by Gregg Olsen
When the lights went off, the war between Carole and David would start again.
After a while, only Carole and her precious framed photo would meet the press.
David was nowhere to be seen.
Liz filled the old white claw-foot tub and stripped while the bathroom filled with the dense vapors of the rising water. She sat awkwardly on the edge of the tub, thinking about what to do. She’d lost a couple of pounds since the accident, the only good thing that had happened because of it. Stress had made her hair fall out in the back, and she’d taken to wearing a ponytail to conceal the physical effects of her guilt. Her skin above her breasts broke out in a light pink rash, and no amount of calamine could calm its angry hue.
The bath was an escape more than anything. She needed an escape. From everything. And everyone. Especially Owen. He was flopped on the bed reading some paperwork and cursing Damon, who he was all but certain was trying to screw him over.
“He’s just a nerd without any game,” he said as she slipped away to the quiet of the bathroom. “All of a sudden his balls have grown to grapefruit size and he’s trying to push me around. What a joke. He’s such a prick. He thinks that he’s the one that created Lumatyx. It wasn’t even his idea. It was mine. I was the one who came up with everything. He just worked the code and the back end.”
She wondered how long this had been going on, how long her husband had been a stranger. She’d been immersed in her law books and her volunteer work at the humane society and hadn’t been paying attention.
The water beckoned her with the promise of an end to her misery.
So did the expensive razors that Owen had been buying online.
Liz slid into the water, letting it envelop her. Her head slipped below the surface, and she opened her eyes. The surface swirled, breaking up the light from the overhead fixture. She wondered if drowning victims were able to see the world from the depths before they died. Was it beautiful to them?
She stayed under the surface for a long time before emerging, gasping and sucking in air. Drowning would never work. With drowning there was too much time and too much fear baked into the solution.
A razor glinted at her.
I’m over here! it seemed to say. Pick me up. Easy. Quick. Never dull.
She pictured the pool of red all around her. Owen busting down the door. Crying out as if he were so upset about what she’d done. Tears and histrionics as though she mattered to him more than anything on earth. That was a big laugh.
She thought of Carole rushing in and pulling her from the water, because Owen wouldn’t know what to do. Or yes, yes he would: he’d stand still, making sure that she was really, really dead.
Her fingertips grazed the handle of the razor. Just the slightest touch. In doing so, she felt a surge of electricity run through her body. She touched it again, this time with more purpose. Yet she couldn’t pick it up. Not even to shave her legs. The temptation was there, but not enough to propel her to take that step. Instead, she reached for the bar of lavender soap. She wanted to die. She deserved to die. She couldn’t do it, though. She finished her bath and went to bed.
She was grateful that Owen was asleep when she slid between the sheets. He was naked, a signal that, later in the night, he’d pretend to be reaching for her in his sleep and wanting sex. It was his MO. A game. She normally played along, pretending she was sleeping too, and the two of them would make love until the sheets were knotted by their feet, and every fiber of their bodies pulsed with the ecstasy of their touch.
But that was BC.
Before Charlie.
Now Liz couldn’t imagine touching him, and she made sure that she went to bed after he did. She went so far as to put an extra pillow between the two of them as a kind of dam to keep him at bay. When he reached for her at night, she said she was having her period and was using a tampon.
He fell for it.
She knew then that her husband didn’t know her at all. She’d stopped using tampons a year ago.
And although she’d started the chain reaction of everything that had happened since the accident, she’d grown to despise Owen. She knew that he’d never admit it to anyone—it would reflect poorly on him—but he felt the same way.
It started to rain that night, and Liz lay there, eyes open, listening. If suicide wasn’t the way out, what was?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
MISSING: FOUR DAYS
Liz was not asleep. She was in a foggy twilight of memory.
She had never been so cold in all her life. The cold was always the first thing she remembered when her reflections—thoughts she tried to vanquish—returned to the flash flood.
The chill gripped her as she and her brother clung to a rocky ledge and watched in horror as the waters swept away Dan and Seth Miller. The memory was still shattered glass, and she would always allow herself a way out from it by wondering if she was remembering what had happened at all, or if it had been told to her. Or if she’d pieced things together incorrectly. Had she seen Seth look at her and call out that he was going to be all right? Or had there been a flash of panic in his eyes as he realized that, by saving Liz, he’d be risking his own life?
Over time, memory played tricks against reality. Jimmy insisted that neither of them had actually seen what happened. He said they were crouched down on the rock, holding on with everything they had. The station wagon vanished.
The cold of the water—that she knew to be true.
She, her brother, and Dr. Miller were admitted to the hospital to treat their injuries and the hypothermia that came with the flood. Liz had a gash on her thigh that took eighteen stitches to close, along with a cracked rib and a broken foot that had her in a cast for the first six weeks of the school year. Jimmy had been luckier. His physical injuries were minor. His skin was bruised, but apart from some abrasions on his knees and a fingernail that had been torn off, he was fine.
Liz held memories of her parents and grandparents coming to see her at the hospital. The look in their eyes had meant to calm her, she later understood, but it sent her into a panic. Never had she seen such alarm in their eyes.
