Father to Son
He finished reading the letter, crumpled it up and threw it into the middle of his desk. The object that the letter had been wrapped around rolled across the teak surface like a red, sticky toffee. He put his head in his hands and sighed.
It was the first communication Harvey Kline had received concerning his son’s health and whereabouts since the boy had received his five million dollar trust-fund inheritance after turning twenty one, and that had been eighteen months ago. Thomas hadn’t even written this particular letter himself, someone else had written it for him. Well, written wasn’t exactly the right word as the communication was made up of printed words cut from a newspaper and pasted onto the page. Ransom note was a better description.
The ‘letter’ had been put together for Thomas by the Action Front For The Poor – AFFTP. It didn’t surprise Harvey that the group hadn’t been able to make their name into decent acronym because, judging by the ragged words on the page, they weren’t even talented enough to cut up a newspaper properly.
Harvey didn’t need to look at the scruffy note a second time to remember what it said. Apparently, Thomas was currently enjoying the Action Front’s hospitality, but was very keen to return home before the hospitality ran out. Most of all, they were very keen to point out that Thomas was really with them and that he was really still alive. To this end, they had enclosed one of Thomas’s fingers – the sticky red toffee-like object that was sitting in the middle of his desk. It was the boy’s little finger, chosen to give the impression of some sort of humanity on the part of his kidnappers who pointed out that they could have chosen a larger finger if the mood had taken them. The digit was nicely presented in crepe wrapping paper with a silk bow tied around the joint. It was the first present Harvey had ever received from Thomas. The letter finished with a polite request (possibly because they couldn’t find any expletives in the newspapers) for twenty million dollars and no involvement from the police (they would know), otherwise Thomas would be dropped into the sea encased in concrete. There was no return address.
Harvey leaned back in his chair and looked out at the magnificent view across the city that his office at the top of the Kline Building afforded him. Thomas was out there somewhere.
“Harvey, what are you going to do?”
He turned his attention to the men who were gathered around his desk – Ed Tyne, his lawyer; Arty Carmichael, his head accountant; and Taylor Brubacker, his private doctor. He had no qualms about sharing his dilemma having known each of them for more than twenty years. They were as much friends as they were personal advisors.
“Do I have a choice?”
Ed shrugged. “I think you do. You’ve got to contact the police Harvey.”
“I can’t. You saw what it said in the letter. They’re watching us. They’ve got an inside contact and they’ll know if I go to the authorities.”
“It could be a bluff,” Ed replied.
“Ed’s right,” said Arty. “You’ve got to involve the police. For one thing, you’ve got no guarantee that once you pay up they won’t just kill him anyway, and for another, you can ill afford the ransom money.”
“That’s not really an issue, Arty,” Harvey replied.
“No, wait, hear me out,” Arty persisted. “I want you to know that if you pay this demand you’ll be completely bankrupt. You will be on skid row without a dime to your name. It goes without saying that you will have to sell your home, close all your savings accounts and cash in your pensions and your medical insurance and put everything you own of any value up for sale. You’d have so little you’d probably even have to cancel the regular flower order to Rebecca and Abby’s grave. I don’t like to have to say that, but it’s true. It could mean that you get your son back Harvey, but equally it could mean that he still dies and you end up eating at a soup kitchen this Christmas. I just want you to be aware of that before you make your decision because it’s hard enough living on the edge when you’re used to it, but even harder if you’re not. Especially hard when you consider who it is we’re talking about.”
Harvey held up a hand. “Yes, it could mean all of that, but it’s a chance I have to take. I’d never be able to live with myself if anything happened and I hadn’t done everything in my power to try to save him.”
“But Harvey, this is Thomas,” Arty said. “Mad, bad Thomas, not the arc angel Thomas. I mean, remember what happened to the girls?” He sighed. “I’m sorry Harvey, I shouldn’t have said that about your son.”
Harvey patted his arm to show there were no hard feelings. “I know you boys only have my best interests at heart and I know what you think of Thomas and, if the truth be told, it’s probably not half as bad as what I think about him myself. Even so, when all’s said and done, he’s still my son and I’m still his father. Thomas is family and it’s my duty to make sure that he comes back to where he belongs – home. You’ve all got children yourselves, I’m sure you understand.”
Ed, Taylor and Arty looked at each other and grimaced.
