by Gregg Olsen
“Let’s get back to the camo guy,” Hayley said, eager to continue the role-play. “What about him?”
Kevin lingered by the car door and spoke quietly, watching the kid with the carts, trying to keep his eye contact on his girls. Eye contact, he always said, was very, very important. “Say he helps you to your car and when you open the trunk he pushes you inside.”
“Easy,” Taylor said. “Jab his eyes out with the car keys.”
“I would scream as loud as I could,” Hayley said, sure that her response was the better of the two. After all, car keys might not be handy—especially if you’re a teenager and don’t have a car or even a learner’s permit.
Valerie shifted on her feet, eager to get going. “You shop somewhere else,” she said flatly.
Kevin made a face at Valerie. “All except your mom’s are the right answers. But there’s one thing to remember above all others.”
The girls waited. Their dad was big on the cliffhanger. Sometimes his sentences ended in such a way that the pause invited more curiosity, a kind of verbal begging to turn the page.
“You only have one second to save yourself,” he said. “And that’s before camo guy is pushing you into the trunk. If the trunk goes down on top of you, well, you’re probably as good as dead.”
“Only one in a thousand abducted girls lives if taken to a new location,” Hayley said, recalling a dinner table conversation.
“Right,” Kevin confirmed, satisfied that the day’s spur-of-the-moment crime safety lesson had yielded the correct response. “And I can’t have either of you girls be the one who doesn’t make it.”
The camo guy who’d been the focus of the girls’ attention was about thirty-five, with pockmarked skin and scraggly red hair. He smiled warily in their direction as he pushed his cart toward his truck. He certainly looked creepy.
“I bet he lives with his mother,” Hayley said.
Taylor nodded. “Yeah, probably.”
Those lessons and countless others came back to Hayley as she made her way home from Beth’s house, four days after Katelyn died.
It was undeniable. The feeling. The damned hair standing up.
Someone was watching her, tracking her. It was that strange feeling, that compulsion that causes someone to suddenly cross to the other side of the street.
Some girls actually courted the feeling and found some kind of bizarre romanticism in being stalked. The Ryan twins never felt that—not once, and especially not when their dad had had a stalker and the fallout from the woman’s twisted fantasies had been devastating to the family. Years later, it was still remembered—quietly so, but nevertheless never forgotten.
Hayley saw nothing that evening as she hurried home on Olympian Avenue. She just had the feeling. She didn’t really hear anything. It could have been the winter wind or an animal moving in the half-frozen ivy.
Whatever it was, it nipped at her consciousness and it chilled her to the bone.
A moment later, a thread of a thought sped through her mind. It was about Katelyn, Starla and Robert Pattinson, of all people.
Hayley was sure she didn’t get it all right. Robert Pattinson?
Chapter Nine
New Year’s Day at the Ryan household smelled of coffee, orange juice and maple syrup. Valerie had sliced a loaf of brioche and had the already eggy bread soaking in a mixture of eggs, cream, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Taylor loved the way their mother fixed French toast. It was the best breakfast thing she made, by far. Hayley was more of a waffle girl, but French toast with maple syrup and peanut butter was pretty hard for her to resist too.
While the French toast sizzled in a foamy sea of butter on the stovetop griddle, Taylor noticed her parents’ mugs were low on coffee and she topped them off with a splash more.
“Couldn’t sleep last night,” she said, returning the coffee carafe to the heating element.
Valerie turned from the griddle. “I know, honey,” she said. “I woke up thinking of Katelyn too.”
“A terrible tragedy,” Kevin said over the morning’s Kitsap Sun.
“An accident like that should never, ever have happened,” Valerie said. “Honestly, what in the world was Katelyn thinking?”
“An accident? Who says?” Taylor asked.
Valerie stacked three pieces of French toast on a plate and handed them to Taylor. “Your dad does.”
Kevin set down the paper. “I talked to the coroner. This one’s going to fall under the ‘tragedy’ heading, a freak accident. That doesn’t make things any better, of course, for the Berkleys.”
