December Park(70)

“Yeah. That’s a really good idea. Did you get that from your dad?”

“What do you mean?”

“A talent for investigating things,” he said.

“I don’t know. It just seems to make sense, doesn’t it?”

“It sure does.”

“You want to come over and watch Star Wars with me?”

Adrian glanced at his house again. When he looked back at me, I saw storm clouds in his eyes. “Not tonight. I should get home.” He readjusted the straps of his backpack, still staring at me. “It’s not a monster or anything who killed that girl and took the other kids. Not like your friends were saying.”

“Of course not,” I said. “They were only joking.”

“Because it’s a man, and he’s very careful and very smart, and that makes him dangerous.”

“Okay . . .”

“We shouldn’t pretend like he’s some bogeyman. We shouldn’t let our guard down like that.”

“Like I said, they were just joking around. They know it’s some guy. Of course it is.”

“Good. Because men are more dangerous than monsters.” Then, wholly unexpectedly, Adrian said, “You’re a putrid fart nose, Angie.”

I blinked at him. “Uh, what?”

His face instantly reddened. “Um . . . I mean, you and your friends and all that name-calling . . .”

But then I understood. And laughed. In his own awkward way, Adrian was telling me he trusted me and that I was his friend. “Oh, okay, I get it. But putrid fart nose? That’s the best you’ve got in you?”

Adrian made a sour little face that sent me laughing again.

“You should take lessons from Michael. He can come up with some whoppers.”

“Yeah,” he said. “And what’s a Gorbachev’s wife, anyway?”

I laughed even harder. I couldn’t stop.

Soon Adrian was laughing, too.





Later that night as I lay in bed staring at the darkened ceiling of my bedroom while Bruce Springsteen issued softly out of my Walkman headphones, I thought about Adrian’s obsession. It had begun mysteriously with him asking more and more questions about the Cole girl. That was explained away after he told me about the heart-shaped locket.

But now there was a new obsession: finding the killer. His interest seemed different than the rest of ours. More intense. My friends and I were doing it for fun; Adrian had another agenda. I kept seeing Adrian’s determined face from earlier that day and those storm clouds roiling in his eyes. Because it’s a man, and he’s very careful and very smart, and that makes him dangerous.

I wondered what darkness clouded Adrian Gardiner’s soul.





Chapter Eleven


The Nightmare





For the first time since Charles’s death, I suffered a nightmare of such vivid, visceral proportion that it would cling to my psyche for days to come. It was dark. I was lying in the dirt in Satan’s Forest surrounded by my friends while a smoky mist crept over us. I saw the moon through the trees, and I breathed in the scents of the woods and distant cigarette smoke and the even more distant dead fish smell of the Chesapeake on the far side of the wooded peninsula.

Angry winds bullied the trees and whipped up whirlwinds of dead leaves and gritty debris off the ground. I felt the wind, probing and unforgiving, its icy fibrils veining across my sweaty flesh beneath the layers of my clothes, which ballooned out from my body as if they had been pumped full of hot air.

Then the ground began to vibrate. Subtly at first but it amplified with increasing and frightening speed. Trees trembled. I sat up off the ground, my bones shaking loose in my flesh. Looking around, I expected to find my friends gone, but they weren’t. They were scattered around me and sitting up as well, staring at the trees as their branches shook apart high above us.

Someone said something. I opened my mouth to scream but succeeded only in emitting a high-pitched keening that caused the lenses of Adrian’s glasses to fracture and explode. Behind the shattered lenses, Adrian’s eyes were missing. Bloody pits gaped back at me, black gore drooling down his cheeks from his eye sockets. His flesh purpled to the color of carbon paper. Graphite-colored veins bulged in his neck.

Then Adrian vanished into the ground fog. It was as if a large hole had opened up in the ground directly beneath him, swallowing him whole. Even the fog on the ground whirlpooled around the unseen hole like water going down a drain.

Beside me, Peter shrieked. It sounded many octaves too deep, like a record played at the wrong speed. I turned and saw that his normally full cheeks were sunken and jaundiced, networked with burst blood vessels. His eye sockets widened until his eyeballs jostled loosely in the expanding divots. Dark red fluid dribbled out of one nostril. I opened my mouth to speak his name but managed only a foghorn sound that blended with the increasing vibration radiating through the ground. Then Peter was sucked into the ground, too.

Michael shouted across the clearing. The mist parted, and I saw his blazing white face twisted in agony, his crystal blue eyes straining in his skull, his mouth stretched so wide I could see the flesh beginning to tear. Before I could attempt to speak to him, he disappeared through a hole in the ground.

To my left, Scott’s countenance was distorted into idiot madness. He produced his butterfly knife, then drove the blade into the soft white flesh of his forearm. Blood spurted out, incongruous in its greenness, and oozed in slimy ropes to the mist-shrouded ground. When he looked at me, he was no longer Scott but the awful Dennis Foley, the haunted boy who had opened up his arm with a scalpel in biology class freshman year. Foley’s yellow eyes blazed as a hideous grin stretched across the lower half of his face. The greenish blood steamed and bubbled out of his wound like lava. But then it was Scott again. Just as he lifted the knife out of the wound and brought it up to his neck, he dropped through the earth just as the others had.