by Gregg Olsen
“He didn’t look all that distressed to me.”
“You want to get a new job?” Amanda was used to defending her boss. David could be a tyrant in the kitchen and a charmer in front of diners. “Is that what you want?”
Mitchell, who had been a sous-chef at three other Bend restaurants before coming to Sweetwater, shrugged. He could get another gig. “You banging him?”
Amanda felt her face flame red. She pointed her index finger at Mitchell. “You are fired. Get out.”
“Fine,” he said. “This place is a train wreck anyway.”
“Go!” she said. “Now.”
When he’d slouched away, Amanda turned to the servers gawking at the scene from the doorway. “Get back to work! We have a full restaurant tonight. We’re not going to let David down.”
A few minutes later she planted herself in a bathroom stall. Amanda had tried to hide it, but she doubted she’d been successful: she was shuddering from the confrontation. Her mind was spinning. She agreed that something had been off about David, but she couldn’t make any sense of it. Where had he been?
That morning had been anything but routine. He’d come in at his usual time, was working on an update to the menu that included some gorgeous chanterelles that had been sourced by a local picker. He was being his old David self, talking about an investment that had gone sideways, a trip to France that he’d been planning as a surprise for Carole, tossing a few darts at the city planners who wanted to limit the number of vacation rentals in town.
“It’s vacation rentals that have transformed Bend from a backwater into a going concern for restaurants like ours,” he’d said. “We can charge vacationers twice what locals can pay. And the whole city cashes in on all this new money. Fresh money. Money du jour.” He’d grinned, pleased with his turn of phrase.
Then, just a little later that morning, things had changed. His mood had shifted with a call, and he briskly announced that he needed to run an errand. He didn’t say where or who it involved.
“I need to skedaddle.” One of his trademark words. “You hold down the fort.”
As Amanda composed herself in the stall, she had a funny feeling about David’s sudden departure. Before the call, he’d talked about how he wanted to personally check out the quality of the mushrooms being brought in by the forager. “Last time I got some hen of the woods from this dude, they were within a day of going bad. Not up to the standards of Sweetwater, for sure.”
“For sure,” Amanda had said.
Yet, when that call came, David had just packed up to leave. As though the freshness of the mushrooms were no longer a concern.
“What about the chanterelles?” she had asked.
David grabbed his keys and hurried toward the door. “You check them out. I trust you.”
Amanda had stood there, mouth agape. David didn’t trust anyone. He was the kind of restaurateur who insisted that no one listened when he spoke. No one followed his precise instructions about the food or the linens or the background music. One time she’d seen him yank a candlelighter from a server in front of the whole house because he said the young man was lighting a tea light wrong.
“Hold the candle at an angle when you light it!”
As she sat on the lid of the toilet, Amanda wondered what was going on at the Franklins’ house and why David hadn’t answered any of his calls. His phone wasn’t dead. It was never dead. Her boss hadn’t taken the calls because he hadn’t wanted to.
CHAPTER NINE
MISSING: FIVE HOURS, FIFTEEN MINUTES
It was almost three thirty in the afternoon when David pulled up in front of the house. Two Bend police cars crammed the driveway, blocking the garage, and another was parked across the street. A group of onlookers in T-shirts, shorts, and flip-flops gawked at the scene from the sidewalk.
“I bet that’s the dad,” said a weekender with muttonchops and a beach-ball belly as he passed by. It was as though he thought he was watching David on TV.
“Nice car,” said another.
Before he could make his way inside, Carole was in David’s arms, gripping him with the force of a vise.
“Charlie’s gone!” she said, her façade giving way, the whole edifice shattering into a zillion pieces. Ruins. Dust. There was no holding anything together. For a second she was a rag doll, and her husband’s grip stopped her from collapsing onto the front steps. Her sobs reverberated from the doorway and back out to the yard.
“What’s happened, honey?” David said, holding Carole tightly, letting her sob into his expensive shirt.
Her face remained buried in his chest. “I—I turned away to answer a call. I told him to stay away from the water. I did. He knows better. Really, he does. I should never have taken my eyes off him,” she said, gulping for air.
David’s eyes met those of a gravely observant woman standing a few feet away in the foyer. Allowing him a moment to calm his wife. She nodded at him.
“Are you the police?” he asked.
She showed her identification and introduced herself.
“What happened?” he asked her.
“We don’t know yet,” the detective said. “We’re trying to find him.”
“David, I’m so scared. What if—” Carole stopped herself.
“We’ll find Charlie,” he said, looking right into her eyes. “Of course we’ll find him.”
Over the next couple of hours, Jake and other officers from the Bend Police Department continued to search the riverbank, question bystanders, and go door-to-door. Esther phoned a woman in the records department to pull up a report on local sex offenders, just to be sure. Not surprisingly, while there were plenty in Bend and the other little towns nearby, there were none in the immediate vicinity of the Franklins’ residence. Real estate prices around the river kept the area pedophile-proof. Unless the neighbor was a very rich pedophile. While the Franklin house wasn’t a crime scene—at least, not yet—Esther told Jake to collect the blood drop on the living room floor.