Hayley, who had been mostly silent, spoke up. “Do you know if suicide has been completely ruled out, Dad?”
Kevin’s lips tightened and he shook his head. “They don’t think so. Anything is possible, but only her history of…” He stopped, to search for the words. “Her history of emotional problems could be an indicator of suicide, but the evidence they’ve gathered doesn’t point to it.”
Hayley weighed her father’s words. “But if they aren’t sure it was a suicide and it could have been a freak accident, couldn’t it just as easily have been a homicide?”
Kevin shook his head. “I don’t know, honey. I don’t think so. But really, we might never know what happened to Katelyn.”
Hayley looked into her sister’s eyes. There was no need to speak. Both of them knew what the other was thinking.
Oh yes, we will.
Beth Lee accepted that she would never be tall. Her parents were both short. She knew her wisp of physical presence might cause her to get shunted off to the side. Sure, she had great hair—black and thick, and near-mirror reflective. Besides the fact that she was the only Asian in her elementary school, she had seldom stood out. At her mother Kim’s insistence, Beth wore long pigtails and ribbons that matched her outfit until fourth grade, when she could no longer take it and took scissors to one side.
Her mother ripped her a new one when she got home and made her go to school for a week looking lopsided.
“You want to stand out, so now you do,” Kim Lee had said.
After her DIY haircut and resulting humiliation, a line in the sand had been forged, Hells Canyon deep. Beth Lee would never let anyone, not her mother, not her best friend, tell her how to look or dress. She didn’t want to be the dutiful daughter, the brainy Asian, the girl who was anything different than the others who lived in Port Gamble.
Hayley and Taylor Ryan were her best friends, though she seemed to consider them a single entity. Hay-Tay were the only ones in town who didn’t try to mold her into something she wasn’t. They simply let her be. If Beth wanted to be a vegan for a month, fine. If she wanted to go Goth and wear a dog collar around town, the Ryan twins didn’t make a big deal out of it.
Lately, she’d taken to shopping exclusively at Forever 21 in the Kitsap Mall in Silverdale, where she purchased outfit after outfit. She never saw a dress or shirt with a nonfunctioning zipper that she didn’t proclaim so totally her.
The only other Port Gamble woman who shopped regularly at Forever 21 was Starla Larsen’s mother, a woman about whom others gossiped, saying that she never saw a zipper she didn’t want to undo.
Beth remarked on it. “Saw Mrs. Larsen at Forever.”
“Was she shopping for Starla?” Hayley asked as the two sat on her bed waiting for Taylor to come upstairs with snacks so they could eat, chat and waste the last few days before school restarted on January 3.
“Shopping for herself,” Beth said. “Same as always. She wears club clothes to work, I guess.”
Taylor entered the room carrying a couple of Diet Cokes and a can of Ranch Pringles.
“Who wears club clothes to work?” she asked.
“Starla’s mom.”
“Did you talk to her?”
Beth took a second. “Not really. I pretended I didn’t see her, but she nabbed me by the checkout counter.”
“Did she say anything about Katelyn?” Hayley asked.
“Something about how she
saw it coming. Katelyn was a sad girl. Whatever.”
Taylor looked upset. “‘Saw it coming’?”
Beth shrugged. “I didn’t ask. I wanted out of there. I was afraid she was going to corner me and force me to come in for a haircut.”
“If she saw something was wrong, if she saw it coming, then she should have done something about it,” Hayley said.
“I guess so. Can we talk about something else? All this talk about Katelyn is kind of boring me.”
Taylor looked at Hayley, her eyes popping. Neither one of them knew how it was that Beth Lee could possibly be their best friend.
But she was.
Chapter Ten
Before leaving for work at the hospital, Valerie Ryan made cookies, fresh—not Christmas retreads that had been moved from platter to smaller plate as their numbers declined. She boxed them up in a Tupperware container for the girls to run over to the Berkley place. There was no bow or ribbon. It was a gesture, not a gift, to the family down the lane who’d suffered the cruelest blow in a season meant for joy and togetherness. Valerie watched a row of cars head down the highway that morning, looking for places to park as Harper and Sandra gathered in their grief with family members and close friends.
