The Last Thing She Ever Did Read online

  After hitting the windshield, the animal rolled over the top of the station wagon. Were they underwater now? It was impossible to tell.

  Then a small red car was coming at them, at the last instant sweeping to Liz’s side of the station wagon. A young woman pressed her hands against the window and called out for help as she passed. Her eyes were more white than blue. So open and full of terror. She was young. Maybe still in her teens. Her gaze caught Liz’s for a second before turning back to wherever the churning water would take her.

  Liz screamed, “We have to help her!”

  The roar of the water outside the car obliterated her words.

  Sleeping bags. A cooler. A child’s dinosaur-shaped flotation device roared past the Ford in a soupy mixture of water, mud, foam, and all of the things that lake goers would have enjoyed throughout a lazy day on the shore. The pod off the top of a car had dislodged and split open, sending suitcases, clothing, and backpacks into the torrent that carried away everything in the road that had become a spillway.

  And then, finally, the station wagon stopped. It had come to rest listing on an outcropping that had been blasted into the basalt when the road to the lake had been forged.

  Now that their progress had halted, the pace of the flood outside flew into a much higher gear. Every few seconds, the water surged against one side of the car or the other, sometimes with enough force to rock the vehicle on its perch.

  “Everyone okay?” Dan yelled out.

  Liz, who had somehow ended up in the backseat with the boys, was the first to respond. “Something’s wrong with Seth,” she said, shaking as water began to pour inside.

  “I’m okay,” said her brother. “Seth? Wake up.”

  The boy, who looked so much like his mother—and often had a quip ready—opened his eyes. “I’m not dead yet,” he said.

  Even in the chaos of the car, Dan’s gasp of relief was audible. Water had begun to pool at their feet. Despite the summer day, it was ice-cold. He rolled up the window.

  “We need to remain calm,” he said.

  “We’re going to drown, Dad,” said Seth.

  “No. No, we’re not,” Dan said. He undid his seat belt and peered through the condensation and muddy stain of the driver’s-side window. The windshield itself had been transformed into a spiderweb of broken glass. “We’re going to get out of here. We’re going to be just fine.”

  Liz wiped her eyes. “Promise?” she asked.

  Dan studied the boys and managed a calming smile. “We’re going to have a hell of a story to tell. I’m going to get out of the car now,” he said. “I’ll get out and up onto that ledge. Then I’m going to get you out. All of you. One at a time. We need to do this very carefully. All right? One at a time.”

  None of the three in the backseat said a word.

  “Is that understood?” he asked, his voice finally betraying the fear that was eating at the edges of his normally calm resolve. The crack in the veneer of his can-do persona had begun to widen: slowly at first, then quickly to a chasm. Liz could see it. The boys too.

  Yet they all nodded.

  The water pooled from the floorboards and now reached knee level. Every moment or so the noise and jolt of something hitting the car rattled them.

  “This will need to be fast,” he said. He rolled down the driver’s-side window. More water poured inside, and the sound of the roar of the river that had been the road filled their ears. It was a roar punctuated with the din of rocks hitting metal.

  Later, Liz would wince at the noise of a friend’s rock-polishing tumbler as the girl turned agates into smooth stones, which would be fashioned into key chains for her parents, a bolo tie for her granddad. The relentless noise reminded her of that terrible Saturday excursion to the lake.

  Dan hoisted himself out of the car by grabbing the top edge of the doorframe and pulling himself up and backward through the opening. The water grabbed at him, but he made it onto the ledge of rock he’d been aiming for and turned back their way.

  The car started to move and the kids screamed.

  A second later Dan was outside the back window on the driver’s side, fighting the torrents, his eyes full of terror. Kids don’t often see grown-ups looking that way. Never had Liz seen a grown man appear as though he was going to fall apart. He pounded on the glass and motioned for Jimmy, who was sitting next to it, to roll down the window.

  “Now!” Dan yelled. “Goddamn it, do it!”

  “We’ll drown,” Jimmy said.

  “Open it,” Seth said. He was sitting between Jimmy and Liz.

  “Open the window, Jimmy,” Dan said, “or you will drown. When I get you out, you’re going to go on the roof of the car and from there . . . from there, over to that ledge and then up above the road. The water’s not going to get higher. It’s going to recede. We’ll be fine there until help comes. Okay?”

  The car moved again.

  Jimmy, shaking, did as he’d been ordered and rolled down the window.

  Their laps were now covered with the murk of the unexpected tide that had filled the car.

  “Take my hand,” Dan said. “Right now!”

  Jimmy did, and in a second he was out the window. Liz could hear him crawling on the roof, then silence.

  “Where’s my brother?” she called out past Seth.

  Dan’s face appeared again. The flood had battered him. A cut above his eyebrow and on his cheek had turned some of his light-colored blue shirt to a violet hue. “He’s good,” he said. “Your brother’s fine.”

  The car moved a little more.

  Liz heard Jimmy scream her name. “You got to get my sister! Get Lizzie out!”

  “She’s coming, Jimmy!” Seth yelled back.

