by Gregg Olsen
PRAISE FOR GREGG OLSEN
“Gregg Olsen’s The Last Thing She Ever Did is atmospheric, darkly moody, and relentlessly thrilling. This book is not to be missed!”
—Linda Castillo, New York Times bestselling author
“Gregg Olsen pens brilliant, creepy, page-turning, heart-pounding novels of suspense that always keep me up at night. In The Last Thing She Ever Did, he topped himself.”
—Allison Brennan, New York Times bestselling author
“Beguiling, wicked, and taut with suspense and paranoia, The Last Thing She Ever Did delivers scenes as devastating as any I’ve ever read with a startling, pitch-perfect finale. A reminder that evil may reside in one’s actions, but tragedy often spawns from one’s inaction.”
—Eric Rickstad, New York Times bestselling author of The Silent Girls
“Olsen’s latest examines how a terrible, split-second decision has lingering effects, and the past echoes the present. Full of unexpected twists, The Last Thing She Ever Did will keep you guessing to the last line.”
—J. T. Ellison, New York Times bestselling author of Lie to Me
“Master storyteller Gregg Olsen continues to take readers hostage with another spellbinding tale of relentless, pulse-pounding suspense.”
—Rick Mofina, international bestselling author of Last Seen
“Tense. Well-crafted. Gripping.”
—Mary Burton, New York Times bestselling author
“Wickedly clever! Twisted.”
—Lisa Gardner, New York Times bestselling author
“Olsen writes rapid-fire page-turners.”
—Seattle Times
“Grabs you by the throat.”
—Kay Hooper, New York Times bestselling author
“Olsen will scare you—and you’ll love it.”
—Lee Child, New York Times bestselling author
OTHER TITLES BY GREGG OLSEN
FICTION
The Sound of Rain
Just Try to Stop Me
Now That She’s Gone
The Girl in the Woods
The Girl on the Run
Shocking True Story
Fear Collector
Betrayal
The Bone Box
Envy
Closer than Blood
Victim Six
Heart of Ice
A Wicked Snow
A Cold Dark Place
The Boy She Left Behind
NONFICTION
A Killing in Amish Country: Sex, Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Murder
A Twisted Faith: A Minister’s Obsession and the Murder That Destroyed a Church
The Deep Dark: Disaster and Redemption in America’s Richest Silver Mine
Starvation Heights: A True Story of Murder and Malice in the Woods of the Pacific Northwest
Cruel Deception: A Mother’s Deadly Game, a Prosecutor’s Crusade for Justice
If Loving You Is Wrong: The Shocking True Story of Mary Kay Letourneau
Abandoned Prayers: The Incredible True Story of Murder, Obsession, and Amish Secrets
Bitter Almonds: The True Story of Mothers, Daughters, and the Seattle Cyanide Murders
Bitch on Wheels: The True Story of Black Widow Killer Sharon Nelson
If I Can’t Have You: Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2018 by Gregg Olsen
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542046428
ISBN-10: 1542046424
Cover design by Damon Freeman
For David Downing, who always knows the right button to push.
