Kitabı oxu: «The Boy in the Park: A gripping psychological thriller with a shocking twist»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

The Boy in the Park, Stanza 1

Part One

San Francisco

Chapter 1. Tuesday

Chapter 2. Wednesday Morning

Chapter 3. The Boy in the Park, Stanza 2

Chapter 4. Wednesday Afternoon

Chapter 5. Taped Recording Cassette #014A – Interviewer: P. Lavrentis

Chapter 6. Thursday Lunchtime

Chapter 7. Friday

Chapter 8. Taped Recording Cassette #014B – Interviewer: P. Lavrentis

Chapter 9. Friday

Chapter 10. Saturday – Office of Lieutenant Brian Delvay

Chapter 11. Sunday

Chapter 12. Taped Recording Cassette #021C – Interviewer: P. Lavrentis

Chapter 13. Monday

Chapter 14. Monday Afternoon

Chapter 15. Taped Recording Cassette #021D – Interviewer: P. Lavrentis

Chapter 16. Monday Afternoon

Chapter 17. The Boy in the Park, Stanza 3

Chapter 18. Monday Evening

Redding

Chapter 19. Wednesday

Chapter 20. Thursday

Chapter 21. Taped Recording Cassette #033A – Interviewer: P. Lavrentis

Chapter 22. Thursday

Chapter 23. The Boy in the Park, Stanza 4

Chapter 24. Thursday Afternoon

Chapter 25. Thursday

Chapter 26. Thursday

Chapter 27. Taped Recording Cassette #041D – Interviewer: P. Lavrentis

Chapter 28. Thursday

Chapter 29. Thursday

Chapter 30. Thursday

Chapter 31. Thursday

Chapter 32. The Boy in the Park, Stanza 5

Chapter 33. Thursday – Nightfall

Part Two

The Farmhouse, 1974

Chapter 34. The Porch

Chapter 35. The Kitchen

Chapter 36. The Living Room

Chapter 37. The Kitchen

Chapter 38. The Living Room

Chapter 39. The Living Room

Chapter 40. Christmas Day – Two Weeks Later

The Schoolyard, 1975

Chapter 41. At School – Two Months Later

Chapter 42. The Schoolyard

Chapter 43. The Boy in the Park, Stanza 6

Part Three

Redding

Chapter 44. Thursday – Nightfall

Chapter 45. Thursday – Night-Time

Chapter 46. Taped Recording Cassette #057A – Interviewer: P. Lavrentis

Chapter 47. Thursday

Chapter 48. Thursday

Chapter 49. Taped Recording Cassette #057A – Interviewer: P. Lavrentis

Chapter 50. Thursday

Chapter 51. Friday

Chapter 52. The Boy in the Park, Stanza 7

Chapter 53. Saturday

Chapter 54. Sunday

Vacaville, California

Chapter 55. Conference Room 4C – California Medical Facility – State Prison

Chapter 56. Conference Room 4C – California Medical Facility

Chapter 57. Taped Recording Cassette #058A – Interviewer: P. Lavrentis

Chapter 58. Conference Room 4C – California Medical Facility

Part Four

On The Road

Chapter 59. Wednesday

Chapter 60. Thursday

Chapter 61. Thursday

Chapter 62. Thursday Night

Chapter 63. Friday Morning

Nashville

Chapter 64. Friday Evening

Chapter 65. Sunday

Chapter 66. Monday

Chapter 67. Monday Evening

Chapter 68. Monday Evening

Chapter 69. Monday Evening

Part Five

Vacaville, California

Chapter 70. California Medical Facility – State Prison – The Present Day

Chapter 71. Conference Room 6A – California Medical Facility

Chapter 72. Friday – Two Weeks Later

Note

The Boy in the Park

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

The Boy in the Park, Stanza 1

Little boy in the park,

Little boy standing, lost.

The waters quiet, the tree-wings

dance

For the little boy still, unmoving.

