Stolen Son: A gripping psychological thriller that will have you hooked

by Cole Baxter

  My mother looked like I’d slapped her across the face. “Absolutely not. You know how much money I spent on home security features to keep everyone safe? That house is the best place for you to be, and I won’t hear of your leaving because of some disagreement. I’m frustrated as heck, but you’re still my daughter. I have a responsibility to keep you safe, even though the other people I love are getting hurt in the meantime.”

  Tears streamed down my cheeks. I felt terrible about what had happened in the last attack, but there was nothing I could do. Her anger felt misguided.

  “I am not the attacker,” I said firmly. “If you want to be mad at that freak, be my guest. He’s the one who killed Greg. He’s the one who injured Tom and kidnapped Gregory. He’s the one who brutally attacked and violated and had his way with me. He did this to us. I may not remember everything, but I’m fairly confident that I never did anything to deserve this. Now, do you really think that I deserve all the blame for what happened to Tom?”

  “No, but—”

  “But what?” I interrupted.

  “But we don’t know who it is,” she said, her voice tired.

  “What difference does that make?” I asked.

  “Maybe we should have tried harder after Greg was killed,” she said.

  “There were homicide detectives on that case,” I pointed out.

  “I still feel like we gave up too easily,” she said.

  “Maybe that was because I had a baby on the way and I was mourning the loss of my husband. Then, once I had Gregory, I was in over my head. He had special needs, but I was still his primary caregiver. I had help, of course, but it was so hard to work while trying to soothe my inconsolable son. I’m sorry if I didn’t have the time or the money to hire people to find the guy who did this to our family. That was some time ago. There have been more advances in technology since then.”

  “I’ve told the nurses to look out for a strange man coming to visit Tom,” my mother said. “They have cameras in that building. If anyone comes through to finish the job, we’ll know.”

  I bit my tongue again. While it was troubling that someone attacked Tom, I knew that the assailant was really after me. I highly doubted he wanted to kill Tom. If anything, he just wanted to get Tom out of the way because he was protecting me. My mom was a short woman with little athletic ability. If someone came after me, she would not be capable of doing much. Tom, on the other hand, was fairly big. At the very least, he was an imposing presence. But I didn’t want to explain this to my mom. She was too busy worrying about her precious son to realize that my life was in peril. In the last few weeks, I had been thinking about what my stalker would do if he got his hands on me. Because he tried to keep me and failed, the next step would be to keep me forever—in a way that I would never be able to escape. I think he planned to kill me.

  When we pulled up in the driveway, I noticed that there was a large package stuffed in the mailbox. I looked over at my mother, who had also noticed it.

  “What did you order?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Whatever it is, I don’t think it’s for me. Besides, it’s way too early for the mail to be here. It never arrives until after two.”

  Frowning, I jumped out of the car and strode over to the mailbox. There, on the center of the white bag was my name, written in thick, black block letters. My heart sank. It had to have been from him.

  There was no address or postage on the package, so it couldn’t have been sent through the mail. Someone had waited until the house was empty and placed it there, knowing that I would see it as soon as I got home. The lettering on the bag was so unnatural that it couldn’t possibly be traced back to anyone through standard handwriting analysis.

  “I don’t want anything to do with that,” my mom said, real fear in her voice. She hurried inside the house and began to set the alarms. I noticed that she had added a small canister of pepper spray to her keychain. Looking up and down the street, I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, so I grabbed the package and ran up the steps, locking the front door behind me. Logically, I knew that it was stupid to take a strange package into my house, but my instinct told me that I needed to open it for answers. I didn’t care if there was a message laced in Anthrax—I just needed the message to find my son.

  Chapter Eighteen

  By now, my mom had holed herself up in her bedroom, likely with a surgical mask on her face and a blast shield near her body. Having faced death myself, I didn’t have the same protective measures in place at the moment. I certainly didn’t want to be annihilated by this freak, but more importantly, I didn’t want my son to fall victim for any longer. If I were meant to play a game, I would play to win.

