December Park(82)

“Check it out,” Peter said, tapping his pencil on his sketch pad and grinning.

“You’ve moved on to fighter planes with big guns,” I said, looking at his drawing.

“The big guns have little guns mounted on them. Pretty cool, huh?”

We lounged around for about an hour, pretty much just wasting time, when Scott shouted from his perch in the tree, “Hey! Someone’s coming!” He pointed at the trees. “Identify yourself!”

“Identify this, jack face,” Michael said, coming through the trees with his middle finger extended. He got caught up in a tangle of bushes, cursed, stumbled, then righted himself with one hand against the trunk of an oak tree. He stepped in a puddle of mud, splashing filth up the leg of his khakis. “Christ. It’s like a toilet down here.”

Scott scrambled down the tree, then clapped the loose bark from his hands. He had his Orioles baseball hat turned backward, and he wore what we referred to as his Oh Shit Shark Shirt, a T-shirt depicting a giant cartoon shark about to devour a tiny scuba diver whose little cartoon thought bubble proclaimed, “Oh, shit!”

“We weren’t expecting you today. You get time off for good behavior?” Peter asked, closing his sketch pad.

“Fuck it,” Michael said. “I snuck out.”

“You snuck out of detention?”

“I was bored.” He bent down and fiddled with the knobs on the radio. In freshly pressed slacks, a buttoned oxford shirt, braided belt, docksiders without socks, and his hair neatly parted as usual, he didn’t look like the type of person who would wipe boogers in Kiki Sullivan’s history textbook. Which was part of his charm.

“It’s detention, *,” Peter said. “It’s supposed to be boring.”

Michael located a station playing a Huey Lewis song, then grinned. “Besides, when I heard old Poindexter was sneaking out of class, I thought that was cause for celebration.”

“Your face is a cause for celebration,” Adrian said, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. There was a thumbprint of mud on the side of his face.

“Ha! Holy shit!” Michael cried. “Was that an insult? That’s great. I’m proud of you, man. Lousiest f*cking insult I’ve ever heard, but goddamn, it’s the thought that counts, right?”

We all laughed. Even Adrian.

“Anyway, come here,” Michael said, waving him over. “I got somethin’ to tell you guys.”

Adrian closed his sketchbook, tucked it under one arm, and joined us on one of the headless statues.

Scott dug a can of Jolt from his backpack, popped the tab, downed a mouthful, and then passed it over to Peter.

“So I’m in detention with Tommy Orent,” Michael said. “We got to talking about the Piper and everything that’s been going on around town—”

“You didn’t tell him about the locket, did you?” Adrian said.

“Heck, no. Am I an idiot?”

“Well . . . ,” both Peter and I said at the same time. Michael kicked the can of Jolt out of Peter’s hand, which set Peter laughing.

“You guys wanna hear what I gotta say or what?”

“Go ahead,” Scott said, though he was smirking.

“So we get talking about the missing kids, and Tommy, he says, hey, you wanna hear something f*cked up? And you know I always wanna hear something f*cked up, so I say sure. He says he was friends with a kid from Glenrock named Jason Hughes. Mostly he said he just used Hughes for cigarettes, since Hughes had a fake ID and would buy cartons of smokes down at Lucky’s and sell ’em to his friends.”

Lucky’s was a sundries shop not far from the city limits, where Harting Farms ended and the depressive blue-collar community of Glenrock began. There were a few bars in that area, too, renown for attracting the lowest common denominators from Glenrock’s working class.

“Well, anyway, Orent says this kid Hughes took his money but never showed up with the smokes. This was back in June of last year, right? Orent figured Hughes would turn up eventually, and he wasn’t too pissed at first. But then he heard that Hughes had run away from home and he owed a bunch of other guys money, so Orent said he got real pissed. He thought Hughes had dicked him over.”

Scott said, “No shit. I’d be pissed, too.”

Michael nodded. “But when those kids went missing in the fall, Orent says he started to wonder if Hughes really ran away. Like, maybe something bad happened to him.”

“How come this Hughes kid’s name hasn’t been in the papers with all the others?” I said.

“Don’t you pay attention? This was months before the Demorest kid disappeared, so no one was talking about the Piper yet, and everyone, including Hughes’s parents, figured he ran away, which he’d done a bunch of times before.”

“That would mean the Piper was in Glenrock before coming here,” Peter said.

“Or maybe the Piper got him when he was here in town,” I offered.

Michael shrugged. “I don’t know what the f*ck it means, but it’s something, isn’t it?”

“How can we find out more about him?” Adrian asked.

Michael shrugged again.

“We can look him up in the newspapers,” Scott added. To Michael, he said, “You said this happened last June?”