The Boy in the Park: A gripping psychological thriller with a shocking twist

A pause. ‘You’re sure this isn’t just a little bit sick, you wanting me to relive all that? You get some twisted pleasure in the gory details?’

She doesn’t reply. The question isn’t really a question.

‘I remember her eyes,’ Joseph finally says. ‘They were alive, just like always. Mad at me, upset maybe. Not sure what was going on, but they definitely weren’t peaceful and loving like they sometimes were. I don’t know. The way eyes look on the face of someone who knows they’re going to die.’

‘She knew she was going to die?’ Pauline asks.

Joseph doesn’t directly answer the question. ‘Then I remember them when I was done. Her eyes. They weren’t alive any more. They just stared at me. They didn’t blink. They were finished.’

She allows some time for them both to reflect on this statement.

‘You said, “when you were done”, just now,’ she eventually says. ‘What did you mean by that?’

‘Sometimes I think you just aren’t listening to me at all,’ the man’s voice answers, sighing with frustration. ‘Done killing the bitch. I thought that was obvious.’

‘Joseph, I need you to try to be more specific. What, precisely, do you remember doing to her?’

Pauline recalls, now, the mounting frustration she’d felt at this point in the conversation. He was so close, so very close.

‘I told you last time. I smothered her with a pillow. Held it over her face until she couldn’t breathe. Until she stopped moving.’

‘No, Joseph,’ Pauline’s voice counters. ‘There was no pillow.’

‘Ah! You admit it!’ Another fist on the table. Joseph’s voice is energetically animated. Vindicated. ‘Your word games have caught you out! You admit I killed her. You admit I had a wife! See, you can’t lie to me. Not about this kind of stuff.’

‘No, Joseph. You’ve never been married.’

‘You just acknowledged the murder! You can’t say I got the details of the killing wrong – “there wasn’t a pillow, Joseph”,’ he squeaks out the words in mocking, mimicking tones, ‘and then tell me there wasn’t a killing!’

Another silence. Twelve and a half seconds.

‘Joseph, there was no pillow. There was no wife. But you’re right, there was a murder.’

The longest silence on cassette #021C. Forty-one seconds. Each one of them had been agonizing. Pauline’s skin had been pinpricks of expectation. She’d watched Joseph’s face contort from surprise, to anger, to confusion, and finally to a muddled, confounded blankness.

‘I don’t understand,’ he finally answers.

‘Joseph, please listen carefully to my next question. Can you do that? Can you promise me you’ll listen to what I’m going to ask you, and think before you respond?’

He shuffles. ‘Whatever. I’ll listen.’

‘Thank you, Joseph. I appreciate that. Now, I’m going to need to ask you what you remember about the boy.’

13 (#ulink_b97d29a7-8f93-531e-a7b7-48bf2df606ce)

Monday (#ulink_b97d29a7-8f93-531e-a7b7-48bf2df606ce)

Damn, if I’m not sick and tired of poetry. I can’t think of how many years I’ve been writing it; there are at least forty notebooks full on my shelves at home – but for what? How many times can ‘dancing sunlight crest the hills’ or ‘artful emotion hug the embrace of day’? I’ve done all the metaphors. I’ve called love everything it can be called, and only on days like today do I start to realize that I haven’t come close to saying anything at all about it. Saying what it really is. Not that I would know; but I know enough to be certain that no stanza ever written has done it the tiniest fleck of justice.

I fling my black Moleskine down in disgust. Margaret’s bench receives it silently. It’s taken this angry assault before. Every so often I go through a poet’s tizzy, convinced momentarily of the senseless uselessness of it all and avowing never again to waste the earth’s depleted paper supply with more vulgar verse. The fit is generally accompanied, like today, with the flinging away of the notebook in disgust. Twice my pencil has even been tossed into the foliage as an extra act of rebellious defeatism.

But I always go back for the notebook, if not for the pencil. It’s far easier to rebel for a moment than for a lifetime. I long ago figured out that the reason the hippie movement died out was because it just takes so much bloody energy constantly to protest everything, no matter how much pot and free love might be involved. When it comes to my own literary rebellions, the weaker but more practical half of my brain always figures that I’d better not actually leave my scraps behind, lest, at the most basic of levels, I find myself in my next fit of disillusionment without anything to fling away in disgust.

For the moment, though, screw it. I’ve been sitting here for the past twenty minutes, trying to wrest a few good lines out of the bowing branches and larger than usual flock of waterfowl on the pond this lunchtime, but it isn’t working. Today the Black Princess water lilies just look like aquatic weeds and the ducks like pond rodents with their butts up in the air as they poke their bills beneath the surface for some revolting, muck-smeared bug.

For an instant I realize that this is nonsense, that the difference between poetry and pessimism rests entirely in the state of wonder with which a person looks at the world around them. But I’m not feeling any wonder today. Today, I’m just seeing the duck butts.

I’d feel wonder, I’m sure, if I knew what had happened two days ago. Then I’m sure my life would feel normal and I’d be able to operate in my usual style, all my emotions appropriately intact. Instead, I have the sinking feeling in the pit of my belly that I might not feel anything at all until I know what’s come of my boy.

My boy.

I’m too much a poet not to notice the shift into the personal possessive.

I gaze out over the pond. One of my pencils is down there, below my perch, somewhere in the greenery, rotting away.

Beyond, on the far shore, I see the spot where the boy ought to be standing. He isn’t, of course. He wouldn’t be. But his stick is lying in the mud, its point touching the water.

And for just an instant, I think that this is wrong. That I’m sure I took that stick with me when I ran after him. That it shouldn’t be there at all.

