The Fort (Aric Davis)

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