Chapter Ten - Part One: Culling the fields

CHAPTER TEN

Oregon City, OR

July 16, 2007

 

Eight o’clock Monday morning.  Bright and early.  Eight Clackamas County Sheriff’s Department vehicles.  Lights flashing.  Sixteen deputies, all looking for a missing girl.  Tiffany Stuart.  Nobody wanted her found more than Matthew, but he knew that she wasn’t here.  He could feel it in his heart.  Still, he met them at the door eager to help look for her.

Rosita, Matthew and Nick were lined up and given the rules.  The warrant was handed to Rosita as the owner of the land and buildings.  Their home.  Now the suspected location of a crime.  It couldn’t be true.  But it was.  They weren’t allowed to help search their own home or the land on which it sat.  They had to just sit in the kitchen and wait.

The deputies went through the house room by room.  Every door was opened.  Every box was overturned.  Suitcases were opened.  Anything big enough to hold a body or small enough to hold a piece of jewelry was searched.  The contents of every drawer were dumped out on the floor.  They weren’t just looking for a body.  They were looking for anything that belonged to Tiffany, or gave them reason to believe that somebody in this family was hiding her.  It took them three hours to search the main floor of the house.

Then they moved to the upstairs and went through the same procedure.  Rosita wept as she watched her home being torn apart.

“It’s OK, Mom,” said Matthew.  “It’s just stuff.  Tiffany is what’s important.  They need to find her.”

“Whatever,” said Nick with his standard tenor of disgust.  “I don’t know why they’re wasting their time here.  She probably ran away.  Got out from under her overbearing Catholic parents, right Matthew?  Isn’t that what kids your age want to do?”

“Really, Nick?  That’s all you have to say?  How’d you get that scratch on your arm, huh?” questioned Matthew.

“Don’t push me, Moron,” Nick said.  “I got it planting the damn cherry tree.  How’d you get so ugly?  Oh, wait.  That’s right.  It was from having a priest for a father!”

Rosita was done listening to her oldest son.  She stood up and slapped him across the face.  “Don’t you say one more word, Nicholas.  If you do, you can start looking for another place to live.  I don’t need your kind of ugliness in my home.  Do you understand me?”

Nick couldn’t remember ever having been struck by his mother.  He was impressed.  Maybe she did have a backbone, albeit small.  “Sorry, Mama,” he said.  “I’ll be a good boy now that you’ve broken my spirit,” he chuckled.

“Oh, shut up,” hissed Matthew. 

Just then one of the deputies walked in.  “Everything OK in here?” she said.

“Yeah, sure,” said Matthew, “except that my brother is a dickhead.”

“Matthew!” yelled Rosita.  “Enough!  Go turn on the television, so you two can stop talking to each other.  This is going to be a long day.”

“It’s already been a long day,” complained Nick. 

“Well,” the deputy said, “it’s about to get a lot longer.  We need to start on the garage, the vehicles, and the outbuildings, all of it.  I need the keys to the shed so we can get in there.”

“I don’t have a key to that building,” said Rosita.  “Nick’s the only one who has the key.  Nick, give her your key.”

“I don’t know where it is,” he said.  “I lost it last night when I was planting the cherry tree.”

“That’s a shame,” replied the deputy.  “Don’t worry, though.  We’ll break in.  Hope you don’t mind replacing the door, though.”

“What?” yelled Nick.  “Can’t you wait for a locksmith to get here?”

“Nope,” she said.  “That’s not how we work.  It’s now or never, now being the opportune word.  I also want to see the cherry tree that you planted last night.  I’m interested in horticulture.  Why don’t you show me the tree before we go into your precious shed?”

“It’s a recording studio,” spat Nick, “not a shed.”

“Fine.  Whatever.  Cherry tree.  Now.”

Four deputies followed Nick out to the field where he’d planted the tree.  Two of them were taking photographs, particularly of the tracks from the studio to the tree.  One of them ran back to the garage and came back with a shovel.

Handing the shovel to Nick, the female deputy said, “Here, Pretty Boy.  Start digging.”

They were out there for an hour or so before turning around and returning to the house.  Nick was following after them like an abandoned puppy.  “So, who’s going to replant the tree for me?  I worked on that for hours.  Are you just going to leave it laying there?”

The deputy handed the shovel back to Nick.  “Go do something useful, brat,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Benson,” she said as they entered the house.  “Now we’ll move on to the garage, vehicles and shed.  Thankfully the newly planted cherry tree is just that.  A plain old cherry tree.”

The thought struck Matthew that Nick had planted the cherry tree for that specific purpose.  Just to mess with the police.  He knew they were coming back with a warrant this morning, and that’s why he insisted on creating something that would make them think he had killed Tiffany and buried her.  “He’s crazy.  He really is,” thought Matt.  “He loves thinking that he’s smarter than everybody else.”

It took the deputies until after eight o’clock that night to finish their search.  They found nothing.  Matthew didn’t know whether to be relieved or not.

Matt and Rosita went into the family room to watch a movie.  Nick went out to his studio to work on some new mixes.

When the lights went off in the house, Nick carried a chain saw from the garage to his studio.  Later he dragged several large trash bags to the hole where the tree had been planted the night before.  He dug the hole even deeper than it had originally been.  He dumped the trash bags into the hole, and dropped the chainsaw on top of the bags.  He added a foot or two of dirt on top of it all, and then replanted the cherry tree on top of that   Knowing that the police had already searched the area, Nick was confident that his plan had succeeded