by Anne McAneny
I gazed up again. “Where?”
“Right there, between this tupelo and that oak.” He pointed straight above me but I still didn’t see it. “Helps if you lie down and stare.”
“Is that how you spotted it?”
“Sure was. I was having myself a good think on this nice patch of dry ground here.”
I smirked in his direction. “Is this a trick?”
“Nuh-uh.” He got flat on his back to prove it. I lay down next to him and crossed my feet at the ankles. Then I cushioned my head with a dirty hand and stared upward. “Holy moly!” I shouted when I saw it. “That’s amazing!”
“Might go so far as to call it a tree mansion.”
Hoop and I were staring at the base of a tree fort covered in real tupelo bark and branches on one half, and real oak bark and branches on the other. It looked like the natural intersection of two trees fighting for space. The structure itself rose up eight feet on all sides, and from what I could tell, it was roughly pentagon-shaped on the exterior.
“Figure it’s dang near 150 square feet inside,” Hoop said.
“Who built it?”
“Boyd Sexton and his dad. Least from what I can figure. Found some magazines inside addressed to B. Sexton, along with tools that got B.S. scratched on ’em.”
“Does Boyd Junior still use the place now that his dad is gone?”
“Dunno, but there’s no reason we can’t use it when he’s not.”
“Except I wouldn’t want to go getting on the wrong side of Boyd Junior.”
Hoop waved away my concerns. “He’s harmless as a house cat. Not a whole lot of IQ points getting a workout in his head, but if you leave him alone, he’ll leave you alone.”
“Breaking into his fort ain’t exactly leaving him alone.”
“Come on, chicken. I’ll give you a tour.”
We clambered up in no time flat. “Dang,” I said, “It’s a regular palace.”
The structure boasted solid walls, a dry interior, two camping mattresses with protective covers, a tiled table, oodles of canned goods, two beanbag chairs, and even a fancy skylight and small slitted windows. Blushing, I pointed to a magazine with a naked woman on the cover. “What’s the date on that magazine?”
“The date?” Hoop said, grinning. “Pretty sure that’s the last thing most people are interested in.”
“I know.” My pink cheeks now glistened. “But I’m curious if Boyd was up here recently.”
“You see? That’s why I call you Clever Clover.”
“I’ve never heard you call me that.”
“I just did. And who’s to say I don’t talk about you behind your back?”
The thought made me deliriously happy, even though he no doubt talked about me platonically—and probably to Macy.
He grabbed the magazine and, perhaps out of a sense of courtliness, did not let his eyes linger on the cover photo. “It’s from last month.”
I frowned. “Still active, then.”
“Not surprising. I mean, who would ever give up a place like this?”
He leaped up and landed with a soft squish on a beanbag chair. “So what do you think, Clover? Party here next month?”
“Can’t imagine a single reason not to.”
#
Turned out there was plenty of reason not to; two of the planned party guests were either dead or missing by the next month, and I’d hardly wanted to be alone with Ronnie Fields in Boyd’s tree fort.
All these years, I’d only returned to the fort once—to search for Hoop a week after he’d disappeared. But the emptiness of it had proved so daunting that it had stripped all the magic from the first visit. I’d vowed never to come back, but here I was, tramping through a forest with champion trees, hoping Boyd Junior had taken refuge in his wood palace. If I could catch him off-guard and at gunpoint, maybe he would tell me the truth.
When I got within a quarter-mile of the fort, I hunkered down, remembering well the peekaboo slits on each side of the pentagonal structure. Although I wasn’t the experienced hunter Hoop had been, he’d taught me how to move quietly. Patience, controlled steps, sharp ears, and good eyesight went a long way toward remaining undetected. I chose a route far from the main path, just in case Boyd was using it.
I tiptoed, crawled, and scurried from tree to tree until I was within twenty yards of the fort, far enough to stay hidden, close enough to detect activity. It didn’t take long. Four footsteps thudded out from above, and then four more, again and again.
Boyd was in there. Pacing.
I considered the best approach. Sneak up and in? Wait until he descended to ground level? Flush him out with a few gunshots?
