by Gregg Olsen
“I feel sick,” Taylor said.
“Me too,” Hayley agreed. Curiosity piercing through her emotions, she added, “I want to know what happened to her and why.”
“Why do you think she did it?” Taylor asked.
“Did what?” Hayley argued levelly. “We don’t know what happened.” “I’m just saying what they’re saying.” Taylor indicated those in the outer ring of grief, just beyond their own.
“I’d rather know how. I mean, really, an espresso machine in the bathtub? That’s got to be a first ever.”
Taylor nodded, brushing away her tears. She could see the absurdity of it all. “Some snarky blogger is going to say this is proof that coffee isn’t good for you.”
“And write a headline like ‘PORT GAMBLE GIRL MEETS BITTER END,’” Hayley added.
The spaces in the crowd began to shrink as people pushed forward. All were completely unaware that someone was watching them. All of them. Someone in their midst was enjoying the tragic scene that had enveloped Port Gamble as its residents shivered in the frigid air off the bay.
Loving the sad moment to the very last drop.
chapter 2
SOME SAY PORT GAMBLE WAS CURSED from the moment they came. The S’Klallam Indian tribe had made its home on the bay’s shores for hundreds of years, finding food from the sea, shelter from storms, and the tranquility that eluded other isolated locations along the Pacific’s rugged coastlines.
The place, the earth, the universe was in perfect harmony.
The way it was always supposed to be.
And then the early explorers arrived at the jagged edge of Hood Canal, an offshoot of the Pacific Ocean that pokes into Washington with the force of an ice pick.
That was a century and a half ago, a very long time by West Coast standards. The sawmill, located below the bluff on which the town was built, was still the source of most of Port Gamble’s jobs and its pungent clouds of smoke. Green hats (those who actually worked in the mill) and white hats (those who told the greenies what to do) coexisted happily in the town’s company-owned neighborhoods of centuries-old homes.
Homes were known by number.
Taylor and Hayley Ryan lived in number 19, the last house in Port Gamble before the highway’s march along the bay toward Kingston, the nearest town of any size. A two-story chocolate brown and white stucture built in 1859 that had been added on to at least four times, number 19 was the oldest house in Washington State to be continually inhabited. It was drafty, quirky, and certainly loved more than most rentals.
The conversation in that particular house was likely the same as others were having throughout Port Gamble that fateful night.
Maybe not exactly.
The Ryan family gathered around the old pine kitchen table. And despite the fact that it was Christmas night, the subject that held their attention wasn’t the gifts they’d received (a Bobbi Brown makeup collection for Taylor and a forensics book, The Science & History of the Dead, for Hayley) All they could think about was Katelyn Berkley and how it was that she had come to die that night in the bathtub.
Kevin Ryan, the twins’ father, was about to celebrate his thirty-eighth birthday and had taken to doing sit-ups every night and half-hour jogs around town. The girls had never known a time when their dad, a truecrime writer, wasn’t poking around an evidence box, hanging out with cops or prosecutors, or, best of all, visiting some lowlife killer in prison. Every year at Christmas time, their mailbox was filled with cards from baby killers, stranglers, and arsonists.
Their mother, Valerie, worked as a psychiatric nurse at a state mental hospital near Seattle. Hayley thought her parents had a symbiotic relationship since her dad seemed to rely on her mom as a human wiki when he was trying to figure out the psychos he was writing about.
Valerie was a stunning blonde with brown eyes and delicate features. In elementary school, Taylor always thought her mom was the prettiest one in Port Gamble. Over time, she learned that her mother was also smart and accomplished—and that a person’s true character is more important than how she or he looks.
Except on TV, of course.
Valerie blew on her hot chocolate—made with real milk, sugar, and cocoa powder—scooting the froth to one side so she could drink it without getting a chocolate moustache. “What did Chief Garnett say?”
“Not much,” Kevin answered. “I mean, just that it was probably an accident.”
Valerie raised an eyebrow and passed out some candy canes. “I don’t see how. Honestly, Kevin, small kitchen appliances don’t get into a bathtub all by themselves.”
