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

by Chris Whitaker

  “SLEEP. NOW.”

  He clamped his eyes shut, desperately hoping the tears wouldn’t fall.

  Jerry stayed perfectly still, the kind of perfectly still that had come with seventeen months of practice. He wasn’t far off the ground, but with his weight on the branch, and the difficulty he had in getting on to it in the first place, he was afraid to move, though that wasn’t the only reason he was afraid to move. He could see the boys by the clearing: the same boys that came into the PhotoMax and laughed at him; the same boys that threw eggs at him.

  He tried to stop his hands from shaking.

  He gripped the Hasselblad tightly. The case felt smooth against his fingers, the strap soft around his neck. He tried not to think of how much it cost, or how much Max loved it.

  He’d taken some test shots with his own camera, but all he had been able to see was a blurry collection of the darkest shades of green. But the Hasselblad, with its advanced optical system and color rendering, made the images look like they had been taken in daylight. If he was ever going to get a picture of the red-billed cuckoo then it would have to be with the Hasselblad. He still didn’t know for sure if the bird existed. He believed it did, because he believed Lisa’s dad, who sounded just like his dad: a man so lost in his own mind that on the rare occasion he found his way out it was a time to be savored. Jerry’s dad had told him he loved him exactly once in his life too, after the Vikings beat the 49ers in the 1987 playoffs. Jerry held onto that memory tightly, and it had helped him when his father said awful things to him, and his mother just laughed—it had helped him remember that deep down they loved him.

  He stared at the boys, then closed his eyes when he felt the sneeze tickle his nose. Hay fever. He clenched his teeth tightly and tried to wriggle it away. But then it came. And it was loud. And then there was laughter and pointing, and he knew they wouldn’t leave him alone after that.

  The first rock they threw was no bigger than a coin; the second, the size of his fist. It struck him hard on the shoulder.

  He fell through the air and landed heavily enough to have the wind knocked from him. He gasped for air. Then he saw another rock hit the tree beside him. So he clambered to his feet and he ran.

  He ran as fast as he could; ran until the trees nestled so tightly together that the branches tore at his chest and face. But still he pushed through them. He ran so far and so deep into the forest that he could barely see the moonlight.

  And then, when he could no longer hear them behind him, when he heard the sky roar above, and when he looked down and saw the cracked case of the Hasselblad, he sat down on the leaves and began to cry.

  Harry woke suddenly, ripped from a dreamless sleep at an hour when darkness still smothered his room.

  It took him a little while to focus. And then he saw it.

  Sitting by the window, in his rocking chair.

  He sat up and rubbed his eyes to make sure he wasn’t imagining it, and then he smiled.

  It was his father. And he was wearing the clown mask; the mask that he had worn when he dressed up for his third birthday party; the mask that Harry made him wear whenever he came to visit, because he loved it when his father became the Clown.

  “Daddy,” Harry said.

  The Clown put his fingers to his lips.

  Harry knew he’d better be quiet so as not wake his mother. She would be mad if he did.

  “Daddy,” Harry whispered.

  The Clown nodded.

  Harry grinned. He tried not to make a sound as the Clown walked over to him and picked him up.

  The Clown put his fingers to his lips again as he put Harry’s coat and sneakers on him. Though it was still warm outside, Harry could hear the storm, the rain lashing against his window and the soft rumble of distant thunder.

  He had to bite his lip to keep from laughing when the Clown opened the door.

  They were leaving. His father had come to take him away.

  Though the Clown had carried a big umbrella, Harry was wet through by the time they reached the cover of the tall oak trees.

  It was dark but the Clown had a flashlight.

  When they were deep in the woods, only the occasional raindrop making it through the dense cover, the Clown stopped and Harry stood shivering beside him, the mud soft beneath his feet. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness he could see the oak tree that had fallen, the huge hole its roots had left in the earth. He could also see a shovel, lying in the leaves.

  “Daddy, where are we going?” he asked.

  But his voice was buried under a crackle of thunder.

  “Daddy,” he said, this time quieter, because Daddy was taking his mask off.

  Only it wasn’t Daddy after all.

  Jess looked down at Harry. He looked small. And he looked scared. She crouched down to his level, her knees sinking into the mud.

  She wiped his tears away.

  “Don’t cry, Harry. I’m doing this for us, so that Daddy will come back to us.”

  She rubbed his shoulders, trying to stop him shaking.

  “I need you to be brave for me. Can you be brave?”

  He shook his head.

  “You can be brave. You can, Harry. When Daddy hears that you’re missing he’ll realize how much he loves you, and how much he needs his family. He’ll come back to us then, Harry, and we can all be together again. Would you like that—if Daddy comes home?”

  He looked up at her, his eyes wide and sad.

  He nodded.

  She stroked his cheek.

  “Daddy says that Mommy is different because of you; that she’s not the same Mommy that he used to love. So if you’re not there, just for a little while, then Daddy will love Mommy again. Would you like that? If Daddy loves Mommy again?”

