December Park(85)

“Sort of,” I said. I knew him from school, and he had seemed cool enough, but we hadn’t exactly been friends.

“In case you were worried about things,” my dad went on. “I wouldn’t want you to keep things . . . you know . . . bottled up inside. If you were afraid.”

I looked out the passenger window and watched the shadows peel away from the trees as we drove by.

“Are you afraid?” he asked.

I looked at him. After a time, I said, “No.”

“Because it’s okay if you are,” my dad said.

“I’m not afraid.”

“Okay. But you’ll talk to me if you get afraid? Or if you just want to talk?”

“Sure,” I said, considering. “But did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Ever shoot anybody?”

He squeezed my knee. “Would it disappoint you if I said no?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, then I’ve shot . . . let’s see . . . maybe a hundred perps. No, no—that’s not right. It’s more like two hundred. Yeah, that’s it. Two hundred perps. Maybe more. You lose count after the first fifty.”

I smiled and he tousled my hair. As we drove out of the woods and hit one of the darkened beach roads, my dad fired the cigarette butt out the window. The houses here were small duplexes with overgrown yards and boat trailers in the driveways.

“Do you guys have, like, a suspect list or anything?” I asked eventually.

My dad arched one of his eyebrows. “A suspect list, huh?”

“How do you figure out who to put on that list?” I asked.

“It’s not necessarily a list of suspects. Remember the man we saw walking down here on New Year’s Eve?”

“Chester somebody,” I said.

“Yes. Chester Vaughn. He was out here so we needed to find out why. We needed to make sure his answers made sense and that he had an alibi. You know what that is, right?”

“Sure. It’s an excuse for where he’s been.”

“Right. But it’s an excuse that can be verified.”

“His excuse was verified?”

“Yes. That’s why we let him go.”

“Have there been other people you’ve questioned like Chester Vaughn?”

His lips went firm, and I thought he wouldn’t answer my question. “Yes,” he said finally, “we’ve spoken to quite a few people.”

“How come the newspapers haven’t mentioned that?”

“Because we try to keep that info away from the press.”

I watched the houses give way to sloping black lawns dripping with moonlight. “Do you think that Cole girl was killed in December Park?”

My dad patted down his shirt, probably looking for another cigarette that he didn’t have. “We don’t really know, buddy. It’s one of the things we’re considering.”

“Not the police,” I said. “You. What do you think?”

He exhaled greatly through flared nostrils. “It seems to make the most sense.”

“Is that why you don’t want me hanging around down there?”

“One of the reasons. You haven’t been playing down there, have you?”

The lie jittered out of me. “N-no.”

My father cut the wheel, and we took one of the nameless gravel roads toward the beach. On the incline, the bay opened up before us—dark velvet rippling with stars. A white mist roiled across the beach.

My dad eased down on the brake, then shifted the sedan into Park. “I’ll just be a minute,” he said, climbing out. He already had his flashlight on. I watched him advance over the dunes and toward the beach. With his shoe, he turned over empty beer bottles in the sand. When he shined his light down the length of the beach, the mist swirled in the beam like smoke.

He had left the driver’s door open. A cool breeze entered the car, causing me to shiver. I peered out the open door, across the gravel roadway toward the incline of trees that ran along the cusp of the beach. Their branches waved in the wind.

I imagined someone standing just beyond that line of trees, staring right at me. Because the door was open, the interior dome light was on, casting me in conspicuous yellow light. All of a sudden, I felt vulnerable and naked. I leaned across the driver’s seat, gripped the door handle, and slammed the door.

My dad’s flashlight jerked in the direction of the car. The circle of light widened as he approached. “You okay?” he said, getting back in.

“Yeah. I was just getting cold.”

He geared the sedan into Drive, carved a semicircle in the gravel, and headed toward the main road.

After a few more stops, my dad slowed to about ten miles per hour as we went by the Butterfield farm. The pens were empty, the cows and sheep having all been brought into the large red barn for the night. Two large grain silos extended over the distant veil of trees, their matching cupolas like dulled arrowheads. As we passed the entrance to the Butterfields’ winding driveway, two carriage lights came on at the house, most likely on motion sensors.

Then there were the wide fields and the lighted houses far in the distance. There were the bats carving erratic helixes across the face of the moon and the heavy-limbed trees that drooped down into the roadway. There were the power lines bowing along the shoulder and the shimmering white eyes of a raccoon as it stood on its hind legs and stared into the sedan’s headlamps.