Stranger in the Woods: A tense psychological thriller

by Anni Taylor

  Luke’s phone rang—it was his mother. I could tell by the sudden change in his tone. Even though she was staying with us, she called him several times a day.

  “Tommy, do you want an ice-cream?” Luke said as soon as he’d finished the call.

  Tommy thought for a second, his chubby fist tightening on the boat, then shook his head.

  “Okay, well, I’m going to get one.” Luke dropped the phone back into his shirt pocket.

  I shielded my eyes from the sun. “Just get one scoop in Tommy’s.”

  “He just said he didn’t want one.”

  “He thinks he’ll have to leave the water to get ice-cream. Of course he wants one.”

  Luke laughed his booming laugh, shaking his head at Tommy’s toddler logic. His voice carried, and people glanced at us, smiling. Luke always laughed easily. It was one of the things I loved about him, about us. His easy-going nature had become so intertwined with me, I could take credit for it and bask in it.

  A couple of mothers nearby gave their children grabby hugs and kisses on their foreheads. Luke’s feel-good nature was infectious. As he strolled away, the mothers watched him, but I watched them. They wore long cargo shorts and long pastel T-shirts and pastel hats. Their husbands were dressed in the same outfits as their tiny sons. They were nothing like Luke and I, in their pastel tutti-frutti. We were the café set in our greys and blacks and neutrals.

  But as I watched the tutti-fruttis, something was wrong. A sadness crept inside me that I didn’t understand, draining the saturation from the day and giving a leaden quality to the air. Like something had just been snatched away from me.

  No, that’s not right. I imagined I felt that way.

  I was a trained actor, and actors sometimes slipped into roles without realising what they were doing. (Okay, so I’d only sometimes been a paid actor, but it had still been my profession.)

  I blinked as I turned back to the water canals, adjusting my eyes to the sun’s sudden glare as the day turned from grey to yellow again.

  Tommy wasn’t in the same spot.

  My stomach dropped, as it had a hundred times before when I’d momentarily lost sight of him. He moved like his feet were on wheels.

  But he was never too far away.

  I raked my gaze along the snaking paths of the canals.

  He wasn’t anywhere.

  Jumping to my feet, I padded around the edges of the water park, searching. Having no idea which direction to head in, I looked for clues as to what had caused him to wander off. It’d have to be something pretty damned compelling to tear him away from the water.

  Some other kid’s toy? A puppy?

  “Tommy,” I called.

  There must have been a worried edge to my voice—one of the T-shirted mothers looked my way with sympathetic eyes.

  “Tommy! Daddy’s got your ice-cream!” If he was accidentally-on-purpose ignoring me, that would make him come running.

  But Tommy didn’t produce himself. How could he be so far away that he was out of earshot? I only looked away from him for a moment. Didn’t I? Didn’t I?

  I calmed myself. He must be absorbed in something. That’s all. Too busy in his own little world. But a wave of panic careened into my island of calm.

  Tommy! Tommy! Tommy!

  I was running now, calling out frantically. No longer caring about looking like a crazy woman who couldn’t keep watch over one small boy while other women were happily herding tribes of kids about.

  A pale, red-haired woman with a baby on her hip touched my arm—one of the T-shirt women. “I’ll help you look. He’s about two, right? What’s he wearing?”

  “He was wearing blue,” I said, both relieved and shocked. The fact that someone was worried enough to offer help meant that things had gone a step further. Tommy was lost.

  “All blue? A hat?”

  I nodded. “Blue shorts and T-shirt. Yes, a hat.” Which hat? The one I’d bought from a fair last month. “It’s blue as well. With a giraffe on the front.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Tommy. It’s Tommy.”

  She hurried across to the T-shirt brigade, most of them with young children and babies. “We’ll see if we can spot him,” she called back. Three sets of pram-wielding persons moved off in different directions.

  My heart sank. There were hundreds of little boys here that looked just like Tommy, unless you were close enough and low enough to look under his hat. How were strangers going to find him when I couldn’t spot him myself?

  A thought jumped into my mind, and I grabbed hold of it. Maybe Tommy tried to follow his father. Yes, that was the only explanation.

  I headed towards the cafés. Luke was ambling back to the water park, laden with ice-cream and drinks. Without Tommy.

  Luke stiffened like a pole at the sight of my anxious face and the sight of people moving about in unexpected patterns behind me, gently calling Tommy’s name. It was instantly clear what the problem was.

  “Where’s Tommy?” he asked reflexively.

  “Luke! Tommy just wandered off!” Everything was okay now. Luke would find Tommy.

  “What do you mean he just wandered off?” He stared down at his cardboard tray of ice-cream for a moment, as though he didn’t know what to do with it. “Where was the last place you saw him?”