  “We need to get you out of this car right now,” Dan said, his voice now more urgent than it had been a moment before, when Liz had been all but certain she was going to die. But when he thrust his hand in blindly for his son, Seth lurched away from him, grabbed Liz by her shirt, and dragged her over him. It was Liz Dan took hold of and yanked through the window. He winced when he saw her emerge into the chaos outside, and then both of them looked back into the station wagon. The last things she saw were Seth’s terrified eyes and his Have a Nice Day T-shirt with its image of a smiley face.

  And that was it.

  Nothing after that.

  Nothing except what had been told to her and what she’d read in the paper when she was in high school and the Bend Bulletin went online.

  Local Boy Drowns in Flash Flood

  An outing turned into tragedy yesterday morning when a nine-year-old Bend boy drowned on a canyon road off US Highway 97 near Diamond Lake. The boy, his father, and two other children were caught in a flash flood.

  “The father managed to save the other two children but, despite valiant efforts, not his son,” said Oregon State Police lieutenant Wilson Donaldson, who led the rescue and recovery team.

  The driver told police that the group was on the way to a day of fishing at the popular lake when a flash flood hit.

  “The car they were driving was carried more than fifty yards by the floodwaters. It got caught on some rocks, and the driver proceeded to evacuate the children to higher ground,” Donaldson said.

  After the man retrieved two children, the car apparently dislodged, sweeping both the man and his son away with it.

  The father was found unconscious downstream, where an off-duty firefighter from Redmond rescued him. The deceased boy was found in the vehicle. All involved were taken to the hospital and are expected to be released shortly.

  Officers also reported one other fatality: a horse. The animal’s owners and another young woman in a separate car were recovered without injury.

  The names were withheld until the Tuesday paper. That article was brief and indicated that the police had conducted an investigation and found that there had been no wrongdoing on the part of the driver. The last mention of the incident was the funeral notice.

  And yet, to all of
those who were there, and both families, the incident clung like a mark that could never be washed away. Dan and Miranda retreated from Liz’s family. Liz and her brother were reminders of what they’d lost.

  Only once did Liz ever hear her parents directly talk about Dan Miller and the accident that had claimed his son’s life. They were grateful, of course, that their own children had survived. More than grateful: overjoyed. But instead of sympathy for another’s loss, Liz’s mother took an approach that would define her in her daughter’s eyes. Her mother could be a selfish and spiteful woman, always looking to blame others in an effort to boost her own mood. It seemed at times that being negative fueled her sense of joy.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You don’t know. Dan might have been drinking that morning. He might have been impaired—seriously so, for all we know. I mean, honestly, you have no idea what happened and neither do I.”

  Brian Camden immediately dismissed Bonnie’s unkind and judgmental remarks. “His drinking early in the day started after the accident, honey. You know that, Bon. Be fair.”

  “I don’t trust him,” she said as she swirled the last few sips of a martini in her glass. “Letting Seth die. Killing your own kid like that.”

  Liz’s father was used to his wife’s cruel streak and often just let it roll off him. Not this time. This time he just couldn’t.

  “He didn’t kill him. It was an accident. A terrible tragedy.” Brian stopped and regarded Bonnie. “Honestly, what’s wrong with you? He saved our son and daughter. Are you really forgetting that?”

  She motioned for another drink. “Of course I’m not. Get a grip. I don’t like it when you dismiss what I have to say out of hand. It’s demeaning. Really, think about it. You can’t say that he doesn’t have blood on his hands.”

  “It was an accident,” he insisted.

  “That’s going to follow him for the rest of his life.”

  “Only because people like you keep reminding everyone and twisting it into something it wasn’t.”

  “I’m only saying what others think.”

  That last line was so typical of her mother. Liz thought that her mom somehow derived a perverse sense of dignity from dispensing a mean remark. She managed to do it with a smile on those Elizabeth Arden–pink lips of hers.

  “Others don’t think that,” Liz said.

  “They do,” she said. “They always will. Whenever he’s out and about in town, all of them think it. They all remember what happened. No amount of drinking will ever erase what happened. Nothing that he did that day will ever go away.”

  PART ONE

  BLAME

  Where did the blood come from, Carole?

  —David Franklin

  CHAPTER ONE

  JUST BEFORE

  Liz Jarrett lifted her head from her grandparents’ old dining table. A spiky jolt of adrenaline traveled through her body. Her fingers found her cell phone, and she looked at the time. It was a little after 10:00 a.m. Shit! Liz peeled herself from the chair and went for the shower. As fast as she could, she stripped off her T-shirt and sweats, not even waiting for the water to warm before jumping in. A blast of cold was what she needed. Ice ran down her spinal column as she steadied herself in the stall. Liz needed to shock herself into alertness. She had been up all night, mixing coffee with Adderall, poring over books and her laptop for the most important test of her life.

  Her second attempt at it.

  I can’t screw this up again. The thought of the exam she’d taken three months before contracted her stomach into a tight, burning nut. I have to pass. As the cold water rushed over her, her internal monologue shifted. I will pass. I’m smart. I can do this.

