Closer Than Blood

by Gregg Olsen

  Corazón pierced a limp lettuce leaf with her fork before dipping it in a small container of low-cal Thousand Island dressing. “That’s right. She was arguing with someone on the phone. Telling someone that she didn’t want him to call the hospital.”

  “A he?”

  Corazón shook her head. “No. She said it was her sister. But she talked to the person like he was a man, maybe a boyfriend. I don’t know. Thought you’d want to know.”

  Kendall was interested, but she kept her affect flat. “What specifically did she say?”

  “ ‘Don’t call here.’ That kind of thing.”

  “How about you,” she said, this time to Diana, the older of the pair of nurses.

  “About the same thing. I distinctly remember her saying, ‘Don’t ever call me here again.’ She told me it was her sister from Seattle or Portland and that she was coming. She was all sweetness when talking to me. But she was full-bitch when she was talking to her ‘sister’ or whoever it was.”

  “You going to eat that?” Corazón pointed to Kendall’s Dutch apple pie.

  “Nah. You can have it.”

  Corazón smiled broadly. “Thanks.”

  Diana lowered her glasses to get a better look at her barely toasted BLT. She didn’t say a word. And for a woman like Diana Lowell that was not an easy thing to do.

  On her way back across the Narrows Bridge to the office, Kendall wondered about the tenacity of a caller such as the one who’d been dialing Tori Connelly’s room.

  Someone she didn’t want to talk to. Someone who wouldn’t take no for answer, she thought.

  Once behind her desk, she rifled the furthest reaches of her desk drawer for an antacid. Her stomach was a sour mess and she needed something to calm it. It had to be the salmon she had for lunch.

  Josh Anderson flopped himself down in her visitor’s chair.

  “Where’d you go for lunch? Amy’s?”

  She shook her head.

  “I wish I did.” She patted her stomach. “I grabbed a bite at a drive-through and now I’m paying for it.”

  “Biting you back, huh?”

  “You could say that.” Kendall paused for a moment, weighing her options. “You might need to run things around here for a few days. A family emergency has come up and I might have to leave town.”

  She hoped he wouldn’t ask where she was going. She’d already lied to him too many times. Lying, she was sure, didn’t get easier with practice.

  “Anything serious?”

  “Just family stuff.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Kitsap County

  Fifteen years ago

  The parking lot of the Secure Crisis Residential Center was mostly empty, though Lainie knew that there would be fifty cars shoehorned into the lot by the time she departed after seeing her sister. She parked her hideous green Toyota Corolla (“Nagasaki’s revenge,” she frequently said, making a dark joke of the car’s unfortunate paint color) and went inside. Daniel Hector was the only guard on duty and he signed her in. He led her to the craft room where Tori was sitting next to a Victorian dollhouse. She stood.

  “I knew you would come. I knew I could count on you, Lainie.”

  Lainie embraced her sister; this time she felt a slight hug in return.

  “I love you, Tori.”

  “I know you do,” she said, tears coming to her eyes. Coming, but not falling. “I need you to do something for me.”

  “What? What can I do?”

  “I can’t take it anymore. I’m going crazy. I’m going to die. I need to get out of here.”

  “You will get out. You’re almost there.”

  “I want out today.”

  “Of course you do. I want you out.”

  “I want you to take my place.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You heard me. You owe me.”

  “I don’t owe you that.”

  “You do.”

  “I’m leaving now.”

  “I’ll tell.”

  “No one will believe you.”

  “Is that what this has come to? That you think no one will believe me because I’m the bad twin? You’re so effing perfect?”

  “I never said that.”

  “You don’t have to. Everyone else does. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of you, Dad, prison, Port Orchard.”

  “Look, I know you are hurting. I wish none of this ever happened.”

  “Wishing something doesn’t make it so. Just one day, Lainie. Can’t you give me one freaking day?”

  She looked at a pair of scissors. “Cut my hair like yours.”

  “I won’t,” Lainie said.

