The Last Thing She Ever Did Page 5

  “Amanda,” Carole said. “I need my husband.”

  “He’s not here. Can I help? I’ll call the police.”

  “No,” Carole said, feeling a wave of nausea in the back of her constricted throat. “No. No. I’ll do that.” In truth, she admitted to herself, she didn’t want to call the police just then. Doing so would elevate what might be, must be, a careless mistake into something much more devastating than she could handle at the moment.

  She hung up and made her way to the basement.

  “Charlie!” she screamed, the words discharged from her vocal cords with a kind of power that she hadn’t, up to that second, known she possessed. “Charlie, where are you?”

  Carole ran back up and through the main level, then the upstairs. Pulling off the sofa cushions. Looking into the shower stall. The pantry. Under the stairs. Her studio. She scoured every inch as rapidly as she could. She threw herself to the floor next to each bed, looking under the bed frame and pulling herself upright to move as fast as she could to the next room.

  The police emergency number was only three digits. She couldn’t bring herself to dial them. Not yet. Not to make it real. Not to make it bigger than it was.

  She ran over to the Jarretts’ little bungalow next door and pounded her fists against the bright pink front door. Her fingertips found her bloody earlobe and she brushed off the blood with the shoulder of her blouse. Owen and Liz were gone. Of course they were. Liz had her exam that day—the essay section of the Oregon bar—and Owen had been going to the office early to prepare for an infusion of venture capital money and then an IPO of his software firm.

  She returned to the house and went through it a third time. Nothing. No trace of her son. Charlie was gone.

  This was real.

  It was her fault.

  Finally, Carole slumped on the upholstered bench at the foot of the bed and dialed 911.

  “My little boy is missing,” she said, giving the dispatcher her address. She fought for composure with every syllable as she scanned the surface of the Deschutes.

  “Please come as fast as you can,” she said, holding the phone with a vise grip. “He’s three. I think my little boy fell into the river.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MISSING: ONE HOUR

  Bend Police detective Esther Nguyen was on her third cup of truly terrible office coffee and working through the least favorite part of her job—paperwork—when one of the department’s newest officers, Jake Alioto, notified her that help was needed on a call.

  “Boy missing,” he said. “Mom’s pretty torn up.”

  Esther set her cup on a stack of papers. “How long?”

  Jake was young, with light brown skin that made his white teeth nearly blindingly so. Esther had a hard time not looking at his mouth when he spoke. So white. Perfect. A somewhat struggling goatee accentuated his look.

  “Not very,” he said. “An hour at most.”

  “Custody issue?”

  He didn’t think so. “Dad’s at work. Mom’s home.”

  “Where?”

  “Riverfront, near the pedestrian bridge by the park.”

  Esther went for a light jacket that hung on a peg adjacent to her office door. She was a petite woman, just five feet tall, with black hair that she wore blunt-cut to her shoulders. Silver wire-framed glasses shielded her brown eyes. She wore no jewelry but a slender gold necklace that her father had given her, a pendant in the shape of a sea star from a trip the family had made to California when she was a teenager. When she was agitated or nervous, her fingertips always found their way to the pendant. Its golden surface held a particularly bright sheen where she’d touched it countless times.

  “An hour doesn’t make a missing person,” Esther said. “You’re aware of that, Jake, right?”

  Esther had an edge that made her good at her job but sometimes difficult to be around. Talk around the office was that she might be somewhere on the Asperger’s continuum. This was just mean-spirited armchair analysis, but it was a fact that Esther could be direct in the kind of unflinching way that can also signal a lack of understanding of social cues.

  Jake stepped aside so she could lead the way. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “Of course. But I feel sorry for the woman. She’s falling apart.”

  “Name?”

  Jake, who had a teenager’s ambling gait even though he was twenty-five, hurried to keep up with the detective. “Mom’s Carole Franklin,” he said. “She’s a local. The missing boy is Charlie. She thinks he might have fallen in the river when she wasn’t looking.”