  At twenty-nine, Liz was no longer young—at least not by the standards of her law-school class at the University of Oregon. Certainly there were older candidates for a law degree. In the beginning, Liz had placed those in their thirties or older somewhere along a spectrum between pity and admiration. She’d even caught herself thinking it was “cute” that a grandmother from Wilsonville had made it through the admissions process. Really, Liz? What’s that about? Someone starting over late in life, working like a dog at it, “cute”? Someday that might be you. Chasing a dream. Never getting there. A dangling carrot that her fingers could only graze.

  Move.

  Like a crazed marionette, Liz jumped from the shower and pulled a towel from atop the train rack over the toilet. No time to use the hair dryer. Working at her dark brown hair under the fluffy weight of the white terry cloth, she looked at herself in a mirror that did not offer the benefit of the concealing condensation a hot shower would have provided. She winced. She looked wired. Ugh. Her hands shook as she applied deodorant, and for the life of her she couldn’t step into her underwear without sitting on the toilet. The room was spinning a little, and for just a flash she thought of the carousel at Disneyland, where her parents had taken her and her brother when they were kids. She’d gotten sick and thrown up on Jim. He never let her forget it. She felt that same queasiness now.

  Liz needed to get to the testing center. Now. The location was a hotel conference room in Beaverton, more than three hours away. She’d need to risk a speeding ticket to get there on time.

  Jeans finally on. Top on. And only one shoe. Liz hobbled through the house, looking everywhere for her other shoe. She stumbled and leaned against the doorjamb. Where is that shoe? Finally, back in the bedroom, she found it next to Owen’s side of the bed.

  Owen! She could kill him just then. Why had he let her sleep? Why hadn’t he shaken her awake at the table? He knew the importance of this exam. It was everything to her. It was the pathway to all she wanted to be. It would provide the proof to her husband that she could fulfill a dream.

  That she had a goddamn right to one too.

  As she slipped her foot into the second shoe, though, Liz recalled Owen speaking to her that morning. The memory came to her through a gauzy veil. Everything about the night before was a little foggy. The pills. The coffee. The reciting of case law out loud until her voice was a rasp. The fishing through the refrigerator for orange juice because she thought it would give her more energy than a Red Bull. Only because she was out of Red Bull.

  Yes, Owen had tried to wake her that morning. He had. Great. Her lateness was her own fault.

  Liz remembered him actually lifting her out of the dining chair. “You are zonked out, babe,” he said, hooking his strong hands under her arms. “You need to get yourself together. Get cleaned up and go.”

  “I need to sleep,” Liz told him, resisting his help and sinking back into her chair. “Test tomorrow.”

  “More like today,” he said. “Four hours from now, right?”

  She looked at him. Her eyes were sore and dry. She knew she looked like a junkie at a 7-Eleven, watching the hot dogs on heated metal rollers as though they were as fascinating as a breaching whale.

  “Four hours?”

  He held out his phone, showing her the time.

  “Shit,” she said. “I’ve got to get going.”

  “Yeah, you do. And so do I. I have that meeting with Damon and the other principals this morning. Got to be there on time.”

  Even now, in her addled state with both shoes on and the memory of his attempt to rouse her, Liz couldn’t suppress the feeling that Owen had always put his needs before hers. It had been that way since before their wedding. He had told her over and over that they would live large—and not because of her skills as an attorney.

  “Lawyers are a dime a dozen,” he’d said more than one time. “No offense, babe. Technology is king. You’ll see.”

  She hated technology. Sometimes she hated Owen. He was so sure of himself, so insistent that he was on his way to something very important. Something big.

  With his firm about to go public, Owen had started a list of all the things money could buy. A Ferrari. A month in Fiji in one of those grass huts that stuck out over the ocean. It went on and on. She went along with his dreams, mostly
because there was no point in arguing. Either they’d happen or they wouldn’t. Only one item on his list had made Liz push back: Owen planned to bulldoze their little house on the river. However, it wasn’t at the top of his ever-growing list, and for a long time she had hoped that he would forget he’d suggested it.

  Liz couldn’t argue that the house didn’t have its problems. Dry rot had weakened the beams under it. Indeed, the floors slanted in the kitchen so steeply that once when she dropped a cherry tomato it rolled to the corner with such velocity that it could’ve been an outtake from Poltergeist.

  “We have such history here,” she would remind him.

  He’d wrap his arms around her as though he loved her and understood. “We’ll make our own,” he’d say. “Who wants to live in someone else’s dream?”

  Liz would nod as if she agreed, though she didn’t. Her grandparents had built the two-story Craftsman bungalow in 1923. She’d spent every summer there. On the drive over from Portland, she’d watch the forest from her place in the backseat until they reached Bend, where the Deschutes sparkled like someone had sprinkled broken glass on a slate-gray table. The house was small, but every inch of it held some kind of memory. Even as a child, she’d felt it was her house. Her refuge. When her grandparents died, they left the house to her mother and father. After they passed in a car accident in Eastern Oregon, Liz and Owen bought out her brother, Jim. It took every penny they had and left them with a mortgage payment that stretched their already tight resources nearly to the snapping point. She’d thought Owen had fought to get the house for her. It was only after the deal was done that Liz understood how her husband of four years really felt about the house.