Aric Davis: The Fort

Tim was working as a tamper, pounding down the gravel as his dad walked around measuring everything. Lost in this work, his mind focused solely on the compression of pea gravel, Tim didn’t see that they had a visitor until his dad said, “Can I help you?” Tim let his arms relax as the tamper slid to the ground and he turned. It was no regular visitor, it was that detective who had decided they were lying, Van Endel.

“You can, assuming I can talk to Tim,” said Van Endel, walking up to Tim’s dad and shaking hands with him. “I’m not sure if you recall, but we talked briefly at the station downtown. My name is Detective Van Endel. If I remember right, you’re Stan Benchley, is that correct?”

“It is,” said Stan. “What did he do now—knock off a convenience store? I don’t think anything would surprise me at this point. Lay it on me.”

The detective looked surprised at Stan’s words and tone, and then seemed as if he might be biting back a smile. “Actually,” he said, “I’m here to apologize to your boy. I’ve got a pretty good feeling that your son and his friends have been telling the truth all along, and I need to hear what else he has to say. Would you mind if we went inside?”

Tim’s dad had been wrong, as it turned out: the detective had been able to surprise him. In fact, Stan looked as though he’d had the wind knocked out of him.

The three of them sat at the dining room table. Van Endel went over their rights, especially Stan’s. Stan said it was perfectly fine for them to talk.

“I would have preferred we do this at the station,” Van Endel said, “but time is fleeting, and as I’ve squandered a few days, I’d like to hear exactly what’s going on.” Van Endel reached in one of his pockets and set a .22 casing on the table. “And please, Tim. Tell me everything.”

Staring at the bullet for a few minutes, Tim knew there was no point in lying, not now. Van Endel would know if he did, and this was his chance to come clean, finally, on everything that had transpired over the last few days.

“When we saw that man and Molly, we were playing sniper with a rifle that Scott borrowed from his stepda—”

“Tim!” his dad exclaimed loudly. “What in the hell—”

For the second time that day, Van Endel came to Tim’s rescue. “Mr. Benchley, please,” he said. “Let me ask your son these questions. You can figure out an appropriate punishment later, but right now Tim needs to help me.” Stan sat back in his chair, red in the face, and Van Endel continued. “All right, Tim. Go ahead. You were playing sniper with a rifle. I assume a .22, is that correct?”

“Yes,” said Tim. “A .22 that came apart with just a few twists. It was pretty cool. Anyways, we were trying to hit this target, and our air rifles weren’t even coming close, so Scott borrowed the rifle. We were each going to get one shot, and that was going to be it. Then we saw the guy with Molly. And…”

“And what, Tim?”

Tim swallowed, or tried to. But there was nothing there to swallow. “We shot him.”

Both Van Endel and Tim’s dad rocked back against the backs of their chairs. Van Endel’s eyebrows had shot up, and Stan’s mouth hung open in horror.

“Say again?” Van Endel said softly. “Who shot him?”

“Luke did,” said Tim, feeling like the worst traitor in the world for telling the cop exactly what they’d told each other they’d never share with anyone. “He shot him in the right leg.”

“Jesus wept,” said Stan.

It came out like a river after that, Tim telling Van Endel and Stan every little detail. The midnight meetings, the detective work. It was only when he got to the part about Becca that Tim said, “Dad, I need you to leave the room for a few minutes, OK?”

“No,” said Stan flatly. “If there’s something that you did that’s so awful that you don’t want me to hear it, then I feel like I need to more than ever.”

Tim understood his dad probably felt like the floor had been yanked out from underneath him, and just wanted to reestablish some parental authority. But it was not to be. “Dad, it’s about Becca and Molly,” he said. “I’ll tell you later, but not now.”

There was a long, silent moment between them, and then his dad sighed and stood. Tim could tell he wanted to say something, but that he didn’t know quite what. Finally Stan settled on “Just yell if you need me,” his voice dull and hollow, before retreating down the hallway.

“They weren’t at the drive-in,” said Tim.

“I know,” said Van Endel. “Downtown, right?”

“Yeah,” said Tim, shocked. “But how did you know?”

“I didn’t for sure, not until right now. What I don’t know is what they were up to.”

“They were playing a game, I think,” said Tim, and then he told Van Endel exactly what Becca and her friends had been up to, as best he understood it, anyway. He told him about the outfits, the luring of men to the hotel to be robbed, and about Molly getting in a car and disappearing. Tim stared at the table during the telling, his face blazing the entire time, as though somehow it was his fault that everything had happened. When he was finished, though, he felt as though an enormous weight had been lifted off of his shoulders. Then he fell silent, exhausted, and almost unable to believe that he was being trusted by an adult again.

“So what happened after that?” Van Endel asked. “You knew Molly had been taken, you knew how it had been done, and you knew that the man who had done it lived nearby.” Van Endel sighed. “You also knew that you couldn’t go to the police or to your parents. So you started sneaking out at night.”

“Scott and I did. Luke was already out there, living in the fort. He just left his mom a note and took off.”

Tim saw a dark shadow pass over the detective’s face and then disappear. “So you started gathering clues. What’d you come up with?”

“Well, I already told you. You know, what Becca told me—oh, yeah, and the guy who picked up Molly drove a green car. I should’ve told you that first!”

“How sure was she about that?”

“Pretty sure, I guess,” said Tim. “She seemed pretty sure of it, or at least was sure of what she’d been told.” Tim was scared to tell the next part but kept going anyway. “Scott’s job was to borrow another gun from his stepdad, a pistol this time. Luke went around looking for houses that seemed suspicious, and it turned out that one that he thought looked creepy was owned by a friend of Scott’s stepdad, and the guy, his name is Hooper, drives a green car.”

“Where’s the house?”

Tim told him, then said, “That’s all of it, I guess. I should go over to the tree fort and tell Luke the cops are involved now. He was supposed to go to Hooper’s house and, like, fake that he was going door-to-door about lawn mowing, to see if there were any clues.”

Van Endel shook his head. “I was just in the fort. Luke wasn’t—” Van Endel stood quickly, upsetting his chair and bouncing the table slightly.

“What’s wrong?” Tim asked, standing now himself. His dad was running down the hallway, yelling and asking something, but Van Endel was already out the door.

“What happened?” Tim’s dad asked as the door banged closed. There was a shriek of tires on pavement, and all Tim could do was stare at his hands. He felt smaller and weaker than he ever had in his life, and if he could have just disappeared at that moment—not died, just never existed at all—he would have chosen to do so, gladly.

53

Van Endel was driving and on the walkie-talkie at the same, pleading with Dispatch for backup at the address Tim had given him, as well as asking for any available information on one Matt Hooper. He was driving the Caprice at speeds on suburban streets that he would have happily seen another officer fined over, if not outright suspended, and he couldn’t have cared less. He figured there was a small window he could land in. It was still early in the day. There was always the possibility that Luke had been out getting breakfast, or running around some other part of the woods, or even that Hooper wasn’t the man he’d been looking for. Van Endel found that last part impossible to convince himself of, however. He wished there was some way to get his partner, Phil, in the car with him, or if not, a couple of veteran unis with shotguns.