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

by Chris Whitaker

  The pain came in ebbs and flows, the stress more constant, unbroken. She often traced her mind for a time when he was with her, when she was happy, but she was finding those times harder and harder to locate. If her mind were a story, it began the last time she’d seen his face. Of course she could recall other periods: her wedding day, Harry’s birth, Harry’s first day at preschool. They didn’t seem connected though; there was no life between them. They were the blips on a radar. If she tried to relax, didn’t drink, didn’t seek distraction, the Clown needled his way into those blips too, taking the face of Michael, sometimes even Harry. He sat at the back of the church at their wedding; he held her hand as she gave birth.

  She had seen a physiatrist, the family shrink, a man retained to help cure or bury. She’d seen him off and on most of her life.

  Dr. Stone. The most apt of names for a man that, she often felt certain, was actually made of stone. When she broke down and cried, he stared back at her, his gaze dismissive and his face stoic. When she told him stories about Harry, stories that made her lip tremble, he nodded impassively. A man that had seen it all before.

  She knew that she needed help. She also knew that Dr. Stone wasn’t the man to help her. She needed Michael. He would help her. He was the only one that could help her.

  At the beginning, those first few days after Harry went missing, her mother had said it was the not knowing that was the hardest cross to bear, the thing that she most struggled with. Jess thought that was bullshit.

  A couple of weeks into the case they’d stopped getting newspapers through the door. Jess had caught her mother reading a piece that informed them that if a child wasn’t found in the first twenty-four hours then the chances of finding them alive grew slimmer by the day. She wondered if it were really necessary to share that information, if it really helped anyone at all. Perhaps it lit a fire under the cops to begin with, and then, once the golden window passed, it forced the case to the backs of their minds.

  No. Just looking at the man across from her she knew that wasn’t true. So the not knowing wasn’t the worst part. The worst part, and the part that she lived in fear of every time her phone rang or there was a knock at the door, was that the police might one day tell her that they had found a body. But until that day, a day that might never come, she sought distraction wherever she could, to keep her mind from running the downward slope to that night.

  “So, here we are,” Jim said.

  “Here we are,” Jess said.

  “What happened to your face?”

  Jess shrugged, seemingly irritated.

  He looked at her arms, noticed the red marks and the yellow bruising.

  She stared back at him.

  He looked down at his coffee cup, at the red letters scrawled across it.

  KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON.

  He looked up at Jess.

  The past three months had devoured her.

  They’d gone to the same school, everyone in town had. She was in the grade below; he doubted she remembered him. He remembered her though. She wasn’t easily forgotten, and not just because she’d gotten into so much trouble.

  Back then she’d had something about her that made you stare. Not now though. Now she wore a cloak around her. A dark cloak, all thick and heavy, that told you she was a woman drowning.

  Things like this didn’t happen in Tall Oaks.

  They had the usual stuff—break-ins, vandalism, the occasional fight. Most people in the town were well-heeled and silver-spooned with a name to protect. He could still remember back when he was a boy and his father had been a cop. There’d been a stabbing outside a bar on Main Street. The local news lit up like a firework. And that had been just a stabbing. The abduction of a child had hit the town like an avalanche. News vans arrived, State police convened. The four roads that led in and out of the town were closed, with blockades quickly set in place. A police helicopter circled above, fixed in the sky until the storm got too bad, its noisy rotors waking up half the town before they even had a chance to switch the television on and see the reporters standing in front of Jess’s house. The media invaded like locusts, filling the coffee houses and restaurants and taking over the two small hotels owned by Francis McDermott.

  Jim had been impressed by the way the town had closed ranks, much to the annoyance of the reporters who sought out rumors as if they were fact.

