The Last Thing She Ever Did

by Gregg Olsen

  “I found him where you and Owen dumped him,” he said. “You two left him to die. I saved him.”

  “He was dead,” she said, fighting to breathe in enough air to stay alive. She felt as though she were going to fall. “It was an accident.”

  The scalpel glinted.

  “Not dead,” he said. “A concussion. A severe one.”

  The sands shifted again. She was going to fall. She was going to let that man plunge that knife into her heart.

  “I didn’t know,” she said. “I thought he was dead. It was an accident. Why didn’t you take him to the hospital?”

  He moved closer. Just a step.

  “I found him,” he said. “He’s mine. You threw him away. His parents—if you want to call them that—care more about their cars than their own child. They never should have moved here. I wish to God that their ugly house would burn down.”

  Liz needed to buy time. She could feel a surge of strength coming to her.

  “I hate that house too,” she said, thinking that agreeing with him would calm him, stalling him for a minute or two.

  But Dan Miller just laughed. “You covet that house,” he said. “I’ve seen the way you have cozied up to those people. You and your husband are nothing but goddamn climbers with no regard for anyone. Only things. That’s all you want: a pile of things.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt Charlie,” she said, her tone suddenly pleading. “It was an accident.”

  “You were careless,” the old man said. “You weren’t watching where you were going. I didn’t see everything you did, but I can add two and two. At first I thought that you packed him up and took him to the hospital. You should have done that. A decent human being would have.”

  “I was scared,” she said.

  Dr. Miller gave her a very hard stare. “You were concerned about something other than that little boy.”

  “I thought he was dead,” she said. “I thought I’d killed him. I was sure he was dead.”

  “Soon you’ll be dead, Lizzie.” He thrust the scalpel at her, and she twisted her body just enough to avoid a slice to her heart. Instead, the blade cut into her shoulder. Red poured from the wound, and Liz let out a scream.

  “You shouldn’t have moved,” he said. “I’m a doctor. I can make this painless and quick. You’re going to die, Lizzie. And Charlie and I are going to leave here.”

  Liz felt a little woozy, but not so much that she couldn’t fight for her life. She threw herself at the old man, and the two of them crashed to the polished cement floor. The scalpel flew from Dr. Miller’s hand and skittered over by the door from which the crying had come.

  The door opened a crack, and Charlie emerged. The sight of the boy took Liz’s breath away. He was wearing pajamas. His head was a mess of blond, a little longer than the most recent photos taken by his mom. Otherwise he looked just as he had the day he went missing. He was healthy. Clean.

  And alive.

  At the boy’s feet was the scalpel.

  “You’re going to die,” Dr. Miller said, as he wrestled away from her and started to crawl after the scalpel.

  Liz somehow found the strength to go after him. She jumped onto his back and grabbed his neck, but she was too weak to choke him. She could feel her strength ebb. Dr. Miller rolled her roughly off him and scanned for the scalpel.

  She looked over at Charlie.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  MISSING: TWENTY-NINE DAYS

  “Don’t let him get it, Charlie!”

  The little boy, wide-eyed with fear, bent down and picked up the blade just before Dr. Miller’s fingertips brushed the stainless steel handle. Charlie took a step back and slumped against the front of the TV, his small body silhouetted against its bluish radiance. He held the blade before him in both hands and stared at them.

  For Liz, it was do or die. She launched herself once again upon the old man’s back and drove him to the floor. She took the doctor’s head in her hands and slammed it forward against the concrete as hard as she could. She imagined that his skull was a hard-boiled egg and that she’d crack it against a hard countertop, shattering the shell. Dan Miller let out a scream and blood poured from his head, forming a dark, viscous pool and mixing with his thick white hair.

  “I didn’t mean to,” she said, pushing herself up and away from him.

  He tried to raise himself, but succeeded only in rolling over. His eyes looked upward at her with a kind of fuzziness that suggested he couldn’t see.