  I set the white package in the center of the kitchen table. In a moment of clarity, I found a pair of dishwashing gloves under the sink and slipped them on. If there was something dangerous inside, I didn’t need it all over my skin. Then, holding my breath, I carefully cut the top of the wrapping off. Just in case, I took a few steps back, only to see a photo slip out of the plastic.

  My heart was pounding as I approached the table. I flipped the picture over in my hand and realized that it came from an old Polaroid camera. I hadn’t seen one of those used in years. I squinted my eyes to make out what was in the photo. It was dark, save for a blurry shape in the center.

  I felt incredibly dizzy. My vision narrowed to a tiny dot in the center of my eyes, so I sat down on a chair and dropped my head to my knees. I clamped my mouth shut so I wouldn’t vomit as a wave of memories came back to me. They were disjointed, like little flashes of light in front of me. It was as if I was watching an old slide projector run out of order. I saw my attacker’s feet coming toward me, then I saw the brick wall in front of my face.

  “Mom,” I moaned as loudly as I could. I don’t think she heard me. It wouldn’t surprise me at this point if she didn’t want anything to do with me. I was the cause of her misery. I didn’t want to be a burden, but if I passed out, I wanted someone around. I didn’t want her to walk in on me sprawled out on the floor. She would immediately suspect the worst, and not the fact that my tormenter knew exactly how to play me.

  I was still wheezing between my knees when I heard tentative footsteps coming down the hall.

  “What is it?” she asked, half-scared, half-annoyed.

  “Just pictures,” I whimpered. “It’s just photos.”

  “Of what?” she asked, her voice lowering an octave.

  I held out the photo without looking at it. She studied it for a moment, her brow sinking as she tried to make sense of it.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “It’s blurry. I can’t make out what it’s supposed to be. Are you sure it wasn’t coated in something? Do I need to call an ambulance?”

  I shook my head violently. “No, Mom, it’s the maze. I would recognize it anywhere. It’s hard to see because the light wasn’t on. That’s the maze he kept me in. He’s trying to tell me something.”

  Her eyes widened as she understood what I was saying. She sat beside me at the table, her hands folded in front of her.

  “What are the other photos of?” she asked slowly. “Annabeth, are they just photos of the maze, or is there something more?”

  I shrugged as I finally rose up to face her. “I don’t know. I just saw the maze and I thought I was going to faint. I’m afraid to look at the others.”

  “I know,” she said, finally sounding supportive. “I’m right here. I think you need to look at the others.”

  “Okay,” I said, beginning to remove my gloves. I figured that the psychological threat was the only intent.

  “Keep those on,” she ordered. “You’re dealing with evidence.”

  “Right,” I said. “Should we call the police?”

  “I’ll call Detective Reyes right now,” she said, scurrying out of the room.

  I took a deep breath and pulled the gloves up a little tighter. I needed to be able to keep it together for just a few more minu
tes. My son depended on me.

  I scooped the remaining photos out of the bag and began to flip through them like a deck of cards. There had to have been around thirty of them stacked in my hand.

  The next few in line were just other parts of the maze in the dark. These, I remembered quite vividly because I spent so much time crawling along the floor with my hands against the wall. With each blurry shot, I remembered how I rubbed my fingertips raw on the grout as I searched for an exit. In time, it was almost as though I was flipping through an old yearbook as I remembered horrible times in my life.

  The next one was different. Here, the lights in the maze were on. I didn’t remember there being overhead lighting. My memories mostly circled around the dark, or in a few instances, dim light that illuminated my captor. This view of the maze in harsh, fluorescent lighting was one that I had never seen before. It looked like a crime scene photo, though I knew that only one man held the secrets of his lair.

  “I talked to the detective,” my mom said, rushing back into the kitchen. “He’ll be here soon. What have you found?”

  “There are lights,” I said stupidly. “I don’t remember there being lights in the maze. I never saw his face. If there were lights, I’m sure I would have seen them eventually.”