“You’ve got the patience of a saint, Harvey,” Taylor said. “No one ever had a child who was as troublesome as Thomas. Yes, you’re right, we all have sons and daughters who we love so much that we’d gladly die for them, but if we’re all honest I’m sure there isn’t one of us who would say there hasn’t been maybe one day over all the years when we secretly wished we hadn’t had them. I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s true. Maybe if we had received a ransom note on that particular day, then who knows. But you, Harvey, have Thomas who any other parent would have wished away every single day of their lives and yet you’re still prepared to give up everything for him?"
“Yes I am, and that’s my final word on the subject,” Harvey said, getting to his feet. He pushed the gruesome sticky red gift towards the doctor. “Taylor, when will you be able to complete the tests on the finger?”
“We’ll have to do a blood test and match it against Thomas’s medical records and then against your own to be absolutely sure that it’s your Thomas they have. It won’t take long. I expect we’ll know one way or another in the next twenty four hours.”
Harvey nodded. “Good, then we’ll meet again here at one o’clock tomorrow to discuss the results. Ed, can you prepare a letter to arrange the hand-over of the money, and Arty can you make sure the money is ready to be delivered?”
“I suppose so,” they replied together.
“Then that’s settled. I’ll see you all here after lunch tomorrow gentlemen.”
Ed, Arty and Taylor tried to convince him one last time to change his mind, but he wouldn’t hear of it. However, they continued to remonstrate with him and in the end he simply had to get up from his desk and walk out.
Harvey didn’t go home that evening. Instead he booked himself into a hotel. He was already of a mind that he was going to have to get used to the idea that he wouldn’t have a home to go to and so the hotel felt like a gentle first step to that realisation. However, he had not gone straight to the hotel, but had made his way there via a series of increasingly unrefined bars. By the time he checked himself in, his hair was a mess, his eyes were red and his jacket was hanging off him. Already the smart businessman he had once been seemed to have slipped away at one of the drinking dens. When he let himself into the room, he didn’t switch on the light, but threw himself down onto the bed without taking his clothes off.
The darkness felt appropriate for a world in which everything would soon be gone. A fortune that had taken his family seven generations to build up was about to be signed away in the blink of an eye. He wondered what his father and his father and his father before him and all of their mothers would say if they could be here tonight to see what he was about to do with their life’s work. The family hadn’t accumulated what he would describe as easy money, the kind made by a lucky invention or a fortuitous investment, but hard money made through the sweat and blood of being at the business end of the building industry. Ten family members had died on site over the years. I
t was that kind of fortune. And now he was about to give it all away. In the stillness of his dark, five star confessional chamber he asked for their forgiveness. He felt the light touch of a tear glide down his cheek. He was sure they would understand given the circumstances. If he had learned one thing as a child sat on his father’s knee while relatives came and went in bursts of hugs and kisses, it was that family was the most important thing to them all, and it was working to support and provide for the family which had led them to the fortune in the first place. As far as he was aware, none of his forebears had ever set out to make a million dollars, the money had just followed the love. Now love was about to throw it all away. Yes, he was sure they would forgive because it was for the love of a son, even if that son was Thomas.
Thomas had been born to his first wife, Alexis. They had separated after just two tempestuous years of marriage, when drink had got the better of first her and then their relationship. Such had been the acrimonious nature of the split that he had not expected to hear from her ever again. However, a month later he had a phone call from her telling him she was pregnant. By this time Harvey had begun seeing Rebecca who was soon to become his second wife which was the new beginning he’d been yearning for, so he was crest fallen to hear that his old unhappy life was calling him back. Keen to deal with the matter swiftly and discreetly, and to ensure he discharged his responsibilities in full, Harvey had admitted his liability and arranged for a substantial allowance for mother and son and for a seven figure trust fund to be put in place for Thomas for when he turned twenty one. Shortly afterwards, Harvey married Rebecca and within a year they had themselves a daughter in the beautiful shape of Alice. The baby girl had set the seal on their blissful life and it had felt at the time as if it were a seal that no one could break. Alice had been happy and carefree and seemed to take them by the hand from the day she was born to lead them from one golden summer to the next in a seamless thread of pleasure. These had been the happiest days of Harvey’s life. During this time Harvey had not had any real contact with Thomas or his mother, who seemed more intent on spending his money than staying in touch. That changed when Alexis died in a car accident while drunk at the wheel of her Bentley.
Harvey rolled over in his hotel bed, trying to turn away from the past, but it had caught up with him tonight and there would be no escaping it now. He gave up fighting it and let it wash back over him.
