December Park(80)

As my friends went to the stacks of local and national newspapers, I wandered over to the Children’s Corner. It was much as I remembered it: beanbag chairs spread out across the maroon carpeting, posters of Judy Blume book covers on the walls, copies of Where the Wild Things Are and The Mouse and the Motorcycle and The Trumpet of the Swan on the shelves. I had checked out all those books as well as countless others.

Maybe someday my own books will be on these shelves, I used to think once I started writing my own stories. It was a thought I still entertained, though with dwindling certainty. I was already halfway done with high school. College would be next, and then I would have to get a job—a real job, as my dad was fond of saying. Where would the writing go? Would there be time? Some nights, when I closed my eyes, I was terrified to imagine myself in middle-age while my old Olympia typewriter collected dust on a basement shelf.

I blinked and for a moment could see Charles and me sitting Indian-style on the floor as a soft-voiced librarian read us a chapter out of The Enormous Egg. The ghosts of lost children, indeed . . .

I joined my friends. Michael and Peter were snickering over an issue of Mad magazine. Scott and Adrian were talking to a librarian who had just handed them spools of microfilm. The librarian, who was a skinny bearded man in an ugly striped shirt, pointed to the three microfilm projectors against the wall. Before departing, he cast a disapproving glance at Michael and Peter, whose snickering had risen slightly in volume.

Adrian, Scott, and I pulled three chairs in front of one of the projectors and sat down.

“He gave us a weird look when I asked for last October’s paper, so I told him we were doing a research project for school,” Scott said, loading the film into the projector. He clicked it on, and milky yellow light flooded the oversized screen. He spooled over until the Caller’s masthead appeared.

I leaned over the back of my chair and waved Peter and Michael over. “Stand behind us,” I told them.

We couldn’t remember the exact date Courtney Cole’s body was discovered, but we knew it had been on the front page of the newspaper, so it didn’t take long to find it. Her yearbook photo was larger on-screen, and I felt a chill looking at it. Behind me, Peter and Michael stood closer together so no one passing by would be able to see the screen.

In a low voice, Scott read the article. There were no details in it that we didn’t already know. When Scott came to the end, we continued staring at the screen in deferential silence.

“Back up,” Peter suggested, “and see if you can find when she was reported missing.”

It was two days before her body was found. This headline was also on the front page—Local Girl Reported Missing. Again, Scott read the article in a quiet voice while we all leaned closer to the glowing screen. As with the previous article, there was nothing in it that we hadn’t already heard on the news or, for that matter, in the halls of school and around town. The article continued on the next page, but when Scott scrolled over to it, I said, “Wait. Go back.”

Scott scrolled back.

“There,” I said, pointing at the screen. “The story toward the bottom.”

The story’s headline read, Car Crash Injures Local College Student, and it summarized Audrey MacMillan’s inebriated slalom off the road and into the woods. The photo that accompanied the article showed a pair of taillights wedged in a net of tree branches.

“Courtney Cole was killed the night she went missing,” I said. It had been staring us in the face since October, yet no one had connected the pieces. “It wasn’t part of his plan for her body to be found. He was in the woods when that MacMillan girl drove her car off the road. He couldn’t risk taking the body anywhere and being seen with it, so he left it there and ran away.”

“Holy shit,” Scott said.

“So maybe it’s true,” Adrian said, “and he was planning to bring her back across the road to the other side of the highway. He would have used the tunnel—”

“And dropped the locket in the ditch,” Michael interjected.

“—on his way back to . . .” Adrian’s voice trailed off.

“Back to where?” Peter said.

We didn’t know.





Chapter Fourteen


After the Storm





As April progressed, our town was accosted by a torrential downpour that lasted nearly three full days. The sky remained the color of soot, and a furious and unrelenting wind blew shutters off houses and cast small tornadoes of dead leaves down neighborhood streets. My friends and I avoided the Dead Woods, which turned into a swamp as the creek overflowed and flooded December Park, and we got rides home from school for much of the week so we didn’t have to walk.

Down by the Cape, the tide came in past the locks and rushed up onto the shore where it smashed against the watermen’s shacks, reducing a number of them to piles of sun-bleached wooden boards and flapping sheets of tar paper, and some of them were washed clean out into the bay. Deaver’s Pond swelled like a balloon and flooded the surrounding culverts and ravines, causing a massive clot of dead leaves, fallen tree limbs, and great clumps of trash to clog the underpass beneath Solomon’s Bend Road. Frogs popped out of the swamp grass of Solomon’s Field, for a brief time ruling the world.

The television news spoke of doom when a grim-faced reporter detailed how one of the massive stained glass windows of St. Nonnatus was struck by lightning and exploded into a dazzling array of colored blades of glass. Lightning also blew out a transformer on the second night of the storm, cutting the power along Worth and Haven for nearly twelve hours.