Tall Oaks: A gripping missing child thriller with a devastating twist

by Chris Whitaker

  “Manny means he who walks with tiny penis.”

  Manny stared at her long enough to see the corners of her mouth begin to turn up, and then her half-smile turned into a laugh. He laughed too.

  He walked into the garage, desperate to get into the shade, and sat down on the ride-on mower.

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “I was born in Iraq, but we moved here when I was very small. My father is a dentist.”

  Manny nodded, sagely. “A dentist? I know what that means, I’ve seen Homeland.”

  She frowned. “And what does it mean?”

  “You know, he tortures people and shit, fucks them up to get information. Probably did train as a dentist once upon a time, but then Al Qaeda spotted his potential, started asking him to pull out teeth for them, except these people weren’t patients—they were prisoners. So what, you left Iraq to come here, probably witness protection or some shit? Don’t worry, I won’t say anything. I’ll look out for you. You’re under M’s wing now.”

  Her frown turned into a look of bewilderment.

  They both looked over as a rusting, silver Volvo pulled up in front of the house.

  “That’s Abe. He runs this town with me.”

  “Runs it how exactly?”

  They watched Abe climb out of the car, his long, thin legs proudly displayed in a pair of black, denim shorts; shorts that Manny felt certain used to be jeans, until Mrs. Goldenblatt set about them with a pair of scissors after Abe outgrew them.

  As Abe walked toward them the car horn sounded. He jogged round to the driver’s side, showing more than a little ass cheek in the process, and kissed his mother through the open window.

  She drove away much too quickly, holding second gear as she did. The Volvo’s complaints could be heard long after she disappeared from sight.

  “For fuck’s sake, Abe. Where’s your suit?”

  “I’m sorry, M. My mother took it away. She said it’s much too hot out for a suit. She’s worried about me, said I’m too thin to lose body moisture. I’ve still got the shoes though.”

  Manny and Furat looked down at Abe’s spindly, pale legs and were both surprised to see black and white Oxford Brogues on his feet. He wore them with black socks that reached his knees.

  Manny held his head in his hands, sighed, and then introduced Abe to Furat.

  “I’ve seen your father in town. He’s got that sweet Porsche. What does he do?” Abe asked.

  “He trained as a dentist back in Iraq and now he’s taking over the practice in town.”

  Abe looked at Manny, his eyes wide.

  Dentist.

  Iraq.

  Manny closed his eyes and nodded solemnly.

  Jess gently, very, very gently, tried to open her eyes. The right opened without too much trouble, but the left seemed to be welded shut. She brought a hand up to her face and rubbed it gingerly, dislodging dried mascara.

  She licked her lips. The skin was dry; a putrid taste filled her mouth.

  She saw that she wasn’t in her bedroom: the bedroom in her mother’s house that she now called her own.

  She could see her bra on the floor, her skirt beside it.

  The pounding in her head would last most of the morning.

  She glanced at the nightstand, at the empty vodka bottle that sat on it. She brought a hand to her mouth, fighting the urge to retch. Her fingers smelled of cigarettes. The varnish on her nails was chipped and faded. She still wore her wedding band, though on the ring finger of her right hand, in case it scared the more upstanding men away, though she conceded that these men were unlikely to frequent the kinds of establishments she had been favoring of late.

  She saw a freestanding clothes rail against the far wall. Shirts and suits hung from it. A step up from the McDonald’s uniform she’d seen on the floor of another shitty apartment a few weeks back.

  There was no drape at the window, just bare pane with stark lines of sunlight streaming in. She found the light hard to take.

  She felt movement behind her, a kick, a roll, the sheet pulling tight against her body. She could hear his breaths, thick and rasping. She felt a leg brush hers, the hairs tickling her skin. She moved away, toward the edge of the mattress.

  She noticed a small, wooden shelf trying desperately to hold up a myriad of empty wine bottles and deodorant cans. On the far corner of the shelf sat a lone bottle of cologne. The label was striped orange and black, the word Tiger emblazoned across it. So that’s what the smell was: a smell that she could well believe belonged in a zoo.

