There was no way out of this, no undoing it.
He finally forced himself to move to the workbench. He stood still in front of it, looking closely at the tarp. It was nearly imperceptible, but what he saw couldn’t be ignored. The tarp rose and then fell. He watched it repeat the same motion. Up and down.
Alive.
Owen Jarrett played out the scenarios one more time. He wasn’t going to lose everything because of one stupid mistake. He stepped closer and put his hands on the tarp. He was going to stop the tarp. Stop the little boy. It was crazy and sick and Owen didn’t care about any of it. He was doing what he had to do.
At first Owen felt nothing but the boy’s still, fine-boned body beneath his hands. He told himself he’d imagined the breathing. But then Charlie made a mewling sound, muffled by the tarp. The noise jolted Owen, and he pushed down on the plastic. The boy stirred—didn’t push back, but remained in barely perceptible, squirming motion. His heart hammering inside his chest, Owen found Charlie’s face through the tarp. He did not want to pull off the loose plastic covering. He didn’t want to see what he was doing, although the act could not have been more deliberate. He put his hand over Charlie’s face and pressed down. The boy twitched. Twitched again.
Goddamn it, Liz! Look what the fuck you are making me do! You bitch! This is your fault!
Sweat from his forehead met the tears in his eyes. He reached for a shop rag with his free hand and wiped his face.
Charlie had been left for dead, but he wasn’t giving up. His muted squirming and odd, twitching motions lasted for what seemed like a long, long time. Owen would never be sure just how long. There was a flash in which he almost stopped doing what he was doing. But he didn’t. There would be no way of explaining the unthinkable.
The boy stopped moving. Owen stepped away, his heart pounding to near bursting. The plastic covering loosely tenting the body was still.
Owen had to get out of there.
He didn’t want to overthink, but he needed an excuse for having come out to the garage and stayed all this time. He scanned the space and retrieved a small box marked KITCHEN and started for the door.
The patrol officer’s head popped up as he emerged.
“Found it,” Owen called to him. “Holy crap, do I need to clean up this garage!”
“Tell me about it,” the cop said. “Girlfriend’s been after me to do the same for about a year now. Just never get to it.”
“Yeah,” Owen said. “Hard to find the time.”
As he turned the doorknob to go inside, he made a promise to himself. He’d never tell Liz what he’d done. This was her disaster. She was to blame for Charlie’s death. He’d remind her of that whenever he needed to. For the rest of her life.
However long that was.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MISSING: FIFTEEN HOURS
As if sleeping would erase what had happened, Carole lay still on the California king bed that faced the moonlit river. She’d tossed her pillow to the floor. It was after 3:00 a.m., technically the day after her son went missing, but in her heart and in her soul it was merely the continuation of the day when she’d senselessly turned her back on Charlie. She told her husband and the detective that it had been only five minutes that she’d taken her eyes from him. That hadn’t been true.
A look at her phone’s call record indicated twelve minutes. A dozen minutes.
There was no way she could insist that she’d only turned her back for a second. Twelve minutes was long enough to go to the Safeway and back. Long enough to watch the news until the sports came on. Long enough to microwave four bags of popcorn.
Too long.
Long enough to call her parenting into question.
Her pillow was soaked with her tears. David held her from behind, wrapping his arms around her shoulders as she cried quietly, steadily, into the fabric.
“David,” she said, her voice a croak, “I’m so, so sorry.”
“Not your fault,” he said, pulling himself a little closer. “Everything’s going to be all right. I promise.”
“Really?” she asked, although she knew the ridiculousness of such a promise. Whatever had happened to their little boy was beyond any promise. “He’s all right. He’ll be coming home, won’t he?”
David tightened his embrace. “Honey, we have to have faith.”
She started to move toward the edge of the bed, but he held her close. The divers searching Mirror Pond had found no trace of Charlie. Searchers also scoured the riverbanks on both sides but found nothing there. One ambitious young man with the local search-and-rescue team even dug into the beaver lodge on the off chance that Charlie had somehow become trapped inside.
Dead or alive.
He’d vanished without a trace. Chasing the heron and collecting pinecones and then gone.
“He’s alive.” Carole shifted in the bed. “We have to do something, David. We have to go look for him. We need to get dressed and get out of here.”
David loosened his embrace. “We have looked. Everyone is searching. Charlie is on everyone’s mind right now. Because of the police. The news. The Amber Alert. Someone must have taken him, Carole. Someone must have hidden him somewhere. I was scared that he might have drowned, but now I know that he’s alive.” David’s voice choked with uncharacteristic emotion and he repeated himself. “He’s alive.”
Carole untangled his arms from her body and put her feet on the floor. “I can’t sleep,” she said. “I have to go. Get up, David! We both have to go. You don’t understand. This is my fault. We have to find our son! I have to find him!”
David watched his once-again frantic wife put on a pair of pants and a shirt. When he could see that she was serious, he did the same, but it was dark outside and he didn’t think there was any point in looking until first light. He followed her down the stairs to the front door. The air was cool and still. Only the Jarretts’ bedroom lights were on.
The couple walked past a police car and an officer with a paper cup of gas station coffee.
“We need to look,” David said to the young man behind the wheel.
“He’s all we have,” Carole added.
The officer nodded grimly, and they left him behind.
They made their way toward the bridge, passing a “vacation rental by owner” notorious in the neighborhood for its parties. It was stone quiet just then. A clutch of amber glass beer growlers sat in a cardboard box on the sidewalk. A hastily rendered sign read: FREE TO A GOOD HOME. Except for a breeze shifting the leaves of an alder, it was as if time were standing still. Carole wished to God that it were, that there was a way to roll everything back to the previous morning.
She leaned against the bridge railing while she and David looked upriver. A crane loomed above a construction site a few houses up from the edge of the playground.
“Maybe he fell into a hole over there,” Carole said. “The excavator has a magnetic pull for little boys. You know that’s true, David.”