CONTENTS
TWENTY YEARS AGO
PART ONE BLAME
CHAPTER ONE JUST BEFORE
CHAPTER TWO MISSING: TEN MINUTES
CHAPTER THREE MISSING: FIFTEEN MINUTES
CHAPTER FOUR MISSING: TWENTY MINUTES
CHAPTER FIVE MISSING: ONE HOUR
CHAPTER SIX MISSING: TIME UNKNOWN
CHAPTER SEVEN MISSING: FOUR HOURS
CHAPTER EIGHT MISSING: FIVE HOURS
CHAPTER NINE MISSING: FIVE HOURS, FIFTEEN MINUTES
CHAPTER TEN MISSING: SIX HOURS
CHAPTER ELEVEN MISSING: EIGHT HOURS
CHAPTER TWELVE MISSING: ELEVEN HOURS
CHAPTER THIRTEEN MISSING: THIRTEEN HOURS
CHAPTER FOURTEEN MISSING: FOURTEEN HOURS
CHAPTER FIFTEEN MISSING: FOURTEEN HOURS
CHAPTER SIXTEEN MISSING: FIFTEEN HOURS
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN MISSING: FIFTEEN HOURS
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN MISSING: SIXTEEN HOURS
CHAPTER NINETEEN MISSING: ONE DAY
CHAPTER TWENTY MISSING: ONE DAY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE MISSING: TWO DAYS
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO MISSING: TWO DAYS
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE MISSING: THREE DAYS
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR MISSING: FOUR DAYS
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE MISSING: FOUR DAYS
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX MISSING: FIVE DAYS
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN MISSING: FIVE DAYS
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT MISSING: FIVE DAYS
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE MISSING: SIX DAYS
CHAPTER THIRTY MISSING: SIX DAYS
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE MISSING: ONE WEEK
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO MISSING: ONE WEEK
PART TWO SORRY
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE MISSING: EIGHT DAYS
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR MISSING: EIGHT DAYS
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE MISSING: EIGHT DAYS
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX MISSING: NINE DAYS
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN MISSING: TEN DAYS
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT MISSING: TWO WEEKS
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE MISSING: FIFTEEN DAYS
CHAPTER FORTY MISSING: SEVENTEEN DAYS
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE MISSING: SEVENTEEN DAYS
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO MISSING: SEVENTEEN DAYS
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE MISSING: SEVENTEEN DAYS
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR MISSING: EIGHTEEN DAYS
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE MISSING: EIGHTEEN DAYS
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX MISSING: EIGHTEEN DAYS
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN MISSING: EIGHTEEN DAYS
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT MISSING: NINETEEN DAYS
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE MISSING: NINETEEN DAYS
CHAPTER FIFTY MISSING: TWENTY DAYS
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE MISSING: TWENTY-TWO DAYS
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO MISSING: TWENTY-TWO DAYS
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE MISSING: TWENTY-FIVE DAYS
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR MISSING: TWENTY-SEVEN DAYS
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE MISSING: TWENTY-SEVEN DAYS
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX MISSING: TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN MISSING: TWENTY-NINE DAYS
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT MISSING: TWENTY-NINE DAYS
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE MISSING: TWENTY-NINE DAYS
CHAPTER SIXTY MISSING: NO MORE
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE MISSING: NO MORE
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO MISSING: NO MORE
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE MISSING: NO MORE
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR TEN DAYS AFTER BEING FOUND
ACKNOW
LEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TWENTY YEARS AGO
Beetles never stop. They gnaw silently and relentlessly.
Guilt is like that too.
Less than two hours from Bend, Oregon, Diamond Lake is a spectacular sapphire blue with a tawny shoreline ringed by ponderosa pines. The pines there struggled to survive against the scourge of a plague of unseen beetles that insidiously burrowed through the bark and into the cambium, a tree’s growth layer where the rings in the trunk are formed. For years the attack by the tiny army went unnoticed, picking away, weakening a once-mighty stand of timber until the trees began to slump into deadfall.
A slow, quiet death.
Unseen.
Until it was all too late.
For Liz Camden, too late happened when she was only nine.
Shards of memory returned every time she passed the sign indicating the turnoff to the lake. Liz was always a passenger when this occurred, because she never, ever drove that route on her own. It was a pact she made with herself, a way out of remembering all of it and preventing the splintery, jagged pieces from stabbing at her. Whenever they did, despite her best efforts to forget, the memories assembled themselves into a cracked mirror.
And it all returned . . .
Liz’s mother, Bonnie Camden, and neighbor Miranda Miller planned a day trip to shop in Portland, three hours from Bend. Liz’s father, Brian, was away on business, though due home that night.
Miranda’s husband, Dan, a doctor with a thriving practice in town, had been looking for an excuse to take out his new boat while the women were “off spending all of our hard-earned money on diamonds and furs.” It was a joke, of course. Dan was always one to exaggerate Miranda’s spendthrift ways and trumpet his own frugality. Except for that boat.