  The Tiger began to snore, each breath a choke and splutter. She didn’t look round. There was little point. He was there to serve a purpose, to fulfill a need.

  She scoured her mind for the name of the town she had driven to the previous night, the bar she had drunk in, or even what the Tiger’s name was. She could find nothing.

  She was about to risk sitting up when she saw a framed photograph on the nightstand. She moved the bottle to the side and stared at it. It was of a man crouching down beside a small boy. The boy was holding a catfish, his fingers pressing into the scales. She could see water behind them, and a cloud-topped mountain in the distance.

  What stood out most to Jess, even more than the giant catfish, was the look of pure happiness on the boy’s face: the kind of happiness only a child can possess—singular, undiluted by the distractions that age brings.

  She remembered that look from her boy’s face. Her Harry.

  As she fought to make space for his beautiful face in the dark depths of her mind, she saw the Clown appear, tearing into her thoughts, without warning, as it so often did. The Clown that no one had believed existed, until the forensics team had found a long, green hair that had buried its way into Harry’s road-map rug. They had first thought it might have come from one of his soft toys, but a detailed analysis had not yielded a match in his room. And so they grudgingly—and she wasn’t sure why it was grudgingly—started to believe her.

  The Clown grinned at her. She shook her head violently, but it clung on, its claws sinking deep into her thoughts. She pulled at her hair, tugging out a fistful and gasping at the pain.

  As the Clown began to laugh and then snarl, its face twisting with burning rage, she started to relive that awful night when she had run into the street barefoot and crying, clutching a carving knife. Just as she felt the scream building in her stomach and rising up to her throat, she felt the Tiger’s hand on her hip and his body pressing against hers.

  Just in time.

  She hooked her thumb into the waistband of her underwear and slid them down, closing her eyes as tightly as she could, forcing the scream back down into the pit of her stomach.

  4

  Rumors and Tumors

  At six foot nine, and closing in on 500 pounds, Jerry Lee was used to the staring and whispering. He was used to the laughter too, though that came when he opened his mouth. With the height, the weight, a list of allergies as long as his arm, and a mind his mother said often took a beat too long to form a coherent thought, life might have been difficult enough. But with a voice that soared to the highest of pitches, he really didn’t stand much of a chance.

  It was a gift, the voice, a gift from God. That’s what his mother said. A gift that was far better received when he was younger and he took the reluctant lead in the St. Mary’s choir. But now, at the age of thirty-five, it was a gift he wished God had given to someone else.

  He opened the PhotoMax store a full hour before he was supposed to, like he did every day. His boss, Max, wouldn’t show up until lunch, if he came in at all. Monday mornings were never good for Max. He usually went out partying on Friday night, leaving Jerry alone on Saturday, their busiest day. How this made him late on a Monday, Jerry didn’t know, and certainly wouldn’t ask.

  He stepped behind the counter, set two stools side by side, and carefully mounted them. They creaked and groaned. He sat perfectly still until they acclimatized to the strain.

  He chec
ked his Death Watch, a gift from his mother for his last birthday. He’d die on March 15th, 2040. That’s what it told him, though he hadn’t updated it lately, and he’d gained even more weight. He watched the minutes tick down. He did that often.

  The door had a bell on it. He flinched as it sounded.

  “Good morning, Jerry.”

  Jerry climbed down, walked round the counter, and took the mail from Mel, the mailman. He didn’t say hello to Mel. He never did. He tried to speak as little as possible.

  “Looks like it’s going to be another hot one today,” Mel said.

  Jerry nodded.

  “See you tomorrow.”

  Jerry set the mail down on the glass counter, mounted the stools again, and opened the only item addressed to him.

  He studied the magazine and gently traced his finger across the title. He had been subscribing to the National Amateur Photography Magazine (NAP) for thirteen years. Though Max deducted the six dollars from his pay check every month, and he had to work almost a full hour to cover it, it was worth every cent.