  “Did she sound drunk?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Esther gave him a look. A familiar one. “Don’t call me that.”

  “Sorry,” Jake said. “My bad.”

  As they made their way to the cruiser, Esther thought of the case of a little boy in Corvallis, the jurisdiction in which she had started her career. Tommy Walton vanished from his babysitter’s backyard. He’d been missing for days when his mangled body was recovered from an abandoned roller rink. Esther had known that little boys and girls were targets of the evil and the insane—but hadn’t really known it until then.

  Esther had worked the case with her partner for six weeks until they arrested the neighbor, a sixteen-year-old boy who’d sodomized and strangled Tommy. He’d done that in the first half hour of the boy’s abduction. Esther never forgot that she and her partner had held out hope that the boy would be found alive, certainly during the first few hours and even days of the investigation.

  Esther knew missing-persons case rules were a bit of a myth. There was no twenty-four-hour mandatory wait to get started on a search. A small child or a professional person with a spotless record can earn the support of a search team within a few hours of going missing.

  While Jake prattled on about a girl he was dating, Esther drove past a Thai fusion restaurant on Wall Street that had been the location of her first date with her soon-to-be ex-husband, Drew. She’d never be able to eat there again. The restaurant, known for its legendary green curry dish, would forever represent the start of her personal disaster.

  Like other professionals their age, Esther and Drew Oliver met online. Drew was handsome and outgoing and had a kind of glib personality that Esther found so very different from other men she’d dated. Those other guys had been interchangeable. Serious. Smart. Most were computer science and technology geeks and more interested in code than in carrying on a conversation. Esther wanted to laugh. She wanted romance. She wanted a little adventure.

  Drew understood all of that. He ran a Bend brewery start-up that was making serious headway but was still far from the steady income her parents required of an ideal suitor for their only daughter. The pair dated for nine months, then moved in together. While Esther was in no rush to get married, her mother’s constant refrain that “things don’t look right” beat down on her like a headbanger’s drumstick. When Drew asked her to marry him, she agreed right away, thinking it would get her mother off her back.

  That was a miscalculation.

  “Money is more important than a good time,” her mother whispered in Esther’s ear on her wedding day. “You will never be able to raise a family. A cop and a beer maker—that’s just not what I’d consider a suitable combination for a successful marriage.”

  “We’re not having this conversation, Mom.”

  Her mother fussed with the white meringue tulle of Esther’s wedding dress, still on the hanger. “You didn’t ask me. So what? It is my job to tell you what I think.”

  Esther didn’t even bother with a response. She hated her mom for ruining her special day, but that was her mother, a negative soul who made a point of slicing the joy from any possible moment with her razor of a tongue.

  As she drove past the Thai place on the way to see about a missing child, she was long past denying her mother had been right. When the brewery ultimately failed, Drew’s charm and outgoing nature turned inward and sullen. He lashed out at the world. Drank mor
e. Found a hundred reasons to stay away from home. Glib turned into sarcastic. Caustic mutated into mean. When they separated, she knew it was not going to be temporary but the only—the final—solution for their situation.

  “We were wrong for each other,” she told Drew when she’d finally had enough and conceded that her mother had not cursed her marriage but simply predicted its dismal outcome.

  “I’m wrong for anyone,” Drew said.

  Esther didn’t argue. She didn’t allow herself to fall into a trap. No more traps. No more fighting. No more feeling sorry about what might have been—and never would be.

  Esther parked the cruiser in front of the Franklins’ residence. The house was one of those dark fortresses with slits for windows on the street side and splashes of lime-colored evergreens jammed into position to brighten up a space that seldom saw sunlight. A fringe of zebra grass edged the walkway, and a basalt water feature that was all angles and dark spires burbled adjacent to the driveway.

  “Some place,” Jake said, looking up at the house.

