December Park(3)

A number of men wore monochromatic suits and thin black neckties. Detectives. Once again, I wondered with some trepidation if my father was among them.

“What are . . . ?” Peter took another step in their direction, but we were still too far away to make out the important details. “What are they carrying? You see that, Angie?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I see it.”

It was long, white. It was a sheet. It was something wrapped in a sheet. My stomach dropped. I had watched enough TV to know what I was looking at.

“Oh, goddamn,” Peter said, his voice quavering. “That’s a person.”

The body was carried on a steel gurney, the gurney’s legs retracted, the whole thing covered by a plain white sheet. One of the uniformed officers walked with one hand pressed to the center of the sheet, keeping it from billowing in the wind, even though it was strapped down.

A body.

They brought the gurney around the opposite side of the ambulance, temporarily disappearing from our view. When they reappeared at the rear of the ambulance, they had rearranged their positions.

Unable to pry my eyes from the scene, I noticed the officer who had kept his hand pressed to the center of the sheet was no longer there. And as if my observation directly invoked the ire of fate, an icy slipstream of wind barreled across the escarpment, rattling the trees like party favors and kicking up whirlwinds of sand and dead leaves.

One corner of the sheet ballooned with wind like the sail of a great ship. Then the loose flap of sheet flipped over, exposing an emaciated, graying female profile, replete with the wet, matted net of black hair tangled with leaves, the hint of a bruised arm, the flank striated with ribs, and the swell of one tiny white breast.

It was the first dead body I’d ever seen, and it was strangely unreal. The mind-numbing barrage of fake blood and guts my friends and I digested each weekend watching horror movies at the Juniper somehow felt more authentic than this.

The head was turned slightly to the left, and I made out what could only be described as a bloodied dent on the right side of her scalp. That side of her head looked caved in, her right eye winking just below the unnatural concave of flesh.

“Holy shit,” Scott uttered. Apparently, he had seen it, too.

The paramedics were clumsy covering the body back up. They rushed too quickly to do it and fumbled with the sheet. For a second there was a bit of tug-of-war before the sheet was replaced over the dead girl’s head. One of the officers even tucked the sheet beneath her, securing it.

To my left, Scott stared across the road, his headphones providing a rather discordant soundtrack to the moment. Peter stood just slightly ahead of us, the wings of his coat beating in the gathering wind, his hands stuffed into the too-tight pockets of his jeans. He’d seen it, too.

No one said a word. We watched as they stowed the body into the back of the ambulance. Everyone moved with incredible slowness. It seemed inappropriate. The discovery of a dead body in the woods should not elicit such lethargy. It was fake, all of it.

“The Piper,” Scott whispered.

“No.” I still couldn’t comprehend any of it. And I couldn’t shake the dead girl’s visage from my mind. I feared I would see it in my sleep tonight. “They’ve never found any of the Piper’s victims. Anyway, there might not even be a Piper.”

“There’s a Piper,” Scott said with unwavering certainty.

“Do you think it’s anyone we know?” Peter asked. “You guys hear of anyone else gone missing?”

I shook my head. But of course he couldn’t see me because he was watching the paramedics start up the ambulance.

A cloud of smoke belched from the ambulance’s exhaust. I realized I was waiting for the sirens to come on, but they never did. Of course they didn’t. Why would they? What was the hurry now? Yet for whatever reason, I wanted them to hurry. It seemed disrespectful to whoever was under that sheet for these policemen and paramedics to move so slowly.

“Did you guys get a good look?” Peter went on. “Did you recognize her, Angie?”

“I don’t think so. It’s hard to tell. Her face wasn’t . . .” But I didn’t need to finish the thought. Her face had been broken, and Peter and Scott had seen it just as clearly as I had.

“I wonder if it was someone from school,” Peter said, finally turning around. His cheeks were rosy from the cold. His eyes gleamed. “You think she could be from Stanton?”

“I haven’t heard of anyone else having gone missing,” I told him.

“She was young,” Scott said. I registered a twinge of disbelief in his voice. “Not a grown-up, I mean. Did you guys see her?”

“Yes,” I said. “I saw her. I saw her.”

“She could be from school,” Peter said. “I didn’t recognize her but she could have been . . .”

Too many cops were staring at us now. With all the commotion over, we were no longer curious onlookers. In our canvas army jackets with Nirvana and Metallica patches sewn on the sleeves, we were burgeoning troublemakers.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

We hoofed it down Counterpoint against the wind. Skipping out on tonight’s get-together down at the docks suddenly didn’t sound all that bad. Just imagining the freezing wind riding in off the black waters of the Chesapeake Bay caused something deep within the center of my body to clench up.