The little boy with stick in hand;

Little boy weeping …

Little boy weeping …

PART ONE

SAN FRANCISCO

1
Tuesday

My bench in the park is old, tainted from moisture, tinged a faint green by the growth of a moss that will one day consume it. A brass plaque that was once a colour other than tarnished black notes that it is dedicated ‘To the Memory of Margaret Hoss, Beloved (1924–2008).’ Margaret’s bench, now mine. We sit together beneath the trees. We sit and we watch, and the world dances before us.

From Margaret’s bench I am afforded the best view in the park. It is not off one of the great grassy quadrangles, nor the main paved walkways that criss-cross the gardens. To find it requires taking one of the thousand dirt pathways that branch away from these, spidering into densely planted greenery that’s divided, for convenience, by continent of origin. My bench is in the hidden underbrush of Temperate Asia, and all around it are plants with names like Autumn Joy, Nymphaea fabiola, Emerald Cypress and Primrose Willow. The bench itself sits on a patch of wood chips – a place to rest one’s feet in the absence of mud. A private retreat. And descending below, spreading out beyond my toes, is the pond.

The pond is tranquil, even beautiful. Not the blue-basined, sanitized sort of water feature too common in public spaces (there’s one of those in the park, too, at the centre of its most obvious green lawn). The pond, though entirely manmade, is of a style au naturel. Just the right number of lily pads and watercress colour its surface. A few stones peek up from the brown water, often serving as perches for birds or even the occasional turtle. Surrounded by tall leafy trees, the pond is generally hidden from the breeze, and so almost always the texture of glass – and just as reflective.

I sit on my bench, the poet in the midst of poetry. It is an everyday thing, or almost everyday, this visit. I come with my little Moleskine notebook and stubby pencil, sometimes with a paper cup dredging coffee beneath a plastic lid marked with the brown imprints of my lips. And I, the poet, gaze into paradise. Outside the park, so close by, looms the paved wasteland of the city. I can hear it as I sit, there, out of sight. Cars (petrol, hybrid or electric, it makes no difference, really), skyscrapers, slums. But here, here a poet can come to sing his song to the greens and browns of nature, and witness it singing back.

A couple strolls by, arms linked at the elbows, smiling, a Nikon camera dangling from the man’s neck. There is a punctuated look in the woman’s eyes. Romance, keyed in by the scents of begonias and rhododendrons. It’s become a visible flush of redness on her face. I can tell she hopes it will become something more.

A chipmunk descends from a tree, marked by a small plastic sign as Picea orientalis, Oriental Spruce. He observes the layout before him, the inclines and dips of the soil. There is food here, a treasure trove of it; he seems fairly confident. A tail shivers in anticipation. Nearby a bird – a hermit thrush, I’m almost certain – swoops down and takes a perch on one of the rocks jutting up from the water. The breath from his wings ripples the surface, changing a still mirror into one of undulating motion.

There is a poem here. I can feel it. Woven into the greenery, the humanity, the natural ebb and flow of life. A poem, waiting to be found, waiting to be spoken. One that will sing of something brighter than the dark world that gives it birth.

And then, there in the distance, I catch it. The little brush of motion from the branches, customary and expected. I turn my head slightly, but I know what’s there. I’ve known since before the motion came. It’s familiar now, this sight, seen on eighteen months of afternoons just like this.

The little boy emerges from the boughs of the faux Asian foliage. He takes three steps to the edge of the manmade pond’s crafted waterline, to where his toes almost touch. He wears the same worn overalls, the same once-white T-shirt beneath them that I’ve seen him wear more times than I can remember. His blond hair is dishevelled, as all little boys’ should be. He holds a stick in his right hand and pokes it listlessly at the water’s edge, sending new ripples across the pond. He gazes vacantly out at these results of his movements. The jade treetops bend in a breeze that doesn’t descend to the tops of our scalps.

The boy is mesmerized. I am mesmerized. The bird on the rock clucks from somewhere beneath its beak then flaps its wings to take flight. The little boy doesn’t notice. His gaze is still on the ripples of the water, meeting other ripples, colliding gently in the swell of a scene fabricated by man, yet hauntingly serene. Almost inhuman. Almost free.

