December Park(67)

Michael snatched the knife from him, feigned slicing open one of his wrists, then dropped to his knees in the muck, gurgling and frothing from the mouth. A glob of spittle hung from his lower lip, slowly lengthening to a fine white thread that eventually touched his sweatshirt.

“Gross,” Scott remarked casually. He’d seen enough of Michael’s stunts to remain unimpressed.

His tongue poking from his mouth, Michael crawled toward the statue.

Adrian continued to turn the pages of the yearbook. On occasion he would lift his eyes and gaze off into the darkness of the woods. Once, he caught me staring at him and turned hurriedly away.

I stood and, brushing debris off my backside, went over to him. “Whatcha doing?”

“Just looking,” he said.

“Is something wrong?”

He shook his head but didn’t look at me. He had his writing tablet balanced on his other knee. I deciphered what appeared to be hasty sketches of Courtney Cole. Even as a sketch, the likeness was unmistakable.

Then he looked at me—a lost babe in the woods of some horrific fairy tale. His big fishy eyes appeared sloppy and unfocused, perhaps muddled by too many thoughts. I noticed a thin piece of shoestring around his neck and saw that Courtney Cole’s heart-shaped locket hung from it. This struck me. Scott had fixed the clasp for him, but it never occurred to me that Adrian would actually wear it.

From the corner of his mouth, Adrian said, “I’m okay, Angie. I’m just doing some thinking. We should probably designate areas and spread out, start searching.”

I chewed my lower lip, then looked over at Michael, Peter, and Scott. Michael was still carving his initials into the statue while Peter watched over his shoulder. Scott was fiddling with the dynamo radio and balancing a can of Jolt on one knee. They all looked young but also strangely old, too. It occurred to me that there wouldn’t be many more days like these, hanging out in the woods without a care in the world.

“Yeah, okay, but you gotta do something first,” I told him.

“Do what?”

“You gotta carve your initials,” I said.





In the end, they ran down the trunk of the statue like this:





PG


AM


SS


MS


AG


Once we finished, the five of us stared at our work in silent appreciation. Seeing our names on that statue seemed to solidify the notion that these woods, these Dead Woods, were now ours and ours alone. We held stewardship over them.

“Scott’s got Nazi initials,” Michael said.

Scott slugged him on the arm.

Adrian nodded at the statue, a satisfied little smile on his thin lips. Then he pushed his glasses up his nose and looked at Michael. “Did you bring the map?”

Michael took out of one his maps from the rear pocket of his jeans and handed it to Adrian. Adrian unfolded it and splayed it out over the statue. The rest of us gathered around and dropped down on our haunches in the cold earth.

The legend said this map had been created by the Harting Farms Parks and Recreations Department in conjunction with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. It was a map of the surrounding woodland as well as the coastal waterways that filtered straight out into the bay.

“The Dead Woods are here,” Michael explained, tracing a dark green horseshoe on the map. Next, he addressed a pale green rectangle surrounded on three of its four sides by the Dead Woods. “And this is December Park, smack in the middle. That means we’re probably . . . right about . . . here.” He pointed to a spot in the dark green horseshoe that was bordered by two intersecting roadways toward the northwest—Point and Counterpoint Lanes—and by December Park to the south.

“This is great.” Adrian retrieved a black felt-tipped marker that he’d clipped to the cover of his sketch pad and returned to the map. As he uncapped the marker, he glanced at Michael. “Do you mind?”

“Shoot, I’ve got a dozen of these,” Michael said.

Drawing a series of vertical lines in one corner of the map, Adrian divided the woods into sections. When he finished, he admired his work for a moment before retrieving some more items from his backpack. He handed us flashlights, some plastic bags with the Generous Superstore logo on them, small notepads, and rubber gloves.

Michael snapped one of the gloves on his hand. “These for the proctology exam?”

“This is how they do it on TV,” Adrian explained. “You wear gloves in case you find evidence and don’t want to ruin the fingerprints that might be on it.”

Examining his own pair of rubber gloves, Peter nodded. “Makes sense. Good thinking.”

Adrian tapped the marker against the grid he’d drawn across the Dead Woods. “See how I broke it up into squares? We each search a different square, then check them off on the map when we finish. But then we rotate, so that we can search someone else’s section after they’re done in case that person missed anything.”

“That’s gonna take a long time,” I said.

“Yeah, but it’s important.” He held up one of the small notepads. “We use these to mark down anything we find. Like, the location of it. And then we can mark it down on the map, too. One of us should stay here, too, at home base. It’s like when you call 911 and you get that operator on the phone . . .”