  With the deadline approaching for the annual NAP competition, Dawit’s photograph sat on the front page again. Dawit had won the previous year. Jerry had read all about him, how he lived in a slum in India, had found a disposable camera in the mountains of rubbish he scavenged each day, and then used it to take a last photograph of his sister as she lay dying in the bed they shared. A local newspaper had printed it and one thing had led to another.

  To Anam.

  That’s what it had said on the inside cover. The winner got to dedicate their photograph. Dawit’s sister had been called Anam. Anam meant blessing. Jerry had looked it up online.

  He frowned at the photograph, wondering if his was better. They were difficult to compare: Dawit’s, unflinchingly emotive; but Jerry’s . . . Jerry’s was special too. He knew that when he’d shown his mother. She’d spent a long time staring at it before she’d made him promise not to send it, even made him promise to delete it.

  The door chimed again.

  Jerry flinched again, though when he looked up, he relaxed.

  “Hi, Lisa.”

  Lisa smiled at him, a smile that flushed his cheeks and made his shirt cling to his back. She handed him the paper bag—his mother’s medication. Lisa worked for Hung, the pharmacist.

  “How is she?” Lisa said.

  “Okay. She’s still in pain. The pills aren’t working.”

  She nodded, sympathetically. “Maybe you could speak to her doctor. There’re others she could try—maybe Prelone. Is she taking them with food?”

  “She doesn’t eat much anymore.”

  “With milk then, Jerry. It’s important.”

  “I’ll try.”

  She glanced at the magazine. “That the new one?”

  He nodded.

  “Dawit again?”

  He nodded.

  “When are you going to enter, Jerry? I’ve seen some of your stuff. You’ve got a great eye.”

  He looked down, blushing furiously.

  “I’m not sure about that.”

  Lisa was one of the few people he felt comfortable talking to, one of the few he could call a friend, even though he still struggled to meet her eyes. They were far too blue, far too pretty.

  “Is Max about?”

  He shook his head.

  Lisa was engaged to Max.

  She checked her watch. “Too early for him, lazy shit. When he shows up will you remind him that we have an appointment with the realtor at five?”

  Jerry nodded.

  Lisa perched on the stool meant for customers.

  “So what do you get this year, if you win?”

  “First prize is a Nikon DX950.”

  “Oh.”

  “A vacation to Aruba, wherever that is.”

  “That’s more like it.”

  “And your photo printed on the front cover of the magazine.”

  “Wow. That’s the big one, right? What you’ve dreamed about. Do it, Jerry. What have you got to lose?”

  He shrugged, the stool creaked. He tried to cough, to mask the sound, but he was too late. His mind struggling again to keep pace, like it always did. His mother said it was because he was starved of oxygen when he was born. The cord had got wrapped around his neck. Dad said he’d come out blue.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said, quietly.

  “Are you still camping out every weekend? Still looking for the red-billed cuckoo?”

  He shook his head.

  Lisa had first told him about the bird, about how her father used to take her bird-watching when she was small, and how they used to hide among the tall oak trees that gave the town its name, looking for the red-billed cuckoo. It hadn’t been seen in America since 1913, and most thought it extinct, though Lisa’s dad claimed to have seen one in Tall Oaks. He’d said it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. Lisa had smiled when she’d told Jerry about it, smiled and cried. Lisa’s dad had died when she was young.

  The coffee wasn’t mixed well. Jim could see black sludge lining the bottom of the cup.

  “It’s funny, you wanting to talk to me now. Didn’t want to know last time, when I couldn’t get any sleep,” Mrs. Lewis said.

  Jim smiled. He looked around the room, tried not to appear appraising.

  Mrs. Lewis kept her eyes fixed on him. She was old, Jim guessed eighty, but could’ve been a decade out either side as she wore so much makeup.

  “So they’ve left town.”

  “Who?”

  “The cavalry. The Fibbies,” she croaked, lighting another cigarette.

  He noticed a bookcase in the corner, each shelf bowed under the weight of a pile of crime novels.

