2:36
P.M.
, City Park
“Park’s crowded today,” Eddie said as he led Laurie through the gate and down the path toward the playground.
Normally, Laurie would have released his hand and skipped ahead, but today she clung firmly to him.
“You sure you want to walk all the way to the playground?” Eddie asked.
“Yes,” Laurie said.
Eddie glanced at the gift Charlie had brought over a few hours before. “It’s really pretty.”
Laurie touched it delicately. “I like it,” she said brightly.
They walked on down the path, through the tunnel Eddie had cleaned out hours before. Kids could run and bicycle through the tunnel now, he thought, with no fear of glass or metal. They could do this because of him, because he’d done his job. “I cleaned that tunnel this morning,” he told his daughter. “We can walk through there now.”
They reached the playground four minutes later. For a time they remained outside the fence, while Laurie surveyed the people beyond it with a curious intensity, as if seeking a favorite playmate.
“Well, do you want to go in?” Eddie asked finally.
“Yeah,” Laurie said. She ran along the fence with a sudden burst of energy, then around its far corner and into the playground. Eddie followed behind, giving her the distance he knew she craved, already needing to feel independent, grown-up, in charge of herself. That was the first step in leaving him, he knew, but that was part of the deal, wasn’t it?
Laurie moved swiftly to the swings, climbed on one, and began pumping herself upward. Her smile was radiant, and Eddie found himself dreading the day when the limits of childhood mushroomed into the burdens he carried. Maybe he could teach her a few things, he decided, to go slow, be careful, marry in something other than a fever, stick things out when you had to, hold on to what you cared about.
Laurie leaned forward and sailed out of the swing so suddenly that Eddie reached for her across the impossible distance between them, then gasped when she landed safely on her feet. That she had done so filled him with delight, and he did the parent’s trick of finding in these early feats evidence of later triumph. If she could land on her feet in this way, might not she do so in all other ways as well, survive, beat the odds, win?
Laurie glanced to the right, where a swarm of children noisily climbed the monkey bars while their mothers watched, talking idly among themselves. Slowly, one by one, the conversations grew less animated as each mother drew her eyes over toward Eddie. They did not stop talking, but their gaze remained disconnected from their conversations, directed somewhere over Eddie’s right shoulder.
He turned and saw a tall man enter the playground. He wore a dark blue suit and black trench coat. A cigarette dangled from his fingers, and as he took a seat on one of the empty benches, he lifted his head slightly and let his gaze sweep out over the yard. For a while he eyed the children with an eerie attentiveness, his eyes roaming from the swings to the monkey bars, then to the sandbox, until at last, as it seemed to Eddie, they came to rest on Laurie.
Through it all, the mothers watched the stranger warily, Eddie noticed, their eyes sliding over to him, then back to their children as if they half expected their son or daughter to be snatched away by the sheer reach of the newcomer’s piercing gaze.
Eddie thought of the little girl who’d been murdered here twelve days before. But they’d caught the man who’d done that, hadn’t they?
He continued to watch the man in the trench coat, his eyes following him as he rose, walked to another part of the playground, and sat down again. The mothers’ attention settled upon him briefly, pulled away, then returned, always warily, as if he were a wolf who stalked them from just beyond the firelight.
Eddie glanced back to Laurie, watched as she abruptly burst from the crowd of children and dashed gleefully across the playground, past the swings, the slide, the monkey bars, and over to the place where the
man in the trench coat sat silently, his long legs drawn beneath the bench, locked at the ankles, his features shadowed by the hat.
If he talks to her, Eddie thought, if he makes the slightest move …
3:01
P.M.
, Dubarry Playground
“Hi,” the man said, the word pushed from the corner of his mouth like a body from a car.
“Hi,” Laurie answered.
“What’s your name?”
“Laurie.”
The man smiled. “My name’s Norm.”
Laurie offered a tentative smile. “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”
“Good idea,” Cohen told her. “You’re not alone, are you?”
“No. Here comes my dad.”
Cohen turned to see a man in work clothes striding toward him from across the playground, a little bantam rooster of a guy, quick, fierce, the type Cohen had seen plenty of in the army, the kind that if you took a swing, you’d probably have to kill him, because he’d never stop getting up, coming at you, never, never stop until he was dead.
“You know my kid, mister?” Eddie asked sternly as he came up to Cohen.