As Alexis had not remarried, there was nothing for Harvey to do but to take Thomas into his home and make him part of the family. The day Thomas moved in had, in retrospect, signalled the end of the dream and the beginning of the nightmare. By this time Thomas already had a police record for drugs and assault offences, although Harvey only discovered this after the incident with Alice.
He brought his hands up to his scalp to try to massage away the pain of the memory, but it would not leave him. It had never left him and almost certainly never would.
There had not even been a honeymoon period. The difficulties with Thomas had started almost as soon as the boy had unpacked, with arguments and fights of the kind he had not had seen since he’d left Alexis. Thomas and Alice fell out almost immediately and he had seen her cry for the first time since she’d been a child, which had hurt him more than he could say. But they had somehow made it through the first year intact as a family, if not happy a one. During their second autumn together, Thomas had taken an interest in guns – at first just air rifles and pellet guns, but a few weeks later, the real thing. When Harvey found out, he had all of his weapons confiscated, but it was a big house and Harvey could not have known that Thomas had held onto one rifle. He found out eventually when he returned home one evening to find his daughter lying dead on the driveway. The police arrested Thomas that same night. In court he had protested his innocence, saying that he had only been engaging in target practice when Alice had cycled around the side of the house unexpectedly, causing him to shoot her in the face. His defence was that he was guilty of nothing more than bad luck. The jury believed him. He was released with a probation order and a promise to attend counselling sessions. Harvey had wanted to believe Thomas version of events, but the only time the boy had cried during the tragedy was when Harvey had taken the gun from him and smashed it on the ground.
Harvey reached out into the darkness to take the gun from the boy again, wishing more than anything that he could have taken it from him before he’d had a chance to use it. His hands clasped nothing but black hotel air. No one was saved.
The time for mourning had only been brief, because more trouble had followed soon afterwards. Thomas had stolen cars, smashed shop windows and killed a neighbour’s pet Labrador with a home-made trap. In fact, most of Harvey’s time after Alice’s trial was spent trying to keep Thomas out of custody. But then, unexpectedly, a chink of light appeared in the darkness when Rebecca found herself pregnant. The light only lasted a couple of months until a prank Thomas played, spiking her food with cocaine, caused her to miscarry. This time Harvey could not protect Thomas from incarceration and neither did he want to. Even so, his spell inside was relatively short and Thomas was out of detention before Rebecca was out of hospital. She never saw Thomas again, because she committed suicide by opening her wrists in the visitors’ bathroom shortly after arriving home and taking a phone call from him.
Harvey could still clearly still see her lifeless body as if the old porcelain bath was sitting at the bottom of his hotel bed, her pale arms hanging from the side giving the impression she had been trying to pull herself out. But he knew she had really been gently lowering herself down into death – down to see Alice again.
Harvey could not bear to meet with Thomas or acknowledge his calls in the weeks that followed. By the time he had summoned up the strength to address his son, Thomas had turned twenty-one and taken receipt of his trust fund. The calls had stopped after that and Harvey had been happy that this was how things would be for the foreseeable future. With his personal life shattered and with nothing left to live for but his work, Harvey had thrown himself heart and soul into his job, toiling seven days a week, working the kind of long days that didn’t leave much time for the nightmares that always followed when he put out the lights. That had been eighteen months ago and he had not heard a solitary word from Thomas until the ransom note had arrived. Now Thomas was back to take away the family business, his one remaining reason to live.
Harvey cursed out loud. The expletive seemed to hang in the air mocking him. There was no use him being angry now when so much of his misery had surely been his own fault. There was no use in anything anymore. He rolled over on the luxurious mattress and wondered if he might not get some sleep on his last night of comfort, but when he looked at the clock, he saw that he had mused the night away and that the morning had risen unnoticed behind the drawn curtains.
He took a shower, dressed, had a light breakfast of scrambled eggs and orange juice and then began the long walk into town for his one o’clock meeting.
When Harvey stepped into his office, his three confidants were already sat around his desk waiting for him. Their heavy faces suggested they had not slept at all during the previous night either. Harvey pulled up a seat and addressed them.
“Shall we get this over with as quickly as possible, gentlemen?”
“I’m afraid it’s not that simple,” Taylor said. “There’s a problem.”
“A problem?”
“Yes, we got the tests back on the finger and…”
“And it’s not Thomas?” Harvey said, excitedly.