  The following morning, in the pouring rain, an army of locals had convened outside the small police station on Main Street. It was a show of force the media ran with and “THE TALL OAKS TAKE” became the most talked about crime of the moment. The newspapers ran a picture of Harry alongside a picture of the mob lined up to find him on their front pages. Jim and his team focused on the woods at first: The tall oak trees that started on the edge of town, then ran into the Black Lake National Forest, and its fifty thousand acres. They’d searched as best they could, though as the hours passed the storm had worsened. The winds were strong, the ground unforgiving. Before long, vast swathes of woodland were flooded. They waded through, knee-deep. It was grueling. Daniel Fischer, a local lawyer, had slipped and broken his leg. The weather made bringing a helicopter in impossible. It had taken six hours to get him out. As night fell Jim had had little choice but to halt the search. Three days after that the rain had finally stopped.

  State police had set up in Jim’s office, alongside his own men. All were quickly overwhelmed with the number of sightings, and crackpots that claimed to know something. When she left her mother’s house, Jess was greeted with the kind of hysteria normally reserved for a flavor-of-the-month actress who had forgotten to put on her underwear.

  It was as they had gathered once more, as Jim and his team lined up to enter the woods again, that they received their first decent tip. A lady had called the hotline, said she’d seen a boy being led into Aurora Springs, a luxury lakeside retreat a hundred miles or so to the west of Tall Oaks. It could have come to nothing, another possible to add to the pile, but then the lady had said the boy had been holding a red cloth. Harry’s comforter. A detail they hadn’t released. A small team stayed back, helped coordinate the search of the woods. Jim headed west, siren blazing, helicopters overhead. They’d searched: for two weeks they’d combed every inch of the place. It was half-finished, a retreat for the wealthy, with much of it still a building site. The houses fanned out around a lake, two miles across. The divers had gone in. All were relieved when they found nothing. Frustrated, but relieved, Jim had headed back to Tall Oaks with more questions than answers.

  And then some twelve-year-old psychopath, in another unassuming town a hundred miles away, had taken a gun from his father’s unlocked cabinet and opened fire on the group of bullies that had made his life a misery, and a few of the teachers too. No sooner had it arrived than the circus left town again.

  Harry was relegated to the local news.

  Though all of this had been a distraction, it didn’t alter the fact that Jim had nothing else to go on. Other than the single green hair, forensics had found nothing of interest. Nothing. And there were no witnesses. No neighbor had heard anything—no screams, no car engine starting. Nothing. Granted, with the rain so fierce prints could have been washed clean, noise drowned, but still, it troubled him. But not nearly as much as the clown did. Jim had no doubt that Jess was telling the truth. Why had the clown called her name? Why wake her? Why dress as a clown? It could have been the work of a pro, a serial killer, but searches on the national database, and the heavy cooperation of the FBI, yielded no similar cases. Again, nothing.

  “So, I remembered something new about the night he was taken. It’s probably useless, like everything else was.”

  Jim sat up a little straighter, more to show that he was interested than because he thought she might have remembered something relevant. His eyes pleaded with her to give him something more to go on, to remember something he could use, something that would help him make some progress.

  “You know what I said, Jess. It all matter
s. All of it. Every single strand of information that you give us might eventually be something we can tie together.”

  “My last words to Harry, I remembered what they were.”

  He waited for her to continue, though didn’t reach for his pen just yet.

  “I used to sit on the eight steps that ran from his floor up to the kitchen. At first I sat by the door in his room, so he could see me. Then I moved just outside the door. Then it was the first step, and then slowly I’d climb up a step at a time, until a month or so after I started I was at the top. I read about the technique in a book, it’s called gradual retreat. And it worked. He started sleeping through the night and became able to settle himself if he woke. I used to keep the video monitor with me. I’d sit there and watch him fall asleep. It’s funny how kids are. We lie down, close our eyes and then drift off. They lie there with their eyes wide open. And they keep them open, like they’ve got matchsticks holding up the lids. And then, when they can’t keep it up anymore, when they’re so tired that they can’t even focus, they start to blink. And then the blinks get longer, and every time that they do those long blinks you wonder if they’ll open their eyes again. Until they don’t, and then they’re asleep.”

  He watched her speak, the way her lips moved, the way she ran a hand through her hair.