The girls planned on paying their respects at Katelyn’s memorial service later in the week, but their mom’s cookies needed delivery.
Bundled up in North Face jackets, Taylor and Hayley slipped out the back door to the alleyway that was the shortest route to the Berkleys. Taylor wore Aunt Jolene’s hand-knitted scarf, a sad-looking strip of yardage in search of a color palette that didn’t suggest—as Taylor aptly assessed it—“a color wheel of different kinds of barf.” The air was bone-chilling, with the added jolt of a damp wind blowing off the bay, coating the shrubbery in a glistening sheath of ice. The weatherman had blabbed about an ice storm coming, but since he was seldom on target with his forecasts, no one really prepared for it.
The girls noticed right off that Mrs. James’s hundred-year-old camellia was encased in ice.
“She’s going to be way disappointed when she gets back from Portland and sees that no one put a blanket over it,” Taylor said. “She’s so possessive of that dumb bush.”
Hayley looked over the shimmering emerald form of the shrub and said, “I think it’s pretty.”
“You think everything is pretty, Hay.”
“Well, not everything,” she clarified, pointedly indicating Aunt Jolene’s scarf. “But yeah, a lot of things can be pretty. You just have to look at things the right way to see their beauty.”
“Mrs. James doesn’t own that bush. Nothing in this town of renters belongs to anyone.”
“That could be said of anything, Taylor. Whether you rent and live in Port Gamble or buy and live in a house in Seattle, ultimately you’re just visiting.”
Taylor changed the subject. “This is stupid. Bringing cookies over to our dead friend’s house? Lame.”
“Yeah, but Mom wanted us to, so we’re doing it.”
“Right. Because she thought it was a good idea. Like we can’t come up with our own?”
“I think that’s the point. We wouldn’t be going to the Berkleys if Mom hadn’t made the cookies.”
“Natch,” Taylor had to agree.
Sandra Berkley pulled open the front door and faced the Ryan twins. It had been a while since they’d seen Mrs. Berkley outside of the family’s restaurant, the Timberline, a breakfast and burger place with good food and a sign over the counter: “Unattended Children Will Be Given an Espresso and a Puppy.”
Neither could be sure when was the last time they’d come over to visit. It might have been back in middle school. Katelyn had sort of slipped away insofar as their friendship was concerned. For most of Port Gamble Elementary, they had been in the same circle of happy little girls that once filled the front row of Ms. Paulson’s second-grade class. Mrs. Berkley had been their Daisy Troop leader. She was different then, prettier, more serene. Watching her and the other moms of Port Gamble, Hayley and Taylor understood as well as any young girl that with beauty came power. This was before Disney princesses could get what they wanted without having to resort to kicking serious butt.
And yet, kicking butt, the Ryans knew from experience, definitely had its own set of empowering charms.
Mrs. Berkley, on the other hand, had let her strong points fade since the crash. Gossip all over town had it that she was a big drinker, and there was little in the way of excuses one could conjure to suggest otherwise.
When she opened the door, she didn’t speak for a moment. Her hair was a black octopus, her makeup was raccoon-smudged and her bird legs shook under her crumbling frame. She was the sum of animal parts, like a mutant cross-breeding experiment gone completely haywire.
Hayley and Taylor, shivering on the doorstep, proffered the cookies.
“Come inside,” Sandra said, a sharp waft of booze emitting with her breath.
Hayley looked at Taylor, then back at Mrs. Berkley.
“We don’t want to be in the way,” she said, pushing the cookies at the dead girl’s mother once more.
Mrs. Berkley took the container and smiled faintly.
Was it wistful? A sad smile? A reaction to the kindness of Valerie Ryan?
“I was hoping some of her good friends would come by. Katelyn’s friends meant so much to her.”
The twins stepped into the house, and before they could say something about the fact that they hadn’t seen much of Katelyn lately, they were in the middle of a swarm of relatives and friends who had convened to support the family during the most difficult of circumstances.
