The Last Thing She Ever Did(67)

Owen sat there drinking coffee and staring out the window, getting angrier and angrier.



Owen shut his office door and sat down at his desk. He couldn’t get any of what had happened in the garage and in that field off the highway out of his mind.

She had done this. All of it.

He turned over a silver-framed photo of the two of them at Crater Lake. Looking at her made him even angrier.

His anger was like a hand behind him, urging him to take care of business. He’d felt it that morning at home. When he stopped for coffee at the drive-through just before Drake Park. Over and over he was reminded that he alone could fix the mess that was taking him down. Deep. Into quicksand. He was being pushed into doing something that he hadn’t planned on doing. He didn’t like to be pushed. He didn’t care one bit about being spur-of-the-moment, although he had manufactured a persona that thrived on spontaneity. With everything he did, there was a calculated payoff. He pulled a sheet of blue paper from the Prada messenger bag that he’d bought used online.

He would never buy used again.

He thought very carefully about what he was going to write.

What he was going to do.

Each word had to count.

Everything he did from now on would allow for no mistakes.





CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

MISSING: FIFTEEN DAYS

Owen had pleaded with her, exhorted her, even threatened her: when the boy’s body was found, she absolutely had to react as though she was as shocked as the rest of the world. After Owen went to work and Carole went back to her megahome to get some more of her things, Liz observed her reflection in the bathroom mirror.

“No,” she said, “it can’t be.”

She put her hands to her face. “Dear God, no. What happened? How could this happen?”

He had told her not to say too much, just convey the obvious emotional responses: shock at the discovery, grief on learning that the boy was dead.

“Be yourself, Liz,” he told her. “That’s all you have to do. Don’t add to the drama by saying any more than how devastating all of this is. That’s it. Nothing more.”

Her hands trembled as she faced the mirror. She was devastated. She’d been grieving over what had happened since the second she realized what she’d done. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t sleep. When Owen told her to be herself, she didn’t know who that was. Not anymore.

She tried again.

“Carole, David, I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

That felt right. She was sorry. She was sorry she had killed Charlie. She didn’t have to say that last part. She could think it.

Yes, that would work.

She could tell them how sorry she was.

Liz found herself increasingly unnerved that Charlie’s body hadn’t been found. He’d been out there in the elements for two weeks. Owen had insisted the night they had left him there that the rancher would find him right away. The next day, even. But he hadn’t. No one had. Surely animals had found the body. Carole and David were never going to get the opportunity for closure that the boy’s burial might bring. The brutal waiting game going on next door had to stop. Carole was convinced that Charlie had been abducted by some child molester or was being held captive by some fiend who was going to trade the boy’s life for money. She clung to that with everything she had. Bend detective Esther Nguyen emphasized several times that abductions like that were exceedingly rare, and in any event, no ransom demand had been received.

“Not yet,” Liz heard Carole tell her. “But it could come.”

“In most cases, ransom demands are made within twelve hours after the abductee was last seen.”

“Then you think he’s dead,” Carole said.

“I’m not saying that,” Esther countered. “I’m saying that you and Mr. Franklin need to be prepared for any possible outcome.”

“What about Jaycee Dugard?” Carole asked. “She was found.”

Jaycee. Elizabeth Smart. The women in Cleveland.

All were mentioned by devastated parents as proof of a miracle.

“Yes, she was. Like I said, the vast majority of cases don’t end that way. We have hope that we’ll find him and that we’ll find him alive. I need you to prepare.”

All of it had to end.

Liz dressed in jeans that were suddenly loose and put on a tank top. Although she hated the drive toward Diamond Lake more than just about anything in the world, she got into the RAV4 for the trip. She was grateful that Carole wasn’t outside when she backed out of the driveway to the street. It seemed every time she saw her closest friend, a lie came out of her mouth. Lies when they weren’t even necessary. It was as if even the simplest, most innocuous truth had to be covered in gratuitous subterfuge.

She scanned the highway shoulder for the cutoff they’d taken the night she and Owen hid Charlie’s body. She remembered the slight rise in the road before a curve. But it was daylight now. The world was a completely different place at night. Then she remembered the most distinguishing elements of the site. The rancher’s fence line had been pristine. Its wires were guitar-string taut. The posts were clean and well maintained, unencumbered by a fringe of native bunchgrass. And the junipers. The evergreen spires lined a section of the field where the cattle gathered for refuge during a storm.