaking out of the house and smoking dope? No, they did not. It never occurred to them.