And I cannot quite see his eyes.

2
Wednesday Morning

There is a rail workers’ strike today. It’s the third this year, and I feel as a result as if I’m becoming an old hand at dealing with them. Taking the train normally saves me thirty minutes of traffic and $28 in a day’s parking charges, but a bus still beats out the car for second best. No reprieve from the traffic, but it’s a $2.50 ride and there’s a stop by the shop where I work, so I can hardly complain.

It’s meant a morning on a hard, plastic bench seat rather than a padded one, and a bit more jostling of starts and stops than my generally impatient personality would prefer. But the wheels on the bus have gone round and round, and I’m fairly certain I’ll get from point A to point B alive and unscathed.

I’d live closer to work if I could – the traditional commuter’s lament. There’s nothing in particular to recommend Diamond Heights, the neighbourhood south of the city that I call home, apart from the fact that it’s outside central San Francisco proper and, therefore, the grossly overinflated San Francisco housing market. The Planning and Urban Research Association designed the district as part of the Community Redevelopment Law of 1951, transforming most of its shanties into liveable quarters, one of which I call my own. On a rental basis, of course. To be honest, I can’t really afford living there, either, but it’s a full three or four degrees less unaffordable than even the smallest flat in the city would be, and those are the kinds of maths that make the impossible seem feasible these days. So it’s home. And it has the glamour of having diamonds in its name.

I can’t say I entirely mind the commute. As the sun rises over the hills in the morning, its rays bouncing up off the sea, San Francisco’s not a bad city to look at. I don’t know if it’s the beauty of the bay on its inland side, with its islands and hills and bridges, or the mystery of the endless, borderless ocean stretching out on the other, but something gives this city an aura – an otherness I’ve never felt replicated anywhere else. A sliver of land wholly encapsulated by the natural world, as if the earth herself had drawn a line around the silicon and steel and said, ‘This far you may come, you may make your homes and monuments. This far, but no further.’

The bus rounds a corner, swerving its metal bulk to avoid a tiny, parked Nissan, and pulls onto Lincoln Way. I’ve taken this line before, I know the route, but even so my heart flutters ever so slightly. It flutters because Lincoln brings us alongside my haven. Dylan Aaronsen’s perfect heaven. The place I most love.

There, on our left, is the park. Somewhere in there: my little pond, my little bench. It will be a while until I can visit them – can retreat beneath those trees, away from all this noise – there’s still the morning’s work ahead. But just the sight is soothing. I suppose I’m an easy person to soothe. I wonder, for a moment, if everyone is like that, where merely the sight of something loved makes the demons run away and peace descend a little closer to the present.

Apart from the modified commute, this morning has been ritualistically predictable – both before and after. In some sense there’s little to say of such a start to a day. As one who’s never fully cottoned on to the social media trend, I find myself unexercised in articulating the vacuously ordinary and unremarkable, in ‘sharing’ something as mundane as the fact that I chose brown socks today rather than black, that I bit my cheek while brushing my teeth.

It’s simply been The Routine. Coffee, perhaps (definitely) too much. Two eggs. A scan over the emails that accrued during the night, mostly adverts and spam and announcements of new digital titles ‘We’re Sure You’re Going to Enjoy’ (though the whole phenomenon of digital books generally eludes me). Then the commute, then work, such as it is, with its customary temptations and boredom-inducing normalities. It’s hard to look at the day-to-day flow of a life and not conclude that the vast majority of it is wasted, cycling through conversations that have been had before, actions that have been done before, chasing goals that never provide the sense of completion they promise. It was that kind of morning. The expected kind.

I have no status that allows me to escape the dross of life through rank. I’m not the sort that can claim a renowned profession or a compelling job title, so mornings generally lead organically into the mundane of the day; and I don’t particularly mind this. It’s neither as exciting as it could be, nor as boring. I’m satisfied to reside in the middle.

