by Gregg Olsen
Carole was still in her bathrobe when she and her husband made their way back to the front door of what had once been a dream home. Carole, who had looked so together the first time Esther saw her, was a mess. Her hair was flat on one side of her head. She’d clearly slept in her makeup. Mascara smeared her cheekbones. Before Esther even said a word, Carole was crying.
Behind them was Liz Jarrett, hovering close to offer support, but not so close as to be part of what appeared to be a serious development.
“You found him,” Carole said. “You found our Charlie?”
“Let’s go inside,” Esther said. “All of us.”
“Just tell me,” Carole said.
“There isn’t anything to really tell you. Nothing conclusive. I’m here because of a discovery made late last night. A trucker pulled over off the highway and found something that indicated a crime.”
“What do you mean, ‘indicated a crime’?” David asked.
She ignored him for a moment. “Look, I’m here because news people no longer wait for anything conclusive before jumping ahead with speculation and innuendo.”
Liz leaned into Carole at that point. Both women were unraveling.
“All right,” David said. “Did you find my son? Did someone kill my boy?”
Esther said she didn’t know. “What I can tell you is that some remains were found in a ditch. The medical examiner is probably just on the scene now.”
“Some remains,” Carole repeated. “Some remains. Did the trucker find . . . what did he . . .” Her words caught in her throat, and she stopped, unable to go on. Liz helped Carole inside and over to the sofa, where the two of them sat down.
David stayed put. “What exactly did they find?”
“Remains, Mr. Franklin. The trucker found only a partial body. That’s all I know.”
“I want to go there,” Carole said, getting up. “I want to be there if it’s Charlie.”
“You all need to stay here,” Esther said, looking from Carole to David and back again. “I’ll let you know everything that I can as soon as I am able.”
Back in the car, Jake spoke first.
“That was weird,” he said again.
“Be more specific.”
“Mrs. Franklin was over at the neighbors’ in her bathrobe.”
“So I saw,” she said.
“She didn’t look like she’d bathed. Her hair. Makeup. I don’t think she slept at home last night,” he said, his voice rising a little at the end of the sentence as though he questioned his statement.
“Maybe she went over to the Jarretts’ this morning just before we got there.”
Jake was on a roll. At least he thought so. “I don’t think a lady like that would ever go visiting anyone without looking all perfect like she does all the time.”
Esther looked in the rearview mirror and caught a glimpse of Carole and Liz returning to the Jarretts’ house.
“Something’s going on,” Jake said.
“The strain of a missing child is immense,” Esther said, thinking back to her Corvallis case and its aftermath. “It’s beyond the ability of many to cope. Few couples can weather the storm that comes at them. Even fewer marriages can survive when the loss is their only child. You’re right, Jake. Something is going on.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
MISSING: SEVENTEEN DAYS
While Liz put her grandmother’s copper kettle on the stove, Carole stayed quiet. She had said little since the detectives mentioned what had been found along the highway. David had gone back to Sweetwater, his Porsche letting everyone know of his exit.
“Chamomile?” Liz asked.
Carole barely indicated a yes.
“All right. Just a minute.” Liz fished through the cupboard for some sweetener. She knew that Carole liked agave or stevia—natural sweeteners. She’d always been a proponent of whole foods, natural products, for herself and her son.
Carole sat there at the kitchen table, her brain running over all the same scenarios again and again. How she should have kept her eyes on Charlie the entire time she was on the phone with the adjuster. How turning away, even for just one minute, had set off the series of terrible events. Her lapse had given some creep the way in that he needed to take her son. It allowed evil to walk right in and take control. And now, although she steeled herself with the tiniest shred of hope, she knew her mistake had led to whatever hell her son had suffered after he was taken from her.
“Who does this to a child?” she asked Liz.
“Don’t think the worst, Carole,” Liz said. “You don’t know what happened.”
Carole’s eyes stayed riveted on her friend’s. “You know it,” she said. “I can see it in your eyes.”
“I don’t,” Liz said, turning away for a moment. “I don’t. Really. I have faith.”
It stunned her to lie like that. She wouldn’t have thought it possible, but the magnitude of what she’d done was growing larger and larger. Her words were an ice ball rolling down a mountainside, building into an avalanche, hurtling toward innocent people.
All completely unaware of what was heading their way.
“I saw the look in your eyes when the detective said they’d found something off the highway,” Carole said. “I saw the hope—the faith, as you say—leak out of you. If you can’t believe he’ll be found, what can I do? I’m alone in this, Liz.”
“You’re not, Carole. Owen and I are here. David’s being a prick, but you know that he loves Charlie. You have to hold on to all of that right now.”
The ball of ice was becoming larger. It was unstoppable.
“Hold on to what?” Carole asked, setting down the steaming graniteware mug. The smell of chamomile filled the air. It was a grandmotherly kind of smell. Sweet and soothing. Liz hoped that Carole would sip the hot drink, calm herself just a little. Maybe lie down and try to get some rest.
“I don’t know,” Liz said. “I’m just trying to be helpful.”
“I know, Liz. I know. I’m sorry. I couldn’t get through this without you. You are the only one who seems to understand how I feel. You’ll make a very good mother to a little boy or girl someday.”