  “Remember what you did,” he said, and then his jaw fell open. His glassy eyes remained fixed on the ceiling.

  What was happening? Was everything around her a dream? Or had the drugs Owen had been giving her caused her to hallucinate? She leaned over Dr. Miller, her shirt stained with his blood, and felt for a pulse. He was dead. She’d fought him to save her life, not kill him.

  Charlie, who was suddenly next to her, said, “I want my mommy.”

  Was this a dream?

  “I want to go home,” he said.

  Liz sat up straight and held him tightly. He was wearing pajamas. He looked fine. He smelled good. He was all right. She could feel a small lump on the back of his head, hidden under his halo of gold hair. Charlie was alive! This was real! And somehow God had given her a chance to make things right. The police would try to figure out how Charlie had ended up with Dr. Miller. Charlie probably couldn’t answer that, but he would tell them what he knew.

  She’d tell them.

  “Honey,” she said, lifting him into her arms, “I’ll take you home. I’ll take you to your mommy now.”

  Blood oozed from her shoulder, but she paid no attention to it.

  “Auntie Liz,” he said, “Dan’s hurt.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’ll call for help when I get you home.”

  Carrying Charlie, Liz opened the basement door facing the river. Adrenaline coursed through her body. Her world was about to change. Carole was on the porch, watching the river. It would be over now. Liz would go to jail for kidnapping or something along those lines, but she had not killed Charlie. She was not a murderer.

  Not the killer of a little boy.

  Dr. Miller? Well, that was another matter.

  “Carole!” she called over the water, her voice charged with emotion. “He’s alive! Charlie’s alive!”

  Carole ran down to the river’s edge. She was frantic. Even from a distance, Liz could see that Charlie’s mother understood what was happening, that her son was about to be returned to her. That everything she’d prayed for had come true.

  He was Jaycee. He was Elizabeth. He was the trio of Cleveland survivors . . .

  The water was high and moving swiftly. Carole was about to go in when Liz stopped her.

  “No, Carole!” she called out. “Don’t go in the water. Meet me on the bridge. Call 911. Dr. Miller had him the whole time. I think I killed him, Carole. I killed Dr. Miller!”

  “Mommy! Mommy!”

  Liz would never forget the expression on Carole’s face as she put Charlie in his mother’s arms on the footbridge over the Deschutes. It was a look that somehow expressed disbelief and shock and fear and relief and gratitude all at the same time. Liz took several steps back, leaving them to it. Mother and son stood in the center of the span, the water of the Deschutes running beneath it a gray scarf being pulled out from under them.

  Tears streamed down Carole’s face.

  “Charlie,” she said over and over.

  “Mommy,” he said, “I was calling for you. Why didn’t you come?”

  Carole held him tight. She breathed him in.

  “Honey,” she said, “I was looking for you. I was looking for you everywhere. I didn’t hear you. I didn’t hear you call me.”

  “Liz hurt Dan,” he said.

  Carole noticed the blood on Liz’s shirt, then the gash on her shoulder. “Liz, you’re hurt.”

  “I’m okay,” Liz said.

  “We need a doctor,” Carole said. She gr
ipped her son but kept her eyes on her friend. “We need help for both of you. She saved you, Charlie. Liz saved you.”

  By then Liz was reeling. She could barely stand. She’d killed someone. This time she really had. Her heart was pumping so hard that her rib cage ached. Inside, she felt as lonely as she ever had. Her secret had eaten away at her, and she imagined she was hollow inside.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” she said, trying to find the words. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  Carole pulled her gaze from her boy for just a moment. “You saved him,” she said. “You saved Charlie. Let’s go.”

  Still searching for the right words, Liz wanted to say more, but Carole wasn’t having any of it.

  “We need to get him to a doctor,” she said. “God knows what’s been done to him.”

  “Okay,” Liz said. “Yes.”