  “Come on, Sergeant. The FBI. We all know they were here. Saw the black sedans. No need to be embarrassed. They bring ’em in for high-profile cases like these. Small-town cops haven’t got the experience—they make mistakes, jeopardize the case.”

  Jim glanced at the window, longing to open it.

  Mrs. Lewis blew a cloud of smoke up toward the yellowed ceiling. A fan spun above—noisy, but too slow to clear the fog.

  He looked down at his notebook, had underlined the word “crackpot” several times.

  “So, back to the complaints you made.”

  “Lot of shouting. Crying sometimes . . . think it was the lady, the pretty one. Jessica Monroe. I never really spoke to them. Like to keep myself to myself.”

  He took another sip.

  “I notice you called about them several times a few years back as well.”

  She coughed loosely.

  He noticed her fingernails were so long they had started to curl.

  “That time it was the baby crying. Harry. Kept me up all night. I knocked. They didn’t answer.”

  Jim wrote “crying baby” on his pad and then crossed it out and underlined “crackpot” again.

  “You’ve called us forty-three times in six years.”

  She blew a jet of smoke from her nose, then reached for her coffee and gulped it down.

  “I hear noises, I call the cops. The time I don’t will be the time someone breaks in, mark my words. I don’t have John here to look after me anymore.” She crossed herself. “So it’s just you working the Harry Monroe case? Everyone else has packed up, moved on. Too many crimes, not enough cops. You’re looking for something they didn’t see, something they missed? Solve the case on your own? I like it.”

  “You read all of those?” he said, nodding in the direction of the bookcase.

  “Oh, sure. More than once.”

  The house was large, like Jess’s. Though this one hadn’t been touched in a long time. Mrs. Lewis would die soon enough. Jim would get the call, from her mailman, or from the gardener. They’d say they hadn’t seen her in a while. He’d break the door, find the corpse. He got calls like that a couple of times a year—a generation dying off. Her kids would sell the house, pocket half a million and the developer another half once he was d
one with it.

  “You any closer to finding him?”

  He drank the last of his coffee, setting the cup down before the sludge reached his lips.

  “Bad news, this long, Sergeant. Don’t need to tell you that. Poor kid. What was he, five?”

  “Three.”

  Mrs. Lewis shook her head. “There’re a lot of rumors . . . whole lot of nothing. Someone knows something.”

  He nodded.

  Someone knows something.

  Jerry sat in his dark room. It wasn’t really a room, more of a closet, a big closet, on the ground floor, next to the kitchen. The house was too big for them, had been even when his dad was alive. Jerry’s great-grandparents had built it.

  He rubbed his stomach. It hurt. His mother had never been a good cook, but since she got sick she’d gotten even worse. She forgot recipes when she was right in the middle of cooking them, then she added ingredients that really didn’t go. Tonight she had cooked him sausages, though they were charred on the outside and frozen solid in the center. She liked to watch him eat, hated it when he didn’t finish everything. She’d baked a pie, too. Apple and something he couldn’t quite place. He was afraid to ask what it was. A pint of what he’d thought was custard to pour over it had turned out to be cheese sauce.

  Dad used to love her pies. He was big. Mom too, though neither as big as Jerry.

  He looked at the photographs splayed out on his desk: some of Lisa smiling, some of her frowning, some where she didn’t know she was having her photo taken.

  He picked up his favorite, taken on Valentine’s Day. Max had taken her to Yosemite and they’d stayed in a log cabin. To the untrained eye it was a fairly unremarkable photo, but Jerry stared at it, sometimes for hours on end, lost in her eyes. He could see something in them—kindness maybe—something that made him want to hold her, to love her and for her to love him back. Max didn’t know Jerry had made copies for himself. He would have been mad. But Max didn’t even like printing them; he only did it because Lisa made him. She liked to put them in albums. Jerry didn’t ever take copies of the really private ones, the ones where Lisa wasn’t wearing many clothes, even though a part of him wanted to. He just copied the ones that Max probably didn’t linger over, that Max probably didn’t think were special.