The Last Thing She Ever Did

by Gregg Olsen

  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.

  She hooked her arms under Charlie’s tiny body and lifted.

  You are so stupid, Liz.

  You are going down.

  The police lab will find Adderall in your bloodstream.

  You will fail the test.

  You will be a pariah in your own neighborhood.

  You will go to prison.

  It happened so fast. Faster than a blink. It was nearly a magnetic force that drew her to the workbench instead of the backseat of the RAV4. She set the body down, gently, on the workbench. Sweetly, even. Even though nothing but darkness was passing through her mind, Liz leaned over and kissed the child’s forehead. A tear splashed on the boy’s blond head.

  What have I done? Fuck me! Kill me!

  A blue tarp her father had used when he painted the house and stained the front porch caught her attention. She unfurled the stiff, paint-splotched fabric and placed it over Charlie.

  She’d killed him. She hadn’t meant to. It had been a terrible accident. It really had.

  She knew what she was doing would only buy her time.

  Got to take the test. Got to figure this out. Got to. Got to. Got to.

  As she approached her car, Liz could hear Carole’s voice calling out for her son down by the river.

  God, no.

  It was an ice pick in her chest.

  “Charlie!” Carole called out.

  Liz slid behind the wheel and started backing out.

  Carole’s voice was louder, more forceful. Closer.

  Liz pushed the button on the garage-door opener, and the door rolled downward. She caught a glimpse of a woman’s face in the rearview mirror. Her own reflection seemed foreign to her. A stranger’s face.

  Again Carole calling out for her son.

  “Charlie!”

  Liz pressed her foot on the gas slowly and continued backing out. As she cleared the space in front of the garage, she saw the bucket of cones that Charlie must have been carrying when she struck him. She also saw a small pool of blood on the gravel driveway. She could feel the pills and coffee make a play for her esophagus, but she managed to suppress the urge to vomit. She’d lost control of everything else.

  She’d lost everything.

  “Charlie!”

  She got out of the car, picked up the bucket, and kicked a couple of the errant cones into the flower bed that flanked the driveway. She put the ball of her foot on the blood and spun around on it, grinding it into oblivion. The spot left behind was no longer red but a damp, dark stain. Liz hoped it would blend into the driveway. She put Charlie’s bucket in the car. She needed air. She could barely breathe. She returned to the car and got inside. She rolled down the window and put her foot on the gas.

  And she was gone.

  Liz pulled over on a quiet side street just before the highway that slices through Bend and rolled up the opened window. All she could see in her mind’s eye were images of Charlie. Playing in the yard. Following after his mother when Carole came for a visit next door.

  He had been an angelic child.

  Now he was an angel.

  As the car idled, Liz screamed as loud as she could. Tears rained from her eyes. She had no idea why she’d panicked. It was an accident, a terrible one. One that she’d made a million times worse by her actions after the car hit Charlie.

  She dialed her husband one more time. This time when she got voice mail she didn’t leave a message. She didn’t know what the message should be. She knew that the right thing to do was to return home, call the police, and face Carole and David. Tell them how sorry she was. Tell them that she loved Charlie too. Beg them all for forgiveness. Plead for mercy.

  For she’d done something she could never explain to anyone. She’d put Charlie under a damn tarp in the garage and drove on to Beaverton and the bar exam.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MISSING: TWENTY MINUTES

  If only.

  There is a moment when the parents of many, if not most, missing children recognize an irrevocable mistake they made. They can pinpoint the split second when something they did changed everything in their world. Mistakes are dominoes, falling on one another in a mechanical, unstoppable progression. Those moments never leave them. The echo is a ticking clock at the end of a long wooden hallway. Pounding. Reverberating. Mocking. Reminding t
hose parents that terrible accidents or dark incidents caused by others truly rest only on their shoulders.

  Carole Franklin told herself not to panic. It would be unproductive to do so. It had only been a goddamn minute since her eyes held the image of her little boy on the green strip of lawn that separated the river from the house. Maybe five.

  She walked around the house, searching for signs that he’d come inside. Nothing.

