The Last Thing She Ever Did

by Gregg Olsen

  Heading south on US Highway 97, Owen was mostly silent. They’d changed positions in the car on the on-ramp when it became clear that Liz, despite the adrenaline that coursed through her body, hadn’t sobered up completely. She’d creased a fender on a mailbox in their neighborhood.

  She looked out the window as the blur of nighttime lights came at her. She thought of Carole and David and how they were probably wishing to God they’d never moved to Bend. Liz wondered if the Franklins had played the game of what-if, as she had herself. If they’d run through the morning Charlie went missing and thought of all the ways that it could have been different. The one little change that could have altered what happened . . .

  Liz had done it. She knew that she’d do it every day for the rest of her life. Her life. Her suffering. She deserved all of it.

  “I think there’s a place we can get off up here,” Owen said.

  Liz nodded in her husband’s direction.

  The car filled with light as another vehicle approached from behind.

  “We’re going to get caught,” she said.

  “Shut up. We’re not.”

  Owen kept his foot on the gas but eased up a little, allowing the other car to pass.

  “We are. Someone will see us,” she said. “Someone will wonder what we’re doing when we get off the highway. No one gets off the highway here. They’ll think we’re in trouble.”

  “We are in trouble, Liz,” Owen shot back. “And you’re the cause of it. Shut the hell up. I’m going to cut the lights and slow down. I’m going to take the turn fast, so you’ll need to hold on. No one will see us.”

  Liz didn’t say anything. Although she wanted to die, she found herself checking her seat belt to make sure it was secure. Her eyes had flooded again, and the stars over the high desert swirled in a messy mix of light and dark. She looked in the side mirror and made note of a pair of headlights a good mile behind them.

  Without a word, Owen switched off the headlights. The dividing line dimmed to a faint yellow band. The RAV4 began to slow.

  “Hold on,” he said. “The turn’s right here.” He gripped the wheel and cut sharply to the right onto a rancher’s road. The right tires lifted slightly from the earth and Liz thought that the top-heavy vehicle would roll over.

  She didn’t care. She hoped she’d die.

  But it didn’t roll.

  Without tapping the brakes a single time, Owen let the car shoot down the road. It was paved for the first twenty-five yards; after that, it was paint-mixer bumpy.

  “Owen, you need to slow down,” Liz said.

  “You need to get a grip,” he said. “I’ve got this. Can’t let anyone see the brake lights, Liz.” The car was slowing. “No one saw us, right?”

  Liz thought of the headlights a mile behind them.

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  The RAV4 rolled to a stop in front of a field of summer-dead bunchgrass framed by a couple of groves of juniper, trees that in the darkness resembled black flames reaching skyward. The desolation of the place hit every mark.

  “We’ll hide it over there,” Owen said.

  It again.

  After making sure the interior lights wouldn’t come on, Owen opened the driver’s door to get out, and the chill of the outside air came at her.

  “I need your help. Are you coming?”

  Liz was frozen. “What about Carole and David? They won’t know what happened to Charlie. They’ll never know.”

  “Don’t be stupid. Look at the fence line here,” he said, indicating the pristine wire-and-wood-post fencing that seemed to run for a mile. “This rancher doesn’t let a single weed grow around those posts. He’s going to find it. He’s going to call it in. David and Carole will think some pervert killed Charlie.”

  “They’ll never get over it,” Liz said.

  He didn’t look at her. “It was an accident, Liz. Wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “We cannot keep talking about this. You need to find a way to deal with it. You’ll need to find a way to deal with Carole and David. You’ll never, ever be able to admit what you did. You’ll never be able to ask for forgiveness.”

  Liz didn’t say another word. She got out, moved to the back of the car, and held out her cell phone, casting a faint light downward so he could see. She watched her husband shift Charlie Franklin’s tarp-wrapped body from beneath the old newspapers. The wind caught a few of the pages and carried the sheets of newsprint like kites upward into the dark.

  A beat later Owen gently set the body at the base of one of the junipers.

  A flash came from her phone that seemed to light up the whole outdoors.

  “Holy shit!” he said, utterly blinded. “Did you just take a picture?” As his eyesight returned, he found Liz standing by the car, propping herself up with her hand on the hood.

  “I didn’t mean to,” she said, fumbling with the phone. “Deleting. God. Sorry.” The wind blew and the tarp rustled.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Owen said. “Get in the car.”

  “The tarp,” she said, sputtering for breath once they were both inside. “Maybe we shouldn’t leave the tarp.”

  “I wore gloves,” he said.

  Their eyes met. “I didn’t,” she said.

  Owen turned the ignition. “I’m not going to go back and unwrap him. I don’t want to see the mess you—”

  “The mess I made,” she said. “I know, Owen. I know.”

  “Just shut up. Let’s get out of here. I want this night over.”

  He turned the car around and returned to the highway, turning on the headlights only after rejoining it and traveling a few hundred feet.

  The RAV4 passed a car parked on the opposite shoulder, its headlights off.

  Owen did a double take, then turned to his wife. “Liz, did you see that car before we pulled off?”