  “You really want to go there? You were driving that night. It was your idea to take the car, not mine.” An intensity came to Tori’s eyes, replacing anguish. “I’ll tell. Don’t think I won’t. Don’t think for one second that I won’t do whatever it takes to get what I want.”

  Lainie could feel her heart pound. She didn’t know what to do. Should she get up and run, or should she stay and reason with her twin?

  “You made an agreement.”

  “I lied,” Tori said.

  Lainie pushed back on her chair. She could feel her legs wanted to rise up and lift her, but they didn’t. For some reason, she stayed. “Are you lying now?”

  “I get that it’s a risk, but you’re going to have to take a chance. Or I’ll ruin your life. Goody-goody Lainie’s not so good after all.”

  “Just one night?”

  Tori picked up the scissors and slid them across the tabletop. “Here, cut.” She swiveled in her chair, her back now facing her sister.

  Reluctantly, Lainie reached for the scissors. “I didn’t think they could have sharp objects in a place like this.”

  “Start cutting,” Tori said. “You’d be surprised what goes on in here.”

  Wearing Lainie’s clothes, blue jeans, and sweater over a long-sleeved T-shirt, Tori O’Neal spun around in a circle as she and Daniel Hector left 7-Pod and her sister. It was part fashion show, part makeover, and a celebration of freedom. Hector nodded approvingly.

  “She’ll never tell,” Tori said. “Do whatever you want with her.”

  The corrections officer smiled, his uneven teeth stained by chewing tobacco. “Wish I could have you both at once.”

  “You can pretend,” she said.

  He handed her Lainie’s purse and car keys from a storage locker behind the counter.

  “She did a nice job on the cut, Tori,” he said, as she started toward the door. “I know you were worried about that.”

  “Lainie, officer. I’m Lainie.”

  “Right.” He reached down and turned on the video camera mounted in the craft room above a painting of an Old English cottage.

  Mikey Walsh’s trailer wasn’t hard to find. Tori went down to the boat launch across from Al’s Grocery on Olalla Bay and asked around. She didn’t say she wanted to score some speed, but a man on a chopper figured that’s what the pretty blonde with the ugly car wanted. She pulled into his long wooded driveway, to the mobile home that was one or two winter seasons away from falling into the soggy soil of South Kitsap.

  She let herself inside and found Mikey on a ratty sofa watching CNN.

  “I didn’t take you for a news buff,” she said.

  Startled, he looked up. “What the fuck are you doing in here?”

  “I’m here to talk to you.”

  “I don’t have nothing to say to you. Get out of my house.”

  “This isn’t much of a house and you don’t have anything to say,” she said. “I’m going to do the talking.”

  “What do you want?” Mikey stood. He wore ratty Levi cutoffs, a tank top, and athletic socks. He smelled of beer and body odor.

  “I’m here to make you a promise,” she said.

  “I don’t want anything from you. Your sister is in jail and we’re done.”

  Tori didn’t correct him. She was Lainie.

  “You think my
sister is trash, don’t you?”

  “She is trash. She’s a freak.”

  “Like I said, I’m here to make a promise.”

  “What kind of a promise?”

  “I promise that you’re a dead man if you ever, ever, ever talk about what you saw.”

  His eyes flashed defiance. “You mean how she killed that kid?”

  She took a step closer. Tori refused to give an inch of ground to that piece of garbage standing in front of her.

  “You want to die, too?”

  “You’re some stupid girl. I’m not afraid of you,” he said, backing off a little.

  There was a coldness in her eyes that was like a bucket of ice water in his face.

  The girl wasn’t kidding around.

  “You think my sister’s a piece of work?” she asked, again with a simmering rage behind each word. “Don’t even think about trying to mess with me, Mikey.”

  “Look,” he said, “I have no intention of saying anything. Who would believe an addict like me, anyway?”

  “That’s what I was thinking, too,” she said. “Don’t blow it, Mikey. Don’t ever blow it or I’ll hunt you down and slit your scrawny neck ear to ear.”