  Liz watched as Carole nuzzled her son as they walked to their side of the Deschutes. Sirens could be heard in the distance and people had started to gather along the river to watch the stunning reunion between mother and child. The onlookers stayed mostly silent as police vehicles and ambulances converged on the scene.

  “That’s the missing boy,” a woman said.

  “It’s a miracle,” said another.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  MISSING: NO MORE

  Dan Miller’s basement was a prepper’s dream. The old man had outfitted the space with a pantry loaded with canned goods, a chest freezer full of food, and a storehouse of potential weapons gleaned from the garden shed and the kitchen. Knives. A saw. Hammers. It was a bunker of sorts. The techs had processed the scene, and the body had been removed. With just Esther and Jake left, the space seemed to echo.

  Clean and spartan.

  “What was he doing?” Jake asked, picking through the strange assemblage of weapons. “The End Times or something?”

  Esther wasn’t sure. “Maybe something else.”

  They made their way through the main living space. The couch had obviously been used as the doctor’s bed. A pillow was placed squarely on one end, a crisply folded Pendleton blanket on the other. Shoes sat polished and waiting for his feet to slip inside. Everything was in order—except for a large bloody smear that indicated where he’d fallen and cracked his skull on the polished concrete floor.

  “Never regained consciousness,” Jake noted.

  “Paramedics said he murmured something before flatlining en route to the hospital,” Esther said. “Not sure what it was. They think it might have been something about Diamond Lake.”

  A startled look flashed on the young man’s face. “That’s where his kid drowned.”

  Esther nodded.

  “You think this has something to do with that?”

  Esther looked over the garden tools and the assortment of medical scalpels and kitchen knives. “Probably not. Don’t want to overthink motive anyway. Let the evidence guide us.”

  “So we might never know.”

  “That’s the way it goes sometimes.”

  “Not very satisfying.”

  A quiet laugh escaped her. “Satisfaction’s a lot to ask for.”

  “Yeah, but not knowing why Dr. Miller would pluck a neighbor kid from his yard and hold him captive . . . I don’t know, that’s a lot to never know.”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  They entered the room where Charlie had been kept. Like the rest of the basement, it was tidy. The bed was made up with vintage Star Wars sheets and an old blue chenille bedspread. Mount Bachelor skiing posters were positioned on a honey-pine-paneled wall behind the bed. A gooseneck lamp illuminated the space in the far corner of the space. It was a replica of a child’s bedroom from two decades before.

  “He was in the army,” Esther said, indicating the hospital corners on the linens and a trio of towels on a nightstand. “That or prison time ensures a man knows how to make a bed properly.”

  Jake was glad his bed was sloppily made, when he bothered to make it at all.

  Across from the bed was a stainless steel table arranged with an array of surgical tools and medical supplies.

  “Jesus, Esther, do you think he was going to do something to that kid?”

  Esther didn’t think so. “He must have injured Charlie when he took him. I think he was doing his best to fix what he’d done.”

  They stood there silently for a second, taking it all in.

  “I never would have thought things would turn out like this,” Jake said. “I was sure that the kid was dead. I thought we might have messed up on Brad Collins and he was the real perp. Or Carole Franklin . . . the blood on her blouse. Her friend Liz maybe covering up something to help her. My mind even went there. Never would have thought the boy would be here all along, right under our noses.”

  Big understatement, she thought.

  “No one could,” she said finally.

  Jake poked around the medical supplies while Esther dropped down to look under the bed. “What do you think Liz Jarrett wanted to tell us when she came to the office?”

  “Maybe she had her suspicions about her neighbor,” she said. “Maybe she felt guilty herself about something or other. Guess it doesn’t matter now.” With a gloved fingertip, she tugged at a paint-splattered tarp and slid it out from under the bed.

  “What have we got here?” Jake asked.

  “A tarp,” she said, stating the obvious and in doing so making her young partner smile.

  “Oh, that’s what those things are,” he said, playing along.