I was settling on a strategy when something hard and metallic pressed into my head.
“Well, well, well,” said a scratchy, quiet voice. “If it ain’t the rabid dog still infringing on my rights.”
Chapter 30
My heart thudded in panic, and every survival instinct in my body escalated to DEFCON 1, but still, a calm thought occurred to me: If Boyd was standing behind me with a lethal weapon against my head, who was pacing inside the fort?
It might mean help was nearby. It might mean trouble. I could call out, but who knew who was in there? Could be some drugged-out loser. Could be the FBI. Best to remain silent because I still wanted Boyd alone. I raised my hands.
He backed the weapon off my cranium and I slowly turned to face him. It was hard to see his face given the large crossbow between us, but there was no mistaking this crooked scarecrow for anyone else.
“Look, Boyd,” I said quietly, surprising myself with an even-keeled voice. “I just want to talk.”
“Yeah? You always bring a gun and a knife to talk?” He grabbed them both from my belt, swiftly, like a man accustomed to handling weaponry and double-crossers.
I shrugged. “Wasn’t sure you’d be in a sociable mood.”
“Lucky for you, I am. Let’s go.”
That was suspiciously easy. “Where?”
“Away from here.”
“Why do we have to go anywhere?” I said as he grabbed my arm and shoved me along a side trail. “Can’t we talk here?” I figured it wouldn’t hurt to keep the person inside the fort within shouting distance . . . just in case.
“How’d you find me?” he barked as we lumbered along the path. “D’you find my boat? Follow my tracks?”
A light bulb went off. Boyd didn’t know I knew about the tree fort. It was even more camouflaged than it had been years back. He thought I’d tracked him. “Yeah,” I said. “I tracked you. Could’ve found Butch and Sundance if I’d been around back then.”
“Figures,” he mumbled. When I paused at a fork in the path, he gestured with his loaded crossbow and I obeyed. A gun or knife can intimidate, but nothing really compares to the sharp, metallic tip of a crossbow bolt loaded with a hundred-plus pounds of tension and aimed at one’s head.
“Where are we going?”
“You wanna talk? We’ll talk. Can’t hurt to have a reporter on my side.”
I marched in front of him, taking cobwebs and twigs to the face while he grunted out directions here and there. We reached what seemed to be a random spot next to a boulder and he told me to stop.
“Look,” he said. “I got no reason to kill you. Truth is, I ain’t never killed no one and I don’t wanna start now.”
“Forgive me if I’ll need some confirmation on that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What happened with Hoop? Did you kidnap him to get back at Avis Whitaker?”
“Avis? What in the hell does he have to do with anything?”
“He came up from your basement a few days before Hoop went missing. It looked like the two of you had some kind of fight.”
Boyd shook his head. “A fight? No way. Avis got stone-cold drunk one night, stumbled into the store and somehow ended up passed out in the basement. I didn’t find him till the next morning, and if I remember right, I had a pretty r
ough night myself. When I tried to wake him, he freaked out, started hitting me. Still drunk or something.”
“But I know for a fact Hoop was in your basement. His DNA was all over the place, along with his shirt and blood.”
“Huh? Well, shit.” He spat a wad of phlegm to the ground. “I ain’t hardly been in that room all these years. Never even thought about cleaning it up. I mean, why would I? Nothing really happened.”
“Come on, Boyd. You used to stare at Hoop in a weird way. Like pedophile weird.”
“Pedophile? Jesus! I got enough problems with women. Why would I mess with a kid? A boy, no less.” He kicked at the ground and a hint of sadness tinged his narrow face. “Maybe I did used to look at him, yeah, but only ’cause I wondered how he did it.”
“Did what?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Made everything look so easy, ’specially when I knew he didn’t have it all that easy.”
Despite the circumstances, I pressed my lips together and held in a burst of sad yet joyful emotion. It hadn’t been lust or perversion I’d seen in Boyd all those years ago; it had been envy, maybe even admiration, for a boy who’d lived life at the top of his game. Boyd just hadn’t known how to express it, let alone achieve what he’d longed for.