Memories are strange beasts, impossible to control. I am not sure what keys one into place now, at this precise moment. Maybe it’s the abnormality of the situation, evoking a normalcy from the depths of my mind to try to counterbalance it, to set things into their customary equilibrium – but for just an instant both stick and circumstance disappear. It’s no longer today. The spot is the same, vaguely, but the day is different. I am back in the midst of wonderful moments. At one supremely wonderful day. The day I first saw him.

It’s eighteen months ago, perhaps. Maybe twenty. I’ve been visiting my bench by the pond for at least six weeks, and I’ve started calling it that. ‘My bench’. I’ve staked my claim. Planted my flag. Clichéd my rhetoric, perhaps, but I’ve found my spot.

I took my time settling on just which one would be called my own, back in those days. There are hundreds of benches in the park, I don’t think that’s an exaggeration, and they come in every conceivable type of setting. Open air, in the midst of large quadrangles. Tucked amongst tended flowerbeds. In stone form within the Succulent Garden, surrounded by the potent scents of rosemary and a hundred other herbs. Hidden in darkness beneath the redwoods. Alongside accessible footpaths.

There are even more just like this one, alongside ponds, of which there are four or five in the gardens and dozens in the park as a whole. So that factor alone can’t account for my taking to this bench in the way I did. It is, like so much in life, in the mixture of things. Just the right amount of shade, without being dark. Near the water, but far enough from its edge to avoid the bugs. Blooming, colourful plants amidst the greenery below, but not so many as to feel you’re sitting in the middle of your grandmother’s flowerbed. That, and it’s a bit off the beaten path – a cliché that’s perfectly literal in this case. The path to this spot isn’t beaten down by the same amount of foot traffic as so many others. It’s still a bit raw, a touch wild.

For a moment I think again of the stick, of the present, but memory has too powerful a hold.

Since the day I first arrived here, since I found this perch and christened it my own (with all due respect to Margaret, whose claim is more memorialized than present) there was very little to surprise me. I cherish that as well. What sort of people are they that spend their lives chasing after surprises? Some may crave the burst-through-the-woodwork spontaneity of the unknown, but I’ve always preferred the peace that comes from comfortable regularity. Some have called me predictable. I’ve always thought them incomprehensibly daft. Is it ‘predictable’ to cherish the familiar face of a friend? Or a scene one has grown to love?

But one surprise did, in fact, come into my otherwise unsurprising retreat. Two days ago, in the past-that’s-present, the way memories go. A Monday, so vividly clear now. I was just starting what I hoped would be one of my longer poems, an exercise in iambic pentameter (I don’t usually write in meter), and I was distracted mid-iamb by a rustling of the otherwise silent greenery.

I didn’t know where to look, at first. There’s so much of it. Part of the appeal of this place is that the pond is completely encircled by trees and dense shrubbery, embraced by it. A flutter in the branches could have come from anywhere.

But sight is far more precise than sound. Green everywhere, rustling leaves everywhere – but a small figure that stood only in one spot. A little landing at the edge of the water, almost immediately across the pond from my perch on the bench. The foliage reaches out nearly to touch the shore, thick and dense; but just at its edge is a foot and a half of hard-packed mud that leads into the water itself.

And on the muddy shore stood a little boy.

I’d never seen him before, which is part of what made his impression on me so interesting. Not being a man with children, or with any cause to be around children regularly, it could realistically be said that most boys are boys I’ve never seen before. For that matter, apart from customers in the shop, most people of any age are people I’ve never seen before. I am not the socialite that culturally advanced mothers hope their sons one day will become, climbing up civic ladders on the shoulders of fleets of ‘friends’ who bear that title after a single lunch together or chat over a Starbucks counter. I have two friends: Greg, whom I haven’t actually seen in six years, but who sends an email on most major holidays and with great faithfulness a week or two after my birthday; and Allen, a co-worker with whom I’ve grown close enough that I suppose by most standards we’ve crossed the amorphous line that distinguishes acquaintances from friends. He owes me three drinks down at the Mucky Duck bar on 9th. That’s a good measure, I should think. Only friends owe each other drinks.

But this boy, who in the present moment is the cause of my angst, was then a complete stranger to me. I’m not even sure just how or when he appeared on the shore of my pond. When I looked up, he was there. He can’t be more than four or five, though I’m hardly the best judge of ages (I still consider Allen’s daughter, Candy, to be three, the age she was when I first met her five years ago).

I find myself at a loss for words to describe him – a strange position to be in, for a poet. He’s a touch over half my height, scrawny, brownish hair in a fluff over his ears. His arms look a bit like wires, but dirty wires, well used. He wore a white T-shirt under his overalls on Monday, and again yesterday. I can’t say it was clean, or that it might smell too nice were one close enough to catch a whiff. But boys play, don’t they? He’s a long way off from puberty and the special reek boys develop when the hormones hit, but sweat is sweat and will stain the clothes of a boy as well as a man.

His overalls are the lighter, rather than the more common darker, denim blue, just a little too short for him. Probably in a growth spurt.

You’ve probably seen this kid. At least, I felt I’d seen him before, or at least the image of him. Mark Twain had him in mind when he dreamed up Tom Sawyer — this exact boy. Add a straw hat and a Mississippi steamer and you’ve got the principal casting for Huck Finn sorted. Throw in a lovable golden dog and you’ve got Travis Coates getting ready to run after Old Yeller. Put him in the Catskills and you’ve got Sam Gribley on his side of the mountain. He’s that boy, all those boys. A bit out of place for modern times, perhaps, but the traditional image in all its details.