  The headlights, dim and far behind them as they got off the highway, came to mind. It was a fleeting thought, refusing to land in her brain as something related to what her husband was asking. Liz didn’t think it could be the same car.

  “No,” she said. “It might have been there. Probably ran out of gas or maybe the driver’s taking a bathroom break.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  MISSING: SIXTEEN HOURS

  When the RAV4 passed from view, the driver parked on the wide shoulder of the highway turned on the ignition. He started toward the spot where the RAV4 had left the roadway. He didn’t bother turning off his lights. He didn’t care who saw him. He was there to find out what the couple in the silver SUV had done in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere.

  He flipped on his high beams to trace the tire tracks after the pavement gave way to gravel. He turned the steering wheel in a slight zigzag to illuminate the landscape on either side of the road as he searched for the place where the car had stopped.

  As he slowed, he could see where footprints led down an incline. He braked and positioned his car so his headlights would flood the space with light. He got out and stood there in the night air. Down by the junipers, he caught a flash of the paint-splattered tarp.

  As he made his way down the incline, he noticed a coyote approaching the tarp.

  “You go away! Get! Go!” he called out loudly and with a force that hadn’t escaped his lungs in a very long time.

  The animal looked at him, its eyes white in the glare of the car’s headlights.

  The man picked up a rock and threw it in the direction of the coyote, missing, but close enough that the animal retreated.

  He bent down, his knees landing hard on the rocky, dry soil. Very gently, he peeled away the paint-splattered cocoon that enveloped Charlie Franklin’s body.

  “What did they do to you?” he said, looking down. “What on God’s green earth did they do?”

  The car wash was self-service, which was a very good thing. Owen Jarrett pulled his wife’s car into the bay and loaded the coin machine with four quarters from change
he’d scrounged from the cup holder in the console. He kept two for the vacuum. Liz slumped herself against the cinder block wall, her eyes no longer raining, but cast downward as though looking at anything other than the pooling water by her feet was more than she could bear. They hadn’t said a word to each other for a half hour. The handheld sprayer fanned a sharp stream of sudsy water over the rear bumper where Owen thought he could see the tiniest trace of Charlie Franklin. A smudge. Owen couldn’t be sure, but he thought it could be blood.

  He hadn’t opened the tarp to see the extent of Charlie’s injuries. He just didn’t want to look at him.

  It was the middle of the night, almost morning. Owen told himself that lots of people are so busy during the day that they delay things like washing the car to dead hours like this. As the water ran over the car, he made up responses to any questions he might get if someone asked him what he was doing there.

  Although no one would.

  But if—if—they did, he’d say that he couldn’t sleep and decided to use his time to the best advantage by washing the car. His wife had come along to keep him company. Or maybe they’d just made it to Bend from a long drive and had to get the bug splatter from the hood and windshield.

  Yes, that was good.

  If his questioner persisted, he’d tell them to fuck off. They were upset about their neighbors’ lost boy. Neither of them could sleep.

  He used the little brush on the back bumper and across the MY RESCUED CAT RESCUED ME sticker that Liz had added the first day off the car lot. Rubbing it back and forth to ensure that any DNA left by the accident had been truly obliterated. He knew that it would never, ever get to that point. No one would ever know what they’d done to make everything disappear.

  Owen had taken care of everything. Charlie would be found, of course. And when he was, Owen knew that he and Liz needed to react in the way that they would have if she hadn’t done what she had.

  If he hadn’t done what he had too.

  While Liz watched, he got back into the car and inched it out of the bay and parked alongside the vacuums. He opened the trunk space. There was the faint odor of urine.

  Owen grabbed the newspapers and deposited the stack into a recycling bin next to the car wash. He returned to the car and fed the machine a quarter and started to vacuum as methodically and as quickly as he could. It was a race against a machine that notoriously petered out just when you needed it to suck up something. He worked in straight, parallel lines. Then he worked crosswise. The sound of the vacuum obliterated what was going on in his mind. Just moving the attachment over the carpet, up on the roof, along the sides. He was getting rid of any trace of Charlie Franklin: his hair, skin cells, fibers from his clothes that might have fallen when the boy’s tarp-wrapped body was placed inside.

  Back home in their house on the river, Owen Jarrett went past his wife and reached for the whiskey bottle. The hour didn’t matter. He needed something to get the taste of what he’d done out of his mouth. His fingers shook as he gripped the glass and poured the amber liquid down his constricted throat.

  Liz came to him. She was still drowsy from the pills and the wine, but not so foggy that she couldn’t see herself through his eyes.

  “What next?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he took another slug.

  “I need to know,” she said.

  “You need to just let it be. Let things happen.”

  “What things, Owen?” Her voice was tight, her words fractured.

  “The things you started. You need to just back off. Let go of it. React to it like you would if you—”

  “We should call the police.”

  He grabbed her. Hard. He shook her.

  “Are you crazy? Look, it’s too late for that,” he said. “Don’t you get it? You killed a kid. We got rid of the body. We’re both so screwed here that we’ll never get out of this if we get caught. Do you understand?”

  “I did this,” she said. “You didn’t. I’ll tell the truth.”

  “Liz, you can’t tell the truth now. We can never, ever tell the truth.”