There is one definitive job perk, though, and that’s my midday schedule. An extensive lunch break is one of the benefits of menial employment, and there’s little more menial than being a teller at a health food retail shop, selling vitamin capsules to yuppies whose only question is some repetitive variant on ‘Is this the organic version? I really want the organic version.’ I’ve been gainfully employed at Sunset Health Supplements for two years, and despite the persistent desire to toss our vapid customers off the nearest bridge (and we have a few good ones for that, here in the city), I have to admit that not once have I been denied an ample midday escape. One that gives time to walk down the bustling rush of 7th Avenue to Golden Gate Park, then the twisting bends of Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive to the iron gates mounted under pine-green signage that reads San Francisco Botanical Gardens. Two layers of fencing and turnstiles, fortress-like, as if the plants inside required prison-level security to preserve them from the outside world.

Today, at 12.11 p.m., I walked through those gates, produced my local ID so as to avoid the tourists’ entrance fee, and wandered through the greenery to my bench. To that spot where that which is expected is also that which is cherished. I took my familiar steps and thanked God it’s not just the dreary parts of life that are repetitive.

I have no coffee today, here on my perch. Enough of it has already worked its way into my system. It often does on mornings like this, which, though unremarkable, follow restless nights. I have too many of those, though there’s no discernible reason why I should. My job isn’t exactly the high-stress sort, and outside of work all is generally as peaceful as I could hope for. But still sleep is often slow in coming, and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it. I’ve tried the tablets, descended at times to drink, even given a shot to the soothing tones of a new-age SureSleep app downloaded to my phone for ninety-nine cents. But nothing really helps (and Apple won’t refund the ninety-nine cents). Insomnia is like an unwanted family member on a holiday visit. The more you wish he would leave, the more obstinately he remains.

So no coffee, but I have my notebook and my pencil – the productive equipment, and the food and the drink, of the poet. Which is what I consider myself and what I am, despite the fact of my rather more worldly employment. And the absence of a single published poem. A badge of honour, I’m convinced. True poets never publish. To publish a poem is to sell one’s soul, to befoul and dirty one’s words with consumerism and industrial approval-seeking. This is a realization almost all real poets come to, generally after their thirtieth or fortieth rejection letter. And however it may sound, it’s not hypocrisy, this: it’s the fruit borne of a slow evolution of genuine understanding. The kind of understanding I am proud to call my own, after many years of careful refinement.

Since I’ve been sitting here I’ve jotted down two lines of my latest poetic effort.

The tree-bough leans, its leaves an applause

Cheering in the wind

It’s what I’ve managed so far. And I’m not one to be too precious: it’s a bit shit. The muses have yet to find me at the pond today. No flashes of inspiration illumine me, no sudden bursts of creativity. That can be a frustrating thing; it’s driven some poets to madness. But today there are ducks in the water – a mother with three children paddling after her from one small bay to the next, seeking what only ducks know is there to be sought. That’s enough. I’ve learned that poems come when they will, they’re not things that can be forced. Being a poet is mostly about the waiting. Waiting for the right thought to take the right shape, then capturing it in words like pixels capture sights for a camera. And there are rice yeast tablets and kale extract drinks to sell in between, so I’m not going to find myself homeless.

Then, clockwork: he’s there again. The little boy. One of those once-surprises that’s become a predictable repetition of the good and welcome sort. I like that I see him every day, visiting this place just like me. I like his kiddish overalls. The white shirt that’s become a dusty brown is on display again, the armpits stained. His hair is dirtier than before. The stick again is in his hand, the tip piercing the water.

He seems to gaze vacantly out over the tiny expanse of our miniature sea. He doesn’t notice the ducks.

He never notices the ducks.

I squint my eyes. It looks like there’s a spot of blood on his arm, poor thing. Happens to kids.

It glistens in the midday light. Blood on the arm of the little boy. And like the ducks, like the wind, he doesn’t seem to notice.