December Park(73)

“Do you think someone could live in one of them?”

“Don’t know. Let’s mark ’em down, anyway.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s.”

Afterward, we were heading down Magothy Road before I realized we were biking right past the Keener farm. At least a dozen scarecrows had been tied to the fence surrounding the property, some with burlap-sack faces, others wearing dime-store Halloween masks. The house stood a distance away, closer toward the river. It was a ranch with a wraparound porch made of natural logs. Junked cars were lined up along one side of the house, their windshields opaque with grime and webbed with cracks. Big black dogs loped about in a pen in the backyard. I scanned the property for Nathan Keener’s truck but couldn’t spot it.

“Let’s get out of here,” I suggested, and Peter didn’t protest.

We spent an hour cruising the streets of Shipley’s Crossing, where Courtney’s friend Megan Meeks lived. There was an old neighborhood clubhouse that had closed down, its black windows arced with soap, large two-by-fours hammered over the entrances. A number of the boards looked new, and I recalled seeing police walking around the place one afternoon as we came home from school.

“I think the cops may have checked this place out already,” I said.

Nevertheless, Peter marked it down in his notebook.

On another day, we biked all the way out to the industrial park, where the houses stood closer and closer together, separated by barrooms, pawnshops, billiard parlors, and squalid brick tenements that overlooked squat warehouses with bars on the windows. On every street corner we came across the hollowed-out shells of abandoned automobiles. There were literally hundreds of places someone could hide in this part of the city—and where bodies could be hidden, too, and most likely never found.

We biked down North Town Road, crumbling storefronts ticking by like landmarks. At the edge of the neighborhood was a miserable little trailer park set among tall blond weeds and crumbly drifts of white gravel. There were ATVs and satellite dishes in nearly every yard.

“Write this place down,” I suggested. We had paused in a deserted intersection made of disintegrated asphalt. In one of the yards across the street, a piebald pit bull barked at us, ropes of saliva whipping about its snout. I felt eyes spying on us through darkened windows.

“What place, specifically?”

“The whole lousy neighborhood,” I said.





During Mass one Sunday morning, Father Evangeline brought Rebecca Ransom, the parents of Jeffrey Connor, and Courtney Cole’s father and younger sister, Margaret, up to the pulpit where he blessed them. Margaret wept when Father Evangeline pressed his thumb to her forehead and prayed with her.

“There is a scourge that has come to this town,” the priest announced. “It is the devil in human form, and he walks among us. He is the beast who wears the mask of a man while cloaking himself in darkness.”

Rebecca Ransom fell to her knees. Two men in the first pew rushed over and helped her up. Her cries were heart-wrenching.





After Mass, I met up with the guys at Echo Base. As I came through the woods, the four of them were gathered around the statues playing Uno while the dynamo-powered radio crackled out “Man in the Box” by Alice in Chains.

Michael noticed me first. He had the Little Mermaid headset cocked jauntily on his head. “Ahoy!” he called, and the others whipped their heads around and looked at me over their shoulders.

“Deal me in,” I said, going over to Scott’s backpack and fishing out a can of Jolt.

My friends all set their cards down. “Tell him,” Peter said.

Scott leaned over and grabbed a can of Jolt from his backpack. “We’ve got a new place to search.”

“Yeah?” I said. “Where’s that?”

Scott pointed across the woods toward the embankment and Counterpoint Lane. “The tunnel that goes under the highway. We’ve looked for clues down here and in the ditches and ravines, but Adrian found the locket right by the opening of that tunnel. It was Adrian’s idea to check it out.”

I looked at Adrian and his swimmy, magnified eyes. I recalled how he had stared at the mouth of that tunnel as if in a trance. How long had he been considering this before saying something?

“Isn’t that like a sewer pipe or something?” I said.

“It’s a drainage tunnel,” Scott said. “It’s there so the highway doesn’t flood during a big storm.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not too crazy about crawling through some underground pipe.”

“It’s wide enough so we won’t have to crawl,” Adrian said, a professorial tone to his voice. Yes, he had been planning on how to approach this for some time. “Maybe just hunch over a little but not crawl.”

“You know what I mean,” I said.

“Well, it’s part of our new theory,” Adrian said.

“What theory is that?”

“That the cops are wrong,” he said.

The others nodded.

“They’ve been looking for clues in December Park, in the woods, and back toward the school. They assume she was abducted and murdered either in the park or in the woods. But that’s because they don’t know about the locket. They don’t know I found it on the other side of the street by the ditch. Which means maybe she was abducted after she walked out of the woods.”