  “What if we get caught?”

  “Let’s pray that we don’t. Let’s goddamn pray that no one saw you back into Charlie and that no one saw us cleaning up your mess.”

  No one spoke for a minute. They just faced each other.

  “They’ll find him, right?” she asked. “Carole and David will get to say good-bye to their baby, right?”

  Owen poured himself another. “Yes. I’m sure it will be soon.”

  “They’ll find out,” Liz said in a whisper. “They’ll know.”

  “No,” Owen said. “You might have fucked up beyond belief, Liz, but I’m not stupid. I’ve never been stupid one second in my life. I’ve fixed this. I’ve thought of everything. You are not going down for this. You’re not going to end up with a goddamn needle in your arm. I won’t let that happen.”

  Esther lay in her bed, facing the ceiling. It was nearly 4:00 a.m. She could not recall a time when she had been more exhausted. Not even the cruel machinations of her ex-husband as their marriage unraveled compared to the emotional drain of the first day of the Charlie Franklin investigation—and how it reminded her of the Corvallis case that ended with the dead boy and a family changed forever. She traced the steps she’d taken, the people she’d talked to, the interviews conducted with the family.

  Mostly she wondered what was really going on in that Architectural Digest‒class home on the river. The river. Divers told her that it was possible that the boy had drowned and got caught under a log, although they’d looked in all the likely points where a body could snag.

  “Water’s not all that murky this time of year,” a diver told her. “Not like it will stay that way when the rains come.”

  As she lay there, her fingers found the gold sea star pendant, and she reviewed the time line in her head. Phone records confirmed that Mrs. Franklin was on the phone for twelve minutes. It was within that period that Charlie vanished. If he’d gone off with someone, then it had likely been without a struggle. No one heard anything. No one saw anything. If Charlie Franklin walked away, it was with someone he knew.

  Who was it? And why did they take the three-year-old?

  Across town, the front page of the Bend Bulletin was rolling off the presses. The local TV stations had already aired the story of the missing little boy the night before as an add-on to coverage about the classic car show in Drake Park. By the time the papers hit newsstands and doorsteps that morning, everyone in Bend would know that Charlie Franklin had disappeared. Among the readership or the viewers who caught the update on the morning news would be the person who knew exactly what had happened.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  MISSING: ONE DAY

  The retriever was more bronze than golden, but she was almost twelve, and the change in her glorious coat came with the territory. Tony Lupita, Jessie’s owner, lamented that she no longer darted out at every squirrel or cozied up to the younger dogs when they were out walking to the top of Pilot Butte, an extinct cinder cone that rose almost five hundred feet above its stunning surroundings.

  It was before daybreak, the best time to be there—especially after the scorcher of the previous day. It was just fifty-five degrees.

  Tony looked at his watch. The sun would pour light like golden maple syrup over the sleeping city of Bend in about six minutes.

  A warm glow.

  Just like Jessie.

  He loved that dog the way that he loved people. In fact, to his way of thinking, she was a person.

  A couple of tourists in navy-blue running gear came toward the dog walker and the dog, racing to the bottom of the butte. They wore earbuds and the look of self-satisfaction. Tony, a widower in his late sixties, gave them a quick wave. It seemed odd that they’d be coming down the butte before the light show, but tourists were a very weird breed.

  The morning air carried a chill. Tony wore old Nikes, faded 501s, and a windbreaker that he
would almost certainly peel off once he made it to the top and felt the heat of his own body rev up from the walk. He’d been coming there with Jessie since she was a puppy. The top of the butte had restrooms and a few benches for soaking in the view, twinkly lights eclipsed by the sunrise. Mount Bachelor, the Three Sisters, and Mount Hood cut through the high-desert floor. Before pulling out his water bottle and taking a seat, Tony tossed a stick out for Jessie and she did just as she always did: took a circuitous route to go after it, nose to the ground, before bringing it back.

  Tony took out his phone and snapped a couple of pictures, drank some water, then began following the coiling track back down to the parking lot. By then they encountered at least twenty or more who had started up the 1.8-mile hike to the top.

  As Tony and Jessie made their way to the car, he noticed a man and a little boy. The boy was crying and the man was telling him to shut up.

  “You aren’t my dad,” the boy said.

  He was blond, about four. Maybe a little younger. It had been a while since Tony had been around children, and ages were tough for him to determine. At any age, however, no kid should be treated like that little boy was being treated.

  “Shut up,” the man said. Tony couldn’t make out his face, which was obscured by the bill of his Pabst Blue Ribbon baseball cap.

  “Is everything okay here?” Tony said, leading Jessie over to the man and the little boy. Jessie, who loved kids, started to growl at the man. It was out of character for the dog.

  “Get that beast away from me,” the man said. “There’s a leash law.”

  “She’s on a leash,” Tony said, taking a step closer. “There’s also a law against child abuse.”

  “Mind your own business,” the man said, tugging at the now-crying boy and shoving him into the backseat of the vehicle.

  Tony hated confrontation, but the hairs on the back of his neck stiffened. “The boy says you’re not his dad,” he said. His heart was pounding, and he knew it had nothing to do with the climb up and down the Pilot Butte.