  “The week or so before that night he had started to bite his nails. I don’t know why. Maybe he fell out with one of his friends at the park, he wouldn’t say. That night I was tired, really tired. Michael had phoned and we’d had a huge argument. That’s when he said that I had changed since we had Harry. I was no fun anymore. That all I did was talk about Harry and all the cute things he did. He said that I stopped being Jess, the Jess that he fell in love with, and I just became a mom. Like that was the worst thing in the world.”

  Jim nodded again, waiting for her to tell him something he didn’t already know. That the whole town didn’t already know. The phone call with Michael had been leaked and Michael hadn’t come off well.

  “So I was tired, and I was in a bad mood. And I was sitting on the top step watching Harry start to long-blink, willing him to go to sleep because I just wanted to get into the tub with a glass of wine and try to relax. And then, just as I stood up and started to creep toward the kitchen, he opened his eyes, brought his hand to his mouth and started to bite his nails.” She was talking faster now, starting to struggle for breath between each word. Jim hated to watch her like this, had to fight the urge to take her into his arms and tell her that everything would be alright. That Harry would turn up soon, and he’d be fine. That if—and it was a big if—he turned up alive he wouldn’t be all fucked-up from the months he had spent away from his mother.

  “I wanted to scream at him to go to sleep. I wanted to walk away and pour my wine and run my bath. But I knew that if he called out for me and I wasn’t there it would break the trust. And then I’d have to go back to sitting in his room, and then climbing the steps one night at a time. And I couldn’t go back. So I called out to him. I said that only dirty little boys bite their nails. And then I saw him quickly snatch his hand away from his mouth and bury it under the sheet. Then his bottom lip started to shake. And I said, ‘Don’t you dare start crying. Go to sleep.’ And then he did the thing that kids never do. He closed his eyes tightly and tried to sleep. Tried to sleep even though there were tears streaming down his face. But he didn’t make a sound. He didn’t sob like he normally did. He was too scared. What if the Clown had been in the room then? What if he was biting his nails because he knew that the Clown was coming for him?”

  Jim walked around the desk and put his arm round her shoulders.

  She leaned forward, doubled over, her head down as she sobbed.

  8

  The Act

  Manny passed by the window for the fifth time, and then decided that he must have the gun belt in the window of Selwyn Antiques. Though it was part of a World War Two display, and wrapped around the torso of a mannequin dressed as a soldier, it was exactly the kind of thing that a gangster, like he was, should wear beneath his three-piece.

  He grabbed a table outside the Tearoom opposite, and sent Furat and Thalia inside to get drinks.

  “What do you want?” Furat called, from the doorway.

  “Milk . . . the ulcer,” Manny replied, holding his stomach.

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Better make it chocolate,” he called, then turned to Abe. “I want that belt, Abe. It’s a gangster’s belt, and old man Selwyn’s got it on an army doll, fucking idiot.”

  Manny looked at Abe. It was time to go to work.

  “Go in there and feel him out. Let him know that we’re the new muscle in this town and that we’re going to start collecting real soon. He might get a pass, for a while at least, if he were to give up that belt.”

  Abe scratched his head, then took his glasses off and wiped the lens on his shirt.

  “I don’t know, M. He’s a tough old guy. Can’t you go?”

  Manny closed his eyes and exhaled slowly. “I’m the Don. The boss. El Capitan.”

  “Isn’t that a mountain?”

  “I can’t go in there and try and get a free belt. It’ll fuck up our credibility. You think Joseph Colombo stole the furs with his own hand?”

  Abe met his eye, looked down and shook his head.

  Abe took a deep breath and stood. “What should I call myself?”

  “I’ve given it a lot of thought,” Manny said, his fingers steepled.

  “And?”

  “Skinny Goldenblatt.”

  Abe frowned. “What about Joey Merlino? He’s called Skinny Joey.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve seen his photograph and you’re much thinner than he is.”

  Abe walked slowly toward Selwyn Antiques.

  “Where’s Abe going?” Furat said, setting the drinks down.