  She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She sipped some water from the sports bottle on the kitchen counter.

  “Charlie?” she called out, her voice firm but not scary. If he was playing hide-and-seek, she didn’t want to jolt him into digging in and hiding from her because he thought he was in trouble. “Honey?” Her tone was plaintive but with a growing edge.

  The TV was on, and she reached for the remote and put it on mute. She strained to hear her son.

  “You better come out right now,” she said. No, too harsh. “I have a Fruit Roll-Up with your name on it.”

  As she stood there, alone in her living room, Carole’s heartbeat began to accelerate; it felt like a hammer striking a pillow inside her chest. A thud on repeat, building in intensity. She sipped more water.

  Finally she made her way out to the deck, filled her lungs, and shouted for Charlie. The hammer continued to pound on the pillow. Harder. Faster. When her calls brought no response, Carole left the deck and ran the length of the yard, which rolled gently down to the soft, grassy edge of the river. She hurried to the space where the landscape designer had incorporated an old river-rock fire pit, scanning the water for something to indicate something terrible had happened under its surface.

  But nothing. No bubbles. No shadow of an object drifting below.

  Nothing at all.

  The water was nearly smooth and transparent.

  Carole stood frozen as a lone crow circled overhead. She put her fingertips to her lips. The muscles in her shoulders and throat had all seized up into a single rigid mass. Her heart was heaving against her rib cage. She was a fighter, though, and began doing everything she could to remain completely composed. She filled her lungs and blasted a cry for help over the water. No one returned her call. Dan Miller was no longer mowing his lawn across the river. The argyle pattern of the grass had been completed. She looked over at the Miller house and thought she saw the old man silhouetted in the window, but she wasn’t sure. She looked upriver. The teenagers on the bridge were gone. No one was there, and that meant no one had seen anything happen to her son.

  Maybe nothing had happened.

  She called over to the paddler in the canoe with the cocker spaniel, still working his way upstream.

  “Have you seen my little boy?”

  The man tugged at his earbuds and leaned in Carole’s direction. His dog barked. “Say that again?” he asked.

  Carole could feel her knees weaken. “My son,” she said. “He was playing out front. Right here. Have you seen him?”

  “Nope,” the man said.

  “He’s three!” she called out, as if Charlie’s age would jog the paddler’s memory.

  “Been focused on getting upriver,” he said. “You’re about the only one I’ve seen in this stretch.”

  Carole found herself back at that moment. The instant she wished she could change. Damn the insurance adjuster! No. She damned herself for taking the call and pulling her eyes from Charlie. She was unsure how long she’d been distracted. Five minutes? If that. As she scanned the space where her son had stalked the heron and then collected pinecones, she told herself everything would be all right.

  “I’ll keep my eyes peeled,” the man in the red canoe called out.

  Carole thanked him and started pondering the most plausible explanation.

  Charlie had gone inside the house.

  He was hiding among the arbor of hopvines in the side yard.

  He had not gone in or even near the water, because he knew better. She told him over and over the water was dangerous. He knew it. She was sure of it.

  After a hurried sweep of the yard and the riverbank, Carole realized that the scenarios she was inventing weren’t helping. In her bones she knew that something was really, really wrong.

  She punched David’s cell number as she went back inside and then sped through the house, grinding the phone to her ear with such ferocity that her earring tore her earlobe. Blood oozed. Why in the hell does this house have to be so goddamn big? There were only the three of them. Why did they have to build a place on the river when she’d preferred a secluded spot on acreage, a site that offered views of Mount Bachelor and posed no threat to the part of their life that meant more than anything?

  At least to her. There had been numerous times when Carole doubted the sincerity of her husband’s interest in their son. Of course, David said the right things. Fussed over Charlie at the right times. He hunkered down on the floor to play cars with him. He even read to him now and then in the evenings. Carole was grateful. A boy needed his father. And yet there was something rote about David’s involvement with their son. It seemed each one of those bonding moments was hastily staged, as though David were checking a box so that he could move on to more pressing matters.

  The restaurant.

  It was always about that. He was utterly and completely wrapped up in Sweetwater. It was his dream.

