The Last Thing She Ever Did(9)

“Good work,” he’d said one time when she was working in her studio. “Too bad you can’t sell this for what you’ve put into it.”

“It isn’t about the money,” she said.

He ran his hand over her weaving. “It’s always about the money.”

“It’s about the creating, David.”

The ice in his drink tinkled as he tilted the glass of soda so he could get the last drop. “Sure,” he said into the glass. “Creating.”

Carole had turned away and returned to her work, ending the conversation the only way she knew how: by ignoring David. He would never understand her need to make art. He could never see what she saw in the white, russet, and black fibers that she wove, tufted, and twisted into something only she saw in her mind’s eye.

Now she went back to the deck and called out to Charlie. “Where are you?”

She scanned the yard, the riverbank. The heron had vanished. So had her little boy.





CHAPTER THREE

MISSING: FIFTEEN MINUTES

Liz Jarrett could not escape it. It hadn’t been a dog or a cat. It had been the little boy next door. She’d felt the air drain from her lungs as she threw herself to the driveway and cradled Charlie Franklin in her arms.

“Oh, God,” she said in a controlled whisper. “Charlie. No. No. Charlie.”

Every synapse in her nervous system was firing. A carpet-bombing. She tried to breathe, but it was as if her lungs had been sealed off with something impenetrable. Though she didn’t let out an audible cry, tears streamed down her cheeks. Liz gently twisted Charlie’s shoulders as if by doing so she’d revive the boy so that he could open his eyes, so that he could speak.

Peekaboo. Come on, Charlie. Snap out of this!

Liz held him close. She kept her voice low. “Honey, wake up! Wake up now!”

Yet nothing happened. Charlie’s lips stayed immobile. His eyes stayed shut. The thin fabric of his Mickey Mouse shirt appeared motionless across his chest.

“Wake up!” Liz said, more command than plea.

But nothing. Nothing at all.

Everything was spiraling around her.

No, it was Liz who was spinning. She was a washing machine. She was a Ferris wheel. A blender. She’d only known such disorientation once in her life—the flood on the highway to Diamond Lake. She tried to stand up, but she couldn’t force her legs to lift her. She pressed her hands against her breasts. Maybe this was a dream. Maybe she was dead. She wasn’t sure if she was really breathing just then.

She let it pass through her mind as she knelt there that none of what had just happened had occurred at all. But there was the proof. The limp body of the little boy next door was right there. Liz called over to the Franklins’ house, but a plane passing overhead swathed her words in a blanket of noise. She reached for her phone to call 911. Her fingertips trembled so much that she couldn’t hit the right sequence of numbers.

This can’t be happening. This didn’t happen. I didn’t do this.

Liz crawled around the car, trying to lift herself up.

What’s wrong with me?

Charlie needs help.

I need help.

From her place on the driveway, she eyed the workbench in the back of the garage. She needed to pull herself together. Her thoughts came at her in pieces, a smashed dinner plate in the driveway of a yard sale. Pieces everywhere. They could be scooped up, reassembled, but never, ever, would any of it be the same. She had done the unthinkable. That was true. But it was an accident. She didn’t see Charlie. Not even a glimmer of the boy had caught her eye. Liz thought back to the night before and the pills she’d taken to prepare for the test. She knew that whatever was coursing through her bloodstream just then was partly to blame for what had happened. Saying so would only invite questions from the police. She’d tell them over and over that it was an accident. She was in a hurry. They’d pounce on every detail, shredding her explanation into a million tiny pieces. Each piece, when assembled, would make her out to be either careless or drugged out.

Liz saw no way out of it. She hoisted herself up and stood there, her head bowed over the boy. Blood oozed from the back of his head.

The RAV4 had hit him hard.

She looked over at the workbench once more.

She glanced down at Charlie.

The spinning had stopped. Liz gripped her phone. She could call for help, or she could put Charlie in the car to get him to St. Charles Medical Center. Driving him would be faster. It would get him to where he’d receive the medical attention that he needed.

If something could be done.

But even as she stood there deciding what to do, Liz Jarrett thought about herself. Later she would wonder what had moved her toward being that person. A person who would go into a self-preservation mode that was really a collision course to personal annihilation. A person who put ambition over responsibility, kindness. Decency. It was in that moment that Liz considered what was at stake in a hotel conference room near Portland. She thought about the test she had yet to take. She thought about Owen telling her that she was a screwup and that she’d really messed up this time. That she was never going to be anything. She was going to be known forever as the woman who killed a close friend’s son.

Tiny pieces of gravel were stuck to her palms from crawling on the driveway. She brushed them off, then noticed tiny blood droplets on her jeans. Charlie’s? Hers? She sucked in some air. She opened the front passenger-side car door and moved the seat up, then opened the back door.