“I’m afraid it is Thomas,” Taylor replied. “The problem is that when we cross-checked his medical records with yours we discovered that…” He looked at Arty and Ed before finishing – they nodded for him to continue. “We discovered that Thomas is not your son. Isn’t, wasn’t, never has been.”
Harvey was dumbstruck. He felt as if he’d fallen down a flight of stairs. And he felt sick. In his haste to do the right thing all those years ago, he hadn’t ev
en considered getting a paternity test done. In retrospect it had been a mistake to be so trusting; his mistake, which had led to the deaths of his daughter and his wife. Overcome with emotion, he put his face into his hands and sobbed.
Arty passed him a handkerchief. “I don’t know what to say, Harvey.”
Harvey didn’t reply, but held the tissue up to his face and drained his emotion into it.
Ed cleared his throat. “I hate to interrupt Harvey, but the kidnappers have insisted on a response by tomorrow. We need to know what to do next.”
Harvey cleaned up his face with a shirtsleeve. “Yes, you’re right, we cannot delay. If you gentlemen will be good enough to wait for me in reception I will prepare a communication for the kidnappers.” The three men left the office without speaking.
Harvey pulled a writing pad out of a desk drawer. He flipped open the cover and wrote a brief note to the kidnappers. When he finished it, he dated it and then pulled it out of the pad and put it to one side. He started to write again on the next sheet. It was a second note, which he dated for one week’s time. He pulled it out of the pad and put it behind the first. Then he wrote a third letter and a fourth and a fifth, dating each of them for a week after the proceeding note. Once he had completed ten letters he buzzed the intercom and asked the three men to return.
Arty spoke up first. “Have you decided if you want to involve the police in the light of this new evidence?”
Harvey shook his head. “You know what the kidnappers said would happen if we did that.”
“So you’re going to pay the money?” Ed asked.
“I vowed to bring Thomas home and I intend to keep that promise.”
The three men frowned.
Harvey handed the ten hand written pages to Arty. “I want you to engage in a dialogue with the kidnappers using these letters. When you have completed this, I want you to get in contact with me.”
“But Harvey, think about Rebecca’s memory,” Taylor said. “If you pay this ransom then…”
Harvey held a hand up. “I want to hear no more from any of you until the letters have been exhausted.”
With that, Harvey got to his feet, bid the men good day and left the office.
Arty turned over the letters in his hand and began to read them. As he did so, Taylor and Ed cursed Harvey’s good heartedness, which had already caused him so much grief. Taylor even went as far as to suggest that Harvey’s actions might be those of a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown. They stopped talking when they heard Arty laughing.
“No, Harvey’s not on the verge of a breakdown,” Arty said. “He’s finally got his priorities sorted out and realised that family is an honour you have to earn.”
He passed the letters to Ed and Taylor who read them together.
The first letter said that the tests on the finger were not conclusive and that they required another finger to be sure before the money was paid. The second letter said that the latest finger was still insufficient to be certain of their hostage’s identity and asked if they would send a hand as further proof. The next letter requested a foot, the next an arm and the next a leg. The following four letters requested the other hand, arm, leg and the torso. The last letter requested the head for final confirmation.
“You know what this means, don’t you?” said Taylor.
“Yes,” smiled Ed. “By the time the tenth letter is answered, Harvey will have brought Thomas home.”
The three men left the office, and then went straight to a bar and drank a toast to the memory of Rebecca and Alice, and to Harvey, the man who had finally discovered the true meaning of family.
“Well, did you see it?” the girl asked.
“I saw it all,” he replied.
“And?”
“And I still don’t believe it…can’t believe it.”
“Perhaps another sighting would convince you. Quick, look over there in the tail of the comet. See anything?”
“Lights...” He hesitated. “A box…no, a house!”
“Yes? Tell me more,” she pleaded.
“It’s a big house, built in an old style with wooden beams running across the front. It looks like the sort of house you might expect to find in the English countryside.”
She clapped her hands together. “It could most certainly be a grand English house! Anything else?”
“I think I can see a man sleeping in the upstairs bedroom. A well-to-do man in a well-to-do house,” he added in a mock English accent. They both laughed.
“And?” she prompted.
“And there’s a window open downstairs. It looks as if someone might have broken in…”
Epilogue
Hope you have enjoyed the first two shorts of Russell Taylors book Falling Stars.
The full book with all 10 short stories can be found on Amazon.
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