by Gregg Olsen
“Let’s go inside,” Liz said.
Carole tried to stand, but she was shaky, so Liz helped her to her feet.
“Thanks,” Carole said, her words sputtering from her lips. “I can’t sleep. I can’t do anything. I need to know what happened. I want to know where Charlie is, and I want to know if he’s all right. I want to be his mom. It’s all I ever wanted to be. None of that,” she said, gesturing toward the big house next door, “none of that matters one whit to me.”
Every word from Liz’s friend was a poisoned dart in her heart.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
MISSING: TWO DAYS
Whoever was at the door was persistent and impatient. The doorbell rang. Knock after knock. Another ring of the bell. From the kitchen where he was searching the refrigerator for something to eat, Owen cautioned his wife with a finger to his lips. He’d told Liz not to answer the door for anyone unless it was Carole or David. No texting. No random phone calls, either. No casual conversation with anyone.
“We need to control the situation,” he’d said as they drove home after taking Charlie to his final resting place. “We can’t do that if we add other people to the mix.”
Liz waited for a long time before she went to peer through the peephole. The front porch was empty.
Who was it?
She cracked open the door and almost immediately a voice surged at her.
“I thought no one was home. Thank God, you’re here.”
It happened so fast. A woman with a microphone was on Liz. Behind her was a man with a camera.
“We’re from KATU,” said a young woman with flinty eyes and a red gash of a mouth. “I’m Katrina Espinoza-Jones. You’ve probably seen me on TV.”
Liz had. She tried to step away, but Katrina latched onto her arm.
“You must be devastated,” the reporter said. “I’ve heard you’re close with the Franklins.”
“Yes,” Liz said, “we are.”
“Great. Can we do a quick interview?” She looked in the direction of her cameraman. “We need to get the word out. Every single second counts.” Katrina didn’t wait for an answer. “Rex, are you getting this?”
The cameraman, his head down and eye in the viewfinder, gave a quick nod.
“I really don’t want to do this,” Liz said, trying to extricate herself from the reporter.
“But you have to,” she said. “We have to find Charlie. I need to know what you know. Everyone in Oregon is looking for this little boy. You can help.”
“I wasn’t home when he went missing,” she said. “I was taking the exam for the bar in Beaverton.”
“My uncle’s a lawyer,” Katrina said, as though they now had a connection. “How are the Franklins doing?”
“You need to talk to them,” Liz said.
Katrina motioned for Rex to get closer. “Oh, we will,” she said. “They’re talking to us in a few. You’re background. What can you tell us about Charlie?”
Liz’s eyes started to get wet. She could feel her hands shake, and she put them behind her back and looked into the lens. “A beautiful boy,” she said. “That’s all I can say.”
Just then Owen appeared from behind his wife and hooked his arm around her.
“She’s in shock,” he said. “Not now. This is a terrible time for everyone.”
Without another word, Owen pulled Liz into the house and shut the door.
Katrina turned to Rex. “I bet GMA is already working with them. God, we’re always so late. I blame you for that, Rex. You are so slow.”
The FedEx quick print shop was on the same block as Sweetwater. When Carole and Liz passed by the restaurant that morning, neither said a word about stopping inside. There didn’t seem any reason for it. Everything had been an ordeal that day. Reporters at the house wanted a story, but there was nothing more to be said. Charlie was gone. No one knew where. At FedEx, Carole started to break down when she told a young man with a shaved head and a half dozen visible piercings why they were there.
“I need to make some posters,” she said.
“Color or black-and-white?”
“Color,” she said.
“Do you have your graphics done?” he asked. “We can help with that if you don’t. Totally reasonable.”
Carole stood mute for a second.
“We could use some help,” Liz said, taking Charlie’s photo from Carole’s trembling fingers.
The employee nodded. All of Bend knew about Charlie Franklin by then.
They followed him to a computer terminal at the back of the store. Liz did most of the talking while the young man scanned Charlie’s photo and typed in the information.
“Maybe we should make the word missing in all caps,” he said. “Like this. And red. I think red would make it more prominent.”
Carole looked at the screen. “Yes, red. Thank you.”
A half hour later, they were out the door with five hundred flyers that would soon be posted all over town.
“We should have offered a reward,” Carole said.
“People will help,” Liz said. “They will. You don’t need a reward.”
They dropped a stack off at the police department, the school district offices, the High Desert Art League. They hung them in the windows of shops all over town. The two women ate and drank nothing. They just kept handing out posters and telling the same story over and over.
“He just vanished. He’s my son. Someone out there must have seen something. Please help me find my boy. He’s scared. I know he is. Tell everyone you know about Charlie. Someone has to have seen him.”
No one looked at Carole or Liz without sadness in their eyes. None who saw them that day would have traded places with either of them for all the money in the world. There could be nothing worse than losing a child.
Maybe one thing, Liz thought, then chastised herself. Who was being self-absorbed now? Carole’s torment had to dwarf hers.