  Mikey slumped back onto the couch. Besides the rage behind the threat, something didn’t seem right.

  “You’re not the nice twin, are you?” he asked.

  “No one’s nice, Mikey,” she said as she turned to leave. “As much as I love a challenge, don’t make me come back and prove it to you.”

  Switching the part in her hair was easy, though such a small change hurt like hell as follicles were shifted in a new direction. As mirror twins, it had to be done. Tori never thought her father paid that much attention to the girls, not enough anyway. She bought a latte at an espresso stand in downtown Port Orchard and walked along the waterfront. It was late afternoon by the time she pulled in front of the house behind her dad’s car. The old pear tree was in full bloom, a cascade of blossoms stuck to the pavement.

  “Dad?” she called out.

  No reply.

  Typical. No one is ever here for me, she thought.

  The house was the same. Smelled the same. The furniture in the living room was placed as it had been before Tori went to serve her sentence. Tori was unsure what she’d expected. She had that strange feeling as if she had been away on vacation and expected the world to be turned upside down in her absence. But there wasn’t anything different about the O’Neal home.

  Dex was washing his hands in the kitchen. With the tap gushing into the sink, he hadn’t heard her come in. He turned and smiled at the sight of her.

  “How was your run this A.M.? You got out of here like a bat out of hell.”

  “Fine.” She slid in to a seat at the kitchen table. “Tired. Long day. Ran a few errands.”

  “Good. Sit down and I’ll make dinner.” He swung open the refrigerator door and brought out two cans of iced tea. Tori hated that canned tea, but she was Lainie just then.

  “Thanks, Dad,” she said, pulling open the top.

  The relationship between her father and sister was closer than her own with either. Tori wondered about that. Was it because she’d hated or resented him and he was merely reflecting her emotions in their relationship? He wasn’t unkind. He was cool. But not now, not to Lainie.

  She decided to bring it up.

  “Tomorrow will be a long day,” she said. “Not looking forward to it.”

  “Your sister? That place?”

  “Probably both.” She decided to gamble with her next statement. “We’ve talked about it before,” she said. “I don’t like seeing her.”

  “We’re obligated. We’re a family.”

  Obligated.

  “She doesn’t even appreciate us.”

  “Don’t get me started. You know where I fall in that argument.”

  Tori felt a surge of hope. “Yeah, she’s not so bad.”

  Dex O’Neal let out a laugh. It was the kind of chortle that cuts to the bone if one is the target of the rub. “Honestly, Lainie, your sister scares me sometimes.”

  Tori could have probed a little. She could have pushed her father’s buttons, but she chose to keep her mouth shut. She’d sit there, play nice, and seethe quietly.

  She always knew where she stood in that family.

  It had rained all night. Tiny bullets of water glanced off the window of 7-Pod. Lainie O’Neal curled as tight as a hermit crab in the scratchy military-issue blankets that outfitted her sister’s bottom bunk. There were only three girls in the pod. None of them seemed to care one whit about anything but themselves and their own misery. Lainie put the girl named Tara at about sixteen. She was a sullen-faced biracial girl who had almond eyes that illuminated nothing of her soul. She was on the bunk above Tori’s. The other girl was named something like Gigi or maybe G.G. It was hard for Lainie to determine her story at all. She barely said two words. Officer Hector told her where she was sleeping and that the girls wouldn’t engage with her if she ignored them.

  “The less you say, the better,” he said.

  “I want to go home.”

  “Like I haven’t heard that before,” he said.

  Lainie spent the day and the early evening on a filthy red beanbag chair in the juvenile correction center’s lounge watching MTV and wishing she could be home with her father. For dinner, she ate a rubbery chicken wing and some mashed potatoes. She pretended to be angry about something.

  “Act mad. People will leave you alone,” Tori had advised.

  That her sister had been living like this for months crushed Lainie.

  “It was a damn accident,” she said. “Nothing more, just a sad, stupid accident.”