He’d wanted one for years. He’d sit on the deck overlooking the Deschutes River and roll his eyes at the tubers who passed by. He wanted a boat with an outboard motor. Why float when you could command the water with an engine’s roar?
“For fishing,” Liz remembered Dan telling Miranda when the Camdens were over to celebrate the end of the summer.
“You can fish from the shore like everyone else,” Miranda said.
She could always deliver a deadpan line. She had a knack for it. Or she could make her point with a simple gesture, a roll of the shoulder, and what they all knew and loved as “the Miranda look.” A dart at her target, then away, with a slight smile across her face. Never mean. Always effective.
“I want a boat.”
“I want a new refrigerator.”
“Oh really?” he said.
“That’s what I just said.”
Liz remembered how three days later a delivery came from Hansen’s Appliances. The day after that, Dan pulled up in front of the Millers’ house with a boat trailer and the apple of his eye. It wasn’t new. But the sixteen-foot Bayliner Capri was the most beautiful thing Dan had laid eyes on.
“God, I love this boat. I might even sleep in it,” he told Miranda as the neighbors gathered to ogle his purchase.
Miranda rolled her shoulder, flung her dart—“Well, I hope it’s comfy, because there’s no ‘might’ about it, buster”—then slipped away with her wry smile.
She wasn’t mad at her husband. Not ever. That’s just the way they played. Liz always liked the Millers’ banter. Her parents were mostly silent. A quiet and somewhat sweet stalemate. When the chance came to hang out over at the Millers’, she always looked forward to it. She knew it would be fun.
The trip to the lake was executed like an army reconnaissance mission, which wasn’t surprising. In his life before returning to Bend to start a medical practice, Dan had served in Vietnam. He never talked about that experience, at least as far as Liz knew, but his crew cut and the jangle of the dog tags he still wore telegraphed his history without words. Dan was a lean man with sinewy arms, who was softened by his ready smile and pretend irritation with all the things Miranda threw his way.
As the big day approached, Dan gathered the kids who were not away at church camp—Liz and the Millers’ son Seth, both nine, and Liz’s older brother Jim, eleven—to talk about the finer points of trout fishing and water safety. Dan could be long-winded, and most everything he said seemed pure overkill. But that was the way he was.
The blast of heat that week had toasted the high desert. When thunderclouds rolled in the night before the big trip, everyone felt the relief that comes with the promise of rain. The TV weatherman, a glad-hander with an endless procession of bow ties, indicated a storm would move quickly through the area.
And, for once, he was right.
The tempest passed through Bend early Friday morning, slickening the roadways, filling the Deschutes, and pounding the eardrums of those unable to sleep through the cracks of thunder.
That morning Bonnie and Miranda went out ahead of Dan and the kids. “I need to get to Portland early if I’m going to empty Dan’s bank account,” Miranda said as they drove off.
Years later Liz could still see her mother and Seth’s mom as they had appeared when they left in the Millers’ Cadillac. They had dressed up for the occasion. Her mom seldom did that. But that day Bonnie Camden looked like a movie star. Indeed, both women did. They wore new summer dresses. Bonnie had made hers from a Butterick pattern she’d found at a fabric store in the town of Sisters. It was a solid sky blue with white piping. Miranda had ordered hers from an expensive catalog from a store in New York. It was white linen that she accessorized with a pale green leather belt. Liz wanted to touch the linen, but she didn’t dare. She wondered when she’d be old enough to wear makeup and put on a gold necklace and shoes that clattered when she walked on the stone entryway of her grandparents’ house.
Of all Liz’s scattered recollections from that day, the one of Mrs. Miller and her mother was unique in that it was the only one Liz didn’t mind revisiting.
The white Ford station wagon reeked of a sweet, spicy scent when Liz and Jimmy got inside to join Seth and his dad. Cloying. Heavy. By the end of the day, the scent had imprinted itself on Liz’s brain in the way that the odor of the first alcohol that gets a new drinker really, really drunk can later turn their stomach at the slightest whiff. Yet, sitting there, she couldn’t determine exactly what it was. Spice like her dad’s Teaberry gum? A sachet in her grandma’s drawer?
