As he slowed, he could see where footprints led down an incline. He braked and positioned his car so his headlights would flood the space with light. He got out and stood there in the night air. Down by the junipers, he caught a flash of the paint-splattered tarp.
As he made his way down the incline, he noticed a coyote approaching the tarp.
“You go away! Get! Go!” he called out loudly and with a force that hadn’t escaped his lungs in a very long time.
The animal looked at him, its eyes white in the glare of the car’s headlights.
The man picked up a rock and threw it in the direction of the coyote, missing, but close enough that the animal retreated.
He bent down, his knees landing hard on the rocky, dry soil. Very gently, he peeled away the paint-splattered cocoon that enveloped Charlie Franklin’s body.
“What did they do to you?” he said, looking down. “What on God’s green earth did they do?”
The car wash was self-service, which was a very good thing. Owen Jarrett pulled his wife’s car into the bay and loaded the coin machine with four quarters from change he’d scrounged from the cup holder in the console. He kept two for the vacuum. Liz slumped herself against the cinder block wall, her eyes no longer raining, but cast downward as though looking at anything other than the pooling water by her feet was more than she could bear. They hadn’t said a word to each other for a half hour. The handheld sprayer fanned a sharp stream of sudsy water over the rear bumper where Owen thought he could see the tiniest trace of Charlie Franklin. A smudge. Owen couldn’t be sure, but he thought it could be blood.
He hadn’t opened the tarp to see the extent of Charlie’s injuries. He just didn’t want to look at him.
It was the middle of the night, almost morning. Owen told himself that lots of people are so busy during the day that they delay things like washing the car to dead hours like this. As the water ran over the car, he made up responses to any questions he might get if someone asked him what he was doing there.
Although no one would.
But if—if—they did, he’d say that he couldn’t sleep and decided to use his time to the best advantage by washing the car. His wife had come along to keep him company. Or maybe they’d just made it to Bend from a long drive and had to get the bug splatter from the hood and windshield.
Yes, that was good.
If his questioner persisted, he’d tell them to fuck off. They were upset about their neighbors’ lost boy. Neither of them could sleep.
He used the little brush on the back bumper and across the MY RESCUED CAT RESCUED ME sticker that Liz had added the first day off the car lot. Rubbing it back and forth to ensure that any DNA left by the accident had been truly obliterated. He knew that it would never, ever get to that point. No one would ever know what they’d done to make everything disappear.
Owen had taken care of everything. Charlie would be found, of course. And when he was, Owen knew that he and Liz needed to react in the way that they would have if she hadn’t done what she had.
If he hadn’t done what he had too.
While Liz watched, he got back into the car and inched it out of the bay and parked alongside the vacuums. He opened the trunk space. There was the faint odor of urine.
Owen grabbed the newspapers and deposited the stack into a recycling bin next to the car wash. He returned to the car and fed the machine a quarter and started to vacuum as methodically and as quickly as he could. It was a race against a machine that notoriously petered out just when you needed it to suck up something. He worked in straight, parallel lines. Then he worked crosswise. The sound of the vacuum obliterated what was going on in his mind. Just moving the attachment over the carpet, up on the roof, along the sides. He was getting rid of any trace of Charlie Franklin: his hair, skin cells, fibers from his clothes that might have fallen when the boy’s tarp-wrapped body was placed inside.
Back home in their house on the river, Owen Jarrett went past his wife and reached for the whiskey bottle. The hour didn’t matter. He needed something to get the taste of what he’d done out of his mouth. His fingers shook as he gripped the glass and poured the amber liquid down his constricted throat.
Liz came to him. She was still drowsy from the pills and the wine, but not so foggy that she couldn’t see herself through his eyes.
“What next?” she asked.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he took another slug.
“I need to know,” she said.
“You need to just let it be. Let things happen.”
“What things, Owen?” Her voice was tight, her words fractured.
“The things you started. You need to just back off. Let go of it. React to it like you would if you—”
“We should call the police.”
He grabbed her. Hard. He shook her.
“Are you crazy? Look, it’s too late for that,” he said. “Don’t you get it? You killed a kid. We got rid of the body. We’re both so screwed here that we’ll never get out of this if we get caught. Do you understand?”
“I did this,” she said. “You didn’t. I’ll tell the truth.”
“Liz, you can’t tell the truth now. We can never, ever tell the truth.”
“What if we get caught?”
“Let’s pray that we don’t. Let’s goddamn pray that no one saw you back into Charlie and that no one saw us cleaning up your mess.”
No one spoke for a minute. They just faced each other.
“They’ll find him, right?” she asked. “Carole and David will get to say good-bye to their baby, right?”
Owen poured himself another. “Yes. I’m sure it will be soon.”
“They’ll find out,” Liz said in a whisper. “They’ll know.”
“No,” Owen said. “You might have fucked up beyond belief, Liz, but I’m not stupid. I’ve never been stupid one second in my life. I’ve fixed this. I’ve thought of everything. You are not going down for this. You’re not going to end up with a goddamn needle in your arm. I won’t let that happen.”
Esther lay in her bed, facing the ceiling. It was nearly 4:00 a.m. She could not recall a time when she had been more exhausted. Not even the cruel machinations of her ex-husband as their marriage unraveled compared to the emotional drain of the first day of the Charlie Franklin investigation—and how it reminded her of the Corvallis case that ended with the dead boy and a family changed forever. She traced the steps she’d taken, the people she’d talked to, the interviews conducted with the family.
Mostly she wondered what was really going on in that Architectural Digest?class home on the river. The river. Divers told her that it was possible that the boy had drowned and got caught under a log, although they’d looked in all the likely points where a body could snag.
“Water’s not all that murky this time of year,” a diver told her. “Not like it will stay that way when the rains come.”