The Last Thing She Ever Did(19)

“Carole’s been trying to get you,” she said. “We all have. You haven’t been picking up.”

“Phone’s dead,” he said. “What’s going on? Carole all right?”

“Yes,” Amanda said. “I mean no. She’s not all right. David, Charlie is missing. The police are looking for you.”

David took a step back, as though doing so would turn back the clock and erase what Amanda had just said.

“What do you mean, ‘missing’?”

By now Amanda was losing some of her calculated cool. She could feel her heart race a little. This was bad. “Carole can’t find him anywhere,” she said. “The police are at your house right now. David, where have you been?”

His face went white. “Running errands. Jesus.” He turned toward the door, and the keys to his Porsche slipped from his fingers. Amanda dropped down to retrieve them. He held his hand out as she passed him the keys. His hand was warm, damp.

“Can’t find him?” he repeated. “Can’t find Charlie?”

Amanda’s heart raced more. “That’s what they said. Carole’s frantic. You want me to drive you?”

David shook his head. “No. No. I can do that. You take care of things here. We have a full house tonight. No mistakes.” He reached for the handle on the back door, a shaft of light beaming into the restaurant as he swung it open.

“What the fuck kind of response is that?” Mitchell, a sous-chef, asked when the light beam had cut out.

“He’s in shock,” Amanda said. “He’s out of his mind with worry.”

Mitchell rolled his eyes. He’d never liked David Franklin. “His kid is missing and he’s worried about tonight’s service?”

“Stop it,” Amanda said. “Can’t you see he’s in distress?”

“He didn’t look all that distressed to me.”

“You want to get a new job?” Amanda was used to defending her boss. David could be a tyrant in the kitchen and a charmer in front of diners. “Is that what you want?”

Mitchell, who had been a sous-chef at three other Bend restaurants before coming to Sweetwater, shrugged. He could get another gig. “You banging him?”

Amanda felt her face flame red. She pointed her index finger at Mitchell. “You are fired. Get out.”

“Fine,” he said. “This place is a train wreck anyway.”

“Go!” she said. “Now.”

When he’d slouched away, Amanda turned to the servers gawking at the scene from the doorway. “Get back to work! We have a full restaurant tonight. We’re not going to let David down.”

A few minutes later she planted herself in a bathroom stall. Amanda had tried to hide it, but she doubted she’d been successful: she was shuddering from the confrontation. Her mind was spinning. She agreed that something had been off about David, but she couldn’t make any sense of it. Where had he been?

That morning had been anything but routine. He’d come in at his usual time, was working on an update to the menu that included some gorgeous chanterelles that had been sourced by a local picker. He was being his old David self, talking about an investment that had gone sideways, a trip to France that he’d been planning as a surprise for Carole, tossing a few darts at the city planners who wanted to limit the number of vacation rentals in town.

“It’s vacation rentals that have transformed Bend from a backwater into a going concern for restaurants like ours,” he’d said. “We can charge vacationers twice what locals can pay. And the whole city cashes in on all this new money. Fresh money. Money du jour.” He’d grinned, pleased with his turn of phrase.

Then, just a little later that morning, things had changed. His mood had shifted with a call, and he briskly announced that he needed to run an errand. He didn’t say where or who it involved.

“I need to skedaddle.” One of his trademark words. “You hold down the fort.”

As Amanda composed herself in the stall, she had a funny feeling about David’s sudden departure. Before the call, he’d talked about how he wanted to personally check out the quality of the mushrooms being brought in by the forager. “Last time I got some hen of the woods from this dude, they were within a day of going bad. Not up to the standards of Sweetwater, for sure.”

“For sure,” Amanda had said.

Yet, when that call came, David had just packed up to leave. As though the freshness of the mushrooms were no longer a concern.

“What about the chanterelles?” she had asked.

David grabbed his keys and hurried toward the door. “You check them out. I trust you.”

Amanda had stood there, mouth agape. David didn’t trust anyone. He was the kind of restaurateur who insisted that no one listened when he spoke. No one followed his precise instructions about the food or the linens or the background music. One time she’d seen him yank a candlelighter from a server in front of the whole house because he said the young man was lighting a tea light wrong.

“Hold the candle at an angle when you light it!”

As she sat on the lid of the toilet, Amanda wondered what was going on at the Franklins’ house and why David hadn’t answered any of his calls. His phone wasn’t dead. It was never dead. Her boss hadn’t taken the calls because he hadn’t wanted to.