  The rain continued to streak the window above her bunk bed. It was dark, desolate. The door to the pod was locked. A toilet and washbasin in the corner was there in case any of the girls needed to use a bathroom during the lockdown hours. The idea was disgusting to Lainie. She’d rather hold it for eight hours and writhe in pain than suffer the indignity of using a communal privy. Tara didn’t seem to mind at all.

  A half hour into the darkness of the pod, Lainie heard footsteps, the sound of a key inserted into the lock. She turned in her bed as a hand went over her face.

  She couldn’t breathe.

  What is happening to me?

  The smell of chewing tobacco came at her.

  “Shut up. You’re mine.”

  Lainie rolled onto her back, twisted her frame to try to get some leverage. She wanted out of there. She clawed into the darkness. The sticky hand over her mouth pushed harder. She couldn’t breathe. She was a virgin, but she knew what was happening. She knew what that man was trying to do to her.

  Please, God, don’t let him rape me!

  “Stop it, you little bitch. You’re ruining my game here,” Hector said. “I like a good dust-up in the sack, but you still have to get the job done.”

  Why isn’t Tara or G.G. or whatever her name is doing anything?

  Lainie was unsure how it happened, but he was on top of her. Somehow he had slithered under the blanket. She could feel his body and she started to cough, then vomit. Vomit of chicken wings and mashed potatoes spewed over the bed, onto the officer, over the surface of the scratchy blanket.

  “You fucking dirty little bitch!”

  She was choking on her own vomit. She couldn’t breathe. She fought, and she fought hard. There wasn’t a moment in which she wouldn’t have begged for her life, even if he’d loosened his grip enough so that she could. No one who’d been pinned down, held tight with the hot breath of an assailant all over her, would deny the feelings that spun through her terrified mind. He put his hand on her breasts and pushed before he bent down, panting, and whispered in her ear.

  “I know what you did,” he said. “Don’t piss me off. You did a real number on your sister, you little privileged bitch. You mess with me by saying anything and I’ll kill your sister and your dad. After I feed them to the sharks in Puget Sound, I
’ll go out and have waffles and eggs for breakfast. And then, I’ll come looking for you.”

  He released her. A sliver of light fell over the room. The door shut.

  Lainie was crying, coughing, choking. Tara climbed down and took her over to the toilet. She handed her a towel.

  “Get a grip. Pull yourself together,” she said. “What the hell was all that drama tonight, Tori?”

  “Drama?” It was a single word, but the only thing that could come to her lips.

  Tara started for their bed. “Whatever. Your puke really stinks. I don’t know how I’m supposed to sleep around here. Thanks for nothing. God, I hate this place.”

  The dreams started then. The nightmares. Whatever they were. Tori didn’t come back the next morning. In fact, she never did. Tori told her father that she just couldn’t go back to “that place,” that it “hurt too much” to see her sister that way.

  Tori let Lainie serve out her sentence.

  Dex O’Neal had no idea what had happened, that the switch had been made. When he saw his daughter in the correctional facility later, he remarked about her new look.

  “You cut your hair like your sister,” he said.

  “Yeah, it was getting too long,” Lainie said.

  “I love it.”

  The sisters never talked about what had transpired the last time they ever switched places as twins.

  Tori ran across Daniel Hector at the Safeway on Bethel Avenue one time, and he approached her.

  “Your sister was a total bitch,” he said. “You said she was going to be hot stuff. Fun stuff. That she was into a sexy, fun scene.”

  “Didn’t you have fun?”

  “She practically threw me on to the floor.”

  “She’s a fighter.”

  “She was a bitch. I’m glad I’ve got you to mess around with.”

  She smiled. It wasn’t a real smile, but he was too stupid to know. “Those were good times. Freaky, but good.”

  When Daniel Hector was arrested for molesting a ten-year-old girl three years later, it opened a Pandora’s box of other accusations. There were some suspicions from the staff at the Secure Crisis Residential Center in Port Orchard, but no one really had anything conclusive. The girls in 7-Pod had turned over to a new group three times since Lainie as Tori O’Neal walked free.