Carole pulled her gaze from her boy for just a moment. “You saved him,” she said. “You saved Charlie. Let’s go.”
Still searching for the right words, Liz wanted to say more, but Carole wasn’t having any of it.
“We need to get him to a doctor,” she said. “God knows what’s been done to him.”
“Okay,” Liz said. “Yes.”
Liz watched as Carole nuzzled her son as they walked to their side of the Deschutes. Sirens could be heard in the distance and people had started to gather along the river to watch the stunning reunion between mother and child. The onlookers stayed mostly silent as police vehicles and ambulances converged on the scene.
“That’s the missing boy,” a woman said.
“It’s a miracle,” said another.
CHAPTER SIXTY
MISSING: NO MORE
Dan Miller’s basement was a prepper’s dream. The old man had outfitted the space with a pantry loaded with canned goods, a chest freezer full of food, and a storehouse of potential weapons gleaned from the garden shed and the kitchen. Knives. A saw. Hammers. It was a bunker of sorts. The techs had processed the scene, and the body had been removed. With just Esther and Jake left, the space seemed to echo.
Clean and spartan.
“What was he doing?” Jake asked, picking through the strange assemblage of weapons. “The End Times or something?”
Esther wasn’t sure. “Maybe something else.”
They made their way through the main living space. The couch had obviously been used as the doctor’s bed. A pillow was placed squarely on one end, a crisply folded Pendleton blanket on the other. Shoes sat polished and waiting for his feet to slip inside. Everything was in order—except for a large bloody smear that indicated where he’d fallen and cracked his skull on the polished concrete floor.
“Never regained consciousness,” Jake noted.
“Paramedics said he murmured something before flatlining en route to the hospital,” Esther said. “Not sure what it was. They think it might have been something about Diamond Lake.”
A startled look flashed on the young man’s face. “That’s where his kid drowned.”
Esther nodded.
“You think this has something to do with that?”
Esther looked over the garden tools and the assortment of medical scalpels and kitchen knives. “Probably not. Don’t want to overthink motive anyway. Let the evidence guide us.”
“So we might never know.”
“That’s the way it goes sometimes.”
“Not very satisfying.”
A quiet laugh escaped her. “Satisfaction’s a lot to ask for.”
“Yeah, but not knowing why Dr. Miller would pluck a neighbor kid from his yard and hold him captive . . . I don’t know, that’s a lot to never know.”
“Yeah, it is.”
They entered the room where Charlie had been kept. Like the rest of the basement, it was tidy. The bed was made up with vintage Star Wars sheets and an old blue chenille bedspread. Mount Bachelor skiing posters were positioned on a honey-pine-paneled wall behind the bed. A gooseneck lamp illuminated the space in the far corner of the space. It was a replica of a child’s bedroom from two decades before.
“He was in the army,” Esther said, indicating the hospital corners on the linens and a trio of towels on a nightstand. “That or prison time ensures a man knows how to make a bed properly.”
Jake was glad his bed was sloppily made, when he bothered to make it at all.
Across from the bed was a stainless steel table arranged with an array of surgical tools and medical supplies.
“Jesus, Esther, do you think he was going to do something to that kid?”
Esther didn’t think so. “He must have injured Charlie when he took him. I think he was doing his best to fix what he’d done.”
They stood there silently for a second, taking it all in.
“I never would have thought things would turn out like this,” Jake said. “I was sure that the kid was dead. I thought we might have messed up on Brad Collins and he was the real perp. Or Carole Franklin . . . the blood on her blouse. Her friend Liz maybe covering up something to help her. My mind even went there. Never would have thought the boy would be here all along, right under our noses.”
Big understatement, she thought.
“No one could,” she said finally.
Jake poked around the medical supplies while Esther dropped down to look under the bed. “What do you think Liz Jarrett wanted to tell us when she came to the office?”
“Maybe she had her suspicions about her neighbor,” she said. “Maybe she felt guilty herself about something or other. Guess it doesn’t matter now.” With a gloved fingertip, she tugged at a paint-splattered tarp and slid it out from under the bed.
“What have we got here?” Jake asked.
“A tarp,” she said, stating the obvious and in doing so making her young partner smile.
“Oh, that’s what those things are,” he said, playing along.
She made a face. “We’ll need to have the techs at the lab look this over for trace evidence. I suspect it’s what the doctor used to conceal the boy when he first had him. Sure doesn’t fit in with the perfect order he’s established here in the basement.”
“No, it doesn’t,” he said.
Esther studied the tarp for a very long time. She looked up at Jake and then back down at the mottled fabric.
He leaned closer. “What is it?” he asked.
“This,” she said, pointing to a splash of color.
It was a pink hue darker than carnation, brighter than peony. It was distinctive and memorable. It was the kind of paint color people used to let the world know they were not cookie-cutter types but purveyors of their own style. She’d come across that hue somewhere before, and had just realized where she’d seen it.
“The front door of the Jarretts’ house is this same color,” she said, again pointing to the spot, the size of a dime. “I’m almost sure of it.”
“I didn’t notice,” he said.
“That’s okay,” she said. “I could be wrong.”
Inside, she knew she wasn’t.
“What do you think it means?” Jake asked.
“I don’t know,” Esther said. “But it’s odd, isn’t it? Everything here is cleaner than clean . . . except this. This dirty old tarp. Why is it here?”
“I guess we’re going to find out. Right, Esther?”
She smiled. “We’re going to try.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
MISSING: NO MORE
Della Cortez was holding down the last three hours of a twenty-four-hour shift when Charlie Franklin and his mother were brought in by ambulance. The whole hospital was talking about it and a score of staff members came to have a look. They’d all seen every kind of medical drama in their careers, and they were excited about this unexpected happy ending to the story everyone in Bend had been following.
Hospitals seldom are the site of good news.