The Last Thing She Ever Did

by Gregg Olsen

  Owen saw a fortune instead of a quaint old house stuffed with memories. He was constantly reviewing the neighborhood homes on Zillow and Redfin. Over and over he’d tell her the house wasn’t worth a penny, but the land was suitable for a million-dollar-plus home. When one of the houses a few doors down passed the two-million-dollar mark on Zillow, he made love to her like they were celebrating a windfall of their own.

  A few summers ago, they’d sat on their porch and watched as the house next door, nearly a twin of their own, was devoured by the jaws of a wrecker.

  “That’ll be us one day,” he said.

  Liz had sipped a beer as a paddleboarder’s wake lapped at the riverbank. She didn’t tell Owen that it was bone-crushingly sad to watch that house vanish. The old places built by previous generations were being eclipsed one after another by enormous megahomes that took up every square inch of their lots and blocked out the sun for those who hadn’t yet given in and erected their own behemoths. Joined the fight to see who could be bigger. Boxier. More obtrusive. More show-the-world-what-I-have. Liz finished her beer and tried to let go of the past as David and Carole Franklin removed the house next door like it was a pimple on a chin.

  She’d wanted to hate them. But she couldn’t.

  Sure, David and Carole were nice enough. New people almost always are—at first. David ran a restaurant downtown. Carole was a textile artist, but that was a recent affectation. Previously, she’d held a senior management position at Google. It was their little boy, Charlie, who provided the bridge between Liz and Carole. He was blond, had blue eyes, and seemed to delight in all the same things that Liz held dear. He loved the river. He collected dozens of pebbles from the riverbank. Charlie didn’t seem to see any difference between an agate and a chip of basalt.

  “He’s into quantity,” Carole once told Liz as they watched the boy drop another bucket of his treasures on the sweeping redwood decking of the Franklins’ house.

  “Owen’s into quantity too,” Liz said. “He likes money.”

  Both women laughed.

  Liz was a blur as she hurried across the gravel breezeway to the garage, dialing Owen’s number as she went. The call went to voice mail. She pushed the button to open the garage door, and as it slowly rose, she left a message.

  “Owen! I’m late! You know how important this is to me. To us. I would never have let you down like this. How could you leave without making sure I had my ass in gear?”

  She slid behind the wheel and turned over the engine of her RAV4. The radio went off like a bomb, blasting a pop song so loudly it made her want to scream as she scratched at the volume control. The music was nearly silenced, but Liz’s heart kept hammering so fast and so hard that she wished for a Xanax. Despite her cold shower, sweat collected on the nape of her neck. Scratch the Xanax. She knew that she was so hyped up on pills and so rattled from the sleepless night of studying that polluting her bloodstream with anything more couldn’t possibly help.

  Goddamn it, Owen!

  She put the car in reverse and pressed the ball of her foot against the accelerator. As the car rolled out of the garage, Liz felt a hard bump and slammed on the brakes.

  The thump against the rear bumper had been muted but solid, decisive. Had to have been a dog or a cat. She’d even heard a kind of muffled cry when she applied the brakes. Oh, God, she hated the idea of hurting an animal. She’d never gotten over the time Owen ran over a fox terrier as they pulled off the freeway one late summer day a couple of years back.

  At first he’d resisted Liz’s pleas to stop the car. When he reluctantly did, he’d stayed inside while Liz scooped up the animal and wrapped it in her jacket.

  “Poor baby,” she murmured to the trembling creature when she returned to the open passenger door.

  “Oh, hell no,” Owen said, glaring at the bundle in her arms. “I’m not taking that to the vet.”

  “That, Owen, is someone’s precious pet,” she said, shifting her arms so he could see the wounded canine’s scared brown eyes. “You have to. Otherwise it will be a hit-and-run and you’ll face charges.” That was probably a stretch, but she knew her husband needed a possible consequence to motivate him to do the right thing. Owen Jarrett was, at best, a reluctant rule follower.

  She got in the car and shut the door.

  Owen glared at the dog in her lap. “I do not want to get stuck with the bill, Liz.”

  “It’s always money with you,” she shot back.

  “Cheap shot.”

  The dog whimpered some more.

  “You hit an animal,” Liz said. “You have to help it. What if it was our dog?”

  Owen looked at her and blinked. “We don’t have one.”

  “If we did.”

  “Fine. Fine,” he said. “We can take the dog to the damn vet.” He put the car into gear and drove slower than he normally did. It was a disgusting thought, but Liz wondered if he was stalling in the hope that the dog would die before they got to the vet.

  No such luck.

  The terrier patched up and the owner contacted, Liz wondered how it was that Owen hadn’t understood—or cared—that the dog’s life had mattered to someone. An elderly lady. A little kid. He’d been worried about the cost of it all. Or maybe the inconvenience.

  Doing the right thing wasn’t that hard to do.