“Then tell me what happened down there,” I said.
He paced back and forth, his limbs jerking wildly as if he were fighting out an issue with himself. Finally, he pivoted to me and blurted out his thoughts. “Look, I can tell you some stuff, but there’s things I can’t say, and you don’t strike me as the type that’s happy with half a story.”
“I’ll take whatever I can get.”
“Truth is, I don’t need no murder rap following me around, so you just report this: Yeah, Hoop Whitaker was in my basement.”
My knees went weak and for a flash, my vision blurred. I fought it by concentrating on breathing.
“Stop panting,” Boyd said. “Sound like you’re gonna have a damn baby or something.”
I regained control. “Sorry. Go ahead.”
“He came into the store, and yeah, I locked him in that room. I ain’t proud of it, but I kinda panicked.”
“You cuffed him to the pole?”
“Only because I needed answers.”
“About a drug deal?”
“What? No.” His frustration showed in the way he kept smacking his dried-out lips. “Look, you gonna let me talk or what?”
I nodded for him to continue.
“So yeah, I cuffed him to that pole. Them cuffs were down there from these ladies my father used to . . . Hell, I don’t know what he did with ’em, but that’s what that was about. I never used ’em before, and when I went back into that room, well, shit, I don’t know what happened, but Hoop, he—”
“Boyd Sexton! Put down the weapon!”
Both Boyd and I jerked our heads toward the voice. It was the sheriff, no doubt having played the role of tree fort-pacer a few minutes earlier. The sheriff looked downright terrifying, dressed in full law enforcement regalia. On his belt hung his Sig Sauer .45, a police baton, cuffs, a flashlight, pepper spray, and a radio. Meanwhile, his Remington tactical shotgun pointed squarely at Boyd’s chest, and his aggressive upper body lean—legs hip-width apart, one foot slightly in front of the other to help absorb recoil—showed pure inclination to act. One of his eyes squinted while the other remained peeled on his target with zero wavering. I’d never seen Strike Ryker look so ominous and powerful, but then, I’d never seen him draw on anyone before.
The next move happened so fast that I’d swear I flung myself into the action. Boyd grabbed me by the arm and whipped me in front of him, thrusting my body between him and the sheriff. He held me fast with a surprisingly strong arm, his fingers digging into my shoulder. With his other hand, he aimed his crossbow at the sheriff.
I did not sense this ending well.
Chapter 31
“Let the girl go, Boyd. I just wanna talk.” Strike Ryker took several confident steps forward and I began to question his tactics. A lawman with a pierced heart wouldn’t be of much use to me—and Boyd wouldn’t be of much use to anyone if the sheriff got off the first shot.
“You don’t wanna talk,” Boyd said. “I know what’s going on.”
“Come on now, Boyd, let’s make this easy. I gotta bring you in for questioning.”
I wanted to scream out, to tell the sheriff that Boyd was already talking, but my larynx was crushed beneath the force of his arm.
“That your personal hunting rifle?” Boyd said. “Or police issue?”
Well, if we were all going to shoot the shit about personal weapon choices, maybe I should get a campfire going. But Boyd’s wild heartbeat against the ribs of my upper back told me this was more than idle chitchat on his part.
“Truth be told,” the sheriff said, “I’d prefer using none of it today, okay? Now put down your weapon and let the girl go.”
The more the sheriff talked, the more frantic Boyd’s heartrate grew. I might not have had a lot of experience in police standoffs, but I knew one thing for sure: things were not tipping in the sheriff’s favor.
He took another step, leaving only eight feet between his rifle barrel and my chest. “Let’s all take it easy,” he said. “Now Boyd, I’m going to overlook you drawing a weapon on an officer of the law, and I’m going to overlook—”
Nope. Things getting worse. Heart more erratic. My own breathing grew nonexistent, but with a surge of adrenaline like I’d never felt, I grabbed the bowed limb of Boyd’s crossbow with both hands and yanked down. At the same time, I smashed my captor’s shin with the heel of my boot.