“These are two of Katelyn’s best friends,” Sandra Berkley said to an older woman with thin lips and a wattle neck whom the girls presumed to be Katelyn’s grandmother, Nancy.
“Hayley?” the grieving mom asked, pointing tentatively. “And Taylor, right?”
She was wrong, but it didn’t matter. After all, they were suddenly “best friends” of the girl they no longer really knew.
“They’ve brought some treats,” Sandra said.
“This isn’t a party.” The older woman sniffed.
Hayley didn’t know what to say. Even though she had agreed to bring them over, she had thought the cookies were a crappy idea in the first place.
“My mom made them,” Taylor said. “They were Katelyn’s favorite whenever she hung out at our place. Always had at least two.”
It was a good save. Taylor was like that. She could always be counted on to think fast on her feet. If Mrs. Berkley was so deluded as to think that she and her sister and Katelyn were the best of friends, she could go along with it.
“Katelyn never knew when to quit. If she hadn’t been eating all the time she would have made cheer,” the grandmother said.
“That’s enough, Mom,” Sandra said, shooting what had to have been a practiced glare in the direction of a woman who’d clearly been more interested in bitching about something than grieving.
And yes, both girls thought, Katelyn had put on a few pounds. She wasn’t mom-jeans fat, but she was a few cookie trays short of it.
“Really sorry about Katelyn,” Taylor said.
“Sorry doesn’t do much for a broken heart,” the grandmother said.
Hayley didn’t take the bait. Instead, she smiled at the older woman, took her sister by the arm and mumbled something about wanting to talk to Mr. Berkley.
Hayley led her sister into the living room, where most of the people belonging to the cars with out-of-state license plates were talking in quiet, anguished tones. The dining room chairs had been pulled from the big mahogany table and were arranged along the wall to provide necessary, but awkward, seating. The table itself was covered with an array of bowls of pretzels, chips and platters of pinwheel sandwiches Hayley recognized as a Costco deli product.
Costco? Wow, that’s really sad, she thought. She hoped if she died her parents would at least have Subway cater a gathering in her memory.
; Harper Berkley, it was clear, had been crying. He was a tall, balding man with caterpillar brows that could use a good waxing. His eyes were red-rimmed and his formidable presence had been Shrinky-Dinked by the circumstances. He looked so small, so sad. A woman neither girl recognized patted his shoulder.
“We’re very sorry about Katelyn,” Hayley said.
“We’re all in shock,” the woman said. “I’m Harper’s sister, Twyla. Katelyn’s aunt.”
As identical twins, the girls were genetic anomalies, not idiots. They knew that the dad’s sister would be Katelyn’s aunt. But now was probably not the time to point it out.
“These cookies were Katelyn’s faves. Just wanted to drop them off,” Taylor said.
“Yeah, she really liked our mom’s cooking,” Hayley echoed.
Harper thanked them with a quiet nod. To say anything was probably too painful. Sometimes one word can lead to a dam burst.
“Thank you for coming,” he finally choked out.
Taylor and Hayley stood there a second in uncomfortable silence before retreating toward the front door. Both wondered how it was that with the inevitability of death, no one really had anything to say about it. It was as if one of life’s pivotal moments—the final moment—was devoid of potential small talk. Death was a big, fat period to most people. Over and out. Dark and cold. A void.
By the staircase, Hayley felt a tug.
Taylor whispered, “Gotta go up there.” She looked up the stairway’s too-narrow risers toward Katelyn’s bedroom.
Hayley shook her head emphatically. “No, we are most certainly not going up there. Aren’t you as creeped out by all of this as I am?”
“You mean the Costco sandwiches? Or that our supposed BFF is dead?”
Taylor started up the stairs, turning to her sister with one last look. “Hay, either you can come up with me, or you can make small talk with them.” She pointed back at the living area. “Remember the tugboat on the water? We’re supposed to ‘look.’ Well, we’re here. We might as well.”