Carole Franklin told herself not to panic. It would be unproductive to do so. It had only been a goddamn minute since her eyes held the image of her little boy on the green strip of lawn that separated the river from the house. Maybe five.
She walked around the house, searching for signs that he’d come inside. Nothing.
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She sipped some water from the sports bottle on the kitchen counter.
“Charlie?” she called out, her voice firm but not scary. If he was playing hide-and-seek, she didn’t want to jolt him into digging in and hiding from her because he thought he was in trouble. “Honey?” Her tone was plaintive but with a growing edge.
The TV was on, and she reached for the remote and put it on mute. She strained to hear her son.
“You better come out right now,” she said. No, too harsh. “I have a Fruit Roll-Up with your name on it.”
As she stood there, alone in her living room, Carole’s heartbeat began to accelerate; it felt like a hammer striking a pillow inside her chest. A thud on repeat, building in intensity. She sipped more water.
Finally she made her way out to the deck, filled her lungs, and shouted for Charlie. The hammer continued to pound on the pillow. Harder. Faster. When her calls brought no response, Carole left the deck and ran the length of the yard, which rolled gently down to the soft, grassy edge of the river. She hurried to the space where the landscape designer had incorporated an old river-rock fire pit, scanning the water for something to indicate something terrible had happened under its surface.
But nothing. No bubbles. No shadow of an object drifting below.
Nothing at all.
The water was nearly smooth and transparent.
Carole stood frozen as a lone crow circled overhead. She put her fingertips to her lips. The muscles in her shoulders and throat had all seized up into a single rigid mass. Her heart was heaving against her rib cage. She was a fighter, though, and began doing everything she could to remain completely composed. She filled her lungs and blasted a cry for help over the water. No one returned her call. Dan Miller was no longer mowing his lawn across the river. The argyle pattern of the grass had been completed. She looked over at the Miller house and thought she saw the old man silhouetted in the window, but she wasn’t sure. She looked upriver. The teenagers on the bridge were gone. No one was there, and that meant no one had seen anything happen to her son.
Maybe nothing had happened.
She called over to the paddler in the canoe with the cocker spaniel, still working his way upstream.
“Have you seen my little boy?”
The man tugged at his earbuds and leaned in Carole’s direction. His dog barked. “Say that again?” he asked.
Carole could feel her knees weaken. “My son,” she said. “He was playing out front. Right here. Have you seen him?”
“Nope,” the man said.
“He’s three!” she called out, as if Charlie’s age would jog the paddler’s memory.
“Been focused on getting upriver,” he said. “You’re about the only one I’ve seen in this stretch.”
Carole found herself back at that moment. The instant she wished she could change. Damn the insurance adjuster! No. She damned herself for taking the call and pulling her eyes from Charlie. She was unsure how long she’d been distracted. Five minutes? If that. As she scanned the space where her son had stalked the heron and then collected pinecones, she told herself everything would be all right.
“I’ll keep my eyes peeled,” the man in the red canoe called out.
Carole thanked him and started pondering the most plausible explanation.
Charlie had gone inside the house.
He was hiding among the arbor of hopvines in the side yard.
He had not gone in or even near the water, because he knew better. She told him over and over the water was dangerous. He knew it. She was sure of it.
After a hurried sweep of the yard and the riverbank, Carole realized that the scenarios she was inventing weren’t helping. In her bones she knew that something was really, really wrong.
She punched David’s cell number as she went back inside and then sped through the house, grinding the phone to her ear with such ferocity that her earring tore her earlobe. Blood oozed. Why in the hell does this house have to be so goddamn big? There were only the three of them. Why did they have to build a place on the river when she’d preferred a secluded spot on acreage, a site that offered views of Mount Bachelor and posed no threat to the part of their life that meant more than anything?
At least to her. There had been numerous times when Carole doubted the sincerity of her husband’s interest in their son. Of course, David said the right things. Fussed over Charlie at the right times. He hunkered down on the floor to play cars with him. He even read to him now and then in the evenings. Carole was grateful. A boy needed his father. And yet there was something rote about David’s involvement with their son. It seemed each one of those bonding moments was hastily staged, as though David were checking a box so that he could move on to more pressing matters.
The restaurant.
It was always about that. He was utterly and completely wrapped up in Sweetwater. It was his dream.
His focus and self-absorption had been a good thing during the first years of their marriage, when Carole was deep into her own career. She didn’t have time for much more than occasional sex and trips to exotic locales. They talked more on airplanes than they did in their own dining room or bedroom. For a time, that was fine. Even preferable. Carole had things to do too. Her mind was laser-focused on her product team and the launch that always loomed ahead at Google.
Charlie’s birth had changed her focus, as babies almost always do. He was the gift from God that Carole Franklin had not dared even to dream about. She was nearly forty when a home pregnancy test kit indicated the right color. Finally. She didn’t even tell David at first because she felt that this was her last chance—and the last time she became pregnant, he’d talked her into having an abortion. She was thirty-five then.
“The time isn’t right,” David told her. “Things are about to pop with my career. I’ve got my sights on a new restaurant concept. TV interest too. I could be a lifestyle brand. I know it. Besides, babe, your career is important too.”