“Mrs. Franklin cut her ear,” she said, “but let’s be sure the blood is hers, not the boy’s. I’ll collect the blouse she’s wearing. It also has blood on it.”
Jake nodded. “Anything else?”
“No,” she said. “Not yet. This is a waiting game. We hope the boy is hiding somewhere and isn’t in the river and hasn’t been abducted. We need to determine where Mr. Franklin was at the time of Charlie’s disappearance too.”
The veteran detective considered that the neighbors who had been relegated to the shadows cast by the enormous Franklin house were gone at the time of Charlie’s disappearance.
“Rental next door downriver is owned by Connie Phillips, Portland,” Esther said. “Owen and Liz Jarrett own the little place on the other side. Let’s track them down too.”
“Got it,” he said.
“Before things go from bad to worse here,” she went on, “I’ll make a run up to the put-in at the park and see who was on the river today. Carole says the tuber that went by just as she answered the phone had a rental from Riparian. The other guy we need to find was in a canoe with a dog, heading upriver.”
“Not much to go on,” Jake said.
“You got that right,” she said, looking out at the traffic jam that had formed in the river. A cluster of fifteen tubers lashed together were drifting by, unaware of what had occurred at the big house they were staring at. One guy with a gut and a beer cooler trailing behind him on a tether noticed the police. “Must be bustin’ a party! Cops, go home!” he called over to his buddies and their girlfriends.
“We have a right to party!” said one.
“Yeah!”
Esther rolled her eyes and turned to Jake. “God, I can’t stand tourists.”
“My dad says the only thing good about them is their wallets.”
“I like your dad. He’s right.”
Esther returned to the Franklins. By then they’d moved to the kitchen. David had made his wife a cup of tea. Carole was slumped on a ba
rstool, one elbow planted on the counter, holding up her head.
“Carole,” Esther said, “I know this is hard. I’ll need you to change your top.”
“My top?”
Esther’s eyes went to the blood drop.
“This is my blood,” Carole said. “You don’t think that it’s Charlie’s?”
“No. Absolutely not. Since I’ve seen it, though, and since you’re cooperating with the investigation, I need to bring it in. You know, to exclude you.”
David spoke up. “Cooperating? Exclude? I don’t like how those words sound, Detective. It feels a little threatening.”
“No. Not at all. It’s procedure. A box we have to tick off.”
“I didn’t hurt him,” Carole said.
“I know,” Esther said, although she didn’t really. “Please. Just help me so I can do my job and move on so that we can find out what happened to Charlie.”
Carole got up from the barstool and disappeared into the bedroom.
Esther focused on David. It was the first time they’d had a moment alone.
“How do you think she’s holding up?” she asked.
“She’s not,” he said. “She feels guilty and she’s scared to death.”
“Guilty?”
“She thinks it’s her fault. That kind of guilty.”
“What kind of relationship does your wife have with your son?”
David narrowed his eyes. “How do you mean? A good one. Mother and son.”
“Little boys can be challenging sometimes,” Esther said. “I have a nephew that pushes my buttons like a video game. There are times when, well, I can hardly stand to be in the same room with him. He gets under my skin. Does Charlie do that to Carole?”
David didn’t respond right away. He let the detective’s words linger in the air. He looked down at the river and the paddlers and tubers.
“He’s a little boy. So, yes,” he said, “he’s challenging. Just so you know—because I know where you are going—Carole is not the kind of person to be undone by a kid. She worked in the tech space and managed a group of half-autistic crybabies, and she did so effortlessly.”
Just then Carole reappeared wearing a light pink sweater. She’d placed her blood-blemished blouse in a dry-cleaning bag. “Here,” she said, handing it over. “Now please stop this nonsense and go find my son. He’s out there and it’ll be dark soon and . . .” Her words fell into tears.
“Sit down, honey,” David said. “Finish your tea.”
“I don’t want any tea. I want Charlie. I want my little boy home right now, right this goddamn minute. Where is he?”
“I don’t know,” David said.
“We’re looking,” Esther said.
“Well,” Carole said, her voice rising with anger, “you can see he’s not here. Go and find him. That’s your job.”
CHAPTER TEN
MISSING: SIX HOURS
Cody Turner was the assistant manager of Riparian Zone Rentals. At twenty-six, he was like a lot of the young people who came to Bend. Skiing in the winter and rafting in the summer. Rinse and repeat. He wore his black hair in a ponytail and was working on a pay-as-you-go full-body tattoo that documented the highlights of his life. His dog. A rainbow trout. His brother. The name of a girlfriend who had moved back to Portland. Cody hadn’t lived all that much, and his roommate, Hawk, had advised him to leave a little room on his body for some future awesomeness. “That’s what my ass is for, bro,” Cody said with his raucous laugh, which fluctuated between endearing and annoying, depending on how stoned his friends were when Cody was being Cody.
Esther Nguyen crossed the heat of the parking lot to the rental shack. Two teens ran the processing part of the operation from under a canopy, collecting signed liability waivers and cash, and holding credit cards and driver’s licenses as collateral for red and blue inner tubes that had been screen-printed with Riparian Zone in bold, black letters. Once the tourists were processed, a pretty girl with dark brown hair and long arms pulled tubes from a stack behind a rope and passed them to renters.