Liz didn’t know how to respond to that without crying. They sat there in silence for a long time, drinking tea until their cups were empty.
Finally Liz picked up Carole’s empty cup and turned to the cupboard. She took her time preparing another cup of tea, then set it down in front of her grieving friend.
“Is it wrong of me to hope that they found someone else’s boy?” Carole asked. “What would God think about that? Wishing that some other family will get the worst news of their lives.”
Liz didn’t know what to say.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Carole went on, filling the void in their conversation. “I know that you think I’m a terrible person. I can’t help it. It’s not logical. It’s not moral. And yet there’s a part of me that hopes that if another child dies, then maybe Charlie will live. Like out of all of the kids who are stolen, you know, one or two make it home.”
“I’m not thinking that,” Liz said, getting up. “I’m thinking that there aren’t enough prayers and hopes in the world for everyone to have everything turn out all right.”
Carole drank more tea.
“I need to lie down, Liz,” she said. “Wake me up if the police come back.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
MISSING: SEVENTEEN DAYS
A caravan of emergency and police vehicles from an array of jurisdictions, along with the Oregon state medical examiner’s familiar white van and a couple of news crews from Portland and Bend, lined the highway. At the head of the procession was a large Ryder truck. Cars slowed and necks craned as passersby tried to see the reason for all the commotion. Before the body was found earlier that day, the place was completely unremarkable. No one would have stopped to look. Rabbitbrush and sagebrush competed for water. A hubcap that rolled off someone’s vintage VW had settled there. Litter clung to a fence l
ike ratty laundry on a line some twenty yards off the highway.
A silvery white tarp over a broad aluminum frame covered the spot where the trucker had pulled over to take a leak. His dog, Jo-Jo, had found an arm.
“Yeah,” the driver said to a reporter as Esther and Jake passed by, “it made me sick seeing that. Something really wrong about people these days. Tossing someone into a ditch like they was nothing but trash.”
The sun was high in the sky, illuminating the tent like a big white beach umbrella. The side panel facing the highway had been dropped to obscure the view, although it wasn’t likely that anyone could see a thing from the roadway. Whoever had been left there was in pieces. Small yellow numbered evidence markers dotted the vicinity of the tent.
“Evidence, Jake,” Esther said as they approached the tent. “Whatever we see here, think of it as pieces of evidence. Don’t let it play with your head. If the pieces belong to our missing boy, then that’s all they are: pieces. Not him.”
Jake made a sound of agreement behind her.
She saw the medical examiner’s assistant, Mirabella Condit, working the scene. They’d met at a conference a few years prior. Mirabella was a striking woman who always dressed as if she were going out to dinner no matter where she went. “Look,” she once told Esther as they took lunch together on a conference break, “I’m in the lab all day long doing this and that to dead people. It’s grim. No doubt about it. My pushback is that I dress up. People say it’s about respecting the victims, but it’s really because it makes me feel good about myself. Reminds me I’m still a person too.”
Now, out on the highway, Mirabella smiled and gave Esther a friendly look. “I thought I might see you here.”
“You know about our missing boy.”
“Sure. Everyone does. At first I thought it might be him.”
“‘At first’?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Unless your three-year-old has a tattoo on his wrist and is female, then I’d say it’s not him.”
“No tattoo,” Esther said.
“No vagina?”
“Guess not.”
The medical examiner’s assistant knelt down and pointed to the happy-face tattoo on the mottled wrist. “Beyond tragically ironic,” she said.
Esther looked at Jake. “You can go back to the car and catch your breath, all right?”
Jake, looking grateful for the dismissal, turned and hurried away.
“Newbie?” Mirabella asked.
“Yeah,” Esther said, her smile joyless. “As green as his face right now.”
The two women talked for a few minutes. Searchers found a leg and the torso, but the victim’s head hadn’t been recovered. Coyotes, Mirabella said, often like to drag those back to their dens for further gnawing. “It takes a while to crack the skull and get into the brains,” she said. “A real treat, evidently.”
“What do you think happened to her?” Esther asked.
“Don’t know,” Mirabella said. “We have a little decomp going on here. As the boss likes to say, ‘a little softening around the edges.’ Exam in the lab will tell us what we need to know. Or some of it. My guess is that we’ve got a girl here, maybe fifteen or sixteen.”
“A runaway, maybe.”
Mirabella agreed. “A runaway that ran in the wrong direction.”
Esther and Jake returned to Bend, first stopping at the Jarretts’ place.
“Weird that Carole is always over here,” Jake said. “Her own house is practically a mansion.”
“It isn’t the same thing, but after I broke up with Drew I actually stayed with my mother for a few days. Didn’t want to be alone.”
Jake knew how Esther felt about her mom.
“That’s saying something, for sure,” he said.
Carole ran toward them.
“No,” Esther said. “It wasn’t your son.”
“Oh, God,” she said, hooking her arms around Liz, who was just behind her. “I told you that he’s alive. I told you!”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
MISSING: SEVENTEEN DAYS
Owen looked up from his desk as he rubbed his stubbled chin. Liz stood in his office doorway with a look on her face that he placed somewhere on the raw continuum between terror and anger. Her hair was disheveled, and she wore no makeup. He got up from his chair as fast as he could and pulled her inside, shutting the door.