  “Something else,” she said. An amalgamation of taste, style, money, and the good sense to let professionals do the heavy lifting while allowing the homeowners to think they’d done it all on their own. Esther’s mother would love this house, and the people who lived here would be her heroes.

  Esther thought that the house, with its perfection, its slavish attention to detail, said new money. People born rich don’t try so hard. They know they don’t need to. They already have everything they want, and they never have to break a sweat to show it off. Showing it off is for those at risk of ending up back where they started.

  They got out of the car. With Jake trailing, Esther turned the corner to walk up to the door as Carole Franklin heaved open the front door and lurched toward them. She was tall—five nine or ten. Her hair was a silvery blond that fell in soft curls to her shoulders. She was trim, with the body of a swimmer or yoga enthusiast. Probably both.

  In other circumstances, Mrs. Franklin would have made a stunning, if not imposing, figure. But this morning she looked crumpled. She wore the kind of terrified look that Esther had seen in the eyes of other mothers.

  “He was out of my sight for a minute,” she said, valiantly fighting to keep any tears from falling from her watery blue eyes.

  Esther put her hand on the woman’s shoulder. “I know you’re scared, Mrs. Franklin. I’m Detective Esther Nguyen, and this is Officer Alioto. I need you to tell me what happened. Take your time.”

  “There isn’t any time,” Carole said. “Charlie could be anywhere. Anything could have happened to him.”

  “I understand,” Esther said. “I know it might be hard to believe, but I’ve been around long enough to know that kids just wander away.”

  Mrs. Franklin’s lips tightened. “Charlie never leaves my sight,” she said, forcing the words from her mouth.

  “Right. But this time he did, right? We’re here to help. Let’s go inside. Tell me what happened.”

  Mrs. Franklin led them to a living room with floor-to-ceiling views of the river and repeated her story about being on the phone for “only a minute or two” with the adjuster from the insurance company. “We had a leak in the basement. I don’t even care about it. I should never have taken the stupid call.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Esther said.

  Mrs. Franklin fiddled with a stray thread that had come undone from the gray velvet pillow she clutched as she sat on the sofa. The light from the river, now full of paddlers and inner-tubers, flickered in her eyes. A sound system played an incongruently soothing interlude in the background.

  “But it is our fault. Living here at all. We live on a river, for God’s sake,” she went on. “I never should have turned my back for even a second. I know better. I do. This is my fault,” she repeated, still trying to keep her voice from shattering.

  “You need to take a breath,” Esther said. Her tone was kind, not condescending. She’d interviewed hundreds of witnesses and knew how rapidly a person could go from being able to help a case to being utterly useless. Sometimes even a distraction. She needed Carole Franklin to be the kind of person who fit her tasteful surroundings. Thoughtful. Organized. Self-aware.

  “You didn’t see any sign that he went into the river, did you?” Esther asked.

  Mrs. Franklin watched as police officers gathered by the riverbank. “No,” she said. “I called over to a man canoeing with his dog. I saw a tuber on a red Riparian tube go by. My neighbor across the river—he was there. No. No one saw him go in. But, really, where else could he be?”

  “Does he have a hiding place?” Esther’s tone was calm, full of empathy, Jake noticed. He wished that particular Esther worked at the police department.

  “My nephew had a secret hideout,” the detective went on, “a fort that he assembled out of cardboard boxes in the basement. My sister had a fit one time when she couldn’t find him.”

  “No,” Mrs. Franklin said. “We don’t have anything like that. I’ve searched the house.”

  The police officer who’d arrived on the scene right after the call approached. “Detective,” he said, “we’ve looked everywhere. In every closet. Under every bed. We even looked in the dryer in the laundry room and the freezer in the garage.”

  Carole Franklin wrapped her arms tightly around her lanky frame. “The freezer,” she said, horror in her eyes. “I didn’t look there.”

  “It’s all right, Mrs. Franklin,” Esther said. “He wasn’t there.”

