The Last Thing She Ever Did(59)

“All right,” Esther said, handing Liz her card. “Please call me if anything comes to mind.”

Liz said she would.



“Did you notice that she talked about Charlie in the past tense?” Jake said as they returned to the car.

Indeed Esther had. “It doesn’t necessarily mean anything, other than the fact that she thinks the boy is gone for good.”

They’d reached the car. Jake looked back at the house. “Why would she think that?”

“Because most kids who’ve been missing this long are dead. Some are never found. Dead nevertheless.” She got in behind the wheel.

“You think Charlie Franklin is dead?” Jake asked when he’d joined her inside.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But yes, probably. He probably is. I hate saying it, Jake, but this is the world we’re living in now. Not very many miracles these days.”

“That’s pretty jaded, isn’t it?”

His remark made her wince a little. He was right. “Sorry,” she said. “It doesn’t mean that we won’t fight like hell to try to find him and bring him home. God willing, he will be alive. I want to be hopeful. Wishing for something doesn’t make it so.”

Esther put the car in gear, and they drove downtown to a coffee shop. Her pessimism about Charlie’s fate bothered her. She wondered if thinking that the case might be hopeless would affect how she handled it. No, she decided. The Franklins needed their son back, but they didn’t need false hope that all would be all right. It was her place to toe the line and always tell family members that she and the other members of law enforcement had locked arms and were working every single second on solving the case. There were lots of cases, though. And sometimes cases cooled.

“Did you notice something odd about the way she spoke about Charlie?” she asked while they waited for their order.

“You mean apart from that it was in the past tense?”

“She never said his name. Not once. A little odd, I think.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Nothing, really,” she said. “Just a little strange.”

He poured three servings of cream in his coffee, turning it from dark brown to a light beige. He added sugar too.

“I noticed something else,” Jake said.

Esther took a drink of her coffee. “What was that?”

“She couldn’t wait to get rid of us, just like last time,” he said, stirring the pale mixture. “She said she had an appointment to go to, but I really don’t think so. She wouldn’t have gotten dressed if we hadn’t shown up. I bet she didn’t have anywhere to go.”

“Maybe she ran out of wine,” Esther said.

“Yeah,” Jake said. “I smelled that too.”



The detectives left, and Liz stood immobile by the front door. She kept her eye on the peephole until Esther and Jake disappeared. She listened for their car to start and waited for the sound of the tires moving the loose gravel over the surface of the blacktop. Their appearance hadn’t been unexpected. She knew there would be a time when the police would circle back. She thought she’d be prepared for it, but it had been hard sitting there, telling them lie after lie. Her hands were shaking, and she held them together while she went back to the kitchen to get a drink. She needed to steady her nerves. She was in serious trouble. Just one glass of wine, and she prayed that God would help her figure out what to do. She was so sorry for everything she’d done. She knew it was impossible to undo any of it. It was beyond grotesque.

One glass turned into two. She paced around the house, glancing at the river every now and then, squinting her tired eyes as the sparkles of light bounced through the old glass of the original window. The laughter of some kids floating on the water turned her stomach. Maybe it was the wine? No, she knew, it was the fact that she’d killed a little boy. She imagined for the thousandth time telling Carole what she’d done, but there was no scenario in which she could imagine forgiveness. Not even a little.

I need to do something.

Owen needs to do something.

She put down her wineglass and retrieved her purse from the bedroom. A painting her mother did of her brother and Seth mocked her. Bonnie Camden insisted it was her best work. It showed the boys sitting in a red canoe on Mirror Pond.

It was an accident.

People say that, and those involved cling to it. A tragedy’s main players have no control over how other people might choose to perceive an error in judgment. The parents who leave their child in a hot car “only for a minute,” the teens who double-dare a buddy to jump from a cliff “because if you don’t, you’re a wuss”—no one means to do harm, but those outside of the scenario are always quick to assign blame.

Her parents had done that to Dr. Miller.

Others would do that to her. The difference was, while what happened to Charlie was absolutely an accident, what she did afterward ensured that she’d never escape blame.

She got into her RAV4 and started for Lumatyx. Outside, the world was bright, sunny. The radio played an upbeat pop song. Everything was at odds with how she felt.

When she got inside Owen’s building, the receptionist said her husband was at an off-site meeting.

“What off-site meeting?” Owen hadn’t mentioned anything. But then, he hadn’t told her much about what was going on at work. She could feel him pushing her to the sidelines. “Where?”