  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 i
n 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.

  The river was a slowly moving circus, water and people melding into an ever-changing spectacle from the put-in just above the Old Mill District to its conclusion at Mirror Pond in Drake Park. Along its banks, property owners and vacation-rental managers positioned benches, docks, hammocks—almost any sort of perch on which to sit and watch the show.

  Carole’s phone rang and she glanced at the number, then called over to Charlie, “Remember, you can’t even get your feet wet. Not even a little.”

  The little boy nodded, the sunlight illuminating his blond hair like a Gothic halo. “Okay, Mommy!”

  Carole knew the number. The caller was an insurance adjuster. The four-thousand-square-foot house had a leaky pipe in the downstairs guest suite, and David was on a mission to get the insurance company to pay for the damages. The adjuster was equally insistent that it was a problem caused by the builder, not something they’d cover.

  “Look,” she said to the man after they’d exchanged pleasantries, “just pay the claim. You don’t want us to get a lawyer, do you?”

  No answer.

  “Do you?”

  The adjuster’s response disintegrated into static.

  Carole made a face. “You’re breaking up,” she said. “Hang on.”

  “Okay,” she thought she heard him say.

  It made no sense to her, but lately cell reception was often better inside the house than out. If this kept up, she’d be making calls from the crawl space.

  Charlie’s attention had drifted from the bird to a bunch of pinecones that had fallen during a thunderstorm a few days prior. “Stay where you are,” she called over to him.

  The boy was sitting on the lawn. Next to him was a burgeoning collection of cones. “Okay! Okay, Mommy!”

  Carole smiled and slipped into the kitchen, keeping Charlie in her sight through the window. “How’s this?” she said into her phone.

  “Loud and clear,” the adjuster answered, “but I don’t think you’re going to like what you hear.”

  “Well, I don’t think you’re hearing me,” she said, and then, although she loathed such trivial confrontations, she spent the next few minutes reiterating her husband’s position on the damage.

  The fact was, she felt sorry for the contractor who had done the work. She considered him conscientious and meticulous. As far as she could tell, there was no blame to be placed anywhere. “Shit happens,” she’d told David when he dumped everything in her lap.

  “Not to us,” he said. “Not anymore. We’re done being anyone’s patsy. People take advantage of people like us because they look right at us and all they see are dollar signs. I’m done with that.”

  She knew he was referring to a Lexus that had been nothing but trouble. It took a year of back-and-forth—heated phone calls, nasty e-mails, and a face-to-face at the dealership that could have made the news—to get the dealer to concede the car was indeed a lemon and make good on the warranty.

  But this situation was not that situation. Besides, they had the money to fix the problem themselves. They had more money than they needed in a lifetime. Her position at Google had been very good to her. It had funded the house. The restaurant. The cars. Their entire lifestyle.

  Carole walked from the kitchen to the living room, her eyes fastened on her son’s blond hair, a golden bouncing ball.

  “You don’t really want this to escalate into some legal battle,” the adjuster said. “Do you?”

  Carole didn’t. David had kept pushing for her to make a stand, but it didn’t feel authentic to her. She knew what things were reasonable and worth fighting for. This wasn’t one of those.

  “Can’t we just forget this?” she finally told the adjuster.

  “No, ma’am,” he said. “Once you open a claim, we have to see it to the end.”

  “Please. Just never mind,” she said. “I wish to un-report this, or whatever the term is.”

  “Not able to do that,” he said. “Has to go through headquarters.”

  Carole was ready to pull the plug on the whole thing. Although she probably wouldn’t tell—definitely wouldn’t tell—David about this attempted change of heart, she was all for giving the insurance company and the contractor a free pass, absolving anyone of any wrongdoing. She just wanted to get the pipe fixed, make the damaged drywall repairs, and get back to a life unencumbered by details that took her away from what was really important. What she most wanted to do.

  “I’m so tired of all of this,” she said, running her fingers over a weaving of Jacob’s sheep wool that she’d finished the previous week. There was something lacking in the piece, and she wondered about it just then. Needs more black fibers, she thought. Maybe birch twigs?

  “I hear you,” the man said. “I’m sorry. It’s a process. Like everything.”

  “All right,” Carole conceded, a sigh leaking from her lungs as she disconnected the call.

  No one seemed to hear her at all anymore. At Google she had led four international teams over a seven-year period. She was the glue that held everything together. No one made a move without her—not because she demanded submission, but because she’d earned respect from team members and suppliers.

  Respect had been elusive lately. The Jacob wool weaving was her latest project. She longed to be taken seriously for her art, but it was slow going. Her weavings were
good but not special enough. One time she overheard someone call her the “millionaire artist wannabe” at a dinner party, and it had crushed her. David encouraged her to keep on with her dreams, but sometimes she wondered if he really held the same view as those party snarks.

  “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!”