  He looked down at the ground, his tears falling into the mud, and he nodded his head.

  “And then we’ll come and get you, Harry, and we’ll be a family.”

  Jess shone the flashlight into the deep hole. “Mommy’s made you a little camp. That’s what I’ve been doing, when I go out running at night. I’ve made you a little camp in the woods. You’ll be safe down there.”

  He looked up at her. “Will you stay with me?”

  She smiled at him. “Mommy will come back and get you soon, when Daddy comes home. I’ve left food down there for you. And you can keep the flashlight. And there’s your sleeping bag too. The one that you took when we went camping, remember?”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll cover it over, you’ll be safe and dry until I come get you. What’s the matter, Harry? Why are you still crying?”

  “I don’t want to stay in the woods. I want to come home.”

  She grabbed his shoulders roughly.

  “There is no home. Look at me. Harry, look at me. There is no home without Daddy.”

  He started to sob, his cries loud and piercing.

  She shook him.

  “Harry, stop crying. You see, this is why Mommy had to wear the mask, because you’re always fucking crying.”

  The cries grew louder, and soon the tears were joined by screams; screams that were so loud that they made her ears ring.

  “HARRY,” she shouted at him, struggling to make herself heard over the screams, and the thunder, and the wind that was starting to whip up the leaves.

  He had his eyes closed, closed so tight that his soft skin wrinkled around them.

  The screams seemed to run together—not letting up for a second. They raced into her ears and fought their way through layers of confusion and exhaustion and then they rattled her brain and flashed red in front of her eyes.

  “HARRY.”

  Her own scream was easily swept aside by the soaring wave of his.

  She shook him harder but he just kept screaming and sobbing.

  She felt her breath coming fast. The fierce anger that had become so normal to her since Michael left coursed through her veins, burning hot, making its way to the surface of her skin and flushing her.

  “H
ARRY.”

  She shook him again, long past the point of worrying if she was hurting him.

  She tried to prize his eyes open with her fingers, but that made the screaming even louder.

  And then, reaching through a thick fog of rage, her hands found the flashlight, its steel case cool against her red hot touch, and she brought it down on his head.

  And then the screaming stopped.

  Because Harry Monroe was dead.

  Jess lay on his body for a long time. Not crying, not screaming—just lying there. When she finally sat up, she looked down at him and felt no remorse. That would come later, when she realized the cold enormity of what she had just done. But for now, she felt nothing.

  As she picked up his small body and held him for the last time, she was lost in her own confused thoughts. She didn’t know whether the moment really existed, or whether she was caught up in another nightmare.

  And if it wasn’t a nightmare, if it had really happened, she didn’t know whether she would ever have the strength to live another day.

  As she softly kissed his head, she didn’t know if Michael would come back.

  And as she knelt in the mud and said a last prayer for her son, she didn’t know how she would be able to breathe without them in her life.

  At that moment there were lots of things that Jessica Monroe didn’t know. Like the fact that the last flash of lightning hadn’t been lightning at all.

  It had been the flash of a camera.

  30

  The End

  Jess stood by the clearing. The air was still, the storm on its way. She rubbed the muscles in her neck. She closed her eyes, found the memories troublingly sharp now. She’d made it further than she might have had she not believed he would come back. It had been that thought alone that kept her from giving up—the thought that they would one day be reunited. She coped during the days: she searched, she ran. But when darkness fell she heard the screams, so she sought heavier distraction.

  She might have been able to go on, for a while longer at least, but not now, now that she had found the papers in her mother’s bureau, hidden from her eyes and locked away.

  He wasn’t coming back. They wouldn’t be reunited.

  Michael was filing for divorce.

  She’d worked hard over the past months, to keep the story alive, to keep herself visible. She’d kept Jim close, she’d visited the station often, keeping track of the investigation.

  The pressure on Michael had been intense; she had done all she could to keep it that way. The media had quickly turned him into a pariah, a man that didn’t even have the good grace to support his wife through the most arduous of times. Jess had anonymously pointed them in the direction of the women he’d had affairs with; the kind of women that eagerly sold their stories. She’d knocked on every door in Tall Oaks, slowly watching sympathy turn to anger, until he was shunned by the whole town. She’d been invited in by his neighbors, cried out her eyes while they comforted her—neighbors that would no longer even say hello to him. Jess knew his latest girlfriend, Cindy Collins, had now left him, unable to cope with the hatred she felt whenever they emerged in public together, or the suspicion that swirled round them after Jess had called in the Aurora Springs tip. There were rumors that Michael had been involved, that he’d done something to Harry. She fanned their flames long enough to see his clients pull every cent from his hedge fund, keen to distance themselves from him. Her money was all that kept him afloat. Yet still, after all of this, he hadn’t taken the easy option. He hadn’t come back to her.

  She reached for her cell phone and dialed his number.

