The Last Thing She Ever Did(57)

“Of course that’s what I mean. I had a family. It was everything to me. Kids are the greatest things in the world, though these days nobody seems to give a rat’s ass about them.”

Esther smiled to herself. Apparently ass wasn’t French.

“I hope they find that little boy,” he said as he got up to lead her to the door. “Still wish they’d move, though.”

“About the day Charlie went missing. You told the officer you were home, but you didn’t see anything.”

“That’s right. I didn’t.”

“I don’t know if that’s entirely true, Dr. Miller.”

“What do you mean?”

It was time to mention the GoPro.

“We have video. It shows you watching from the window.” She indicated the pair of binoculars. “You were using those.”

“I don’t know if I was or wasn’t, but I sure didn’t see anything. If I did I’d have called the police. Calling the police or an ambulance is the decent thing to do.”



Across the river, Liz called the humane society to let them know that she couldn’t come in to volunteer that afternoon. It was the first time she’d ever missed a day.

Animals had always been her great love. Throughout her childhood she’d raised just about every kind of creature available at a pet shop. She was not a cat person or a dog person. She was an animal person. One time she’d found an injured otter, and she nursed it back to health. For years after his release, she was sure that every otter she saw was Ollie.

She held her cat, Bertie, on her lap when she left a voice message for the volunteer coordinator. The cat’s outboard motor purr ordinarily calmed Liz when she was feeling stressed.

But no longer. Nothing could calm her.

“We’ve had a tragedy in our neighborhood,” she said, picking her words carefully as she thought of Owen’s advice. When you talk to anyone, never give details. Details will trap us. “Our next-door neighbor’s son is missing. I think I’m going to stay home and see if there’s anything that I can do to help out.”

Liz hung up and went over to the window that faced the Franklins’. That enormous house punched at the sky. It looked dark and foreboding, even more so than ever. She remembered the day the framers came and how, board by board, the structure shut out some of the light that had poured over the river and spilled onto the Jarretts’ shoreline. She’d gotten used to the change over time, mostly because Carole, David, and Charlie brought some joy and their own kind of light to the neighborhood. She tried to erase from her mind what she’d done. She wanted to tell herself that it had been a nightmare or even a stray recollection from a movie she’d seen.

Liz watched from the window while police came and went. Owen insisted that everything would be okay.

For Carole and David, she knew it never would be.





PART TWO

SORRY

Blame me. Fine. That’s how weak you are.

—Owen Jarrett





CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

MISSING: EIGHT DAYS

A little over a week since Charlie vanished, and they had nothing. Just Matt Henry’s GoPro videotape strongly suggesting that Charlie Franklin had not gone in the river. And that was shot from his dog’s point of view. No one had seen anything. Not a single verifiable sighting. The man from Pilot Knob with the New Mexico plates and the screaming little boy was a Match date disaster. Local police had questioned him. Nothing. Nothing at all. Esther and Jake decided to return to where it had all started.

“Let’s revisit the Jarretts. Liz is Carole’s closet friend, at least here, locally.”

“She wasn’t home when it happened,” Jake said, looking at his notepad. “She’d left around nine thirty to take the test.”

“The bar exam she didn’t stick around for,” Esther said.

“What more do you think she could tell us, then, if she wasn’t home?”

Esther wasn’t sure. “Let’s pay her another visit and find out.”

They drove across town and parked in the driveway, looking down the stretch of gravel that led to the Franklin place.

“Man, that house is huge,” Jake said.

“It sure is. Pretty soon little places like this one will be a thing of the past,” she said, indicating the Jarretts’ house.

She knocked on the door. Liz answered. She was still in her bathrobe and her hair hadn’t been washed.

“Sorry,” she said, realizing she looked like a wreck. She ran her hands over her hair, trying to flatten it out, but it was no use. It was a twirl of snarls. “I haven’t been myself since this all started.”

“Can we come in?” Esther asked.

Liz kept the door stationary. “The house is a mess. Just like me. Probably not the best time.”

“We don’t mind, Mrs. Jarrett,” Esther pressed, taking a step closer to the door. “We won’t be long. We’re just revisiting some things, trying to find out anything that we can. A little boy’s life is at stake here. Can we come in?”

Liz couldn’t refuse. Rebuffing an interview would make her look indifferent. The fact was she was shattered inside. She could feel her heart rate escalate and her face grow warmer.

“All right,” she said, “but you’ll have to excuse the place.”