December Park(92)

Outside, the afternoon looked gray and drawn-out. We walked through the woods, conscious of every snapping twig and falling acorn. When a flock of blackbirds burst from the ground and took to the treetops, both Adrian and I unleashed simultaneous cries. Then we laughed nervously.

We took turns carrying the head out of the woods. Finally, when we could see the back of the Mathersons’ house, I unzipped my backpack and we stuffed the head inside it. We didn’t want anyone stopping us and asking us questions about where we’d been and what we’d found there.

When Adrian saw that his mother’s car wasn’t in the driveway, he said, “My mom’s still at work. You can come over and we can put our clothes in the wash. Then we can get down to the woods with the statue head and wait for the guys to get out of school.”

The Gardiners’ house was just as dark and unwelcoming as it had always been, but after spending however long cowering like mice in the basement of the Werewolf House, stepping inside was like being embraced by a loved one.





Chapter Seventeen


What Adrian Saw





The concrete head we had found in the basement of the Werewolf House didn’t match any of the headless statues in the Dead Woods. For one thing, the head had a metal pipe jutting from it. All the bodies did, too. The corresponding body wouldn’t have a pipe but rather a hole for the pipe to fit in. It felt like we were overlooking something very simple, but no matter how we considered it, the head just did not belong.

“So what does that mean?” Scott asked.

“It means it belongs to some other statue,” I said. “There must be one we’re missing.”

“What do we do with the head in the meantime?” Peter said. The head was on the ground, and he was rolling it back and forth with his foot.

“We keep it here at Echo Base,” Adrian said. “This is our place. It’s protected.”

“What the heck were you guys doing at the Werewolf House, anyway?” Peter asked.

We told them about the fleurs-de-lis on the fence posts.

We also told them about Keener. It was decided that we all lay low for a bit.

The near confrontation with Keener left us shaky and nervous, and for the next several days, I glanced over my shoulder every time I stepped out of the house. This wasn’t paranoia—twice in the following week I’d seen Keener’s pickup idling at the end of Worth Street. After seventh period, we left school from the back doors. This way, we were able to avoid the main roads.

It was necessary to keep away from the Dead Woods for a while, too, since we spotted Keener’s truck down there again toward the beginning of May. Adrian was unhappy about this—we were all unhappy about it—but to return to Echo Base so soon was to court further trouble. So instead, we killed the hours in someone’s basement, listening to music, watching TV, and playing board games until dusk beckoned us home.

And spring ushered us closer to summer . . .

I read Rachel’s poems and thought they were quite good. I told her so in class, and she seemed genuinely pleased. She asked if I had written any new stories. I told her that I had been thinking about it.

(The truth was, I had been setting aside an hour each night before bed to hammer out fresh pages. I typed quickly but too hard, pecking at the keys with enough force to pop paper circles out of the O’s, which littered my desk like confetti. After just a few weeks, a sizable stack of typed manuscript pages had materialized on my desk, smelling of ink from the new typewriter ribbon. What began as a short story soon grew into something larger and more dangerous, and I wondered if I had unwittingly crossed into the precarious and intimidating territory of a novel.)

My family and I piled into my dad’s unmarked police sedan and headed to The Wagon Wheel, the gaudy steak house where life-sized ceramic cattle grazed in the parking lot, for my birthday dinner. I had a fat, juicy sirloin with sweet potato fries and a milk shake for dessert.

When we got back to the house, my grandmother placed one of her wonderful apple pies speared with sixteen candles on the kitchen table. We all had several pieces, dollops of vanilla ice cream on the side. My grandparents gave me some sweaters and slacks—“church clothes,” my grandmother called them, since she was constantly complaining that I dressed like a beggar—as well as a birthday card with fifty dollars flapping out of it like a party favor.

My dad gave me a CD player and stereo, along with a bunch of CDs and paperbacks. The novels were cool—Stephen King, Peter Straub, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway—but the CDs were from groups I’d never heard of, groups my dad probably listened to when he was a kid. Nonetheless, I cracked them open and plugged the player into the wall. Soon we were eating birthday pie and listening to such mysterious groups as The Guess Who and The Lovin’ Spoonful.

“Next gift,” my grandfather announced, kicking his chair back from the table, then disappearing down the hallway.

“What gift?” my grandmother called after him. Shaking her head, she looked at me and said, half in jest, “I really think that old fool is losing his mind.”

When my grandfather returned, he held his samurai sword horizontally in both hands. As I watched with widening awe, he set the sword on the table among the plates of uneaten pie crusts and mugs of steaming coffee.

“No way,” I said.

“Salvatore,” said my grandmother, “is that really such a good idea?”