The Day our Child Disappeared

THE DAY OUR CHILD DISAPPEARED ROBERT J. WALKER ALEXANDRIA CLARKE CONTENTS The Abduction Robert J. Walker Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Epilogue The Frozen Child Robert J. Walker Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Epilogue If She Only Knew Alexandria Clarke Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 About the Author THE ABDUCTION ROBERT J. WALKER 1 Jackson groaned softly as he shifted in his seat, his legs and lower back aching with a dull, persistent throb. The relentless muted roar of the aircraft’s engines felt like a miner’s drill slowly boring its blunt tip into the depths of his ear canals. He yawned, crushed by exhaustion but unable to drift into any sort of slumber longer than fitful periods of fifteen or twenty minutes. “Man, I hate flying,” he muttered under his breath, checking his watch for what felt like the fiftieth or sixtieth time and noting with immense frustration that only seventeen minutes had passed since he had last checked his timepiece. It was almost four in the morning, so just over an hour before the Boeing touched down. Jackson couldn’t wait. After almost six hours shoved into this cramped economy seat, he was ready to sell his soul for a few moments of rest on a soft, wide mattress. Everyone on the plane was asleep except for him, it seemed. Well, almost everyone. Movement in the periphery of his vision caught his attention. He turned to his left and saw one of the young kids in the center row of the airplane, the middle child of a family of five, getting up to go to the bathroom. Jackson turned his face back to his screen after this minor distraction and resumed scrolling listlessly through the movie titles on offer. He finally picked something he was vaguely interested in, put it on, and leaned back, praying for the last chunk of the flight to fly by swiftly. When the plane finally touched down shortly after five in the morning, nobody knew that a major crime had been committed on board the aircraft, least of all the victims of that crime. Jackson, a twenty-two-year-old college student from Texas, had no idea that he was possibly the only witness to what had taken place. What he had briefly described in the gloomy half-light of the sleeping airplane hadn’t seemed at all like anything even vaguely criminal. However, a couple minutes after the hundred or so passengers had disembarked from the Boeing and were waiting to collect their baggage, a bloodcurdling scream roused them from their half-asleep, zombielike stupor. Jackson, who was almost falling asleep on his feet next to the baggage carousel, got such a fright that he almost lost his footing, for the piercing howl exploded from only a few feet away from him. Startled, with his heart suddenly pounding and his eyes wide open, he spun around. “My baby! Someone’s taken my baby! This… this isn’t my child! This is a stranger! I don’t know who this child is! Someone’s taken my son!” Jackson could barely make sense of what was going on. The woman doing this hysterical, almost-nonsensical screaming was the mother of the family of five who had been seated across from him on the plane. The father’s face was alabaster-pale, drained utterly of color, and both he and his wife were staring at the middle child of the family—a boy of around five years old—with a look of complete shock and horror on their faces. The boy’s older sibling, a girl around eight, was also staring at him as if he was some sort of monster out of her nightmares, while the only member of the family who didn’t seem completely rocked to their core was the baby in the woman’s arms, who was gurgling contentedly. “Who… who are you?” the father suddenly screamed at the five-year-old boy, who was swaying groggily on his feet, blinking in the harsh fluorescent light of the baggage claim area and looking both terrified and confused as he emerged from what had seemingly been a deep slumber. Meanwhile, Jackson and the other passengers were gathering in a circle around this unfolding scene of the bizarre and unsettling drama. The father, a large, heavyset man in his forties with a grizzled beard and close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, suddenly lunged for the five-year-old boy, picking him up by his shoulders and shaking him violently. “Who the hell are you? Where’s Wilbur? What have you done with my son?” he roared, spittle flying from his mouth. “Where’s my son?” wailed the wife, a pale, slender redheaded woman in her late thirties. “This can’t be happening! Who is this child? Where’s my Wilbur? Where’s my baby boy?” Jackson didn’t know what was happening and was as confused as he was shocked, but he couldn’t stand to see a child being abused, no matter what had happened.