December Park(60)

After a pause, Adrian handed him the locket.

Scott held it with equal reverence, turning the small silver heart over in his fingers as though it were something unearthed from an archaeological site. “The eyelet is broken, all right.”

“I think it happened when she was attacked,” Adrian said.

Scott nodded, as if this made total sense to him. “I can take this home and fix it for you. I just gotta bend the clasp back into place. And if I can’t do that, I can replace it with a new one.”

“Yeah?”

“Sure. It’s easy.”

Adrian nodded.

“Hey,” said Peter, breaking the tension. “Why don’t we go catch a movie at the Juniper?”

“Sounds like a good idea,” I said, anxious to get out of Adrian’s house.

“Count me in,” said Michael.

“Let me get my coat.” Adrian stood and bounded up the stairs but then paused halfway up. He turned around and came slowly back down. “Can I keep that yearbook for a while?” he asked me.

“It’s not mine,” I said and looked to Scott.

“I guess so. I may have to take ugly Martha Dooley to the Quickman for a burger, though.”

“Scott and Martha sitting in a tree, F-U-C-K-I-N-G,” Michael sang, snapping his fingers like someone out of West Side Story.

We all laughed.





Just over a week later, after a Sunday dinner of spaghetti and meatballs, my grandparents retired to the den to watch television while my father remained at the kitchen table, going over stacks of paperwork.

“How’s the case going?” I asked, grabbing an apple from the fridge.

He leaned back in his chair and ran his hands through his thinning, graying hair. “We’ve got a lot of people looking at a lot of different angles. I’m just double-checking to make sure all the lines have been connected.”

I saw that his coffee cup was empty so I took it over to the pot and refilled it for him.

“Thanks, pal.”

“Are you guys getting any closer to finding out who killed that girl?”

He made a face that approximated sad resignation. “I wish I could say we were.”

“Do you think whoever did that to the Cole girl got those other kids, too? Like Aaron Ransom on New Year’s Eve?”

“That was a bad night, wasn’t it?” There was compassion in my father’s voice, though I couldn’t help but wonder if he was deliberately avoiding my questions. “I’m sorry you had to be in the middle of it.”

“It’s okay. I was just wondering about all those kids that nobody’s found. Is it the same person who killed that girl?”

“It’s hard to tell,” my dad said with a sigh. “We’ve been talking to the other parents and getting as much info as we can. It might seem like too much of a coincidence that these kids seemed to vanish within months of each other, but maybe it isn’t a coincidence at all, if you look at it in another way. There’s always the possibility of a runaway pact or something like that.”

“What’s that?”

“Friends conspire to run away from home at the same time. They hide out someplace for a little while before eventually coming back home. Or more likely, a guy runs off with his girlfriend. The Frost girl kept a journal and mentioned a high school boy she had been seeing without her parents’ knowledge. She doesn’t mention the boy’s name, but it could be the Connor kid, who disappeared around the same time. They could have gone off somewhere together.”

“Oh,” I said. I supposed it made sense to the police, but any kid at Stanton School could have told them that thirteen-year-old Bethany Frost had frequently been spotted sucking face with Tyler Beacham, a Stanton School sophomore, in the woods behind the middle school. Sixteen-year-old Jeffrey Connor probably didn’t even know Bethany existed.

And then there was William Demorest, who hadn’t been friends with either of the other two. That didn’t explain how Aaron Ransom fit in, either. Wasn’t it too much of a coincidence that all these kids had decided to run away around the same time a girl from town was found murdered? I wondered if my father actually believed this theory or if he was feeding it to me to quell my fears.

“Well,” I said, “if it is the same person, do you think it’s possible that the other kids, the ones who disappeared, were killed and left in the woods, too?”

“No. We searched the woods thoroughly with cadaver dogs. December Park, too. There isn’t . . .” My father let his voice trail off. He had gone into cop mode and had temporarily forgotten that he was talking to his fifteen-year-old son. “Listen,” he said, the timbre of his voice more conciliatory now. “As long as you keep away from deserted areas, stick in groups, and get home before it’s too late, you and your friends have nothing to be afraid of. I promise. Okay?”

I nodded.

He winked at me, smiling wearily. Exhaustion seemed to radiate off him in visible waves. “You doing okay otherwise?”

“I guess.”

“How’s school?”

I shrugged. “Okay.”

“You finish your homework for tomorrow?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” Again, that weary smile. He turned back to his ream of paperwork, bringing the fresh coffee to his lips and slurping.