“What are you doing here? You look whacked-out,” he said, dropping the miniblinds that provided some privacy from the prying eyes of the office staff as he ushered her to a chair.
She slumped downward.
Rag doll.
Jell-O.
Noodle.
“The police came,” Liz said, her voice cracking. She tried to get up, but Owen pressed her shoulders downward. “The body wasn’t Charlie’s,” she said. “Where is he? You told me, Owen . . . you told me . . . animals took him. Carole thinks he’s alive. This is going too far. Too far, Owen. Really.”
Owen slid the other visitor’s chair up next to his wife’s and sat down. His eyes were wide, and he supported himself by keeping a hand on her shoulder.
“Right,” he said. “I told you that animals got him. That didn’t mean he’d never be found.”
She put her face in her hands and started to sob. It was guttural. Constricted. The kind of ugly cry that comes from something very deep and broken.
Owen’s eyes darted to the miniblinds and the shadowy figure he thought he saw linger outside the window. He needed to calm Liz. Keep her quiet.
Shut her fucking mouth.
“I guess I was wrong,” she said when she’d managed to at least marginally compose herself. “I mean, I wasn’t wrong, because it was gone. Some animals tore him apart and they found parts out there off the highway. I don’t know what parts. It’s on the news already.”
Owen tightened. “Where are David and Carole?”
“He’s at work, I guess,” Liz said. “She’s home. At our place. She’s asleep.”
“Asleep?”
Liz turned her eyes away. “I put something in her tea, Owen.”
“Something in her tea?”
“Yes, Owen. Damn it. Valium,” she said, her voice rising from a whisper to a normal voice. Then a little louder as she found her footing on the shifting sands of what she’d wanted to say. “I know it was wrong,” she went on, “but I just can’t stand lying to her. Pretending everything will be all right. Acting concerned when she runs through a litany of the mistakes she made that day. You have no idea what it’s like. You can leave. Get away from both of them. Come here and get on with normal life. Me? I’m trapped because I messed up in the biggest way possible.”
Owen kept his eye on the slightly parted slats of the blinds. “Lower your voice, Liz,” he said. “People can hear you.”
His words seemed to embolden her a little.
“Really?” Liz asked, although she took the volume down a notch. “I don’t care. I really don’t. I’m not able to turn off my feelings the way you are.”
“I have feelings too,” he said. “I hold them inside. Because if I didn’t, I’d smack you so hard for what you’ve done. How your fuckup has encircled me like a goddamn noose.”
The office door opened, and Damon came inside. He looked concerned as he studied the two of them through his Buddy Holly glasses. “Everything okay?” he asked, looking first at Liz, who wouldn’t even glance in his direction. “Owen?”
“Yes,” he said. “Fine. Just a disagreement about where we’re going on our celebration trip. She says Tahiti, I say Bora-Bora.”
Owen was a facile liar. Liz had always known that about him. She wondered how many times he had turned on a dime and lied to her. He was too quick. Lying was second nature to him. Maybe first nature. It probably took more effort for him to tell the truth.
“Sounds like a lot of disagreement going on here over some pretty good travel choices,” Damon said. “Why don’t you go to both? You can certainly afford it—that is, if you can ris
k the time off.”
“Right.” Owen forced a smile. “Great plan. Right, Liz?”
“Yes,” she responded, still not making eye contact with her husband or his business partner. “Sounds great to me.”
“Conference call in ten minutes,” Damon said. “Nice seeing you, Liz.”
He shut the door and disappeared.
Liz got up. “You have a line for everything, Owen. I see it. I also see how everything you do is for you. You pretend it’s for us. I know better. I did something terrible and probably completely unforgivable. Carole is about to find out her son’s dead. For all I know, there’s some goddamn DNA or fibers or something that will circle back to me.”
“We were careful,” he said.
“You were careful, Owen. You always are. You cleaned up my mess for yourself. Not for me.”
Owen tried to hug her, but she pushed him away.
“You need to chill, Liz,” he said. “Go home. We can ride this out.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
MISSING: EIGHTEEN DAYS
To Owen Jarrett’s way of thinking, running a restaurant was among the stupidest and riskiest of business endeavors. Not only that, there was no way of getting around the fact that you had to deal with the public every single day. Listening to a litany of complaints while reveling in only occasional praise. The staff problems. The cycle of rinse and repeat for every single lunch and dinner service. While he admired David Franklin’s house, car, and standing in the community as someone everyone seemed to know, he knew that none of what David had had been earned entirely on his own. His wife’s money had kept Sweetwater afloat. It had paid for every single thing the older man had.
Everyone who lived there knew it.
Owen scrolled through the news alerts he’d set up for Charlie’s case. He’d returned to one in particular several times.
Ohio Man Questioned in Boy’s Disappearance
Bend police detectives questioned a registered sex offender in connection with the disappearance of Charlie Franklin, the three-year-old Bend boy reported missing by his parents, David and Carole Franklin.