Aric Davis - The Fort

Dr. Martinez shrugged. “You have to follow the evidence, right? And the available evidence says you need to assume the teens are telling the truth and the boys are lying. That said, you know my feelings on the matter. Body or not, not one of those boys came off to me as a liar.”

“At least you like it as much as I do,” said Van Endel. “This is just infuriating. There’s a young girl missing, dead most likely, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.”

“Well,” said Martinez, “there is the hope that Tracy finally gets a negative on those teeth. If that’s not Molly, those boys might really have seen her.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Van Endel. “I’ve had that thought at least a million times. Not ideal conditions for grabbing a decent night’s sleep. Hey, that reminds me. I didn’t tell you what Tracy found on the body. I don’t think much of it, but he thought it was interesting.” Dr. Martinez tilted her head, as if to say, “Go on.” “She had condoms on her. More than just one too, though Tracy couldn’t tell me exactly how many. Think it means anything other than that she wanted to party?”

“That’s interesting,” said Dr. Martinez. “Did the mother give any indication that Molly was sexually active?”

Van Endel shrugged. “Mothers aren’t necessarily the best source for that info, as you know. But as it happens, this one made it a point to tell me that her daughter was not sexually active. I can’t remember the exact quote, but it was something like, ‘She does stuff with boys, but not that .’ She was almost smug about it. Molly was either telling the truth or lying well enough that her mom believed her.”

“You know,” said Dr. Martinez. “Molly has something in common with those girls who keep showing up at Riverside, other than being missing, of course.” Van Endel raised his eyebrows. “Rubbers, Dick. Every single working girl on Division Avenue has them on her.”

“I have a picture of Molly in my car,” said Van Endel. “Let’s go for a ride.” He looked at his watch. “It’s a little early, but we should be able to catch some day shifters.”

41

Luke was walking through the neighborhood doing something he never had before: actually analyzing what was around him. It had never occurred to him before that he spent so much time whizzing around on a bicycle or fighting imaginary battles that he had never really focused on the people around him, and the myriad differences in the ways they lived. Tim had told them that Becca had said to look for things like an unmowed lawn, and Luke was trying to take that a step further, looking for windowless vans, poorly maintained landscaping, and signs that said KIDNAPPER posted in someone’s front yard. He’d seen lots of yards that needed mowing, several windowless vans, and a great number of homes with poorly kept landscaping, but he was batting zero on KIDNAPPER signs.

This is a total waste of time , thought Luke as he walked on a street perpendicular to the one that Scott lived on, and actually bordered the woods where the fort was. So far he had seen two houses that stuck out: one a couple of blocks from here, also along the forest’s edge, and one that was gray and needed paint. Beside the latter, Luke had seen a man in an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt watering a dying bush with a hose. The man had been on crutches and looked to be of a similar build as the one they’d seen in the woods, though he had a gut Luke didn’t remember seeing.

He wished Scott and Tim were with him, and not for the first time. It would be nice to have someone to talk to, and to ask questions about how they remembered the man looking.

The other house that had stuck out as being a little off had many of the same characteristics as the first one, though there was no injured owner visible to add more weight to the picture it painted. The house was made of red bricks and was small enough that Luke couldn’t imagine anyone other than a single man or woman living in it. The yard was unmowed, and the grass had yellow and dead patches, even with the rainy spring and June that they’d had that year. In addition to the ratty yard, the car in the driveway was an ancient El Camino. It was black but looked like it had been painted with a roller or something, and there were several dried spots of black, too dark to be oil, in the driveway around the car.

What made the house stick out most of all, though, was the impression it gave of having somehow been taken from another neighborhood and just transplanted there. There were no other brick houses on that stretch, and it didn’t fit the mold that all of the houses on the same strip seemed to come from. The rest of the houses were ranch-style, with attached garages and aluminum siding. Families were outside most of the other houses, messing around and lighting off small fireworks, but the little brick house had no one outside.

Luke had forgotten all about the Fourth until he’d been out on his little recon mission, but the signs of it were everywhere: blackened fountains and cakes lined the bases of driveways, sticks from bottle rockets littered the road and yards, little kids ran around with sparklers and snap-pops. It made Luke homesick in a way that he hadn’t been since this had all happened. He wasn’t telling his friends about his trips to the gas station to buy food during the day, or about what it was like not having his crazy mother and sisters around. Frankly, it was sweet as hell, but there was also a sadness lingering over him that he knew wasn’t going away.

He felt like a traitor for thinking it, but Luke had a feeling that this was all going to blow over, and without anything happening. Molly was going to be found dead, or maybe one of his friends would get caught sneaking out, and then that would be it. There would be no clearing their names, just a stigma that was going to follow him through the rest of middle school, and maybe on into high school. It would follow his friends too, but it would be different for them. After all, everything else outside of school was different for them; it was only a matter of time until his school world caught up. He would no longer be just another student. He’d be that trailer-park liar, or some other, equally awful version of that, in the eyes of his fellow students and his teachers. That part almost stung the most: knowing that for the foreseeable future, adults were always going to assume that he could be lying to them. The thought fueled Luke as he pushed on through the suburb, finding clues that didn’t matter and looking for answers that weren’t going to reveal themselves.

The house appeared before him only moments after his self-defeating train of thought had eked away the last of his interest in searching for it. He almost didn’t notice it. It had its back to the forest, and the backyard was fully encompassed by a tall wooden fence. Neither of the houses on either side of it was two stories, so the backyard would be basically impossible to see into. Luke could see that the fence went almost all the way to the trees.

Cutting through the yard of a neighbor a couple of doors down, he looped around into the forest and quickly came upon a cluster of popples that looked quite similar to the one the man and Molly had disappeared into. He spent some time trying to orient himself to where the fort would be in relation to where he was standing. Unless he was mistaken, Luke was pretty sure this house was in exactly the direction they’d seen the man and Molly walking.

He cut back to the street and gave one last look to the mailbox. The address was stenciled on it, and above it the word HOOPER.

Luke headed back to the fort at a dead run.

42

Tim and his dad had finished tamping down about ten square feet of gravel when Stan sat down on the edge of the patio. “Go get Mom,” he said. “I want to see if she’ll be impressed with our progress yet. We’re finally getting places, thanks to your early start.”