The Last Thing She Ever Did(7)
Around that time, Liz started volunteering at the humane society in Bend. She’d always loved animals. Except horses, of course. Horses always frightened her. They reminded her of what she would come to consider the second-worst day of her life.
CHAPTER TWO
MISSING: TEN MINUTES
From the gleaming redwood deck where she drank her morning espresso, Carole Franklin watched her three-year-old, Charlie, stalk a heron along the river’s edge. The steel-gray bird with legs that disappeared into the late summer mat of reeds let the little boy get close before launching herself with her massive wings, hovering above the river’s surface, and planting herself ten feet farther down the Deschutes. As she looked on, Carole wondered just how intelligent that particular bird was; birdbrain certainly didn’t seem to apply. A smile came to her as the act repeated itself.
The heron and Charlie were playing a game.
The tranquil water that passed by her home was mostly glass at that time of the morning. That would change. Within an hour the paddleboarders, the inner-tubers, and the hordes of tourists with their air mattresses lashed together, music blaring and beer-can tops popping, would put a stranglehold on the scene. Morning was the best time of day—really, the only time when many were reminded of what had drawn them to Bend, Oregon, in the first place.
Carole and her husband, David, were among a flood of newcomers, and as such couldn’t freely join in to complain about how things had changed in the Central Oregon city. Although they’d never admit it to anyone, they knew they were part of the problem. People like them arrived in Bend with armloads of cash, bought high, and propelled taxes upward on cottages and small riverfront homes that had been modest family vacation retreats for generations.
Carole’s gaze was drawn across the water to where Dan Miller, a Bend native with a bristle brush of white hair and a wiry frame draped as always in a way-too-large Hawaiian shirt, sheared the blades of his perfect lawn with a push mower. Dan’s wife, Miranda, had died the year before of cancer. Carole and David had tried to befriend the Millers, but the older couple had grown tired of welcoming new people into what had been an insular world. The very presence of newcomers like the young couple and the skyrocketing property values they triggered had forced many of their friends to leave. It was a quiet war, an impasse that left the old-timers with the realization that new endings for their stories were being written by people other than themselves.
Carole and David knew all this because Dan had actually said as much when he and Miranda ran into the Franklins at a downtown gallery opening.
“No offense,” Dan had said, turning his University of Oregon baseball cap as though tightening it in place over eyes locked steady on the Franklins, “but people like you are going to force us to sell. We’re seniors. We’re on a fixed income. Our place has been in my family for forty years. I thought I could leave it to my family, but now all they see is dollar signs.”
There had been nothing subtle about Dan Miller. Carole knew this dig about his children was really directed at what she and David had done when they purchased their property, a modest two-story that had been owned by longtime friends of the Millers and the Camdens.
Miranda tugged at her husband’s shoulder. “That’s enough, Dan,” she said. “This is just the way the world is now.”
Carole understood where the couple was coming from. Her husband, not so much.
“I wish they’d just quit complaining and appreciate what they have,” David said as the Millers disappeared from the gallery.
“They do,” Carole said. “Or, rather, what they had.”
“Things change,” he said. “It’s called progress.”
“Right. Progress. But it isn’t progress to them, David. It’s a sharp stick pushing them out, and people like us are on the other end of it.”
David just raised his shoulders a little and sipped some O’Doul’s. “Sounds like it’s his kids he should be bitching to.”
Carole didn’t say another word. She couldn’t think of anything to say.
While Charlie made his way along the riverbank, trailing the elusive heron, Carole waved to Dan Miller as he pivoted his push mower toward her and the next row in the nearly perfect argyle design he was cutting into his lawn, crisscrossing to ensure that every blade had been trimmed to uniform height in what surely had to be the most pristine yard along the river. From her vantage point, the old man looked like he’d been carved out of soapstone. His eye drawn by her wave, he looked up and offered a curt nod.
“Beautiful day,” she called out.
“The weather’s changing,” he said, before carrying on.
“Yes,” she answered. “I can feel it.”
It was nearing the middle of September. The daytime highs still flirted with triple digits, but in Central Oregon’s high desert a chill comes at night and lingers into the morning even on late summer’s hottest days. That time of year it sometimes cooled to such a temperature that the surface of the Deschutes would emit a slight puff of steam where it wound under the bridge just to the north of the Jarretts’ place. Looking at that bridge now, Carole saw a couple of vacation-rental teens crossing it and a lone early-morning tuber sliding beneath it on his downriver float. A man in a canoe with a nearly white cocker spaniel hugged the shoreline along Dan Miller’s sliver of beach, paddling upstream.