December Park(91)

More fumbling reverberated through the floorboards. Something else was knocked over. Their heavy footfalls retreated to the rear of the house. The door slammed as they exited. For several moments, they could be heard cackling and jeering out in the yard. Then, something like twenty minutes later, there came another gunshot. After that, things went quiet.

Adrian and I remained under the stairs, not moving, hardly breathing. Even when the vehicles started up in the field, I gripped one of Adrian’s knees and whispered, “Don’t move. It might be a trap. They may not really be leaving.”

So we remained where we were even after the engines faded down the street, leaving nothing but empty silence in their wake.

“Did they shoot that possum?” he whispered.

“Yeah. I think so.”

“Those guys are crazy.”

I resisted the urge to click on the flashlight. For one thing, if it was a trap, I didn’t want Keener or whoever else to see the light come on. For another thing, I didn’t really want to see what we’d been crouching in for the better part of half an hour.

Something moved upstairs. It was a subtle sound, like the shushing of stocking feet across the floor. I felt Adrian tense up beside me again. I tensed up, too. I was just about to convince myself that it was nothing more than a rat when footsteps moved down the hall. As they drew nearer, I held my breath.

They stopped directly overhead. At the basement door.

He won’t come down here, I thought, desperate to convince myself with logic. He was too chickenshit to come down here before, so he won’t come down here now. He’s trying to scare us out of hiding, but if we just wait him out, he’ll get bored and go home.

A heavy foot came down on the first step. The whole staircase creaked.

Sweat leaked down my forehead and stung my eyes.

A foot on the second step. The staircase—reeeek.

I wouldn’t sit here and watch him leer at me from behind the barrel of a rifle. If it came to it, I would jump at him, attack him, bite and claw and tear and pull. I would be a wild animal if I had to be.

It was Charles’s voice I heard in my head: I would never let anyone hurt you, Angelo. He had always protected me.

But now Charles was dead.

I clenched my fists. My whole body trembled.

The person on the stairs came down two more steps, then paused. The silence was as loud as the rifle blast had been. Louder, even.

In one second—He won’t come down here.

In the next—I’ll fight him if he does. Even if he kills me in the end, I’ll hurt him and make him remember me for the rest of his miserable—

The footsteps went back up the stairs.

At first, I thought I’d misheard. But then I heard soft footfalls in the rear of the house. I heard the back door squeal. And although I didn’t hear it bang against its frame, I was overcome by the sensation of being sealed up, so I knew the door had closed.

I shut my eyes and was powerless to move.





Somehow, astoundingly, Adrian and I had fallen asleep. I awoke with a jolt, gripped by a nameless terror that only intensified when I realized I couldn’t see and that I was crouching in freezing water. Then it all rushed back to me.

I was still gripping the flashlight with both hands, so I turned it on. A jittery milk-colored beam issued out across the cellar. The walls were exposed cinder block. The water we were crouching in looked so much like cocoa that I felt my stomach tighten up in revolt. What appeared to be disassembled machine parts leaned against the walls and hung from large iron hooks.

I jabbed Adrian with an elbow. “Wake up.”

His head jerked and slammed against the bottom of the stair. He rubbed his head, then looked around. “This water smells like poop.”

“Congratulations. You win the prize.”

“Are they gone?”

“I think so.”

“What time is it?”

I checked my wristwatch with the flashlight. “Crap. It stopped working.” I shook my wrist. “There’s water in it.”

“I can’t stay down here any longer. My muscles are sore, and the smell is making me nauseous.” Adrian climbed out from under the stairwell, his backpack spilling water like a sieve.

I handed him the flashlight so I could climb out, too, and was instantly greeted with a tightening pain beginning from the base of my neck all the way down to my tailbone. It felt like someone had driven an iron rod through my spinal column.

“Angie. Look.”

Adrian had the flashlight trained on a series of large wooden crates that had been stacked against one cinder-block wall. They looked similar to the rabbit hutch out back. But it wasn’t the crates he wanted me to see. It was what sat on top of them, molded out of concrete, its features buffed to rudimentary suggestions. Where its neck should have been was just over two feet of rust-red pipe threaded like a screw.

“Holy shit,” I said. “Do you know what this is?”

Adrian’s voice was surprisingly calm. “One of the missing heads for the statues down in the woods.”





The head was heavy but we got it out of there. I carried it up the stairs and through the house. Before we left, I paused to peer into the kitchen. The back wall of one cupboard had been blown out, and there was blood spattered all over the place, even on the ceiling. But the possum’s carcass was not in attendance, which could only suggest that Keener and his buddies had taken it with them. What had Falconette said before Keener pulled the trigger? Don’t take off its face. I wanna keep the jawbones.