December Park(16)

“And don’t think I’m letting you slide on breaking curfew,” my father called after me.

“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry for coming home late.”

“No, you’re not,” he said. Then he sighed again. He sounded ancient. “We’ll talk about that tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I said. I couldn’t move, couldn’t take my eyes from his darkened, hunched shape across the porch. “You coming in, too?”

“In a bit.”

“Good night,” I said, and crept inside.

Later in bed, despite the heaviness of sleep pressing down on me in the dark, I forced myself to stay awake until I heard my father’s leaden footfalls thumping down the hallway. When I heard his bedroom door creaking at the opposite end of the hall, I finally shut my eyes. Hot and gummy tears slid away from them, coursing down my temples. Their arrival shocked me.

I replayed the scenario from earlier that day—the cops carrying the stretcher out of the woods, the girl’s body covered in a white sheet until a gust of wind lifted it and exposed her broken face to me. That face.

I tried to distract my mind with a myriad of safer things—music and girls and horror movies—but, like a hungry wolf, the visage of that broken and bloodied face pursued me into my dreams. Only in my dreams, it was the face of my brother.





Chapter THREE


Mischief Night





Daughter of Byron and Sarah Beth Cole, older sister of seven-year-old Margaret, Courtney Cole had been an attractive fifteen-year-old soccer player at Girls’ Holy Cross in the Palisades. In the newspaper picture, which appeared to be a yearbook photo, she had thick black hair, stunning eyes that were surprisingly seductive for a girl her age, and the sort of half-crooked, memorable smile that resonated behind your eyelids like the afterimage of a flashbulb.

The account of her death in the Caller was cursory at best. Courtney had been visiting friends in a neighborhood near Stanton School, then walked home with Megan Meeks sometime in the late afternoon. According to Megan, they had split up just as they reached December Park. Megan turned down Solomon’s Bend Road, and Courtney, who lived in the Palisades, cut through the park.

But Courtney Cole had never made it home. She’d had her head staved in by an unknown assailant, and two days after her parents had reported her missing, her body was found by two county workers who had been in the woods cleaning up after Audrey MacMillan’s automobile accident.

Prior to the discovery of Courtney’s body, there was speculation as to what had become of the three other Harting Farms children who had simply vanished over the past two months—thirteen-year-old William Demorest in late August and sixteen-year-old Jeffrey Connor and thirteen-year-old Bethany Frost in September. Without evidence of foul play—and without actual bodies—the police seemed most confident that they were a series of unrelated runaways. Of course, the parents of the missing children wanted the police to consider the prospect of abduction.

Before Courtney Cole’s disappearance, Chief of Police Harold Barber was quoted in several papers, stating, “What is more probable? That some nameless, faceless Pied Piper has come to our town to systematically lead our unwitting children off into the sunset, or that we are looking at a few unrelated instances of kids running away from home?”

Thus, Chief Barber gave a name to the faceless monster, and that seemed to make the menace all the more real. The Caller adopted the name and ran with it. Soon thereafter, the television news reported on the existence of a possible child abductor known as the Piper stalking the residents of Harting Farms.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t until Courtney Cole’s body was discovered that the people of Harting Farms began to truly panic. The newspapers and TV news suggested that the Cole girl’s death was related to the three disappearances over the past two months, and all four incidents may in fact be the work of a single individual.

“Are they talking about a serial killer?” I asked my grandfather.

“It’s sensationalism,” my grandfather advised me, looking somewhat agitated in his recliner. The television cast an eerie blue light over us both. “Yellow journalism and scare tactics to rile the public. It’s nothing you need to worry about. Sells newspapers and brings up the television ratings. That’s all it is.”

While the nightly news was ordinarily saturated with shootings and murders in Baltimore and D.C., Harting Farms was a quiet middle-class suburb where the weekly crime blotter generally consisted of graffiti on the side of the local Generous Superstore or the occasional bout of mailbox baseball. Murder was something our community was unaccustomed to, and there were a multitude of reactions.

For starters, the community initiated the Courtney Cole Memorial Charity and elected a chairman. However, no one seemed to know the purpose of the charity aside from using donations to pay for the girl’s funeral, and it wasn’t long before my grandfather chastised the organization for defrauding the good and grieving people of our community.

The Elks, of which Courtney’s parents and grandparents were members, planted a blue spruce in her memory on the lawn of their chapter house. Similarly, a bronze plaque engraved with her name and some quote from a semi-famous local poet was affixed to the wall outside the confessionals of St. Nonnatus.

Although Courtney had never set foot in our hallways, Stanton School erected a memorial bulletin board secured behind a glass enclosure in the main lobby. The memorial consisted of numerous pictures of the girl, mostly clipped from various newspapers, as well as the articles recounting her death. The whole thing was in poor taste, somehow made worse by the garland of pink and white flowers that hung beneath the largest of the photos, giving it a wholly incongruous Hawaiian flair.