“Manager here?” the detective asked the employees working the cash boxes.
“Cody’s over there,” said one, indicating the illustrated young man helping a mother put a life jacket on her daughter.
Esther waited for him to finish before introducing herself.
“Yeah,” he said. “Word travels fast around here. I heard some kid drowned downriver.”
“We don’t know what happened,” she said. “That’s why I’m here.”
Cody shifted his weight on his flip-flops. “We didn’t do the kid, and even if we did, we have an ironclad waiver,” he said. “Last year some showboater from California cracked his skull on a rock and tried to blame us. Said the tube was flat and he lost his balance and fell into the river. Totally wrong on that. We didn’t even need to prove him wrong. Waiver’s everything.”
“I’m looking for one of your customers,” she said. “Someone who might have seen something.”
“Nobody here saw anything.”
“Right,” Esther said firmly. “But someone you rented to might have.”
“Look, no one said anything and, just between you and me, the whole idea of a drowning is flat-out bad for business. Look around you. Most of these people are out of shape or half-drunk. We don’t need them scared too.”
“I see,” Esther said, glancing around at the group of patrons lined up to sign waivers to get out on the river. One young man caught her gaze and ditched whatever he was drinking in the trash can. “Should you even be renting to some of these folks? I mean, if they are drunk. Or half-drunk, as you say.”
Cody gave up a lazy grin. This cop was smart. Probably smarter than him.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“How long does it take to get to the bridge by Columbia Park?”
Cody computed the time. Numbers had never been a strong suit. He was more the artistic, free-spirited type. His tats proved as much.
Esther wondered if he was mentally counting the minutes on his fingers and toes or if he was actually calculating the flow of the Deschutes. “Cody?”
“Half hour,” he finally said. “Maybe twenty-five minutes. Depends on a bunch of stuff: time of year, current, and if you make it through the little rapids without a wipeout.”
The time of year was today.
“Fine,” she said. “What time do you open in the morning?”
“Ten,” Cody answered, this time with complete confidence. “We open at ten. Usually we have a line the second we put out the shade awning.”
“I need to know who rented here from opening to, let’s say, ten thirty. I’ll need to see their waivers.”
Cody did a little more of his very slow processing. “Don’t you need a court order?”
Esther kept her eyes on his. She didn’t think Cody was high. She suspected he just had the kind of empty look that made him appear as such. “You really want me to go to the trouble of getting one? Might trigger other trouble too. You want this place closed down, Cody? Drunk people shouldn’t be given a rental.” She indicated the young man who had ditched his beer. “It would invalidate the all-important waiver, you know.”
Cody looked stunned. Or not. Maybe that was how Cody looked all the time. “You wouldn’t do that, Detective. Would you?”
She needed the information and she needed it now. Charlie Franklin’s life was at stake. “Trust me, Cody, you don’t want to find out.”
The tatted young man turned toward the office part of the rental shack and motioned for her to follow. “Fine,” he said. “Fine. But you can’t keep the waivers. I need them. It’s procedure. You know, an important legal requirement.”
He disappeared inside and returned a beat later with a folder full of waivers.
“We have sixty-five. Pretty much in order,” Cody said. “You know, in sequence of when we get them turned in. The most recent ones on top. The first ones of the morning on the bottom.”
“I
get it. Thanks.”
“Hey, you promise to get those back to me, right? I’m the assistant manager here and I need to follow procedure. It’s a superimportant part of my job.”
She looked down at the papers. “I know. I’ll copy these and get them back to you before the end of the day.”
“You better,” he said.
“No worries, Cody.”
Esther walked across the hot asphalt, got inside the hot car, and immediately turned on the air-conditioning. It had to be one hundred degrees. The last gasp of summer was a scorcher. She practically melted into the seat. As she let the air flow over her face, Esther leafed through the papers Cody had given her. She removed any with female names or whose ages indicated they were children.
Carole wasn’t sure about the age of the inner-tuber she’d seen, or really anything about his physical description. “He was white,” she’d said. “I really didn’t look at him. At the time there was no reason to. He was just another vacationer floating by. Maybe in his thirties. I don’t know, maybe older. I don’t know.”
“Think. Take a second. Nothing remarkable about him?” Esther had asked.
Carole, shattered as she was, came up with one more detail, although she was hazy on it. “I think he had a U of O T-shirt on,” she had said, before adding, “but that’s about half of the floaters around here.”
As the air-conditioning cooled her, Esther identified five names that seemed like possibles among the sheaf of waivers. Their ages ranged from twenty-eight to forty-two. Three were Oregon residents, though not locals. One was from Los Angeles, the other from Dayton, Ohio. All were staying in summer rentals. All included their home addresses on their waivers.
Esther called the names in to Jake, who had returned to the office to enter more details into the national database on missing and exploited children.
“What are we looking for?” he asked.
“We need to know where they are so we can talk to them,” she said. “One of them may have seen something. Maybe they didn’t even know what it was that they’d seen or why it could be important.”