Jimmy was in the same room, a curtain separating them when the nurses came to examine her. Liz hated the sound made by the metal hooks holding up the big white curtain whenever the medical staff drew it open or closed.
“Where’s Seth?” she asked one of the nurses.
“Let me get your mother,” the nurse said, swiping the curtain open and looking at Bonnie Camden.
“She’s asking about her friend,” the nurse said.
Mrs. Camden’s blue eyes seemed almost gray. Red and gray. She’d tried to make herself presentable, but her makeup had been applied carelessly and her lipstick was a red smear. Liz would think about that from time to time. Wondering why her mother had bothered to put any makeup on at all . . . or if it was the makeup she’d had on from the day before. Liz had lost all track of time while she lay there in the hospital bed, staring, thinking.
“Honey,” her mother said, “we have some sad news about Seth.”
Her mom waited a beat so Liz could prepare herself for what she already expected after picking up the pieces of whispers from the other side of the curtain while she waited for the doctors and nurses to do whatever it was they had needed to do.
Even so, she asked, “What, Mommy? What happened to Seth?”
Her mother placed a hand on her arm. “I’m sorry, honey. Seth didn’t make it.”
Her father, a big man with dark brown llama eyes, reached from behind her mother.
“We’re lucky that you and Jimmy are alive. None of you should have been up that canyon road with the rains we had.”
Liz started to cry. She didn’t know what else to do.
Later she would revisit that salvo thrown by her father at their neighbor. There would be others. The Millers would nearly fade from their lives, only to be seen when crossing paths at the store or when Dan Miller would mow his lawn that perfect way that he always did. The Camdens
would pounce at every opportunity to cast blame on the man who “could have killed our kids.” Others would agree. They’d nod or even corroborate the charge that Dan Miller had been incompetent, drunk, and generally a nefarious character.
Everything changed for everyone who’d been so happy the morning of the fishing trip to Diamond Lake. They hadn’t let the rainy forecast or the showers the night before get in the way of what they all thought was going to be an outing to remember—which it became for all the wrong reasons. And now there was nothing but a wall of pain between all of them. What had been a loving and fun relationship was now icy and cold. What had been a bond between two families living across a river from each other had been upended. When the city proposed a footbridge across the river, Liz’s father lobbied hard to get it moved a little farther north. He was careful with his words, even suggesting that the resident beavers would be disturbed by the proximity of the bridge—although anyone who lived on the river knew that beavers didn’t care one jot about the tourists who had started to pour into Bend.
Liz was a teenager then, but she knew the underlying reason.
Her father didn’t want a direct route to the Millers. His own shortcomings as a father had made him sickened by the sight of the man across the river. A mistake like the one made by Dan Miller was a virus. Liz remembered how the backyard chickens her grandfather kept would relentlessly peck at an injured bird—peck and peck until a small wound turned into an open gash. Until the weakened bird was pushed into the corner of the coop, unable to fend off its attackers, which pecked, pecked, pecked until all that was left was a bloody carcass.
Her parents had been Dan Miller’s first stealth assailants. Others followed. Whatever the doctor did was suddenly seen through the smeared lens of something he’d done—or something he hadn’t done. His medical practice suffered. His membership in the Rotary lapsed. Kiwanis too.
The lawn fronting the river became the only aspect of the man’s life that looked as though the unthinkable had never occurred. It was a velvet strip of green separating his house from the water’s edge. The river had become a moat that isolated the Millers.
It was true that Miranda Miller fared far better than her husband. Many pitied Dan’s wife. Some wondered if she’d forgiven her husband for what happened or if she reminded him at every turn that Seth was gone. She was seen as a tragic figure, as much for the fact that she was married to Dan as for being the mother of the little boy who had drowned in the flash flood that last weekend of summer. The visits between Liz’s mother and Mrs. Miller continued over the years, but only sporadically, and never foursomes with their husbands. No more joint barbecues or outings around town.
Dr. Miller took a break from his incessant yard work one time when she and Owen moved into the old house on the river and gave a slight wave in Liz’s direction. She saw him and stood there, doelike, on a roadside with traffic whizzing by. Unresponsive. Not even a blink in acknowledgment. Dan Miller had saved her brother’s life and her own, but Liz found herself acting like one of those pecking chickens in the coop.
She came to hate how she’d never reached out to Dan. Wrong, she knew, was wrong.
The call from Linda Kaiser, the Beaverton woman who had managed the registration table for the Oregon bar exam and who insisted that Liz Jarrett had lied about her whereabouts the day Charlie went missing, was one of more than a hundred tips that Esther and Jake sifted through in the first days of the case. Linda said that Liz had just settled in before getting up and leaving.
“She seemed off to me, too,” she said. “Like she was upset. Came just before we locked the door. Most are Johnny-on-the-spot and come early. Not this one.”
Esther wondered where Liz had gone after the test.
And if she’d just made it to Beaverton before the exam started, had she been in the neighborhood when Charlie disappeared?
“Maybe she saw something,” Jake said as Esther pulled into the driveway that the Franklins and Jarretts shared.