When all the posters were gone, they sat on a bench at Drake Park, looking at the other moms as they paraded their children back and forth on the pathway that fronted Mirror Pond. Liz had said that they should just go home, but Carole was adamant that she wanted to be in a place that Charlie loved so much.
“Maybe whoever took him will take him here. Maybe Charlie’ll convince his kidnapper to bring him here.”
Liz didn’t know how to respond. In her grief and shame, she’d veered toward the improbable on numerous occasions.
Carole sprang to her feet when she glimpsed a blond-headed boy from behind. He was the right height and build.
“Charlie?” she asked, running over to the child, who was holding a young woman’s hand as they walked toward a massive redwood tree.
“Charlie!” she cried out, bending down and dragging the child into her arms.
“Hey! What are you doing?” the woman said. “Don’t touch my daughter!”
Carole froze, then leaped back from the child.
Liz took her arm. “My friend’s little boy went missing.”
“Your friend scared the crap out of Evie!”
“Sorry,” Liz said.
Carole looked completely mortified. “I am. I really am.”
Evie was crying and her mother swept her into her arms. “Scaring a little kid like that,” she said. “That’s really twisted.”
Liz felt as if she were going to vomit. If Charlie stayed missing, if there was no end to the story of what happened to him, Carole would roam Drake Park or shopping malls or anyplace where kids congregated, looking for her son. She would be trapped in a kind of hideous limbo. She’d suffer until her dying day.
Dear God, she thought as they walked back home, what have I done?
“Jaycee Dugard made it home,” Carole said.
“Yes, she did.”
But Charlie isn’t going to. I absolutely know it.
“I know he’s coming home too,” Carole said. “He’s out there and we just need to find him.”
“Right,” Liz said.
>
“I had a dream last night that he was a teenager. I wasn’t living here anymore. I’m not sure where I was. Somewhere warm. I was sitting outside on my front porch when I saw a young man walk toward me. I jumped to my feet because I knew right away that it was Charlie. Even though I couldn’t really see his face, I just could feel it inside that my son had come home to me. He was so big. A young man. He told me that he’d been held captive and that he’d escaped.”
They stopped by the bridge. Tears had puddled in Liz’s eyes. Carole’s too.
“Oh, Carole,” Liz said. There were no other words.
“I know. It was so real. He was so handsome. I told him that I’d never stopped looking for him. I told him that I’d known all along that he was alive, that the part of me that is a mother could not die just because he was missing.”
Some paddlers went under the bridge; one of them was playing country music on a smartphone.
“Dreams are powerful,” Liz said. She’d had a few of her own. All had been ugly. All had been a product of her growing guilt.
“I know it’s just a dream,” Carole said, “but I really do think there is some kind of truth in what came to me. That my son is alive. That he will be coming home, and I won’t ever stop believing that no matter how long it takes.”
Liz wished more than anything that Carole’s hopes were true.
But she knew a whole lot better.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
MISSING: THREE DAYS
Owen shut his office door behind Liz and pulled the miniblinds on the sidelight. They stuck a little and he yanked hard, nearly pulling the whole unit off the wall. His face was red. Liz didn’t care. She was suffering, and he was going on with his life. Owen could come here to his office every day to forget what she’d done. She was forced to sit at home, looking out at the river, comforting Carole.
And now dealing with the police.
Liz folded herself into a chair. She smelled of wine. Her brown hair was a mess; her hastily made ponytail had come loose. Her face was devoid of makeup, her eyes rimmed in red.
“You cannot come here like this,” Owen said. “Holy crap, are you drunk?”
Liz glared at him. “No, I’m not drunk,” she said, nearly in a growl. “I’m scared, Owen. I’m goddamn scared. I should have told the truth. I should never have listened to you.”
He looked past her at the shuttered sidelight. “Keep your voice down, Liz. You need to pull yourself together.”
“Keep my voice down? I can’t even think anymore. Look at me, Owen,” she said, holding out her hands. “I can’t stop shaking. We need to tell the police the truth. They are going to find out. They are. I know it. They are going to find out and I’m going to go to prison.”
“They aren’t and you aren’t,” Owen said, hovering over his unraveling wife and grabbing her thin shoulders. His words came out in a whisper yell, the kind parents use when a kid is acting up in a restaurant.
“I killed him,” she said. “I killed him.”
“Shut up! Don’t say that! You stop that right now.”
He shook her, and her body went limp for a second.
“Owen, what I did was wrong.” She looked up. Tears streaked her face. She searched her husband’s eyes, looking for something that didn’t seem to be there. “What we did was wrong.”
He ignored her last words. “What did the police say? What did you say to them? Talk to me, Liz. Take a breath and keep your voice down. Okay?”
“They wanted to know if I’d seen anything. Or anyone. They just kept pounding me with questions over and over. They were grilling me. They were. I think they know something.”
Owen perched on the edge of his desk and leaned toward his wife. “They weren’t grilling you. Get a grip. They are doing a routine investigation. They have to talk to everyone. No one knows what happened to Charlie.”
“I do. You do.”
“No,” he said. “We don’t. You need to tell yourself that a thousand times over so that you can believe it. We don’t know. We don’t have any idea. I was at work, and you were taking your test.”
