The Last Thing She Ever Did(21)

“No. Not at all. It’s procedure. A box we have to tick off.”

“I didn’t hurt him,” Carole said.

“I know,” Esther said, although she didn’t really. “Please. Just help me so I can do my job and move on so that we can find out what happened to Charlie.”

Carole got up from the barstool and disappeared into the bedroom.

Esther focused on David. It was the first time they’d had a moment alone.

“How do you think she’s holding up?” she asked.

“She’s not,” he said. “She feels guilty and she’s scared to death.”

“Guilty?”

“She thinks it’s her fault. That kind of guilty.”

“What kind of relationship does your wife have with your son?”

David narrowed his eyes. “How do you mean? A good one. Mother and son.”

“Little boys can be challenging sometimes,” Esther said. “I have a nephew that pushes my buttons like a video game. There are times when, well, I can hardly stand to be in the same room with him. He gets under my skin. Does Charlie do that to Carole?”

David didn’t respond right away. He let the detective’s words linger in the air. He looked down at the river and the paddlers and tubers.

“He’s a little boy. So, yes,” he said, “he’s challenging. Just so you know—because I know where you are going—Carole is not the kind of person to be undone by a kid. She worked in the tech space and managed a group of half-autistic crybabies, and she did so effortlessly.”

Just then Carole reappeared wearing a light pink sweater. She’d placed her blood-blemished blouse in a dry-cleaning bag. “Here,” she said, handing it over. “Now please stop this nonsense and go find my son. He’s out there and it’ll be dark soon and . . .” Her words fell into tears.

“Sit down, honey,” David said. “Finish your tea.”

“I don’t want any tea. I want Charlie. I want my little boy home right now, right this goddamn minute. Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” David said.

“We’re looking,” Esther said.

“Well,” Carole said, her voice rising with anger, “you can see he’s not here. Go and find him. That’s your job.”





CHAPTER TEN

MISSING: SIX HOURS

Cody Turner was the assistant manager of Riparian Zone Rentals. At twenty-six, he was like a lot of the young people who came to Bend. Skiing in the winter and rafting in the summer. Rinse and repeat. He wore his black hair in a ponytail and was working on a pay-as-you-go full-body tattoo that documented the highlights of his life. His dog. A rainbow trout. His brother. The name of a girlfriend who had moved back to Portland. Cody hadn’t lived all that much, and his roommate, Hawk, had advised him to leave a little room on his body for some future awesomeness. “That’s what my ass is for, bro,” Cody said with his raucous laugh, which fluctuated between endearing and annoying, depending on how stoned his friends were when Cody was being Cody.

Esther Nguyen crossed the heat of the parking lot to the rental shack. Two teens ran the processing part of the operation from under a canopy, collecting signed liability waivers and cash, and holding credit cards and driver’s licenses as collateral for red and blue inner tubes that had been screen-printed with Riparian Zone in bold, black letters. Once the tourists were processed, a pretty girl with dark brown hair and long arms pulled tubes from a stack behind a rope and passed them to renters.

“Manager here?” the detective asked the employees working the cash boxes.

“Cody’s over there,” said one, indicating the illustrated young man helping a mother put a life jacket on her daughter.

Esther waited for him to finish before introducing herself.

“Yeah,” he said. “Word travels fast around here. I heard some kid drowned downriver.”

“We don’t know what happened,” she said. “That’s why I’m here.”

Cody shifted his weight on his flip-flops. “We didn’t do the kid, and even if we did, we have an ironclad waiver,” he said. “Last year some showboater from California cracked his skull on a rock and tried to blame us. Said the tube was flat and he lost his balance and fell into the river. Totally wrong on that. We didn’t even need to prove him wrong. Waiver’s everything.”

“I’m looking for one of your customers,” she said. “Someone who might have seen something.”

“Nobody here saw anything.”

“Right,” Esther said firmly. “But someone you rented to might have.”

“Look, no one said anything and, just between you and me, the whole idea of a drowning is flat-out bad for business. Look around you. Most of these people are out of shape or half-drunk. We don’t need them scared too.”

“I see,” Esther said, glancing around at the group of patrons lined up to sign waivers to get out on the river. One young man caught her gaze and ditched whatever he was drinking in the trash can. “Should you even be renting to some of these folks? I mean, if they are drunk. Or half-drunk, as you say.”

Cody gave up a lazy grin. This cop was smart. Probably smarter than him.

“What do you want?” he asked.