  She made a face. “We’ll need to have the techs at the lab look this over for trace evidence. I suspect it’s what the doctor used to conceal the boy when he first had him. Sure doesn’t fit in with the perfect order he’s established here in the basement.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” he said.

  Esther studied the tarp for a very long time. She looked up at Jake and then back down at the mottled fabric.

  He leaned closer. “What is it?” he asked.

  “This,” she said, pointing to a splash of color.

  It was a pink hue darker than carnation, brighter than peony. It was distinctive and memorable. It was the kind of paint color people used to let the world know they were not cookie-cutter types but purveyors of their own style. She’d come across that hue somewhere before, and had just realized where she’d seen it.

  “The front door of the Jarretts’ house is this same color,” she said, again pointing to the spot, the size of a dime. “I’m almost sure of it.”

  “I didn’t notice,” he said.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “I could be wrong.”

  Inside, she knew she wasn’t.

  “What do you think it means?” Jake asked.

  “I don’t know,” Esther said. “But it’s odd, isn’t it? Everything here is cleaner than clean . . . except this. This dirty old tarp. Why is it here?”

  “I guess we’re going to find out. Right, Esther?”

  She smiled. “We’re going to try.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  MISSING: NO MORE

  Della Cortez was holding down the last three hours of a twenty-four-hour shift when Charlie Franklin and his mother were brought in by ambulance. The whole hospital was talking about it and a score of staff members came to have a look. They’d all seen every kind of medical drama in their careers, and they were excited about this unexpected happy ending to the story everyone in Bend had been following.

  Hospitals seldom are the site of good news.

  The boy’s vitals were all in good shape, but some faint bruising on the back of his head concerned the trauma doctor enough to order an MRI. Not surprisingly, Carole refused to leave Charlie’s side even for a second. Given the circumstances of his disappearance and miracle recovery, the hospital staff allowed her to remain with her son.

  “I wouldn’t let go of my child, either,” one nurse said to a colleague who insisted that the mother was in the way. “Look, you don’t have kids, so you don’t get a say.�
��

  A nurse inserted an IV with a sedative before the procedure.

  Charlie didn’t even wince.

  “Where’s Daddy?” he asked, his eyelids fluttering as the sedative kicked in.

  “He’ll be here soon,” Carole said, although she wasn’t sure if he’d even been notified. She hadn’t tried to reach him. She didn’t care if she never saw him again. In fact, she hoped she wouldn’t.

  “He’ll be scared in there,” Carole said quietly to the doctor, gripping her son’s hand.

  “No, he’ll be fine,” Dr. Cortez said. “He won’t even know the MRI is being done.”

  Charlie’s mother didn’t let go until the very last moment as the radiologist wheeled him through the double doors to the exam.

  “He’ll be out in twenty minutes,” Dr. Cortez said.

  Carole wrapped her arms tightly around herself and stood there, facing the doctor, her mind playing back every beat of the ordeal that had started with the phone conversation with the insurance adjuster. Deep down she knew that all of what had happened had been her fault. No matter what anyone said. She had left him alone. She had turned her back long enough for someone to take him.

  And it hadn’t been a stranger at all.

  It was the man across the river.

  “Who takes someone’s child?” she asked the trauma doctor, a sanitized version of her thoughts.

  “I couldn’t begin to tell you, Mrs. Franklin,” she said. “But Charlie’s safe now. He looks good. He’s young. He’s healthy. He’s back where he belongs.” The doctor motioned to a nearby chair. “Please sit,” she said. “This will be all right.”

  Carole brushed her fingers to her lips. “No, I’ll stand. I’ll wait right here.” She planted herself outside the double doors, her eyes trained on the empty hallway beyond the glass. The weeks of the ordeal had beaten her down, her skin, her hair. She no longer looked put together. Yet no one who observed her at that moment saw anything more than the happiest mother on the floor.

  The results of Charlie Franklin’s MRI came shortly before Esther and Jake arrived at the hospital in search of Della Cortez. They found her just outside the room where the little boy was resting, his mother by his side.