Owen took a step back toward the window. “How? How in the hell can you fix this?”
Now Liz started pacing. She went to the kitchen. She hurried back to him. Over to the front door. Then back to her husband.
“I’ll tell Carole and David,” she said. “They know I loved Charlie. They will know it was an accident. Carole knows me.”
Owen tried to hold it together, but his wife’s reasoning was completely ludicrous. “Seriously?” he asked from his place by the window. “And then you’ll tell them the part that you put their kid’s body in the garage so you could go take the bar?”
“I wasn’t thinking clearly,” she said. “I was messed up.”
Owen shot her a look. It was cold. It was meant to hurt. Hurting her just then was the only way that he could stun her into stopping her inane excuses for what she’d done.
“Hopped up,” he said. “You were hopped up on those goddamn pills you’ve been taking. It isn’t an accident when a drunk driver kills someone. It’s a crime.”
Liz’s eyes went to the front door. It passed through her mind that she could make a run for it. She could push past Owen, get to her car, and drive far, far away. She could go to some place in Idaho or Nevada. A place where no one would know what she’d done. A place where she could start over. She’d never be a lawyer. She’d lose Owen. She’d live the rest of her life looking over her shoulder while she worked as a grocery checker or motel maid. She’d never be anything in life, and in that moment, she accepted such an inevitable outcome. She deserved it. She could feel the doorknob twist. She could hear Owen yelling at her to stop, but only halfheartedly. He’d want her gone. He’d want to start over with his big money and a wife who wasn’t a murderer.
“I’m sorry,” she said, crying. “What do you think I should do?”
Owen slumped back down into the chair facing the river. “Let me think. The police are crawling around the neighborhood. Let me think of what to do. Goddamn you, Liz. You screwed up big-time. The biggest screwup in the world.”
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
“We aren’t going to do anything.” Owen went to the bathroom and splashed water on his face. He looked in the mirror, not at himself, but in the direction of his wife, whom he could hear rummaging around for a corkscrew.
“Owen, we can’t just leave him there.”
“We won’t,” he said, reemerging from the bathroom. “We aren’t. I’m going to clean up this mess.”
He didn’t say your mess, though Liz knew that was what he meant.
“Owen, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You know that, don’t you?”
He barely looked at her.
“Don’t do anything,” he said, going for the door. “Stay put. I’ll fix this. I’ve worked too hard to lose everything because of something you did.” He turned to her to show that he meant what he was about to say and amended his words. “We’ve both worked so hard.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
MISSING: FOURTEEN HOURS
For decades the front porch of the Jarrett place had been the site of countless family celebrations. It ran the length of the Craftsman bungalow, facing the river and the endless parade along it. Birthday parties, the Fourth of July, a nearly annual family reunion had taken place on those wide, old, worn planks.
To Liz, all of that seemed a million years ago.
With her husband gone, she looked in the direction of the water. It was after midnight and she half hoped the next day would never come. Her tears with Carole and David had been genuine. She’d loved Charlie. She knew he’d loved her too. He’d come to show her his pinecones that morning. A few days before, she’d told him that they would make pinecone turkeys for Thanksgiving that year, something she’d done with her mother when she was a girl. Pipe cleaners, gobs of glitter, construction paper, and googly eyes transformed the cones into the kind of treasure that mothers can never discard.
Owen had given her some pills, and now she sat there watching, drinking some wine, and feeling as though a dark lid were sliding over her. She looked down at her hands, limply lying in her lap. What had she done? How could she have carried Charlie into the garage to hide him away? Who was she now?
She saw old Dan Miller ensconced in his swivel chair across the water, the light from his TV set silhouetting his bushy, white cockscomb hair. He was always in that chair, facing one way or another. Sometimes he held binoculars to his eyes to get a better look. Seeing him like that always gave her a hollow feeling, only served to remind her how after Seth had died he’d simply retreated from life. He’d become one of those people on the outside, looking in. Face pressed against the glass. She wondered if Dan had seen something that morning, anything that she would not want him to see.
Even in her drugged and drunken stupor, Liz traced the sight line from Dan’s vantage point to the driveway the Jarretts shared with the Franklins. She wasn’t sure, but she didn’t think he could have seen what had transpired when she backed out from the garage. He might have witnessed Charlie wander over with his pinecones, the lurching of her car, her panic as she ran around to find the dead boy behind the car.
Liz looked over at the house next door. Carole and David’s place had knife cuts for windows on the street and the sides facing their neighbors. The narrow windows were afire with light. Every one of them. She wondered if they were looking in every room again, trying to find something that might indicate where Charlie had gone.
Or who had taken him.
She knew they’d never see him again. Carole’s heart would be broken forever. The chain reaction that she’d ignited would reverberate for the rest of their lives. Carole would grieve. David too. They’d do so publicly. Arms would wrap around them. Maybe their marriage would become stronger. Maybe it would disintegrate. Liz had done all of that. She’d lit a fuse, and there was no way of stopping it.
She would live with what she’d done. She’d cry with her friend, but her tears would not come from the same place as Carole’s. Owen would stand by her. Wouldn’t he? In books, secrets are always a dangerous bond. Would they stay together because of what he had on her? And what she would have on him when he’d fixed the problem?
Liz put the wineglass to her lips and poured the rest of it down her constricted throat. She hated pinot gris, but it was what Owen gave her when he told her to pull herself together.
As she waited for Owen, she prayed silently that God would forgive her and would understand that it had indeed been an accident. That God would know that evil didn’t live in her heart. That she’d made a mistake. As the wine and the pills took over, Liz felt her eyelids become heavy and her limbs go numb. The wineglass dropped into her lap. What was happening? She wondered if she was overdosing. She hoped that she was. She didn’t deserve to live. She didn’t want to live. Living would be torture.