Liz saw Charlie’s face everywhere. In the swirl of foam in her coffee. In the line of kids waiting for a turn to skateboard at the park. On TV. In Carole’s eyes.
Especially in Carole’s eyes.
Liz went for a run to try to bolster her weakened self back into someone who could—and would—do the right thing. As she ran, she kept coming back to how betraying Owen and her promise to him would only serve to visit more misery on an innocent party. He didn’t deserve to have his world collapse because of what she did.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
MISSING: NINETEEN DAYS
Esther didn’t need the help of the Pines office manager to let her inside the cabin where Brad Collins had been staying. The door was ajar, and she eased it gently open, looking around the small space—at the bed, the chair, the nightstand, the tiny kitchenette—to be sure that Brad Collins’s attacker was gone. What she saw momentarily took her breath away. It was as if a bloody cyclone had rearranged the furniture and splattered red on the sheets. There could be no doubt that the man fighting for his life had endured his beating there.
She dialed Jake.
“We’ll need some techs at the Pines to process the scene,” she said. “Big mess here, that’s for sure.”
“Rage beating,” Jake said. “That’s pretty messed up.”
Esther exhaled. Her blood pressure was up. “That idiot Massey should never have told the paper Collins’s name,” she said. “I told him how messed up that was. Might have made Collins a target of some vigilante. Wouldn’t be hard to find him, drive around any motel and look for Ohio plates.”
Her eyes landed on the phone jack that had been pulled out of the wall.
“Check with dispatch to see if any 911 calls were made from here,” Esther said.
When she ended the call, Esther again scanned the room’s wreckage. Yes, it was sadly possible that this was the work of some kind of vigilante, spurred by the media coverage of the Franklin case. But it could also be something totally random. Maybe Brad Collins met someone locally and things went very wrong. Maybe he’d tried to pick up the wrong guy—a vigilante of another stripe. While Oregon was very liberal, things were a lot more conservative in the central and eastern parts of the state.
“Are you sure you don’t want tea?” Liz asked as she lowered herself into the sun-bleached Adirondack chair next to Carole’s on the Jarretts’ riverfront porch. Her eyes stayed on the gleaming surface of the Deschutes. Looking at Carole only made the bile in her stomach rise.
“No,” Carole said. “Wine is fine.”
Carole didn’t seem to need or want any eye contact anyway.
“Charlie’s out there,” she said.
“I know,” Liz said, pouring herself a second glass from the bottle she’d set on the deck next to her chair.
“He’s coming home,” Carole said, reaching over to Liz but still not looking at her.
“Yes,” Liz said, shrinking smaller and smaller. “That’s right.”
“Who took him? Who would do that to a little boy? What kind of evil do we have here?”
Carole was like a mother cat that had been dumped at the humane society not long ago. She stalked every corner of the facility, calling out and trying to find where her babies had gone.
“We don’t know everyone,” Liz said. “Not like we used to.”
“Strangers come here for a good time,” Carole said. “They come, they go.” The alcohol was working its way into her system. Calming her. Numbing her. Not that Carole needed an excuse. “They take our peace and quiet with their drunken paddling, and then they take our children.”
Liz took a gulp of wine. The bottle was nearly empty. She’d need more. They both would. There was likely nothing she could say to quell her friend’s unbridled agony. She was a sham of a sounding board, and she knew it. She could nod. She could sprinkle a few words here and there to show her closest friend that she was listening. But there was nothing she could say that would even begin to approach the truth of what had truly happened.
“There’s a special place in hell for those who harm children,” Carole declared.
“Yes. I agree,” Liz said. “We’re out of wine. Stay here and I’ll be right back.”
Carole tilted her head backward and emptied her glass. “You’re a good friend, Liz.”
Liz slipped through the old screen door and made her way to the kitchen. She deposited the empty bottle on the counter and went into the bathroom. She turned on the sink tap the way some with shy bladders do to mask the sound of using the toilet. She gripped the edges of the pedestal sink and hung her head over the now-steaming water. The hot vapors primed her tear ducts. She stood there crying as quietly as she could. She looked up at her reflection, then swung the mirrored door open so she could no longer view herself. She would have smashed that mirror without hesitation if she could have done so without making any noise.
Silent screams are the most gut-wrenching of all. She deserved every bit of the pain that she was feeling at that moment. She was the most loathsome creature on the planet. The cause of Charlie’s death no longer mattered. So what if it had been an accident? She’d killed the boy in her carelessness and weakness. So what if none of what had transpired after that had malice attached to it? Had she known that her effort to retreat and save herself would ultimately prove futile, she’d never have attempted it. But she had. It was like the tightest knot, a noose around her neck: there was no undoing what she’d done.
Owen’s threats were a cobra striking her: “He’s gone. He’s over. You’ll be over too. David and Carole will be in agony but they, too, will get past this. Our lives will never, ever recover. Think about that, Liz. Don’t be so selfish. Doing the right thing means keeping this all between the two of us.”
Her knuckles were white as she gripped the edge of the sink.
“You okay in there?”
It was Carole.
Her hands were superglued to the porcelain. “I’m okay,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“Something didn’t agree with me,” Liz said, flushing the toilet.
“Sorry. All right then,” Carole said, her footsteps fading from the bathroom door as she made her way to the kitchen.
A bottle of pills beckoned from the medicine cabinet’s center shelf.
All she had to do was open the cap, swallow them all, and tell Carole that she wanted to lie down. She’d set the stage for such a plan by saying she didn’t feel well and by spending all this time in the bathroom. It would take a while for the Percodan to ease her away from what she’d done, but if Carole was the kind soul that Liz knew she was, she’d let her sleep.
I could leave a note. I could write something and stick it under my pillow.
She amended her plan. There was a chance that Owen would find the note and then he’d dispatch it to the trash.