Dan stopped at McDonald’s on the way out of town and ran inside while his son and the Camden kids waited. Liz would later remember thinking it was an auspicious beginning to the trip. An Egg McMuffin was a treat. Her mom never let her children eat fast food.
“She says it isn’t good for you,” Liz recalled saying to Dan when he handed her a McMuffin wrapped in oily paper.
“Beer isn’t, either,” Dan said. “But you’ll drink it anyway when you’re older.”
Liz sat in the front next to Dan. The radio played country music. At the time, Liz—with her Egg McMuffin and not having to sit next to her brother—thought the moment could hardly be improved. Well, at least the fast food was awesome. The smell and country music, not as much.
The wipers went on when it started to rain a few miles before the turnoff to the lake. At first, small droplets smeared the brittle remains of dead bugs over the surface of the glass. The droplets grew larger and then suddenly multiplied into such fearsome numbers that individual drops could hardly be discerned. The pelting water sounded like a hundred nail guns hitting the roof.
“We don’t need no stinkin’ sunshine,” Dan said, sipping his now-tepid McDonald’s coffee, which earlier had been too hot to drink. Taking his foot off the accelerator a little, he put down the cup and leaned forward to swipe the inside of the windshield with his fingertips in case condensation was contributing to the difficulty in seeing the road ahead. “Man,” he said, glancing at Liz next to him and the boys in the backseat, “this is some cloudburst.”
The wipers fought wildly against the rain, but it only kept coming faster and faster. The car was enveloped by
a continuous sheet of water.
As the vehicle eased up an incline, Dan lowered the driver’s window and looked to the sheer walls of blasted basalt on either side as a guide.
Liz couldn’t be sure, but later she came to believe she’d been the first one to feel it. A slight rumble. Maybe something was wrong with the radio. Jimmy liked to turn the bass up real high on the dial on their parents’ stereo system. But it wasn’t the radio. Liz looked at Dan and their eyes met for a second. Was it the sound of the tires on the roadway? She didn’t think it could be. The road had been freshly paved. It looked smooth, like black licorice. Without warning, the wheels began to shake.
“Crap,” Dan said, moving his gaze to the rearview mirror. “Boat trailer must be dragging that back taillight. It was loose when the dealer sold it to me. Said he’d fix it. I need to pull over for a second, guys.”
Just as the car and the trailer stopped, it suddenly turned dark, as if Liz’s mother had pulled her blackout shades against one of her all-too-frequent migraines. It would always be difficult to accurately place what happened in those moments when the wall of water first hit the front of the station wagon. It was fast and fierce. Liz and the boys screamed.
Everything was staccato in her eyes. Dan’s terrified face. The rising water. Even the roaring sound emanating from outside seemed to come in pops or flashes.
Dan, who had not yet opened his door, yelled, “Hang on! Flash flood!”
The vehicle lurched from its resting spot. It was a cork. It was a feather. The force of the water shoved it back down the highway. Bumper pool. A steel ball in a pinball machine. The station wagon and the boat trailer careened back down the highway.
Dan stretched his arm over to Liz as though he could protect her.
Washing machine.
Dryer with shoes inside.
Liz looked out her window, and the boat trailer appeared next to her before snapping off and hurtling away with the dark water—along with logs and what might’ve been a capsized horse trailer. All of it passed in the kind of frightening blur that doesn’t allow the mind to fully comprehend what one is seeing.
Shards of memory.
Debris of all kinds pelted them as they rattled backward down the highway. Liz was wondering if that had really been a horse trailer, when, through the filthy windshield, she could suddenly make out the image of an immense horse as it lunged at them. Its hooves hit the glass, and the animal let out a terrified scream, the likes of which Liz would never forget but never be able to describe no matter how hard she tried. It was sharp and guttural at the same time.