The Night Parade(86)

David just looked down at the polo shirt he now held. When he looked back up at Heck, he said, “I’m really very sorry about your son. It’s terrible. It’ll haunt me.”

“Nothin’ you could’ve done.”

David wiped at his eyes.

“God bless,” Heck said. He reached out and pulled the passenger door closed with a squeal of hinges. As David stepped away from the truck, Heck released the brakes. The truck grumbled forward, then cut down a fork in the road. David watched its taillights slip between two of the darkened condominiums.

He wondered now if he should have asked Hector Ramirez to wait with them, just to make sure Tim showed up. They were here now at this campground with no car and it was getting cold. If Tim failed to show up, they were screwed.

When he turned back to Ellie, he was surprised to see tears standing in her eyes, too. “Hey,” he said, rubbing the side of her face. “What’s the matter?”

“That boy,” she said. “Benny.”

David smiled at her.

“Do you think Mr. Ramirez will be okay?” she said.

“Yes, hon. I think he’ll be fine.”

Because what was one more lie on top of all the others?





46


At the top of the hill, the fence surrounding Funluck Park rose out of the gloom—a series of iron pikes capped with spearheads at the center of which stood two wrought-iron gates. The gates stood open, though they were so entwined with vines and ivy that David doubted they’d be able to close. The sign above the gates was missing letters. It now read:



FU CK PARK





Things arced through the air just overhead as they crossed through the open gates. When Ellie noticed, she cried out jubilantly, “Birds! Birds, Daddy! Look!”

“They’re bats, hon.”

The park grounds were overgrown, the grass thwacking against David’s shins while coming up almost to his hips. Clouds of tiny insects billowed out of the underbrush with each step. Ellie walked behind him, allowing him to clear the way through the buggy undergrowth. When they came to a snare of thorny branches and desiccated holly bushes, David stripped off his bloodied shirt and stuffed it down within the prickly boughs. He pulled Heck’s shirt on over his head and found that it was at least three sizes too big. With some irony, he wondered what proved more conspicuous—a bloodstained T-shirt or Hector Ramirez’s XXL polo shirt hanging from him like a parachute. To make it appear less obvious, he tucked it into his jeans, feeling the hem of the shirt bunching up around his waist. He left only the rear untucked, so that it covered the butt of the Glock, which poked out of his waistband.

They came upon a clearing where a half-dozen picnic tables rose up out of the tall grass. The tables were empty, but David could see a few cars parked in the adjacent parking lot. Beyond the lot, he could see the flickering tongue of a bonfire and hear distant chatter. The cabins were no longer there, as they had been when he was a child, but a few tents had been erected in the nearby field, black triangles just out of reach of the sodium lampposts that lined the circumference of the parking lot.

“Where are all the old rides?” Ellie said.

David looked around. “There’s some, I think,” he said, pointing to a series of dark humps partially digested by the underbrush. “Come on.”

He took Ellie’s hand and led her over to the arrangement of shapes rising out of the ground. They were the bumper cars. Their metallic paint had faded to a dull monochromatic gray, and much of the rubber around the base had rotted away, leaving behind only black, jagged teeth of brittle rubber. He wouldn’t have thought it possible that this place could fall into further disrepair, but that seemed to be the case.

David tapped the hull of one bumper car with his sneaker and something small and furry darted from it, squealing like a creaky hinge. Both David and Ellie jumped back, then laughed nervously. The overgrown grass parted as the creature—a raccoon, most likely—carved its way across the field.

He surveyed the surrounding hillside. Deadfalls blocked the path leading to the top of the hill, and much of the hilltop itself was overgrown in forestry. He decided it made more sense to wait for Tim in the parking lot.

Please show up. Please show up.

On their way back to the lot, Ellie found the plaster face of a clown in the weeds. The face held a hideous grin, all its paint having faded to various shades of gray throughout the passage of years. It looked like something that had once decorated the roof of a carousel.

“Creepy,” Ellie said. She held it up over her own face. The clown mask leered at him.

“Cut it out,” he said. It reminded him of his students, and those terrible masks they wore. “Let’s go sit on one of those picnic tables over there.”

She dropped the plaster face and followed him to the assembly of picnic tables. From this vantage, they could keep an eye on the parking lot, the campers around the bonfire in the nearby field, and the dark curtain of trees that bordered the park. Far in the distance, a few windows glowed in the fa?ade of the condos. Otherwise, they could have been camping out in some remote and undeveloped part of the world.

As they sat on the picnic table, Ellie leaned her head against his arm and continued to stroke the bird eggs. She sang to them in a low voice, though not bereft of musicality, and although David could not recall the name of the tune, he knew it had been one of the songs Kathy had sung to Ellie when she was just a baby.