Esther put her hand on the woman’s shoulder. “I know you’re scared, Mrs. Franklin. I’m Detective Esther Nguyen, and this is Officer Alioto. I need you to tell me what happened. Take your time.”
“There isn’t any time,” Carole said. “Charlie could be anywhere. Anything could have happened to him.”
“I understand,” Esther said. “I know it might be hard to believe, but I’ve been around long enough to know that kids just wander away.”
Mrs. Franklin’s lips tightened. “Charlie never leaves my sight,” she said, forcing the words from her mouth.
“Right. But this time he did, right? We’re here to help. Let’s go inside. Tell me what happened.”
Mrs. Franklin led them to a living room with floor-to-ceiling views of the river and repeated her story about being on the phone for “only a minute or two” with the adjuster from the insurance company. “We had a leak in the basement. I don’t even care about it. I should never have taken the stupid call.”
“It’s not your fault,” Esther said.
Mrs. Franklin fiddled with a stray thread that had come undone from the gray velvet pillow she clutched as she sat on the sofa. The light from the river, now full of paddlers and inner-tubers, flickered in her eyes. A sound system played an incongruently soothing interlude in the background.
“But it is our fault. Living here at all. We live on a river, for God’s sake,” she went on. “I never should have turned my back for even a second. I know better. I do. This is my fault,” she repeated, still trying to keep her voice from shattering.
“You need to take a breath,” Esther said. Her tone was kind, not condescending. She’d interviewed hundreds of witnesses and knew how rapidly a person could go from being able to help a case to being utterly useless. Sometimes even a distraction. She needed Carole Franklin to be the kind of person who fit her tasteful surroundings. Thoughtful. Organized. Self-aware.
“You didn’t see any sign that he went into the river, did you?” Esther asked.
Mrs. Franklin watched as police officers gathered by the riverbank. “No,” she said. “I called over to a man canoeing with his dog. I saw a tuber on a red Riparian tube go by. My neighbor across the river—he was there. No. No one saw him go in. But, really, where else could he be?”
“Does he have a hiding place?” Esther’s tone was calm, full of empathy, Jake noticed. He wished that particular Esther worked at the police department.
“My nephew had a secret hideout,” the detective went on, “a fort that he assembled out of cardboard boxes in the basement. My sister had a fit one time when she couldn’t find him.”
“No,” Mrs. Franklin said. “We don’t have anything like that. I’ve searched the house.”
The police officer who’d arrived on the scene right after the call approached. “Detective,” he said, “we’ve looked everywhere. In every closet. Under every bed. We even looked in the dryer in the laundry room and the freezer in the garage.”
Carole Franklin wrapped her arms tightly around her lanky frame. “The freezer,” she said, horror in her eyes. “I didn’t look there.”
“It’s all right, Mrs. Franklin,” Esther said. “He wasn’t there.”
“We’ve cast a wider net,” the officer continued. “We have another pair of officers working the shoreline. Nothing so far.”
“All right,” Esther said, returning her attention to the woman. “Where is Mr. Franklin?”
“I don’t know,” she said, watching the water. “His phone went to voice mail. I’ve texted. I’ve called. I have no idea.”
“Is there any chance he might have come home and taken Charlie somewhere?”
Mrs. Franklin faced her. “You mean to the park or something? Of course not. David’s not that way,” she said, her tone shifting a little.
“What way?”
“A father who surprises his son. He’s more . . . predictable.”
“Right, of course. What does he do?”
“He runs Sweetwater. The restaurant on Wall.”
Esther nodded and told the responding officer to send someone over to see if David Franklin was at work. “We need him here.”
“Thank you,” Mrs. Franklin said.
“No problem,” the officer said. “We’ll find your little boy.”
Esther shot the young man a swift but decisive look.
Mrs. Franklin caught it. “You can’t promise that, can you?”
Esther didn’t think so. “No. I’m sorry. We can’t promise. What the officer is saying, though—and what I know from my own personal experience—is that kids turn up.”
“Always?”
Esther could feel her desperation. Carole Franklin was grasping at straws, and she needed to believe that everything would be all right.
“More than ninety-nine percent of the time.”
Mrs. Franklin nodded. “I need to do something,” she said, turning to look back at the river, imagining her little boy falling from the bank. Getting scared. Scrambling. Thrashing. Fighting to get to the surface. The images played on a loop over and over, and she couldn’t stop the sequence.
“I need to go out there and help find him,” she said, getting up.
“No.” Esther motioned for her to sit. “Take a breath,” she repeated. “You need to let us do our job. We can do this. Is there someone we could call? Another family member?”
The mother of the missing three-year-old looked hard at the detective. Her eyes were outlined in red. She slumped back down and rocked herself a little, thinking before speaking. Perhaps willing herself to be the deliberate woman she’d been in the boardroom. “And tell them what?” she asked. “Tell them that I wasn’t paying attention and my son vanished? That I wasn’t watching and he fell into the water? I can’t. I can’t do that. I can barely say that to you, let alone people who know Charlie.”
Esther reached over to touch her hand, but the frightened mother pulled away. “We don’t know what happened, Mrs. Franklin,” Esther said. “It’s early. Let’s see where we are when your husband gets here. This is traumatic. You need support.”
“I can’t,” she repeated. “I can’t even say the words.”
“I understand, Mrs. Franklin.”
Carole Franklin looked at the detective in a way that indicated she no longer saw her as someone who was judging her lapse in motherhood. She was, in fact, there to help. Yes, she was going to find Charlie.
“Please,” she said. “Call me Carole.”
Esther nodded, and Carole handed her a photograph that she’d retrieved from the side table.
“This was taken two weeks ago,” Carole said. “My dad and his wife were up from Santa Rosa. We went to Lincoln City for the day.”
Charlie was standing on a driftwood log, smiling at the camera with that kind of exaggerated smile that little kids make whenever a lens is pointed in their direction.
“He’s wearing that same shirt today,” she said.
Esther studied the photograph. The boy was wearing a Mickey Mouse pullover, a wild mix of red and black that little ones find cool. He had a crooked smile and light blue eyes like his mother’s. “This helps. Thank you. He’s adorable.”
Carole offered coffee, but Esther declined.
“Let’s talk about the water. Is Charlie able to swim at all?”