December Park(87)

Adrian nodded, his gaze trained on the ground now.

“My grandparents moved down from New York to help my dad take care of Charles and me. It’s been like that ever since.”

“So you lost your mom and your brother,” Adrian said.

“Yeah.” It was a different feeling having lost Charles, but I didn’t possess the words or the desire to explain that to him. I hardly understood it myself.

“My dad killed himself.”

I looked at him.

“He didn’t do it in a messy way, like you sometimes hear about,” Adrian went on. “Some people take their heads off with shotguns or swan-dive out of an office building or something. Or open up their wrists.”

Inwardly, I cringed. Open up their wrists. I thought of Dennis Foley again and how he’d cut himself with a scalpel in freshman biology. I thought too of how much Adrian reminded me of him.

“He turned the car on in the garage and just, like, sat in it. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning. It’s the least painful way to do it, I guess. That’s why we moved here. My mom wanted to get away from Chicago and our old house and all.”

I thought of Doreen Gardiner’s haunted eyes and expressionless face, of the zombielike way she moved, and wondered if this explained it. What drives a man with a wife and a son to take his life? I wanted to know but I couldn’t ask. Anyway, I wasn’t sure Adrian would know the answer.

We walked the rest of the way through the woods without talking, content listening to the Mellencamp tape on my Walkman. By the time we stepped into the large field that flanked the road, it was as if we’d left the ghosts of our dead parents behind us among the trees.

“There it is,” I said, pointing at the decrepit remains of the Werewolf House. “Creepy, huh?”

“Wow. You’re right—it looks like something out of those hockey mask movies.” It was what Adrian called the Friday the 13th franchise.

“I’ve ridden my bike past this place like a billion times,” I said as we walked toward it, “but it wasn’t till last night when I came out here with my dad that I noticed it.”

“Noticed what?”

“Come on,” I said and broke into a jog.

“Hey! Wait up!”

The overgrown grass whisked against my shins as I ran. By the time I reached the wrought iron fence surrounding the property, Adrian was only halfway across the field, struggling to maintain a steady pace with that overburdened backpack weighing him down. When he finally joined me, he was out of breath.

“We shouldn’t be here,” he said, no doubt reading the No Trespassing signs.

“Don’t worry about those. Look.” I closed my hand around one of the iron staves in the fence; it was loose and I rattled it like a saber. Then I motioned to the top of the stave, where it was capped in an iron fleur-de-lis.

“That’s . . . ,” Adrian began. He dropped his backpack on the ground at his feet and rooted around inside it. He produced the matching fleur-de-lis that he had found in the tunnel beneath the highway. He held it up against one of the others, and we both saw that it was a perfect match.

“How could one of these make it all the way into the tunnel?” he said.

“Someone would have had to bring it down there,” I said. There were plenty of staves missing from the fence, and some of the ones that remained had their fleur-de-lis missing. “I think we should look around inside.”

Adrian studied the house. I did, too. It somehow seemed less ominous now, almost inviting . . . but it was a false front, a subterfuge. As if it were saying, See? I’m just a harmless old house. You two boys are on the right track. Why don’t you both come inside? I promise not to bite. I promise not to have my roof cave in and crush your little skulls. I promise not to have my floor fall away under your feet and swallow you whole . . .

I swung my backpack around and took a flashlight from the front pocket.

“Do you think there’s really a dog?” Adrian said. I didn’t know what he was talking about until I realized he was looking at the Beware of Dog sign nailed to the front door.

“No. My dad put that up. The police want to keep kids away from the place.”

“Smart thinking,” he said and didn’t seem any less apprehensive. “How do we get in?”

“Let’s try the front door.”

I went through the opening in the fence, where the gate hung lopsided from its rusted and broken hinges. Adrian followed close behind me. The ground was a cushion of matted weeds, and the porch steps were so overgrown that they hardly existed anymore. The porch slanted toward its center where a gaping hole bristling with tall yellow weeds was visible.

I was contemplating the best way to mount the porch when Adrian came up beside me and said, “Why don’t we go to the back and see if that would be easier?”

We circled around to the rear of the house much in the same way my father had the night before. The yard was festooned with spiny-looking bushes, the boughs weighted down by countless birds’ nests. Much of the siding had rotted away, exposing weather-blackened boards and bent carpentry nails. Nests made of dead leaves and twigs burst from between the boards like stuffing from an old car seat. They weren’t birds’ nests, I knew, but probably some mammal, like that fox-like thing I’d glimpsed arcing through the underbrush last night.