  The way Luke was staring at me in fear and disbelief caused a stabbing feeling in my stomach that reached all the way to my throat. “Exactly where he was when you left.”

  “He’s probably still there somewhere.” Luke made his way back to the water canals. I followed, glad to have some sort of direction.

  Luke stopped and stared at the spot where we’d last seen Tommy, like it should have an arrow pointing to where Tommy had gone. He hurried around the canals, searching. His eyes filled with a hazy panic. “Fuck. What if he headed for the harbour? To sail his boat?” Dumping the cardboard tray of ice-cream and drinks in the trash, he bounded away.

  My breath stilled. I didn’t think of the harbour. It didn’t even enter my head that he could get that far. What if the whole time I’d been looking for him, he’d been heading in a beeline for the water?

  I trailed after Luke—Luke already far ahead of me.

  But there was no tufty-haired Tommy anywhere along the long line of concrete steps that edged the harbour. I scanned the surface of the water alongside Luke.

  “Call the police,” Luke called to me. “I’m going to keep looking.”

  I fumbled in my pockets, searching for my phone. Neither my fingers nor my mind was working. I couldn’t find the damned phone. Terror roared inside me.

  The red-haired woman moved in front of my face again. “Excuse me, I just called the police for you. I hope that’s okay.”

  Something in the way she said that and the guarded look in her eyes made me think it was me she was concerned about. But I was imagining that, surely. I was a responsible parent. As responsible as she was for the red-haired baby on her hip.

  “Thank you,” I breathed, although I wanted her to go away—her and her doppelgänger baby who was staring at me reproachfully.

  It seemed wrong that a stranger had taken it into their hands to call the police before I did. Tommy was my child. And the more that strangers pushed their way in, the farther away Tommy got from me.

  By the time the police arrived, a frantic half hour had gone by.

  Luke and I met up again. He handed me his phone. “It’s Saskia.” He hadn’t answered it yet—there was just her name flashing on the screen.

  My mind grabbed onto yet another desperate possibility. Had Saskia found him just wandering around and she was calling to tell me?

  “Phoebe,” she said in an excited voice. “I couldn’t get you on your phone, so I tried Luke’s. There’s an art exhibition you have to see with me!”

  “Sass, I—”

  “What’s wrong?” she interrupted.

  “Tommy.”

  “My God, what? What happened?”

&nbs
p; “He’s missing, Sass. He’s just gone. We’re at the playground at

  Darling Harbour.”

  “I’m there.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Tommy was still missing.

  Less than a minute after that point, not only Saskia—but Pria and Kate—were rushing up to me. The whole gang. I had no idea how Sass had been able to rally them and herself so quickly.

  My friends’ faces were blanched with worry. They all loved Tommy. Sass, with her strawberry-blond waves spilling over her red city jacket. Kate, with her impossibly straight brown hair and gym clothing form-fitting her angular model’s body. Pria, with her warm dark eyes and shoulder-length blond hair and soft green dress. Sass worked for a company a couple of blocks from here, organising home renovation shows. Kate did brochure modelling but was mostly at home with her three-year-old twins. Pria, a single mother with a daughter, worked from a home office as a counsellor.

  I was too numb to feel their sympathetic hugs, oblivious even to the December heat that had me complaining earlier.

  Pria held my arms, her brown eyes crinkled and anxious beneath her thick fringe. “Honey, what can we do to help?”

  “Pray,” I said, my voice cracking.

  “We’ll spread out.” Kate tied her hair into a messy knot. “Maybe he’s scared and hiding.” She nodded firmly. “That’s what my twins used to do at that age.”

  Sass whipped out her phone. “I’m calling the media.”

  “The what?” I frowned. “What would—”

  “It’s my job to know this stuff,” Saskia told me, her tone brisk and efficient. “If you need help in a hurry, call the media. Every minute counts, right? Well, we’re going to blast this across Sydney. Everyone in this city is going to know there’s a little boy missing, and they’re going to be on the lookout.” She stopped for a breath. “Trust me.”

  While Saskia called up her media contacts, Pria and Kate raced away. I noticed then that Luke’s business partner—Rob Lynch—was talking with Luke.

  Somehow, it panicked me that everyone was rushing down here. No one was treating this casually. No one was saying, never mind, Phoebe, he’ll turn up in a little bit. This was serious. And everyone knew it was serious.

  Fifteen minutes later, Tommy was still missing. He’d been missing an entire hour. An army of people had joined the search, moving in swarms. The voices of strangers, male and female, called Tommy’s name. My son’s name. Until I wanted to scream at them:

  You’re going to frighten him. Stop yelling his name. Just . . . find him.

  But they couldn’t find him.

  Because he was no longer here to be found.