Kevin nodded in agreement and looked across the table at the girls, who’d endured a blizzard of text messages from friends about their suspicions of what happened to Katelyn. “Was she upset about something? Do you guys know anything?”
Taylor hated cocoa but loved her mom too much to say anything. She stirred the steamy liquid with her candy cane. The only thing that could make homemade hot chocolate worse was a candy cane.
“Nah. Katie is—”
“Was,” Hayley corrected, always precise.
Taylor looked at her sister. “Right. Was. Anyways, Katie was super mad about something.”
“She allegedly had a boyfriend. I mean”—Hayley quickly corrected herself when Taylor shot her an exasperated look—“that’s what I heard. But I never met him. We didn’t really talk to each other in school.”
Kevin sipped his cocoa. “This has nonfat milk in it, right, Val?”
She nodded, turning to the girls and winking. “Yes, honey. Nonfat.”
The Ryans rinsed their mugs, and Kevin turned off the oversize multicolored lights that decorated the large, airy Douglas fir that filled the front window of the living room.
“Sure doesn’t feel like Christmas around Port Gamble,” he said, looking out the window at the street and the bay beyond it.
“I couldn’t imagine being without you girls,” Valerie said.
That was a little bit of a lie. There was a time when she had come very close to knowing exactly how Sandra Berkley was feeling right then. Hayley and Taylor had come within a breath of dying, an event that no one in the family ever really talked about. It was too painful and too fragile, like a crackly scab that had never fully healed.
No one knew it right then, but someone was about to pick at that scab, and when they did, many who lived in Port Gamble would face fears and consequences they’d never imagined.
chapter 3
HAYLEY AND TAYLOR HAD SHARED A BEDROOM in house number 19 all through elementary school. It was big enough to accommodate two cribs, then later twin beds with matching sheets and identical duvets. Theirs was the larger of two upstairs bedrooms in the place they’d lived in since their parents brought them home from Harrison Medical Center in nearby Bremerton.
Their father had used the second, smaller bedroom as his office to decent effect. Kevin Ryan’s most successful crime book at that time, Gorgeous and Deadly—the true story of a beauty queen who’d murdered six of her rivals by poisoning them with strawberries dipped in chocolate and laced with rat poison—had been written there.
He always told his girls, “If only these walls could talk … the world would know just how hard it is to tell the truth in a story in which everyone’s a liar.”
But the walls didn’t talk.
One afternoon when the twins were in seventh grade, their best friend, Beth Lee, goaded them into asking for their own rooms. She sipped from a sports bottle—though she didn’t play any sports—as the trio sat in the Ryans’ family room watching a plastic surgery show on the Discovery Channel.
“People at school think you’re weird for sharing a room,” Beth said before the girl on TV went under the knife for a nose job.
“How could anyone at school possibly know?” Hayley asked.
Beth shrugged her knobby shoulders. “I might have mentioned it.” Taylor rolled her eyes. “’Course you did.”
“I’m just looking out for you, Ha
y-Tay,” Beth said, refusing to call the girls by their individual names.
“The other room is ridiculously small. Besides, it’s Dad’s office,” Hayley concluded.
“Take turns. Who cares? It is almost Siamese-twin creepy that you two can’t be apart.”
Taylor’s face went red. “Can too.”
“Someone’s upset,” Beth provoked. “Wonder why that is? Maybe because someone else is right? As usual.”
The twins didn’t argue, but that night they convinced their dad to move his work station downstairs. Then they flipped a coin and Taylor got the little room. They hated being apart, but they despised the idea of Beth Lee blabbing at school that they were weird.
Weren’t twins supposed to be close, after all?
They moved their beds—headboard to headboard—to the inside wall, where an old power outlet had been plated over on either side. The single screw that held each plate in place was nearly threadbare. It took only the slightest touch to swivel it aside. It wasn’t an intercom system, but it functioned like one. At night when their parents were downstairs, the sisters would talk about the things that troubled them: boys, Beth Lee, the weirdos their dad wrote about, the pasta dish that their mother didn’t know they absolutely hated, and the odd feelings and visions that came to them at inexplicable times. Those were harder to discuss because putting the unthinkable, the unbelievable, into words was extremely difficult.
