December Park(54)

“No,” he practically snapped, clutching the locket against his chest. “No, Angie.”

“If you’re right and that did belong to her, it’s evidence. We have to let the cops know you found it. It might have fingerprints on it or—”

“I wiped it down and cleaned it when I found it. There aren’t any fingerprints anymore, if there ever were.”

“There still could be—”

“There aren’t.”

A cold wind rustled the trees. I was suddenly aware of my exposed skin prickling in the chill air. My teeth had started to chatter at some point, though I wasn’t entirely sure that was due to the temperature. “You didn’t have to bring me down here tonight to show me that locket. So why are we here?”

“I want you to show me where the body was found,” he said. “There might be other things like this locket down here, too. We could find them. I’m a good scavenger hunter.”

“But what do you think we’d find?”

Adrian shrugged and suddenly looked as innocent as a newborn. “I have no idea. It could be anything.”

“And why would we bother finding it? Because you like to collect junk?”

“No. Because we might find clues that tell us who the killer is.”

The image of us traipsing around the underbrush looking for clues like the goddamn Hardy Boys nearly caused me to laugh. Not to mention how absurd it was that we might be able to uncover something the police had missed. “The police have already been through the whole area. They even had dogs down here. What makes you think we’ll find something they missed?”

“They missed the locket, didn’t they?” he retorted.

“The only reason you found it before the cops did was because they weren’t looking for anything. Courtney Cole’s body hadn’t been found yet. If that’s even her locket in the first place.”

Adrian slowly closed his fingers around the locket. “I’m telling you, it’s hers,” he repeated, and I knew then that I was wasting my breath trying to convince him otherwise.

“So this is why you wanted to know about Courtney Cole,” I said.

“Yeah. I mean, I didn’t make the connection with the locket until you told me about her and said she had been killed here.”

“I didn’t say she was killed here,” I said, although I wasn’t sure if there was a difference. “Just found here.”

Adrian nodded.

“You found the locket in October, so why did you wait until now to say something about it to me?” Yet one look at him—at the downtrodden puppy expression he perpetually wore—gave me my answer. It was the reason he’d asked me to share a personal secret with him: so he knew he could trust me. It had taken him all these months to build up his courage and his trust. I sighed. “Do you know anything about these woods?”

“No. What should I know about them?”

“They’re huge. They start here, but they run along the highway and go all the way out to the cliffs that overlook the bay. I’m not sure where they found her exactly, because I only saw them carry her out. But even if they found her right here, that doesn’t mean she was killed here. And that still doesn’t mean there’s anything left for us to find.”

“You said they brought her body up at the intersection,” he said. “If she was found a mile away, they wouldn’t have brought her up over there, right? She must have been found close to this spot.”

“But that doesn’t mean she was killed right here,” I repeated.

“It doesn’t matter,” Adrian said. “There still might be things left behind.”

I sighed again, rubbing my palms against the thighs of my corduroys. I felt the cold radiating through my body. Darkness was drawing closer around us, and stars were beginning to poke through the sky.

“Some people say these woods are haunted,” I told him, looking around at the ancient trees, their leafless black branches crisscrossing high over our heads and intersecting over the pale face of the moon. “December Park, too. They call this the Dead Woods now because of the Cole girl, but it had other names before: Satan’s Forest, Ghost Park, the Black Lands.

“When I was younger, Charles used to scare me with stories about devil worshippers coming down here and sacrificing chickens and goats and whatever else they could get their hands on. I didn’t necessarily believe him, but it worked in keeping me away from the woods until I was a little older. Fuck, those stories used to give me nightmares.

“Then there’s the girls’ school on the other side of the park, out by the cliffs,” I continued. “People died in a fire there after World War II, after it had been converted to a hospital or something, and it’s been closed ever since. It could be that the ghost stories originated from there. I think many of them did. Or maybe the history of a place like that tends to fuel those kinds of stories, makes them real.”

He seemed unimpressed with the folklore of my hometown.

“Come on,” I said, rising. “Let me show you something.”

I led him deeper into the woods, wending around fallen trees and overgrown holly bushes that were full and prickly even in the dead of winter. I remained conscious of the daylight slipping away, and I knew we should head home soon.