December Park(18)

After a while, nighttime began to terrify me. And it didn’t help that my friends couldn’t let it go, either.

“I’ve been thinking about it nonstop,” Scott said out of nowhere one afternoon as the two of us sucked on cigarettes outside the Quickman, our favorite burger joint. “I keep seeing the way she looked when that sheet blew off her.”

“Yeah,” I confessed, “I think about her, too. Sometimes. Mostly at night.”

“Perv.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Do you think much about the killer?”

No, I didn’t. It seemed implausible that there was actually a living, breathing human being responsible for the whole thing. It was easier to see the missing children and what Courtney Cole had looked like beneath that white sheet than to consider what type of animal could be behind such things.

“A cousin of mine sat next to Ted Bundy on a bus in Florida,” Scott said before I could answer his question. “He was wearing a fake cast on his arm, too, like they say he used to so he could get his victims to help him carry stuff to his car. My cousin said she recognized him when he was arrested and they showed pictures of him all over the news. I always thought it was weird that she recognized him—I mean, how closely do you look at people on a city bus, right?—but I guess people like that stick with you in some caveman part of your brain that tells you something’s just not right. Like a flashing neon sign that says stay away.”

I gazed out across the parking lot, beyond the trees and toward St. Nonnatus. Cars scuttled along the highway like shiny beetles. The sky was the saturated monochromatic yellow of an old photograph.

“They say he drilled holes in girls’ heads and poured boiling water into their skulls while they were still alive. That psycho tortured the shit out of them. Can you f*cking imagine?”

“Who did?” My mind was wandering.

“Ted Bundy.”

“It’s not like that here,” I said. “She just had her skull crushed.”

“Yeah, but you don’t know what kind of twisted things the Piper might have done to her before she died.” After a moment of consideration, Scott added, “Or even after she died.”

“You’re sick.”

Scott rolled his shoulders. “It’s a sick world.”

“I guess anything’s possible.”

“So what about the others?” he said. “The ones they haven’t found yet?”

“I don’t know. You think they’ll find them eventually?”

“I would think so. I mean, they gotta be somewhere, don’t they? People don’t just disappear.”

Even though I knew that people disappeared without a trace every year, I sucked at my cigarette and said, “I guess so.”

“Doesn’t your dad tell you anything?”

“About the missing kids? About the Cole girl’s murder?”

“About anything,” said Scott. “About his job. About being a cop.”

“Not really. Besides, I don’t think the cops know any more than anyone else. And if they do, they’re not gonna tell me about it.”

“Have you ever seen his gun?” Scott asked. He put one hand in the pocket of his coat, digging around for something.

“Well, sure,” I said. I saw my father’s issued firearm in its holster every night when he came home from work and took his coat off. I also knew he kept it in his sock drawer when he wasn’t wearing it—the top drawer of his bedroom bureau. He also kept a six-shot revolver under his bed in an old cigar box.

The truth was that my father had carried a gun for as long as I’d been alive. It was as commonplace to me as if he’d been a salesman hauling around a briefcase full of encyclopedias. To my friends, however, the prospect of having a gun in the house was both foreign and tantalizing, so they professed an inordinate amount of interest in the weapon.

“He ever let you shoot it?”

“Nope,” I said.

Scott produced a dangerous-looking butterfly knife from his pocket. With a magician’s flourish, he flipped it open and held it out away from his body. The blade was shiny, a good five inches. He turned it over slowly in his hand. “I wonder how it happened.”

Behind us, a mother and her two young children bounded out of the Quickman, and I caught a whiff of the deep fryer.

“I wonder how the Piper got to her.”

“There is no Piper,” I said, more out of habit than anything else. I was instantly reminded of what my father had told me the night he’d sat on the back porch, waiting for me to come home. When you go out, stay with your friends in populated areas, preferably at their houses.

So Harting Farms mourned the death of one of their own and feared that a similar fate might have already befallen the three children who had previously disappeared from its streets.





Mischief Night, the night before Halloween, saw a sky that trembled with snow. It seemed to swirl and hover above the streets and the low gabled peaks of the neighborhood houses without ever touching the ground. Halloween had always been my favorite holiday, but Mischief Night carried with it the sense of jittery anticipation of things to come, like Christmas Eve.

Before heading out for the evening, I helped my grandmother put up decorations on the front porch—rubber skeletons dangling from invisible wire, an electric cauldron that spewed dry ice smoke, a ceramic black cat whose eyes glowed a feral green. I filled a bowl with candy and left it on the kitchen counter in anticipation of the little kids who would come knocking on the door tomorrow.