Cohen shook his head.
“You got a kid here?”
“No, I don’t.”
“There’s a sign, you know? You got to accompany a kid. That’s what it says. If you don’t have no kid here, you ain’t supposed to be here neither.”
“I know there’s a sign,” Cohen told him. He reached for his badge. “I’m a cop.”
“Jeez, I’m sorry.” Eddie sat down beside Cohen and drew Laurie into his lap. “What with that other little girl … you know … I … but you got that guy, right? The bum?”
“Yeah.” Cohen gazed over the playground. “He always said there was another man. A guy who scared the little girl when she was in the playground, but we never found anybody else who’d seen him. The Invisible Man, we called him.”
“A guy alone, people notice,” Eddie said.
“Yeah,” Cohen agreed. “But I just thought I’d test the theory to be sure.” He shrugged. “Turns out we were right. Everybody in the place noticed me.”
“Maybe he done it somewhere else,” Eddie said. “Not in the playground. Scared that kid, I mean.”
“Maybe.”
“You should talk to a friend of mine,” Eddie suggested. “He works the whole park. He might have seen something.”
Cohen noticed a workman as he entered the playground. He was dressed in a bright orange Parks Department uniform and carried a large canvas bag over his shoulder. The mothers’ eyes flicked toward him, then away.
“Cleans the playground every Monday, Tuesday, and Friday,” Eddie added. “My friend does. He’s off today though.”
The worker moved methodically from one area of the playground to the next, picking up litter with a spiked stick, filling his bag, then emptying it into the nearest garbage can.
“Name’s Sweeney,” Eddie said. “Charlie Sweeney.”
The workman continued his rounds, unobtrusively
edging around the swings and the monkey bars, retrieving candy wrappers and paper cups while the children frolicked without care all around him and the mothers chatted obliviously, paying him no heed.
“The Invisible Man,” Cohen said.
“Uncle Charlie gave me a birthday present,” Laurie chirped. She lifted her hand to display it. “See?”
Cohen drew his eyes to the child’s wrist, the red velvet bracelet tied delicately around it, weighted with a purple stone. Smalls’ words sounded in Cohen’s mind, telling a story Cohen hadn’t believed before. A story about a man Smalls had once encountered. A man who worked in the park. But not
this
park, for Smalls had seen this man years before, and in a different place, this man, Smalls claimed, who’d killed a little girl. He saw Debra Pierce through Smalls’ pale blue eyes, moving away from him haltingly, the metal brace glinting in the sun as she turned and headed down the path, toward the wooded ravine where they would later find her.
The purple stone winked in the light, summoning Cohen to its proof. “Has this friend of yours always worked in the city?” he asked.
“No,” Eddie said. “Charlie came here about four years ago.”
A man appeared at the end of the ravine, wearing the work clothes that made him invisible, Debra limping toward him now, away from Smalls, feeling safe as the uniformed man turned and caught her in his eye.
“From where?” Cohen asked.
“Englishtown,” Eddie answered.
Cohen saw the man in uniform let his canvas bag drop from his shoulders as he lowered himself to the ground, eye level to a child, his arms stretching toward the frightened little girl who limped toward him, dragging
her dead foot through the clutching bramble, relieved to see him waiting there, warmed by his smile.
“Does he wear a baseball cap?” Cohen asked. “Your friend Charlie?”
Eddie peered at Cohen oddly. “Yeah, he does.”
From somewhere in the scheme of things, Cohen heard a wheel turn, a gear unlock, felt something fall like a coin into his needful hand. His eyes glistened.
“Where is this man?” he asked.
About the Author
T
HOMAS
H. C
OOK
is the author of fifteen novels, including
The Chatham School Affair
, winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel;
Places in the Dark; Instruments of Night; Breakheart Hill; Sacrificial Ground
and
Blood Innocents
, both Edgar Award nominees; and two early works about true crime,
Early Graves
and
Blood Echoes
, which was also nominated for an Edgar. He lives in New York City and in Cape Cod, where he is at work on his next novel of psychological suspense,
Peril.
If you enjoyed Thomas H. Cook’s THE INTERROGATION, you won’t want to miss any of his award-winning novels of suspense. Look for them at your favorite bookseller’s.
And turn the page for an exciting preview of his next novel, PERIL, coming soon in hardcover from Bantam Books.
