The Last Thing She Ever Did(20)

CHAPTER NINE

MISSING: FIVE HOURS, FIFTEEN MINUTES

It was almost three thirty in the afternoon when David pulled up in front of the house. Two Bend police cars crammed the driveway, blocking the garage, and another was parked across the street. A group of onlookers in T-shirts, shorts, and flip-flops gawked at the scene from the sidewalk.

“I bet that’s the dad,” said a weekender with muttonchops and a beach-ball belly as he passed by. It was as though he thought he was watching David on TV.

“Nice car,” said another.

Before he could make his way inside, Carole was in David’s arms, gripping him with the force of a vise.

“Charlie’s gone!” she said, her fa?ade giving way, the whole edifice shattering into a zillion pieces. Ruins. Dust. There was no holding anything together. For a second she was a rag doll, and her husband’s grip stopped her from collapsing onto the front steps. Her sobs reverberated from the doorway and back out to the yard.

“What’s happened, honey?” David said, holding Carole tightly, letting her sob into his expensive shirt.

Her face remained buried in his chest. “I—I turned away to answer a call. I told him to stay away from the water. I did. He knows better. Really, he does. I should never have taken my eyes off him,” she said, gulping for air.

David’s eyes met those of a gravely observant woman standing a few feet away in the foyer. Allowing him a moment to calm his wife. She nodded at him.

“Are you the police?” he asked.

She showed her identification and introduced herself.

“What happened?” he asked her.

“We don’t know yet,” the detective said. “We’re trying to find him.”

“David, I’m so scared. What if—” Carole stopped herself.

“We’ll find Charlie,” he said, looking right into her eyes. “Of course we’ll find him.”



Over the next couple of hours, Jake and other officers from the Bend Police Department continued to search the riverbank, question bystanders, and go door-to-door. Esther phoned a woman in the records department to pull up a report on local sex offenders, just to be sure. Not surprisingly, while there were plenty in Bend and the other little towns nearby, there were none in the immediate vicinity of the Franklins’ residence. Real estate prices around the river kept the area pedophile-proof. Unless the neighbor was a very rich pedophile. While the Franklin house wasn’t a crime scene—at least, not yet—Esther told Jake to collect the blood drop on the living room floor.

“Mrs. Franklin cut her ear,” she said, “but let’s be sure the blood is hers, not the boy’s. I’ll collect the blouse she’s wearing. It also has blood on it.”

Jake nodded. “Anything else?”

“No,” she said. “Not yet. This is a waiting game. We hope the boy is hiding somewhere and isn’t in the river and hasn’t been abducted. We need to determine where Mr. Franklin was at the time of Charlie’s disappearance too.”

The veteran detective considered that the neighbors who had been relegated to the shadows cast by the enormous Franklin house were gone at the time of Charlie’s disappearance.

“Rental next door downriver is owned by Connie Phillips, Portland,” Esther said. “Owen and Liz Jarrett own the little place on the other side. Let’s track them down too.”

“Got it,” he said.

“Before things go from bad to worse here,” she went on, “I’ll make a run up to the put-in at the park and see who was on the river today. Carole says the tuber that went by just as she answered the phone had a rental from Riparian. The other guy we need to find was in a canoe with a dog, heading upriver.”

“Not much to go on,” Jake said.

“You got that right,” she said, looking out at the traffic jam that had formed in the river. A cluster of fifteen tubers lashed together were drifting by, unaware of what had occurred at the big house they were staring at. One guy with a gut and a beer cooler trailing behind him on a tether noticed the police. “Must be bustin’ a party! Cops, go home!” he called over to his buddies and their girlfriends.

“We have a right to party!” said one.

“Yeah!”

Esther rolled her eyes and turned to Jake. “God, I can’t stand tourists.”

“My dad says the only thing good about them is their wallets.”

“I like your dad. He’s right.”

Esther returned to the Franklins. By then they’d moved to the kitchen. David had made his wife a cup of tea. Carole was slumped on a barstool, one elbow planted on the counter, holding up her head.

“Carole,” Esther said, “I know this is hard. I’ll need you to change your top.”

“My top?”

Esther’s eyes went to the blood drop.

“This is my blood,” Carole said. “You don’t think that it’s Charlie’s?”

“No. Absolutely not. Since I’ve seen it, though, and since you’re cooperating with the investigation, I need to bring it in. You know, to exclude you.”

David spoke up. “Cooperating? Exclude? I don’t like how those words sound, Detective. It feels a little threatening.”