  Manny reached for his sunglasses and put them on. “Business. Doesn’t concern a civilian like you.”

  Furat shook her head.

  Manny sipped his chocolate milk, then crossed his legs and smoothed his tie down.

  “Thalia’s inside, she’s playing with Mrs. Parker,” Furat said.

  “So, how you settling into Tall Oaks?”

  “It’s nice enough. Quiet though, after living in the city.”

  “My mother says that.”

  “What’s the school like?”

  “Full of assholes.”

  “Like most schools then.”

  He laughed. “No, it’s not too bad. Well, it won’t be for you.”

  “How come?”

  “You’re pretty.”

  She tried not to smile.

  “How come you left Chicago? Long way to move,” he said, suddenly embarrassed.

  “My father wanted to leave.”

  “And you?”

  “Not really. My sister is still there,” she said quietly, looking away.

  “Oh.”

  She stood. “I’ll check on Thal.”

  Manny turned to see Abe walking toward him, without the belt.

  “What happened?”

  “He said he didn’t want to sell it. But if he ever did, it would cost twenty dollars.”

  “Did you tell him about the protection money?”

  “I started to, and then he looked at me real funny so I walked out.”

  Manny lifted his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes. Abe needed a pep talk. Manny took another sip of chocolate milk.

  “It’s tough out there, Skinny. These people have had it easy for a long time, their whole lives, really. They don’t want to pay up, nobody does. But if we don’t get in there first and claim this town then someone else will. Like those fuckers from Blossom Creek, or the animals from Pleasant Hill. They’ve got their own gangsters there, people like us that saw what they wanted and had the balls to take it: visionaries. It’s virgin land. Like Bugsy Siegel saw Vegas when he looked at the desert, I see an empire when I look at Tall Oaks. And you know who’s sitting on top
of that empire?”

  Manny slapped Abe’s cheek gently.

  “We are, Skinny. We are,” he whispered. “Now walk across the street and make old man Selwyn an offer he can’t refuse.”

  Ten minutes later, Abe returned with the belt in his hand and a smile on his face.

  Manny grinned back at him.

  “How’d you do it?”

  “I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse,” Abe said, looking deep into Manny’s eyes and seeing the pride reflecting back at him.

  Manny stood, pulled him in for a hug, and then kissed both his cheeks.

  Gangsters.

  “By the way, you owe me thirty bucks,” Abe said, “for the belt.”

  Jared thought of the evening ahead and felt nervous: stomach-flipping and dry-mouth nervous. He always was before a date. The nerves clawed at his stomach, marched down his spine and shook his knees. He tried to control them, found that sometimes a drink or two helped. He couldn’t risk any more than that, in case it loosened his tongue. He hated the nerves. They served as a tacit reminder that he was just an actor, that it was all just an act.

  He hit the gym four times a week, always following the same routine. Twenty minutes on the running machine, trying desperately not to look at the spandex-clad ass of the woman in front of him—he didn’t want to be that guy. Twenty minutes of free weights, and then a final twenty minutes in the pool. He didn’t lift heavy weights, he didn’t want bulging muscles like some of the guys he saw in the locker rooms. Guys that enjoyed being stared at.

  He got his hair cut weekly at the salon in town, unisex, though he had yet to see another man in there. If he was honest, the cut was exactly the same as the one he used to get in the barber shop in Echo Bay, though double the price. It was as if replacing the word “barber” with “stylist” gave them free rein to add ten bucks to a simple trim. He paid it nonetheless, more fool him.

  Then there were his clothes. He had spent years cultivating a wardrobe to be proud of. He owned two sports coats; neither fitted, but close enough. He wore those on top of a polo shirt, Ralph Lauren, tucked into navy jeans, Hugo Boss, and always with Gucci loafers, which he purchased online. The result, to the untrained eye, was of a man of means. A man who took care of himself—someone confident, outgoing and stylish. The kind of man you could take to meet your friends and not be embarrassed by, a man equally at home in a fancy restaurant or sitting on your sofa with a glass of wine watching a movie.