  “He probably didn’t turn them on often. It would be too easy to find a way out.”

  “I guess,” I said, not entirely convinced that she was right. It was easier to blame a faulty memory.

  I flipped to the next picture and screamed. In one of the rounded sections of the maze where I frequently slept, was my son. He had his little arms tied behind his back, a cloth gag around his face, and a rope around his ankles. My mom looked over my shoulder and sharply inhaled, sucking the breath between her teeth.

  I studied the picture, trying to examine my son through a tiny piece of film. He looked sleepy and I feared that he had been drugged so he would cooperate. I wondered if I was drugged and if that was why so many of my memories were gone. He didn’t look scared, necessarily, but he also didn’t look like he was in his right mind. If my son knew he was in trouble, he would be hell to deal with. My guess was that he’d tried to escape and got too close for his own good.

  His shirt was stretched out and his shoes were missing. The bottoms of his white socks were stained brown from the dirty maze. I hoped he wasn’t too cold. The picture was blurry, so I couldn’t tell if he had bruises on his body or if I was just seeing shadows. I was relieved that there was a picture of him at all, clearly alive and relatively untouched.

  The next picture was the same shot, but from a different angle. Here, I could see his arms behind his back. His wrists looked raw and red where the bindings pressed into his skin. I grimaced as I thought about how my baby was processing the pain. He spent most of his time inside and away from anything that could cause him physical pain, so I wasn’t sure how he handled the pain of being tied up and pushed around. It wasn’t as if he had gotten a taste of rough behavior from organized sports.

  “My baby,” I wailed. My mom’s face turned white. She had helped raise her only grandchild. Now, with so much uncertainty in her children’s’ future, she feared she’d never have another chance at being a grandmother.

  My mother was very good with Gregory. While it seemed as though she was tired of my relying so heavily on others, she never treated him like it was a chore to watch him. She was amazed at his intelligence and stuck every aced test to the refrigerator. She bought him expensive building sets and complex books to keep his mind busy. From the time he could speak, she always bragged to her coworkers about how she had the next Albert Einstein at home.

  “He looks okay,” she said softly, trying to get me to calm down. “Don’t you think he looks okay?”

  I looked at the picture again. He certainly wasn’t okay, but I knew what she meant.

  “He’s not dead,” I replied. “He’s still alive. We still have time.”

  “That’s right,” my mom said as I continued on through the pictures. In the next one, his eyes were wide with fear and his mouth was open. I could practically hear him crying out in that one.

  “Jeez,” my mom hissed. “Who does this to a child? He’s the most innocent kid I know.”

  “Someone who wants to get to me,” I replied. “I have to say, it’s working. If he’s trying to lure me to him, I think he’s got me figured out. I’d break down those brick walls for him.”

  The next couple of pictures were more of the same. In each one, Gregory looked either scared or sleepy, possibly depending on the effect of the drugs at the time. Then, there was one with the lights off and a dim beam of light shining on my son’s face.

  “Oh, it’s dark,” I said, my voice quivering. “He must have screamed for the guy to turn the lights on. I know my son—if it was too dark and he was scared, he wouldn’t stop screaming until they came on.”

  “Maybe that’s why he was gagged,” my mom suggested. “This guy doesn’t know who he’s dealing with. Of course the poor kid is going to scream and cry. I would do the same, and I’m an adult.”

  Much to my shock, the next photos weren’t of my son at all, but of me. I almost didn’t recognize myself at first, but as I stared at my body in the light, I was able to put myself back into the maze.

  I wasn’t even aware that my mom was looking at the picture until she gasped. I dropped the stack to the table and covered it with my hands. I felt violated all over again. My privacy had already been taken from me when he’d stripped me naked and had his way with me, then again when I was examined by a doctor and interrogated by police. Now, there was evidence that I had been violated, and now, people would have to see it.

  “Do you want me to look for you?” my mom asked.

