December Park(137)

A week later, the phone rang just after eight o’clock on a Wednesday morning. I was already up, having to be at Secondhand Thrift for work by nine. My father had left for the day, but he’d scribbled his beeper number on the wall pad beside the phone in case anyone called for him. I had hardly seen him since Jennifer Vestos went missing.

“Is that you, Mazzone?”

I just barely recognized the voice. “Michael? Where are you?”

“At summer school. I told the secretary I left my lunch at home and needed to call my mom.”

“I’m not bringing you your lunch.”

“No, man,” he said, his voice urgent but hushed. I pictured the overweight school secretary who always wore too much makeup staring at him from across the office. “I don’t need a lunch. Well, I mean, yeah, I could use a lunch, but that’s not why I’m calling.”

“What do you want?”

“Round up the guys, and meet me here after school lets out at two thirty.”

“It’s summer. The last thing I want to do is meet you at school.”

“Dude, you have to. I found something, and you guys are gonna flip the f*ck out.” In his excitement his voice had risen, and in the background I heard the secretary scolding him for his language. Michael ignored her.

“I’ve got work all day,” I reminded him. “I don’t get out till five.”

“You need to get here before they close the school. Can’t you call in sick or something?”

Since Callibaugh was friends with my grandfather and knew my dad peripherally, any excuse I used to get out of work would eventually follow me home. I had to be careful. “I’ll think of something,” I said, sighing.

“Awesome. Two thirty by the smoking door.” A second later, there was a dial tone in my ear.





When I arrived at Secondhand Thrift, Callibaugh was scrounging around on his hands and knees behind the front desk. He looked up, his features relaxing when he saw that it was me and not a customer.

“Morning,” I said.

“The cavalry has arrived,” Callibaugh intoned, locating what he’d been looking for, which turned out to be a tiny plastic sprocket no bigger than an atom.

“Can I use the phone in the back?”

“Are you planning to call China?”

“No, sir.”

“Have at it, young scalawag.”

The back office was no bigger than a closet, its rows of unpainted wooden shelves crowded with paperwork, three-ring binders, and a few model ships. A cheap desk was shoved against one wall, its surface frilly with curled bits of receipts and other random papers, and the telephone was buried beneath a VCR manual.

I called Peter, informed him of Michael’s request, then told him to pass along the info to Scott and Adrian. “You guys may have to go without me. I’m stuck at work.”

“Sneak out.”

“It isn’t that easy.”

“That old fart wouldn’t even know you were gone.”

I laughed and we hung up.

I spent the morning transporting boxes from the stockroom, and to the best of my ability, organizing the shelves.

When I didn’t adjourn to the back room at noon for lunch, Callibaugh said nothing yet eyed me suspiciously as if he’d just caught me doing something immoral.

At a quarter past one, the old cur shambled out from the back room, a can of Chef Boyardee in one hand. There was tomato sauce at the corners of his mouth, and he smelled of cigar smoke and modeling glue. “Your grandmother got you on some strict diet? Because you look like skin and bones to me.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Food,” he said, spraying flecks of Chef Boyardee into the air. “Didn’t bring your lunch today?”

“I forgot it.”

Callibaugh surveyed the store, which hadn’t seen a customer since eleven thirty. “Why don’t you skip out for your lunch hour and get some food?”

“Thanks. I’ll just finish stocking this shelf first.”

Thus, I was tearing across the rear parking lot of the high school on my bike by 2:25. With the exception of a solitary cheddar-yellow school bus chugging out onto the main road, the boisterous cackle and flailing arms of students spilling through the half-open bus windows, the parking lot was deserted.

I pedaled over to the set of concrete steps at the far end of the lot. Peter, Scott, and Adrian were perched on them. Behind them, the bloodred steel smoking door, which would have looked less out of place on the hull of a submarine, stood shut. We’d termed it as such because it was the door we popped out of whenever we wanted a quick smoke between classes but didn’t have time to make it to one of the less populated restrooms in B Hall. It was the only door in the whole school that wouldn’t automatically lock you out.

“And he arrives,” Peter said. “I was wondering if you’d make it. So what’s this about, anyway?”

I dumped my bike on the blacktop. “I don’t have a clue. You guys know just as much as I do.”

At the top of the steps, the smoking door creaked open—a sound equally befitting of a submarine—and Michael poked his head out. He beamed at us.

“Okay,” I said, still a bit winded from my bike ride halfway across town, “so we’re here. What’s the big surprise?”