December Park(47)

“I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention.”

“What about Courtney Cole? You must have heard something about her, right?”

He shook his head.

Given all that had transpired since last fall, it seemed impossible that anyone could live here and not know about any of it. And it wasn’t like Adrian had just moved in last week; even though he never came out of his house, he and his mother had been here since early October, just before Courtney Cole was found dead in the woods.

“I haven’t heard any of this,” he said.

So I told him about the discovery of Courtney Cole’s body in Satan’s Forest. Since we were standing on the street above the woods at that point in the tale, I gestured toward the embankment. “They found her body down there. Me, Peter, and Scott saw them carry her out.”

Adrian stared into the woods. “When?”

“Early October.”

“Are you serious?” His voice trembled. “No way.”

“Yes way. Why would I lie about it?”

“I mean, you guys saw her?”

“Yeah.”

“What did she look like?”

“I don’t know.” Of course, the image of her smashed skull was imprinted on my own brain with perfect clarity, but I did not possess the words—or the desire—to explain it to him. “I mean, the whole thing just seemed sort of . . . surreal . . . you know? Like it wasn’t actually happening . . .”

“And no one knows who did it?”

“No,” I said. “The Piper’s just a name the newspapers gave him, but no one knows who he is.” We started walking again, heading straight for the highway. “You haven’t even heard about this stuff on the news?”

“My mom doesn’t want me watching the news,” he said.

“Well, the news complains that the cops aren’t doing enough, and the cops complain that the news is out to get them,” I said. “My dad’s a detective at the police department, so I hear him complain about that stuff sometimes, too.”

“What do the cops think is going on?”

“They don’t really know.”

“Well, what do you think?”

I thought about New Year’s Eve and what had happened to Aaron Ransom. I pictured those cops carrying Courtney Cole’s body out of the woods on a sheet-covered stretcher. Lastly, I thought of what Scott had said to us Halloween morning at the Quickman.

“I think there’s probably a serial killer going after kids,” I said.

We talked about the Piper for the entire walk back to Worth Street. He asked a lot of questions, and I was able to answer only a few of them, mostly from what I’d heard from other people or what had been in the newspapers. Adrian seemed mostly interested in Courtney Cole. Just as we reached the foot of his driveway, he said, “You said you saw them take that girl from the woods. Like, for real? You’re not fooling with me?”

“I swear I’m not.” I touched my nose. “I promise.”

“Did you, like . . . know her?”

“No. She went to a different school.”

“Are there pictures of her somewhere?”

I thought this was an odd question. “There was a picture in the newspaper after she was found. How come?”

“Just curious.”

Adrian asked some more questions about Courtney Cole. I assumed his interest in what my friends and I had witnessed was purely sensationalistic—that any boy our age would have been curious as to the gory details of such an event.

It wasn’t until two weeks later that I would come to understand Adrian’s true obsession with the dead girl, and how that obsession changed everything.





Book Two


The Dead Woods





(February–May 1994)





February brought new snow, but it could not blanket old fears. “Towns like ours have good, long memories,” my grandfather said, “and the people aren’t so quick to forget.”

Pink paper hearts went up in shopwindows. Stanton School held its annual Valentine’s Day dance. The Bagel Boutique served their traditional pink bagels, and Mr. Pastore handed out Hershey’s Kisses to anyone who came into his deli. The Kiwanis held their obligatory bake sale. Ice skaters took to Drunkard’s Pond. The sordid bars in the industrial park served hot toddies, the smell of heated whiskey permeating the concrete alleyways and tenements straight out to the interstate. The homeless took refuge beneath the Solomon’s Bend overpass. It seemed the world hadn’t changed and that things kept on motoring along just as they always had.

But that wasn’t the truth of it. Like hairline cracks in bone, tiny differences could be perceived if one looked closely enough. The skaters at Drunkard’s Pond left each evening before the sky became fully dark, and there were no high school lovers camped out on the snow-covered benches, sharing kisses well into the night. The Valentine’s Day dance was cut short so everyone could make it home before nightfall. The Butterfields let their Holsteins out and opened their fields for sledding, but very few kids came around.

People were on edge. Two men got in an argument over a parking space outside the Generous Superstore. A nervous woman struck a pedestrian with her car, breaking the pedestrian’s leg in three places. Local taverns suffered an increase in barroom brawls. Breakins occurred with more regularity at the industrial park, where there were nothing but liquor stores, pool halls, and pawnshops pressed against the banks of a soiled brown river.