  “Did you know? I wonder if you knew. That’s why you didn’t help search for him; that’s why you didn’t help me. Was it because I did it before? All those times I told you Harry was sick, just so you’d come over and see me? That time I told you he’d run away? Have you been grieving alone now that so much time has passed? Why didn’t you tell Jim that I’d lied before? Was it because of the money? Was it because you still loved me? Did you want to protect me? They all think you left because you didn’t care about us, but I know that you did, in your own way. I couldn’t just let you walk away. I had to try and fight. I love you too much, Michael. I think that’s always been the problem.”

  She looked up at the tall oak trees. They rose high above her, casting a shadow she stepped under gratefully. She knew the woods well—she’d run the trails since she was a teen, when Dr. Stone had first told her that exercise might help. It did, though not as much as the pills he prescribed.

  She turned and walked slowly into the forest.

  When she was deep, when she’d walked so far her legs ached and the trees closed in around her, she left the trail behind and used her compass to find the fallen oak tree. She gazed up at the base, at the clumped roots, ten feet high.

  She kneeled on the spot where she had buried him, her knees on a bed of leaves.

  She closed her eyes and cursed herself for it . . . for what she had done.

  And she cursed Dr. Stone for being so easily fooled, so easily bought, for believing that she had her life under control again.

  She cursed Jim for falling in love with her: a love that she knew well; a love that made you do unspeakable things all in its name; a love that made him avoid the questions he should have been asking, always going easy on her, always protecting.

  And she cursed her mother, for not taking Harry away when she knew how much she was struggling. Alison had seen the marks on his body, marks she should have known couldn’t possibly have come from falling from the statue in the park. She knew Jess was too scared to let him climb it. But she didn’t know she was scared because a trip to the emergency room would lead to a series of follow-up questions she couldn’t possibly provide an answer to.

  And finally, she cursed God, for making her this way. For making her capable of hurting those that she loved and driving them away. Capable of feeling the same kind of love that Jim felt for her, only a hundred times more blinding.

  She would tell Him when she saw Him—God—after she found her Harry and made him love her again. Because she was on her way to them now. Now that she had taken the gun that she had found in Michael’s desk drawer; the gun that she held to her head.

  When she pulled the trigger she hoped to see a flash of light, a last image of Harry and Michael. But when she fell backward, and she caught a glimpse of the reddening sky through the tall oak trees, she saw the Clown, and he was racing away from her eyes, moving so fast and so far that he disappeared completely.

  And then she felt the first drops of rain on her face as the heat finally broke.

  31

  The Strong One

  The summer passed by in a blur of news crews and noise.

  They found Harry Monroe’s body buried directly under the spot where they found his mother. The site was located a mile from the nearest trail, and three miles from the edge of the search area. Harry was buried deep, in a tract of woodland prone to flooding. The ground appeared undisturbed. All facts that had been of little comfort to Jim.

  As word spread to the people of Tall Oaks there were tears of unimaginable grief for the little boy who had died such a tragic death.

  Every single resident attended his funeral in a show of such unbridled love that the previously silent Michael Monroe broke down in tears and cried for his son, for not doing more, for not protecting him, for not changing the way he was, and most of all, because it was too late for his tears to make a difference.

  Jim put the last of the tapes into the machine, lit a cigarette and pressed play. He’d listened to them all again, in order, the pieces slotting together to form a picture he struggled to look at.

  He skipped forward an hour—there were lots of breaks, lots of tears.

  “I didn’t know he was dead. I just thought she was holding him. I mean . . . with the rain and the dark. I didn’t know the storm would drive the red-billed cuckoo out of its nest. I didn’t know what I’
d captured in the background.”

  “And when you did?”

  “I showed it to my mother.”

  “I can guess what she said.”

  “She needed me. She said I’d get into trouble. There’d be no one to care for her. But . . .”

  “But?”

  “But then she sent it anyway, and I don’t even know why. I like to think that it was because she loved me, because she knew how much it meant to me to do the right thing. I knew I could’ve tried to get it back. I could have phoned the magazine. But I didn’t really want to. I knew it was the right thing to do.”

  “And the camera? The Hasselblad? We found it in your dark room.”

  “I wanted to give it back, but Max came in early the next day, because Lisa called him and told him about Harry. I was going to explain, to pay to get it fixed. But he was so mad. He was pacing up and down, his face all red. He punched the wall. He made a hole in it. And he had already called the police. And the town was crazy, with Harry.”

  He could still hear the fear in Jerry’s voice: the pain, the anguish.

  “I know I should have given it to you.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “I couldn’t lose my job, Jim. I had to pay for her medication.”

  “I get it.”

  “I saw Jessica Monroe. I thought that she must have known where he was. And she’s the only one that really needed to know. I mean, she’s the only one that really cared. She did what she did. I know that now. It can’t be undone. It can’t be taken back. I wish it could, more than anything, I wish it could.”

  He stopped the tape, ejected it, then slipped it into his pocket.

  He glanced up at the clock, then walked out of the station.

  It was pleasant out, still warm but the storm had killed the searing heat. He headed in the direction of St. Mary’s, stopping only to drop the tape into the trash.

  Jerry could see the cemetery outside, through the open door.

  He sat alone.