“Bitch!” he yelled out.
He yanked his arm back and his finger must have pulled the trigger because an arrow slashed through the air with a wicked whoosh and buried itself in a tree thirty feet behind the sheriff. Boyd pulled at the crossbow to get it back under his control, but my hands—out of paralysis or fear—held on as if welded.
Boyd, in what had to be the fastest calculation of his life, released his grip on the weapon and darted into the thick of the woods, zigzagging like a gazelle with a hunter on its tail.
“Chloe!” the sheriff said as he sprinted after Boyd with remarkable agility. “What in tarnation?”
“Don’t shoot him, Sheriff!” My voice came out hoarse, pained. “He knows what happened to Hoop!” The message died in my throat.
I glanced around. In what had been a very bad move, Boyd had put my gun and knife down on the boulder. I grabbed them and dashed after the two men in time to see Boyd pull a sharp right onto a path—a route I was familiar with. It would veer left in twenty yards and then head down through a gully. Negotiating that gap would be no picnic. Boyd better hope he either had a big lead or that the sheriff wasn’t feeling trigger-happy. Beyond the gully, the trail would lead to one more turn that offered a straight shot to the water’s edge.
But I knew what waited there.
I figured I could help the sheriff close in on Boyd by taking an alternate route. It would put me on a bank of sturdy roots just upwind of where Boyd would emerge—possibly before he arrived. I scrambled over rocks and silent patches of pine needles, and then through an ungodly amount of thorns and vines before gaining access to my chosen path, but once I did, I whipped along. Within three minutes, I’d situated myself on my expansive root perch where it jutted out over the water.
I scanned the area, surprised to see that he wasn’t there—and I wasn’t talking about Boyd. I was talking about the other regular resident of that particular real estate on the swamp’s bank: Old Bastard.
Damn! Old Bastard’s lolling presence would have sent Boyd straight back into the sheriff’s arms. Where was my old ectothermic friend? Never had I passed by here and not seen him in position. My heart sank for a moment as two possibilities filled my mind: Old Bastard had finally cashed it in and floated off to alligator heaven—or Boyd had killed him so he wouldn’t have to face him while holed up out here.
&
nbsp; Bastard!
When I heard rustling, I drew my gun and waited. Suddenly, from a patch of low-hanging branches and vines that formed a vertical curtain, Boyd burst forth like a late night TV host, his arms spread as if greeting an audience. He leaned over on his knees to catch his breath, looking exhausted and petrified—and guilty as hell. So, he thought he’d just skirt by, feed me his line of bull, and then skip town, but now he’d have to fill in the gaps of his lameass story—as long as the sheriff agreed to question him before letting the Feds know.
Panic shot through me. What if the sheriff turned Boyd over too soon? No, I couldn’t—wouldn’t—let that happen. I glanced at my gun and decided that if I had to, I’d hold them both at gunpoint until I got the truth.
A still-panting Boyd turned to face the trees from which he’d just emerged. He had no idea I was watching. I waited in silence, using the time to extract my cell phone from my back pocket and turn on the recorder app, just in case Boyd confessed to anything worthwhile in the pending confrontation.
A gun and a phone—all a 21st century girl needed to survive.
The sheriff’s voice suddenly penetrated the air with an unexpected calm. “Come on now, Boyd, I’m too old for this malarkey. I just want to talk.”
Boyd glanced at the water, his eyes shooting in the direction of my canoe two hundred yards away— out of his reach and way slower than a bullet. Think again, buddy. He looked around desperately, even skyward, perhaps hoping that a giant-taloned hawk—or a Greek god on a crane—would reach down and save him.
“Leave me alone, Sheriff,” he shouted. “I ain’t saying nothing. Got nothing to say.”
The sheriff finally emerged through the draping branches, his face flushed, sweat glistening in the small space between his hat and furrowed brows. He held his gun steady, the muzzle pointed straight at Boyd’s unprotected chest.
“You made a deal with those government men, Boyd. You promised them a conversation. Now I got to imagine that’s going to be one heck of a chat.”