How does one really describe a feeling? Or how can one know something with absolute certainty that one shouldn’t, couldn’t, possibly know?
THERE WERE DIFFERENCES IN THE TWINS, of course. They might have come from a split egg, but that didn’t mean they were identical beyond their carbon-copy genetics. Physical similarities aside, the girls were distinct and unwavering in their likes and dislikes.
Hayley leaned toward alternative music. She loved homegrown northwest bands like Modest Mouse, Fleet Foxes, and old-school Sleater-Kinney—anything off the beaten path, out of the mainstream. While their friend Beth gravitated toward whatever music was hot and trendy, Hayley was more interested in finding meaning and real, genuine voices.
If Taylor measured things in emotion, Hayley looked at ways to quantify life. Analytical in nature, her head almost always overruled her heart. Love it? Hate it? She wanted to know it. Her drive to know something at its very root was likely the reason the boy next door, Colton James, fell for her.
Taylor’s intelligence wasn’t as logic-based; it was more intuitive. She liked a color because it made her feel good, not because it made her eyes look pretty. She prided herself on being outspoken and socially conscious—often flip-flopping with vegetarianism, risking ridicule from Hayley. Words came easily to her, as opposed to her shier, more introspective twin.
But despite their differences, something more than mere twinship always bonded them together.
FROM HER BED, TAYLOR WATCHED A BOAT decorated with a Christmas tree on the bow glide across Port Gamble Bay toward the mill. It being Christmas night, the scene was deathly quiet. A faint plume of steam rose above the sprawling site with its rusty, tin-roofed shacks, a near-empty parking lot, and logs stacked everywhere like Jenga on ’roids. Taylor may have had the smallest room, but it offered the best view in the house. The boat, an old tug, left a trail of foam in its wake. It curled and undulated on the glassy black surface of the water. She sat up and stared at it more intently, her heart starting to beat a little faster.
On the water were the letters:
LOOK
Knowing this was one of those inexplicable moments, she turned, lifted the outlet plate, and called to her sister. “Hayley, come here! You gotta see something.”
“I’m tired,” Hayley said. “I’ve already seen that hideous scarf Aunt Jolene got you.”
Taylor spiked an exasperated sigh with a sense of urgency. “Nope, not it. Come. Now.”
A beat later, Hayley stood in the doorway and Taylor pointed out the window.
“Yeah, so it’s a boat with a pretty Christmas tree.” Hayley narrowed her brow and shot an impatient look at her twin.
“Check out the water behind the tug.”
“Can’t you just tell me what I’m looking for, Taylor?”
“Read it.”
Hayley glanced at her sister and then back at the bay. She looked more closely and nodded. The word on the water had morphed a little, but it was as clear as if a child had scrawled it on a tar-soaked pavement with a fat piece of chalk.
“What do you think it means?” Hayley asked.
Taylor drew back the curtain to widen the view, and then turned to face her sister. “It’s about Katelyn. I feel it.”
Hayley’s blue eyes, identical to her sister’s down to the golden flecks that speckled her irises, stared hard, searching. “What about her? Where are we supposed to look? And at what?”
Taylor shook her head. “Don’t know.”
They stood there a moment as the December wind kicked up and erased the message on the water.
“That scarf is pretty atrocious, Taylor.”
“Yeah, it is majorly fugly. I’ll wear it once for Aunt Jolene. Then I’ll ditch it on the bus. I’m just saying …”
Neither girl knew it right then, but the night Katelyn Berkley died was the beginning of something that would change everything.
Everything.
Every. Single. Thing.
chapter 4
THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS IN PORT GAMBLE was completely out of whack. Certainly, some things seemed the same on the surface. Plastic bags of gift-wrapping and ribbon were stuffed in alleyways or burned on the sly in backyard fire pits. Children re-examined their haul with an eye toward who’d given them the best gift and who’d screwed them over with something that wasn’t even worth returning. A few shoppers descended on the town to make the most difficult of returns: handcrafted items. It was hard to say a pair of mittens was the wrong size or the painted jacquard stemware was something one already had.