“Maybe she was upset by the news. Carole probably reached out to her. They’re friends and neighbors.”
“Makes sense,” Jake said.
“Looks like they’re home,” Esther said, indicating the Jarretts’ RAV4 and the Forester as they stepped out of the cruiser. A breeze blew smoke from a barbecue grill across the river, one of the last smells of summer permeating the air.
A moment later the detective and the officer stood in front of the pink front door. Liz answered the bell with Owen right behind her.
“I saw it was you,” Liz said, looking past Esther and Jake. “Not the press. I don’t want to do interviews, but I do want to help.”
“I know this is a hard time,” Esther said.
Owen spoke up. “It is. Hard for David and Carole, that’s for sure. Hard for us because we care about them.” He reached for his wife’s hand and squeezed it.
“And Charlie,” Liz said as her cat, Bertie, slid past her to the great outdoors.
“That’s why we’re here,” Esther said. “Can we come in?”
“We were just going out,” Owen said, still gripping his wife’s hand. “Now we’ll have to catch the cat.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Esther said.
“It would just take us a minute,” Jake said.
“We really have to go,” Owen said. “What is it?”
“Right,” Esther said. “You’re in a hurry. Understood. We took a call from Linda Kaiser in Beaverton. Do you know Linda?”
Liz’s face went blank. “No. Sorry.”
“We’ve never heard of her,” Owen said.
“Well,” Esther went on, “she saw you on the news, Liz, and she took exception to something that you said.”
“What was that?” Owen cut in.
Liz looked down. “What did I say? I was upset. I said I hope Charlie is found soon.”
“Of course,” Esther said. “Not that. She said that you didn’t stay for the exam. That you left almost immediately after getting there.”
Owen shook his head. “That’s wrong. She took the exam.”
Awkward silence filled the space. Liz didn’t answer right away. She stood perfectly still. Thinking.
“What’s going on here?” he asked.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes now brimming with tears. “I should have told you. I choked. I just knew I couldn’t pass it. I lied to you, Owen. I went there to take it, but . . .”
He put his arms around her. “Oh, honey . . .”
“I’m sorry,” Liz said. “I should have told you.”
Esther and Jake took a step back from the couple. The scene was intense. Liz wasn’t crying, but it was obvious that she was devastated by her disclosure. She kept her eyes cast downward. There could be no doubt that she was humiliated by her admission.
“What did you do after the test?” Jake asked.
Liz was flustered. Her face was red. “What does that matter?”
“Just trying to pin down the time line,” Esther said. “Maybe you got home earlier than you told us before?”
“No,” Liz answered. “I took my time getting home. I was in no hurry to tell Owen what had happened. Everything I told you was true. I just didn’t stay for the full exam, that’s all.”
“This is pretty embarrassing for my wife,” Owen said, speaking about his wife as though she weren’t within earshot. “We’ve got somewhere to go now. Let us know if there’s anything else we can do.”
“All right, then,” Esther said. “Linda said you got there late.”
“I overslept a little,” Liz said. “I didn’t get out of Bend until nine thirty. I probably broke the speed limit the whole way there.”
“Before you left, did you see anything?” Esther asked.
“Anyone?” Jake added quickly.
Liz stood there for a beat. “No. Nothing. I really wasn’t paying attention to anything. I was late and in a hurry to get to Beaverton.”
“The test was important to Liz,” Owen said, reaching for he
r hand.
Tears welled up in her eyes. “I’m really sorry, Owen. I just . . .”
“It’s all right,” he said, leading her back inside. “There’ll be other tests.”
Jake turned to Esther as they went back to the cruiser.
“Family drama there for sure,” he said.
When the detectives were gone, Owen put his arms around Liz.
“You were perfect,” he said.
She pulled away and found a seat on the couch. She grabbed an old embroidered throw pillow to hug. “I don’t understand why you want it to look like I lied to you. I told you about everything I did.”
He sat next to her. “I just think it plays better this way. It makes it seem more realistic if you are so deeply embarrassed about your failure at the bar exam that you couldn’t even tell me.”
“It makes me look like a liar,” she said, forcing him away.
“No,” Owen insisted. “It makes you look real.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
MISSING: FIVE DAYS
A thunderstorm that had been forecast had moved over Bend early the morning of the fifth day of Charlie’s vanishing, darkening the skies and making the world seem even heavier than it had been when Esther arrived at the Franklins’ place five days ago. The thunder was coming from far away. It was the bass of her brother’s stereo system, pounding in the background as she kept her nose in a book. She and Mark rarely talked anymore, a casualty of the geography that separated them. He worked for a youth organization with a facility somewhere in the jungles of Belize. She missed him. She missed many things.
Before going to the office, the detective walked up the street to the footbridge over the river. She looked downriver at the Franklins’ house. Two paddleboarders passed under as she stood there; a group of tubers floated by the beaver lodge.
Where are you, Charlie? Did someone take you? How come no one saw anything?
Her phone buzzed, snapping her out of her thoughts.
It was Jake. “Detective, we got something. Something big, I think.”