[106]
Walt parked near the picnic tables not far from where the youngest children were swinging on swings and building castles out of sand. Across the park, near the baseball diamond, Childs sat in the bleachers, shading his eyes against the afternoon sun. In his company this afternoon was a woman who appeared to be in her mid-to-late thirties, her hair cut short in front. She was wearing a modest, gray pants suit that seemed oddly out of place here at the park on a sunny day.
Walt climbed out of the car and moved over to sit at one of the tables. An old oak tree provided a canopy of branches and leaves, blocking out all but a few tiny patches of sunlight. Behind him, a little girl screamed with delight as she came down the slide and was caught at the bottom by her mother. This was the way it was supposed to be, he thought. Children building their sand castles, delighting in their rides, not a care in the world. Children weren’t supposed to have cares. Those were for the adults, for the ones who had forgotten what it was like to be children.
He noticed a pair of initials carved into the corner of the picnic table. D.E. Nothing else. No postscript about love. No misshapen heart. No giant plus sign connecting the initials to another pair of initials. Not even a hint as to whether a boy or a girl had done the carving, though Walt assumed it had been a boy. It seemed like the kind of thing a boy would do without thinking. Some hot summer afternoon when nothing was going on and no one else seemed to be around, the knife had come out almost unconsciously an hour had passed.
He looked up and watched Childs nudge the woman next to him and point across the park to the snack bar. A piece of plywood had been set into place over the window, like a storm shutter, and painted in crude white lettering across the front was the announcement: CLOSED FOR WINTER. Congregating near the building was a small group of teenagers, just hanging out as kids were prone to do. A girl with beautiful brown hair, an oversized sweatshirt and a nose ring, laughed loud enough that Walt could hear her from across the park. The boy next to her reached into his shirt pocket and offered her a cigarette. She nodded and they passed it back and forth for awhile.
It was the group of teenagers that had apparently piqued Childs’s interest.
In the bleachers, the woman asked the doctor a question. He nodded and offered her a hand as she climbed to her feet. She made her way down the stands one cautious step at a time, still curiously out of place, then strolled across the park toward a small grassy area near the restrooms.
Two of the kids broke off from the group. They backpedaled off the gravel and onto the grass, talking casually, then turned and started in Walt’s direction. Another kid, wearing a plaid shirt over a black tee-shirt and looking to be no more than thirteen or fourteen, broke away. He raised his hand and pointed apologetically toward the restrooms, nodded and started in that direction.
Almost immediately, the woman appeared to take notice.
She tucked her hands into her pockets and moved across the grass toward the walkway. It was an angle designed to take her directly across the path of the young man.
Whatever it was, it was going down.
Walt stood and stretched and wandered over to the barbecue pit. The two kids, who had been the first to leave the group, passed in front of him, one of them rattling on zealously about some group called the Cranes.
The woman stepped onto the walkway, turned and brushed past the boy. It was a snap of the fingers, just like that, and then it was over. As near as Walt could tell, all she had done was put her hand on the boy’s shoulder and whisper something. What she had whispered was anyone’s guess.
The boy displayed no outward acknowledgment, good or bad; he simply stayed on course to the restrooms, with barely a break in stride. The woman stayed to a course of her own. She circled around the perimeter of the park, and rejoined Childs in the bleachers.
What the hell was that all about?
After several minutes, the boy emerged again from the bathroom and stood at the entrance, looking confused. He shaded his eyes against the sun, glancing across the grass to where his friends were still huddled together, talking. And then he did a curious thing. He turned and went the other direction.
That put Walt in a sudden quandary.
He watched the kid disappear behind the foliage at the far side of the park, then glanced at the bleachers and noted that neither Childs nor the woman had budged an inch from where they were sitting. Whatever or whoever they were waiting for, they were still waiting. And that left Walt with a decision. Follow the boy or join the wait.
He cut across the picnic area, around the outer edges of the ball field and slipped out through the wall of oak leaf hydrangea at the far side. The boy was crossing the street half-a-block up. His hands were jammed into the front pockets of his jeans, which were at least four inches too large around the waist and held up by nothing more than a length of rope. His head hung low as he shuffled along in no apparent hurry. He did not appear to be a boy with a mission.
Walt kept a safe distance back.
At the next corner, the boy turned right and continued on his odyssey through the suburban territories. If you followed half-a-dozen regular kids walking down the street, this one would blend in seamlessly, a chameleon with all the right colors, all the right moves. He was invisible if you weren’t looking, reticent if you weren’t listening. He was a thousand other kids, a single faceless child. All of these and none of these.
So what was really going on?
They moved in make-believe tandem three blocks down, two blocks over until the boy stopped outside a small, cubby-hole-of-a-store set back from the street. It was shouldered on one side by a coffee shop called Mimi’s and a Coin-Operated Laundromat on the other. The boy raised his head and read the sign over the store. It read: The Book Mark. New and Used Books. Buy or Trade.
This was where he had come.
He sat on a reading bench outside the bookstore, his hands out of his pockets and clasped behind his head. He crossed his legs in front of him and stretched and stared off into the endless blue dreams of the afternoon sky.
Walt crossed the street and got himself a window table at a place called The Sandwich Shop, where he could keep an eye on things without looking conspicuous. He ordered a slice of lemon meringue pie and a Diet Coke, then sat back and watched.
A few minutes later, a girl, who looked to be a couple of years older than the boy—maybe sixteen or seventeen, it was so hard to tell these days—came down the same street, in the same direction. She was dressed in jeans with holes in the knees and an oversized sweat shirt with the sleeves rolled up above the elbows. Sunlight glistened off a string of four earrings dangling from her left ear.
She stopped and looked up at the sign over the bookstore, the one that said: The Book Mark. As the boy had done before her, she seemed satisfied that she had found her way to the right place. She sat on the bench opposite him, curled protectively into the little space afforded.
As far as Walt could tell, they exchanged not a glance nor a word nor any other form of communication that might indicate they knew each other. They sat like two strangers sharing a park bench out of necessity, neither liking nor disliking the need. And perhaps that was what they were. Two strangers sharing a bench.
It was another fifteen minutes before the third one came along. Walt hadn’t recognized the girl from the park, and he didn’t recognize this second boy, either. The kid sat between the other two, his arms folded defiantly across his chest, his gaze faraway and out of touch.