As the artist accepted the returns, the lies were told. On both sides.
“I love them, but I have six pairs already.”
“I have a matching hat that you might like to go with it.”
Pause.
“I wish I had known. I just bought one yesterday.”
Nothing was open on Christmas Day. Another lie.
The mittens were, indeed, ugly.
Lies on both sides. That happened in shops and households all over town.
Sandra and Harper Berkley had a Christmas holiday that not a soul on earth would want. Their daughter was dead. Gone. She was in the chiller at the Kitsap County morgue in Port Orchard waiting for the indignity of a knife tip down her skin, a saw through her skull, and the cool voice of the county’s forensic pathologist as she gently picked through the flesh and bone of what had once been a beautiful girl.
And while it was the end of Katelyn’s life, it was the start of something else.
Katelyn was Sandra’s last great hope. And a kitchen appliance in the bathtub had stolen it from her. She surveyed her situation and dealt with her disappointment and heartache the best way she could.
She threw a poison-tipped dart at Harper.
“You know, if we didn’t have that stupid restaurant, you’d have been around more.”
He shook his head. He’d expected her attack. “Everyone works, Sandy. Are you really going to blame me for Katelyn’s death?”
“Daughters need their fathers.”
Harper stared hard at his wife, weighing a rebuttal that would drive the point home without setting her off. “They also need a sober mother.”
It was the wrong response.
Sandra balled up her fist and jabbed at Harper. He stepped back, his wobbly wife no match for his still-agile reflexes. When the emotion of the moment cooled enough for her to realize what she’d done, Sandra started to cry.
Harper put his arms around her and cried too.
They’d been bonded by the joy of the birth of their daughter.
She’d been the glue that held them together when their marriage was at its most fragile.
As they lay in bed in the early morning hours after their daughter had died, Sandra cried quietly into her pillow. Her eyes were red, a color borne of agonizing grief and too much alcohol. She wondered how Harper could find enough solace to actually sleep.
Yet, Harper was far from asleep. He was only pretending to avoid talking to Sandra. Everything out of her mouth was tinged with anger and blame. Sandra was that kind of person: bitter, jealous, and completely unsatisfied with her lot in life. Where some might have found pleasure from seeing the joy on others’ faces, Sandra merely wondered why God hadn’t given her whatever it was that they had.
A new car.
A bigger house.
Diamonds instead of CZs.
The happiness that came with relationships.
A daughter who would lift her out of Port Gamble.
Side by side in silence, both wondered if the death of their daughter would bring them closer.
Or would it be the excuse they’d sought to end their marriage?
ALL OVER PORT GAMBLE, the young, the old, and those close and distant to Katelyn thought about her. As she lay on her bed and typed on her laptop, Taylor Ryan could see the inky water of Port Gamble Bay. She had been overcome by emotion in a way that seemed more painful than cathartic. Her eyes finally stopped raining.
She IM’d Beth:
I FEEL SELFISH. 4COL! SEMZ RONG 2 GRIEVE 4 K & B GR8FUL 4 MY LYF & MY SISTER’S LYF. I KNOW ACDNTS HPN EVRY DY. I ALSO KNW DAT K WZ
On the other hand, Hayley didn’t fight her thoughts about Katelyn. She let them tumble from her, texting her ponderings to Colton about what could possibly have led to this very moment.
KATELYN WAS IMPLODING OVER STARLA. SEEMS SO UNFAIR. INSTEAD OF GETTING HELP, SHE WAS SHOVED ASIDE LIKE TRASH. PEOPLE AREN’T TRASH. NO ONE DESERVES TO BE DISSED LIKE THAT. KATELYN JUST WANTED STARLA TO LIKE HER AGAIN. I KNOW SOME PEOPLE THINK THAT KATELYN HAD SOME KIND OF GIRL CRUSH ON STARLA, BUT THAT’S NOT TRUE. THAT’S JUST THE KIND OF THING MEAN GIRLS SAY TO MAKE EVERYONE LAUGH.