“What if they find out that I didn’t take my test?”
Owen stopped her. “They won’t,” he said. “Why would they? We aren’t suspects. We loved Charlie. We are the Franklins’ closest friends.”
“I don’t like lying to Carole,” Liz said. “It makes me sick inside. I can barely look at her and she wants me to tell her everything will be all right. I know it won’t ever be all right again.”
“We can’t change what’s done, Liz. We can’t change the people we are and the relationships we have with others. It won’t look right. It isn’t who we are.”
Liz could scarcely believe her ears: Who we are? She was a murderer and he was an accomplice after the fact. She could put all of the blame on herself when it came to Charlie’s death, but that still didn’t mean that Owen had clean hands. They were bloody too.
“They are going to find out,” she said.
Owen pushed back. “They haven’t even found his body.”
“But they will,” Liz said. “I know it. And when they do, there will be something there that will point to me. To you. DNA. Carpet fibers from the car. Something.”
“There isn’t anything. You don’t need to worry.”
“Owen, this isn’t worrying. This is facing up to it.”
“You need to go home. You need to shower. You need to pull yourself together and be Carole’s best friend.”
“I’m a monster.”
“You made a mistake. Don’t make another. Don’t drag us down to a place that we can never get out of.”
“We’re already there, Owen.”
Owen ushered her out of his office and down the hall to the reception area. He could feel the eyes of Lumatyx employees as they traced his movements. Owen used to show Liz off. She was so beautiful. Smart. She could talk to anyone who worked there about whatever it was they did in a way that made everyone feel that she understood what they were talking about. One coder thought Liz was cool. The accounting lead asked Owen one time if Liz had been a model. She was part of what his future was going to be. Not arm candy. She was smarter than that. True, some of that pride had ebbed when she failed the bar. He’d lied and said she’d had the stomach flu that day. He didn’t want his team to think his wife was a failure. That would make him look foolish, as though he’d chosen poorly.
And now Liz had made a spectacle of herself. He was embarrassed beyond words. Angry too. She was a screwup.
He had chosen poorly.
“Is Liz all right?” the front desk girl asked as Owen turned to go back to his office.
“Our cat got hit by a car,” he said.
“Oh, no,” she said, making a sad face. “That’s terrible. Is it going to be okay?”
“No,” he said. “I’m afraid not. She didn’t make it. Liz is crushed. Me too.”
Her sad face went into overdrive. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “That’s super-rough.”
He thanked her and went back to his office. Later that day a card addressed to Owen and Liz appeared on his desk. Everyone at Lumatyx had signed it:
Sorry about your cat . . .
Linda Kaiser had just about given up on her latest Blue Apron meal. Tuscan-style pear and arugula pizza? Seriously? There was no need to make pizza from scratch when anyone in Beaverton with a phone could get one delivered and ready to serve in half an hour. The pictures made it look easy, but it was nothing short of a major hassle. She put the caramelized pears on the pie and slid it into the oven and poured herself a glass of wine.
She followed the sound of the TV news and joined her husband in the family room to watch. The lead story featured reporter Katrina Espinoza-Jones discussing the case of a missing boy from Bend.
She sipped from her glass as a woman’s face filled the flat-screen mounted over a fireplace mantel crowded with framed family photographs and Scottie dog knickknacks.
“I know that woman,” L
inda said, pointing. “I saw her at the bar exam.”
Her husband, Dale, reached for the remote. He preferred ESPN.
“Wait,” Linda said, tapping his hand. “Stop it! That woman’s lying. Why is she lying?”
“Lying about what, Linda?” Dale asked, although he didn’t care about anything she had to say. She always saw trouble where there wasn’t any.
Linda snatched the remote. “She wasn’t at the exam all day at all. She left after only a few minutes. Came late, too. Something’s very wrong about that girl.”
“Hey,” he said, “why don’t you report it?”
His tone was only on the edge of being sarcastic. Too much and she’d smack him. Linda never liked her “rightness,” as she called it, challenged. Dale had learned to live with it by allowing himself to be less right.
Even when he wasn’t.
Linda was always tweeting a complaint. Calling customer service. Telling a server how to present a dish. Asking to see the manager at a store. Linda always needed her voice heard. One time she called the police about a suspicious package left at her door.
It was from UPS, addressed to her husband.
She took her wine to her laptop and looked up the number for the Bend Police Department. When it came to giving her two cents about anything, Linda refused to be denied.
“It’s my civic duty,” she told her husband as she punched in the numbers.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
MISSING: FOUR DAYS
Over the next few days Carole and David would appear in front of the cameras. Carole would plead for their son’s return. She’d hold a framed photo of Charlie against her chest, much in the same way she’d held him when he was a baby, rocking slightly back and forth. David sat there impassively, responding to questions only when prompted, and never when Carole was speaking.
“Our Charlie was our dream come true,” he said during the interview with the reporter from KATU. “If you know anything about where he is or what happened to him, please call the Bend Police Department.”