  “No,” I said before quickly flipping through the pictures of me. None were all too explicit, but several featured me in various stages of undress, pleading for him to stop. I didn’t even realize at the time that I was being documented in such a way. Add that to the list of things I didn’t remember.

  I saw the marks on my body, the ones he’d made when I tried to fight him off. I had spent months rubbing special ointment into those scars to fade them to the point where they weren’t obvious. In my mind, if I eliminated the physical scars, the psychological ones would disappear along with them.

  I was also struck by how young I looked in the photo. While I was still relatively thin, I looked skinny like a child in the photo. I looked like a teen, because I was one. I was in college at the time, and still incredibly naïve. I would give anything to have that innocence again. Most girls learned the ways of the world bit by bit. If they were lucky, their education would be through anecdotes from others and seemingly benign personal experiences. I learned how quickly things could go bad in a span of a few days.

  I remembered my long hair that I had grown out for my wedding. I continued to grow it for our honeymoon because Greg once mentioned how much he liked it long. I cut it to my chin after he died. I didn’t feel like the same woman anymore, and I needed a look to match how I saw myself. That, and it was easier to keep my scalp lacerations clean with short hair.

  I noticed that in one of the photos, my wedding ring was missing. I twirled it around my finger as I looked at the photo. If he took it from me, I don’t know how I got it back. I figured that would be a prime opportunity to take a token from me. Whatever happened, I was grateful that it was back on my finger.

  The last photos were of Gregory again. In one, the lights were on and he was facing a wall. In another, a lantern was illuminating the space. Apparently, he had managed to fall asleep in a ball on the ground. Then in another, he was staring down at the ground, a look of rage on his face. I understood where he was coming from. I was angry too.

  When I reached the end of the stack, I started over from the beginning, poring over all of the small details that had been overshadowed by the big picture. Once I looked beyond my son and me in the center of many of the photos, I noticed things that I hadn’t
realized when I was within the maze.

  When I compared the pictures of my son and me, I noticed that the construction had aged considerably. In the ten-year span, the wooden beams had changed color with the air. In my son’s photos, cobwebs clouded the corners. A few times, I was able to match specific locations in both sets of photos. As far as I could tell, he was in the exact same hell I’d lived through, just ten years apart. I wondered if anyone else had been stuck down there in the meantime, or if it was a creation just for my own displeasure. While I hoped that no one else had to be subjected to that torture, it seemed so extreme that someone would build such a labyrinth to torment one person.

  So, that ruled out the possibility of a second location and a copycat. If was safe to say that my stalker had been near for quite some time. I couldn’t remember anything about the location of the maze, but if it was in the vicinity of the stalker’s house, it could be useful to the police. With any luck, my son was near. It was now just a matter of finding him.

  I now felt a particular sense of kinship with my young son. Though I never wanted him to go through any of the nightmares I’d experienced in my young life, at least I would know what he was going through. I didn’t want to have this connection with him, but we really had no choice.

  My mom returned to the table with two steaming cups of lemon and ginger tea. I took a small sip, letting the hot liquid settle my stomach. She set out a plate of cookies beside the white bag, but I wasn’t interested in eating right now. Instead, I went into detective mode, trying to find meaning in the photos. I wasn’t entirely sure why my stalker was sending these pictures to me in the first place. Did he want to show me that he could easily rattle me with a small package? Or did he want to communicate the fact that my son was still alive and relatively untouched? It seemed particularly cruel to include pictures of me, though, which led me to believe that the guy was messing with me.

  I wasn’t a psychologist by any means. I’d spent the last ten years wondering what a stranger would want to do with me. I thought back to what my mom had said about encountering someone in my past and paying no mind. I feared that there was some guy in a college class that I’d inadvertently slighted by ignoring him. I was very studious in the early days of college, so if a guy tried to ask me out during class or something, I may have refused because I didn’t know what was going on. Besides, I had been with Greg for awhile, so I had a built-in excuse. Other than that, I couldn’t think of a single man in this world who had something against me or a reason to become infatuated with me. Nothing came to mind.