Carole rolled her shoulders. Liz wondered if Carole had finally processed what it was that she’d just said. Her little boy was missing, and she had taken the opportunity to trash her husband.
“I guess I really don’t know it for a fact,” she said, “but David hasn’t been a good husband or a decent father for a very long time. He’s had affairs in the past. I think he’s having one now.”
Liz could scarcely believe her ears. “Do you know who it is?”
Carole put down her chopsticks and set her food on the steel-and-glass coffee table. “I used to think it was Amanda,” she said. “For a long time, I was pretty sure that he was sleeping with her. Not so much now. She was at the restaurant when he was out doing whatever it was he was doing when I needed him.”
Carole’s words hung in the air. Damp clothes on a laundry line, blowing just enough so that they could snap and be seen.
Dirty laundry.
The hours blurred into what would become an endless loop. Losing a child was like no other crime. Police came. People gawked from the street. Reporters showed up. Carole barely registered the attention that swirled around her. Her focus on Charlie coming home alive stayed resolute. She didn’t pay any mind to a Bend Bulletin story that speculated her son had drowned in the river. That couldn’t be true. She felt for sure he was alive. He had to be.
Only one other line in the article stopped her.
Bend Police recovered evidence from the home that has been sent to the state crime lab in Springfield for testing.
She had to read it twice to find the sense in it.
Her bloodstained blouse.
This was at once a truth—the blouse had been sent in for testing—and the vilest lie, in what it suggested.
But that quickly, she brushed even this aside. The heat left her face. Her breathing settled. It was nothing but a distraction. It had nothing to do with finding her little boy.
Charlie was no longer under the blue. He wasn’t sure where he was. Not at all. In fact, Charlie still didn’t know what was up or down. There was a weightlessness that made him feel buoyant. Happy. Safe. The throbbing pain where his head had been hurt, and that made him cry out and wince with every movement, had abated. Faded away. He felt as though he were floating in warm water. Not on the river. Not a lake. Warm, like the big soaking tub in his mom and dad’s bathroom. It was black all around. He wasn’t scared, though. He wasn’t calling for his mommy anymore. Not his daddy, either. The boy was just floating and waiting. Every once in a while he could see a shooting star, a smear of light, streak across the blackness overhead. There was no sound. He wondered if maybe he was in heaven. If so, where were the angels? He listened to hear them, but there was nothing but silence. A slight hum, maybe? Where were the puffy white clouds that would float him?
He was only three, but in that moment, floating on that soft, warm water, Charlie somehow had the sense that he’d be all right. That everything would be fine. He believed that whatever had occurred was only a moment in time. It would pass.
He would be free.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
MISSING: TWO DAYS
Detectives continued to canvass the riverfront neighborhood and work the phones to determine if there had been anything in the Franklins’ background that might have made Charlie a target for a child abduction driven by either monetary gain or revenge . . . and not the attention of a child predator.
As perfect as their home environment appeared, there were indications that the couple’s life before Bend wasn’t nearly as pristine as had been portrayed. A woman who had worked with Carole at Google told Esther that not only was Carole a drinker, she was a hard and selfish boss.
“I’m totally talking out of school,” Cassie Potts said from her office in San Rafael, “but she was a total bitch to work for. She never advanced any of her team members. At least her female team. If you had a dick you had a better shot at moving up.”
“So she didn’t get along with some of her staff?” Esther asked.
“No,” Cassie said. “I mean, I guess people who get that far so fast forget that they were once like the rest of us.”
“You don’t like her,” Esther said, keeping her sarcasm in check.
“No. But that’s not why I’m calling. I wanted you to know that she wasn’t all that. She’s still a Google Alert of mine and I saw the story about her son. I’m surprised she has a kid at all.”
“And why’s that?”
“She didn’t want to be bothered. She actually fired one of her assistants after she told her that she was having twins. Carole Franklin literally said, ‘You’ll have twice the work with those twins and I’ll get half of what I need out of you.’”
“That isn’t legal,” Esther said.
Cassie let out a laugh. “Half the stuff that goes on in the real world isn’t legal. You should know that, Detective Nguyen.”
“Was there anyone there who might have wanted to harm Carole, hurt her in some way?”
“A lot of people hated her,” she said. “But taking her kid, that’s just not something I could imagine anyone around here doing.”
“You must have thought you might know something that could help the case,” Esther said. “You called me.”
“I just wanted you to know that the woman in the papers crying about her kid isn’t perfect. That’s all. She’d do the same for me.”
Jake appeared when Esther set down the phone.
“Got anything?” he asked.
“No, not really,” she said. “Unless you count a coworker from Carole’s past that uses a missing-child news article to pour more misery on what I assume to be a former business rival.”
“Aren’t people super?” Jake said.
“Super isn’t the word I was thinking but, yes, they are.”
Jake stayed planted in the doorway. “Lab guy called. The blood on the blouse is Mrs. Franklin’s.”
Esther nodded. “That’s good. I guess. Doesn’t help the case much, but it makes it less likely that the boy’s mother did something violent to him. Woman on the phone said Carole was a drinker back in the day.”
“Didn’t smell anything on her.”
“No. I didn’t, either.”
Jake briefed Esther on his conversation with the insurance adjuster.
“He backs up everything Carole Franklin told us. She was on the phone. Longer than she admitted, but she wasn’t off doing something to her son.”
“Unless she did it before she talked to the insurance adjuster,” Esther said.
“Didn’t think about that. Her whole time line might be a lie. She could have done something to Charlie anytime after her husband left the house. Couple of hours there.”
“Right. But my gut tells me no, she didn’t. I just don’t read that from her.”
Jake shrugged. “Okay. Fine. So where does this leave us?”
“Same place,” she said. “We need to find Charlie.”
Carole was sitting outside on the front steps when Liz arrived home from another aimless run along the river. Liz was running to escape and knew it. It was a sunny and warm day, but Charlie’s mother wore a down vest. Even the puff of the down couldn’t conceal her shivering frame.