PERIL
A NOVEL OF SUSPENSE
THOMAS H. COOK
Sara
Okay, she thought, do it.
She headed up the stairs to the bedroom she’d shared with Tony for the last fifteen years. With every step she crumbled a little. Her ankles felt like sawdust, and she half expected parts of her body to fall away as she continued up the stairs, a tuft of hair on the third step, a hand on the fourth, until there’d be nothing left of her by the time she reached the second floor. But she moved on up the stairs despite the sensation of breaking apart, and step by determined step, the forward movement knit her together so that by the time she reached the top of the stairs she was once again resolved to do it.
Tony’s underwear lay crumpled at his side of the bed. The rest of his clothes were strewn haphazardly about the room, lifeless as pelts. He could have easily tossed his underwear into the hamper and draped his shirt and trousers over the bedpost. But he’d thrown them on the floor, probably because his father had told him that that was what a man should do. She could hear the Old Man going at him, laying down the law, daring him to disobey it.
A woman has to be taught certain things, Tony.
One of them, she thought, was to stoop.
But on this morning she had not stooped to retrieve Tony’s clothes. That they’d still be lying where he’d
tossed them would be his first clue that things had changed. When he got home that night, he’d notice that his clothes had not been picked up, and there’d be a click in his head, audible as a pistol shot,
She’s gone.
She walked to the closet, pulled the suitcase from the top shelf, and began to pack. She took no shorts or swimsuit or sandals, and leaving such things behind confirmed the irrevocable nature of what she was doing. She was packing not for a few days away, but for the rest of her life, and she made sure there was nothing temporary about the clothes she selected, nothing that suggested she might change her mind, return to the sun-drenched house, the glittering pool. The clothes she chose were decidedly simple, the colors gray and black, appropriate camouflage for the hidden life she would live from then on. She selected them like one readying for nocturnal battle, and as she packed each item, she tried to think of herself as one of the women warriors she’d read about, armored, mounted, broadsword in hand, brave in a way she’d never been but now had to be if she was going to climb out of the sucking quicksand of her life.
Once packed, she took a moment to observe the room. Everything in it looked frilly. Lacy pillows. Fringed draperies. All the colors were pastels. It was a little girl’s room with muted hues and caressing fabrics, a vision of safety where there were no shadows or sharp corners, and nothing ever grabbed you from behind.
She returned downstairs, called a cab, and waited by the door, watching the morning light build over her neighbors’ houses. Again the dangerous and irrevocable nature of what she was doing settled over her. She would never see this street again, never wave to her friend Della across the cul de sac or shop with her in the local supermarket. Della, like everything else on
Long Island, was already disappearing from her life, growing translucent in her memory. She would call her when she got to the city, let her know that she’d made it, but all the rest, whatever job she got, where she lived, all of that she would have to keep secret. Especially from the Old Man. She felt his hand groping at her thigh as it had on that Saturday a week before, smelled his drunken breath, heard his brutal whisper,
You should try a real man for a change.
The phone rang but she didn’t answer it. She was afraid it might be Tony and she didn’t want to hear his voice because she knew she’d feel sorry for him, the way she always did, sorry for the little boy with the bullying father who’d never really grown into a man. She knew that some part of her still loved him, but that this love was mostly made of pity for how weak he was, how baffled he would be by her leaving him, and how wounded. But if she stayed with him it would be guilt that kept her there, and no one in the end, she thought, should build a life on that. You needed substance in a marriage, each person firm enough to hold the roots of the other. You needed to be able to work out your differences without interference, and in the face of interference you needed to act. That was what Tony had finally been unable to do, and so the Old Man’s malicious goading had grown steadily more poisonous and uncontrolled, until he’d finally crossed the line, reached for her as some sweaty lout in a sleazy bar would. He’d done it not because he was drunk, or crazy, but because he knew he could, knew she’d be afraid to tell Tony, and perhaps even knew that Tony, faced with such an affront, might actually do nothing about it. That was the moment when she’d realized that it was over, that she had no choice but to leave. It had taken her a week to finally do it, but now, as she did it, the act itself seemed
inevitable, something long ago foretold but only now brought to fruition, everything before it oddly weightless and insubstantial, the years of her marriage suddenly rising from her like the final bubbles of a dead champagne.