Харлан Кобен - The Boy from the Woods

Wilde turned to look at her, but she wouldn’t look back at him.

“Don’t know what?” he asked.

“How long you were out there.”

“Not exactly, no.”

“It could have been days.”

Wilde didn’t know what to make of this. “What are you talking about? Your son and I played for years.”

“Years.” Hester made a scoffing sound. “Come on.”

“What?”

“You were two little boys. You think you could have kept a secret like that for years?”

“That’s what we did.”

“That’s what you think you did. You know how time slows down when you’re little. It could have been days, maybe weeks, but years?”

“I have memories, Hester.”

“I don’t doubt that. But don’t you think maybe it could have been just a few days’ worth? You always say you have no memory of any time before you were in the woods. So maybe — just hear me out, okay? — maybe something happened to you, something so traumatic that you blocked everything from before. Maybe, since you’ve retained nothing about your life from before this traumatic event, those memories are now magnified and so what may have been a few days seem like years.”

That wasn’t what happened. Wilde knew that.

“Hikers spotted me months and even years earlier.”

“They said they spotted a little boy. Might have been you, might have been someone else.”

But Wilde wasn’t buying it. He remembered breaking into homes — lots of them. He remembered traveling miles. He remembered that red banister and those screams.

“It doesn’t matter,” Wilde said. “Even if you’re right, no one looked for that boy.”

“That’s why you need to find out the truth — to feel whole.”

Wilde made a face. “Did you really say ‘to feel whole’?”

“Not my finest moment, I admit. But you know what I mean. You have issues with intimacy and connection, Wilde. That’s not a secret. It doesn’t take a genius to see it all began with this abandonment. So maybe if you got some understanding of what caused it, of what really happened—”

“I’d be more normal?”

“You know what I mean.”

“It won’t change anything.”

“That’s probably so,” Hester said. “Then again, there’s another reason.”

“That being?”

“I’m curious as hell,” Hester said, throwing up her hands. “Aren’t you?”

Wilde checked his watch. “Fifteen minutes to the ransom deadline. Let’s go find the Maynards.”

The Maynards sat in the same two burgundy wingback chairs. Not surprisingly, they both looked stressed to the max. Their skin was drawn, complexions ashen, their eyes bloodshot. Somewhat surprisingly, they were both smartly dressed in expensive couture. Dash, sporting tan slacks with a crease that could slice deli meat, did the talking.

“Please fill us in on anything new,” Dash said to Wilde.

Wilde did his best. They both listened without moving, almost as though they were trying to stay perfectly still and not show anything or maybe, more likely, they were just working hard to hold it together and figured that if any part of them cracked, that would be it, they’d totally burst open. When Wilde finished, Dash and Delia turned to one another. Delia nodded once.

“Delia and I have talked this to death. We’ve reviewed the evidence. We’ve tried to map out a timeline of what our son did last night. We’ve talked to both of you extensively, and we’ve bounced around the various theories we’ve heard.”

He reached out and took his wife’s hand.

“The truth is, we don’t know whether this is a kidnapping or a hoax or something else entirely. Neither, it seems, do either of you.”

“I don’t,” Hester said. “Wilde?”

“Impossible to know for certain.”

“Exactly,” Dash said. “Which is why, after extensive discussion, Delia and I have decided that the best course of action, the safest course, is to send the tapes. We can’t send them all. The file would be too large, plus, well, how would anyone know how many hours we have? I don’t even know.”

“Why do you have so much footage?” Hester asked.

“It’s always been my way,” Dash said.

“He’s a documentarian first,” Delia added.

Wilde nodded, looked about the room, then decided to go for it. “Is that why you’re taping us now?”

Silence. Then Dash: “What are you talking about?”

Wilde took out his phone. “I have a network scanner app that detects if there are listening devices or cameras in a room. Right now, it’s spotting networks and ISPs that can only be explained by the fact that we have cameras on us.”

Dash leaned back and crossed his legs. “I’m a documentarian. I record our lives as well. I don’t think I’ll ever use it—”

“Do we have to do this now?” Delia snapped.

“No,” Wilde said. “You’re right. Let’s concentrate on the task at hand.”

It had all been a bluff. There were indeed apps for scanning or mapping out networks and detecting hidden cameras. People were using them to make sure, for example, that Airbnb hosts weren’t spying on them. But Wilde didn’t have one on his phone.

It was five minutes until the 4:00 p.m. deadline. A laptop was set up on the oak coffee table between them. Dash hit the link that had been sent to them before. A screen came with a countdown clock indicating the link would be live in four minutes and forty-seven, forty-six, forty-five seconds.

“My team will try to trace down the ISP when we go live,” Wilde said, “but I’m told that even a simple VPN will prevent us from getting anything significant.”

They silently watched the clock go under the four-minute mark.

“So what’s on the tapes?” Hester asked.

“Outtakes from the show,” Dash said. “Behind-the-scenes stuff. The writers’ room where we hashed out ideas. Stuff like that.”

“Uh-huh,” Hester said. “In the ransom email, they asked you to upload the ‘truly damaging’ tape to a special folder.”

Hester waited. No one spoke.

“Are you going to do that?”

Delia said, “Yes.”

“What’s on it?”

“We don’t see how that’s relevant to you.”

“Excuse me?”

“We don’t want to share any of this. We are being forced to for the safety of our son.”

“So you’re willing to share it with an anonymous kidnapper, but not your attorney?”

“We see no reason to show it to anyone,” Dash said. “But as Mr. Wilde here pointed out, these people didn’t ask for a public release. So perhaps they’ll keep it to themselves, perhaps not. Either way, this is not a confidence we want to betray, even to you. We are betraying it, if you will, for the safety of our son.”

Hester looked at Wilde and shook her head. Then she turned back and glared at both of the Maynards. “I hope you two know what you’re doing.”

When the clock clicked down to zero, Dash Maynard refreshed the page. The page was simple. There were two yellow boxes. One was marked: VIDEOS-UPLOAD, the other: SPECIAL FOLDER-UPLOAD.

Under them, the instructions said:

Click both links. We will not communicate with you until the videos start uploading.

Whoever was behind this, Wilde said, was good. No negotiation, no back-and-forth.

Dash let loose a long breath. Delia placed a comforting, familiar hand on his shoulder.

“Here goes,” Dash said.

He clicked first the special folder button, then the videos one. The files began to upload. A minute passed. Then another. Finally, a new icon appeared. An envelope. Dash moved the cursor over it and clicked it.

We will need to review the files.

If you did as we requested, your son will be returned to you tomorrow at exactly noon. We will contact you with his location.