  His focus and self-absorption had been a good thing during the first years of their marriage, when Carole was deep into her own career. She didn’t have time for much more than occasional sex and trips to exotic locales. They talked more on airplanes than they did in their own dining room or bedroom. For a time, that was fine. Even preferable. Carole had things to do too. Her mind was laser-focused on her product team and the launch that always loomed ahead at Google.

  Charlie’s birth had changed her focus, as babies almost always do. He was the gift from God that Carole Franklin had not dared even to dream about. She was nearly forty when a home pregnancy test kit indicated the right color. Finally. She didn’t even tell David at first because she felt that this was her last chance—and the last time she became pregnant, he’d talked her into having an abortion. She was thirty-five then.

  “The time isn’t right,” David told her. “Things are about to pop with my career. I’ve got my sights on a new restaurant concept. TV interest too. I could be a lifestyle brand. I know it. Besides, babe, your career is important too.”

  The last part of his plea was a bit of an understatement. In fact, her salary and sizable bonuses and soon-to-be-cashed-in stock options had fueled their lifestyle for years. In any event, David hadn’t wanted a baby. At least as far as Carole could tell, just not then. He’d wanted to pursue his dream unencumbered by the responsibilities of fatherhood, and she’d gone along with it.

  Before the moment that sent her searching the river frontage and every room in the house for her son, Carole thought that her greatest irrevocable mistake had been the abortion. She’d done it willingly. She couldn’t completely pin her decision on David. He hadn’t forced her, even though it felt that way sometimes. She’d agreed to it because she hadn’t really wanted to press the pause button on her own career. Not then. She had moved up to director, and the power and money that came with that was undeniably intoxicating. A drug that she couldn’t shake in any kind of rehab. She’d been sucked into a lifestyle that she loved but also knew precluded whatever personal dreams she’d had before joining Google. She loved her job, but she couldn’t see a way just then to be both a mother and a rising executive.

  Carole let herself believe that she’d terminated the pregnancy at David’s insistence. It was, she came to know, a little lie she told herself. She cried a thousand tears after the procedure. She could still picture everything about that morning. The silent drive with David’s hand on her knee. A young mother pushing a stroller across the crosswalk as they made the turn to the clinic. A dead bird on the road. The brochure rack in the lobby. An old disco song playing in the waiting room, as though the
re could be some reason why anyone would ever dance there.

  It all came rushing back to her as she searched for her son.

  The sound of the technician as she did her work under the shroud of a sheet.

  The icy feel of the metal stirrups on her heels and against her calves.

  Carole didn’t know if it had been a son or a daughter she’d aborted, but she secretly named the baby’s spirit anyway. She mourned Katherine and wondered what might have happened had she said no to David.

  She was sure she had more time for a baby. But when it became time to have one, she didn’t become pregnant. A deep chill went through her. It was payback for her selfishness, for choosing ambition over Katherine. For more than a year, she tried to get pregnant—and nothing. At thirty-nine, she started looking up in vitro fertilization clinics on the Internet—something she’d sworn she’d never do.

  But then it happened. It was nearly five years after the abortion when Charlie was born.

  When David didn’t answer his cell right away, Carole dialed the restaurant’s main number.

  Amanda Jenkins answered on the second ring.

  “Where’s David?” Carole asked, her voice sharp and charged with adrenaline.

  “Hi, Carole,” Amanda said. “He’s out of the office right now.”

  “Where?” Carole asked, her voice rising to nearly a scream. “Where is he?”

  “Are you all right, Carole?” The young woman had weathered more than one storm of David Franklin’s making over the past couple of years at Sweetwater. She’d juggled staff and customers whenever David asked her to do so. Even when it made no sense. She was good at her job because she was unflappable and loyal. “Take a breath,” she said to her boss’s wife.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t breathe. Charlie’s missing. I need David.”

  “Slow down,” Amanda said. “What happened?”

  Carole started to spin. She was sure she was going to pass out. She’d fainted once before, when she hadn’t bothered to eat in the morning. Low blood sugar. But this was a different kind of wooziness, one brought by fear instead of hunger.