The Last Thing She Ever Did(10)

She hooked her arms under Charlie’s tiny body and lifted.

You are so stupid, Liz.

You are going down.

The police lab will find Adderall in your bloodstream.

You will fail the test.

You will be a pariah in your own neighborhood.

You will go to prison.

It happened so fast. Faster than a blink. It was nearly a magnetic force that drew her to the workbench instead of the backseat of the RAV4. She set the body down, gently, on the workbench. Sweetly, even. Even though nothing but darkness was passing through her mind, Liz leaned over and kissed the child’s forehead. A tear splashed on the boy’s blond head.

What have I done? Fuck me! Kill me!

A blue tarp her father had used when he painted the house and stained the front porch caught her attention. She unfurled the stiff, paint-splotched fabric and placed it over Charlie.

She’d killed him. She hadn’t meant to. It had been a terrible accident. It really had.

She knew what she was doing would only buy her time.

Got to take the test. Got to figure this out. Got to. Got to. Got to.

As she approached her car, Liz could hear Carole’s voice calling out for her son down by the river.

God, no.

It was an ice pick in her chest.

“Charlie!” Carole called out.

Liz slid behind the wheel and started backing out.

Carole’s voice was louder, more forceful. Closer.

Liz pushed the button on the garage-door opener, and the door rolled downward. She caught a glimpse of a woman’s face in the rearview mirror. Her own reflection seemed foreign to her. A stranger’s face.

Again Carole calling out for her son.

“Charlie!”

Liz pressed her foot on the gas slowly and continued backing out. As she cleared the space in front of the garage, she saw the bucket of cones that Charlie must have been carrying when she struck him. She also saw a small pool of blood on the gravel driveway. She could feel the pills and coffee make a play for her esophagus, but she managed to suppress the urge to vomit. She’d lost control of everything else.

She’d lost everything.

“Charlie!”

She got out of the car, picked up the bucket, and kicked a couple of the errant cones into the flower bed that flanked the driveway. She put the ball of her foot on the blood and spun around on it, grinding it into oblivion. The spot left behind was no longer red but a damp, dark stain. Liz hoped it would blend into the driveway. She put Charlie’s bucket in the car. She needed air. She could barely breathe. She returned to the car and got inside. She rolled down the window and put her foot on the gas.

And she was gone.



Liz pulled over on a quiet side street just before the highway that slices through Bend and rolled up the opened window. All she could see in her mind’s eye were images of Charlie. Playing in the yard. Following after his mother when Carole came for a visit next door.

He had been an angelic child.

Now he was an angel.

As the car idled, Liz screamed as loud as she could. Tears rained from her eyes. She had no idea why she’d panicked. It was an accident, a terrible one. One that she’d made a million times worse by her actions after the car hit Charlie.

She dialed her husband one more time. This time when she got voice mail she didn’t leave a message. She didn’t know what the message should be. She knew that the right thing to do was to return home, call the police, and face Carole and David. Tell them how sorry she was. Tell them that she loved Charlie too. Beg them all for forgiveness. Plead for mercy.

For she’d done something she could never explain to anyone. She’d put Charlie under a damn tarp in the garage and drove on to Beaverton and the bar exam.





CHAPTER FOUR

MISSING: TWENTY MINUTES

If only.

There is a moment when the parents of many, if not most, missing children recognize an irrevocable mistake they made. They can pinpoint the split second when something they did changed everything in their world. Mistakes are dominoes, falling on one another in a mechanical, unstoppable progression. Those moments never leave them. The echo is a ticking clock at the end of a long wooden hallway. Pounding. Reverberating. Mocking. Reminding those parents that terrible accidents or dark incidents caused by others truly rest only on their shoulders.

Carole Franklin told herself not to panic. It would be unproductive to do so. It had only been a goddamn minute since her eyes held the image of her little boy on the green strip of lawn that separated the river from the house. Maybe five.

She walked around the house, searching for signs that he’d come inside. Nothing.

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She sipped some water from the sports bottle on the kitchen counter.

“Charlie?” she called out, her voice firm but not scary. If he was playing hide-and-seek, she didn’t want to jolt him into digging in and hiding from her because he thought he was in trouble. “Honey?” Her tone was plaintive but with a growing edge.

The TV was on, and she reached for the remote and put it on mute. She strained to hear her son.

“You better come out right now,” she said. No, too harsh. “I have a Fruit Roll-Up with your name on it.”

As she stood there, alone in her living room, Carole’s heartbeat began to accelerate; it felt like a hammer striking a pillow inside her chest. A thud on repeat, building in intensity. She sipped more water.