  “We’ve cast a wider net,” the officer continued. “We have another pair of officers working the shoreline. Nothing so far.”

  “All right,” Esther said, returning her attention to the woman. “Where is Mr. Franklin?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, watching the water. “His phone went to voice mail. I’ve texted. I’ve called. I have no idea.”

  “Is there any chance he might have come home and taken Charlie somewhere?”

  Mrs. Franklin faced her. “You mean to the park or something? Of course not. David’s not that way,” she said, her tone shifting a little.

  “What way?”

  “A father who surprises his son. He’s more . . . predictable.”

  “Right, of course. What does he do?”

  “He runs Sweetwater. The restaurant on Wall.”

  Esther nodded and told the responding officer to send someone over to see if David Franklin was at work. “We need him here.”

  “Thank you,” Mrs. Franklin said.

  “No problem,” the officer said. “We’ll find your little boy.”

  Esther shot the young man a swift but decisive look.

  Mrs. Franklin caught it. “You can’t promise that, can you?”

  Esther didn’t think so. “No. I’m sorry. We can’t promise. What the officer is saying, though—and what I know from my own personal experience—is that kids turn up.”

  “Always?”

  Esther could feel her desperation. Carole Franklin was grasping at straws, and she needed to believe that everything would be all right.

  “More than ninety-nine percent of the time.”

  Mrs. Franklin nodded. “I need to do something,” she said, turning to look back at the river, imagining her little boy falling from the bank. Getting scared. Scrambling. Thrashing. Fighting to get to the surface. The images played on a loop over and over, and she couldn’t stop the sequence.

  “I need to go out there and help find him,” she said, getting up.

  “No.” Esther motioned for her to sit. “Take a breath,” she repeated. “You need to let us do our job. We can do this. Is there someone we could call? Another family member?”

  The mother of the missing three-year-old looked hard at the detective. Her eyes were outlined in red. She slumped back down and rocked herself a little, thinking before speaking. Perhaps willing herself to be the deliberate woman she’d been in the boardroom. “And tell them what?” she asked. “Tell them that I wasn’t payin
g attention and my son vanished? That I wasn’t watching and he fell into the water? I can’t. I can’t do that. I can barely say that to you, let alone people who know Charlie.”

  Esther reached over to touch her hand, but the frightened mother pulled away. “We don’t know what happened, Mrs. Franklin,” Esther said. “It’s early. Let’s see where we are when your husband gets here. This is traumatic. You need support.”

  “I can’t,” she repeated. “I can’t even say the words.”

  “I understand, Mrs. Franklin.”

  Carole Franklin looked at the detective in a way that indicated she no longer saw her as someone who was judging her lapse in motherhood. She was, in fact, there to help. Yes, she was going to find Charlie.

  “Please,” she said. “Call me Carole.”

  Esther nodded, and Carole handed her a photograph that she’d retrieved from the side table.

  “This was taken two weeks ago,” Carole said. “My dad and his wife were up from Santa Rosa. We went to Lincoln City for the day.”

  Charlie was standing on a driftwood log, smiling at the camera with that kind of exaggerated smile that little kids make whenever a lens is pointed in their direction.

  “He’s wearing that same shirt today,” she said.

  Esther studied the photograph. The boy was wearing a Mickey Mouse pullover, a wild mix of red and black that little ones find cool. He had a crooked smile and light blue eyes like his mother’s. “This helps. Thank you. He’s adorable.”

  Carole offered coffee, but Esther declined.

  “Let’s talk about the water. Is Charlie able to swim at all?”

  “No. He’s three. We took him to toddler swimming lessons but—no, he’s not a good swimmer.”

  “Has he been known to go into the river? You know, when you are not around to supervise?”

  “No,” Carole said. “Never. Absolutely not. Look, we live on the river. Our son knows better. I tell him every day. I told him this morning. Don’t even think about getting your feet wet.”