December Park(72)

Michael took to his job with the zeal of a religious fanatic. He stopped sitting with us in the school cafeteria so he could make the rounds at various other tables, intent on overhearing poignant tidbits of information that might reveal the identity of the Piper. Like a beat reporter, he kept the small notepad Adrian had given him in the breast pocket of his shirt. I often caught him jotting down notes in it while in class, and he was reprimanded by Mr. Johnson several times for not paying attention.

Michael came up with a list of possible suspects, although his rationale for arriving at these outlandish conclusions was more than just questionable. Half the teachers from Stanton School, including Mr. Johnson, Mr. Mattingly, old Nozzle Neck, and even Principal Unglesbee, made the list.

Down in the woods, we passed the list around so we could all view it.

I raised one eyebrow. “Old lady Schubert?” The elderly woman who lived on Shore Acre Road and whose lawn was populated with an entire army of ceramic garden gnomes was certainly a mean old witch, but in no way was she capable of anything more malevolent than shouting at kids from her front windows.

“Is that so impossible?” Michael said.

“She’s like a hundred years old,” I said. “And besides, weren’t you the one who said the killer has to be a man?”

“Hey,” he said, hands up, “that was the old sexist me. I’m new and improved. I’m a modern man now.”

“This is just a list of people you don’t like,” Peter said, leaning over my shoulder to look at the list. “Or people who don’t like you.”

“Explains why it’s so long,” Scott said.

“Why Mr. Mattingly?” I asked. “What has he done to you?”

“Nothing. But he’s new to town. I figured that had to count for something.” When Michael saw that none of us understood his rationale, he said, “Think about it. Do you really believe the killer is someone who’s lived among us for years and just, wham, one day decides to start kidnapping and murdering kids? Highly unlikely. It’s more plausible that the killer is fairly new to town. Maybe he’d been killing where he came from and things got too hot for him, so he had to move on.”

I had to admit, the theory made a lot of sense. However, I couldn’t picture Mr. Mattingly with the cleft in his chin and the clean-shaven face as a murderer of children.

Adrian dropped a hand on Michael’s shoulder. “I think you’re onto something. Put little stars next to the names of the people who are new to town.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Peter remarked. Looking at Adrian, he said, “You’re new to town.”

“Yeah,” Michael said, gripping Adrian around the wrist and shaking his thin little arm. “But look at this thing. He couldn’t choke the life out of a teddy bear.”

We laughed.

Since I had been avoiding my own job, I helped Peter with his—namely, coming up with a list of all the possible places a child killer might hide out. On a Thursday afternoon after school, the two of us hopped on our bikes and coasted through the streets of the city. We visited the houses of the missing kids and checked out the general vicinity where each one had last been seen.

Peter stopped to write in his notepad whenever we saw an abandoned house with a For Sale sign in the front yard or a run-down hunting shack that stood haunted and empty along Peninsula Drive. There were some vacant storefronts on Second Avenue, their windows dark and soaped over. Some of them had been that way for years. We made note of all of them.

We marked down the boathouses along the Shallows, and on our way back home, the weathered remnants of the Werewolf House beyond the Butterfield homestead made the list, too.

On a different day, we rode out to the Palisades, with its whitewashed gazebos and manicured lawns, and down to the playground where, when we were just toddlers, Peter and I had played together in the sandboxes. The sandboxes were gone, as were the jungle gyms and tire swings, and the small lake that had once looked so beautiful had greenish scum on the surface through which sickly looking mallards carved their passage.

We located the Coles’ house, which was only a few blocks from the modern-looking Girls’ Holy Cross High School, and we straddled our bikes outside the quaint cottage-style home with the peach siding and the dark green shutters, wondering what the last horrible moments of Courtney’s life had been like. The house looked dark, and the only thing in the driveway was a large oil stain. I felt some of the adventure seep out of me. This wasn’t a game; this was real.

“What are you kids doing?” a screechy voice called from across the street, startling us both. I turned and saw an elderly woman in curlers and a floral housedress admonishing us from over a white-picket fence. She had a newspaper tucked under one arm, and she pointed an accusatory finger in our direction. “Get away from that house!”

Without a word, Peter and I pedaled away.

Down at the Cape, we peeked into the grimy windows of the watermen’s shacks along the shore. Not much bigger than outhouses, these sloppy, poorly constructed hovels reeked of rotten fish, urine, and sweat. There were rubber waders in some, dirty calendars pinned to the walls of others, and even a potbellied stove in one of them. We wrote them down in the notepad, although we couldn’t imagine someone willingly hiding out in one of those claustrophobic and foul-smelling little coffins.

Peter motioned to the water and the rank of winter-proofed boats suspended by winches near the docks. “What about those?”