Beneath Her Skin

by Gregg Olsen

  The last two pounced at her.

  SELF IVORY

  Taylor clawed at the surface of the water, her eyes open with the kind of fearful look that beach lifeguards know all too well. She wasn’t drowning. Even so, more than three minutes without a breath underwater was frightening beyond words. Coughing, choking on oxygen, Taylor pulled herself to the side of the tub and tried to breathe.

  What was Katelyn telling her?

  Chapter Fourteen

  There were ways to figure out what messages Katelyn had left behind. That was if, presumably, the words transmitted under the waters of the bathtub were truly from her. Taylor knew that the seven little words she had received underwater probably didn’t mean what they said. They were only a clue to put her on the right path. Figuring it all out was the hard part.

  When Hayley and Taylor had first started receiving messages, they played around with index cards. Even with a half-dried Sharpie, Taylor had better handwriting, so it was she who wrote down each word in crisp black printed letters. Whenever they’d unscrambled the true meaning of each message, they tore up the cards and flushed them down the toilet—despite the historic district’s rule against the disposal of anything other than toilet paper and “personal waste,” as it taxed Port Gamble’s sewage system.

  “Isn’t this personal waste?” Taylor asked, looking down at the confetti of index cards.

  Hayley nodded. “It is personal—though we’re not always sure what person we’re hearing from. And it is waste, but I think we could come up with a more eco-friendly way.”

  “E-occult-friendly. I like that. We should copyright that one.”

  Hayley gave her sister an irritated look. “It has nothing to do with the occult.”

  “Kidding,” Taylor said.

  “I hate it when you make comments like that. It makes all of this seem so ugly.”

  “Maybe it is.”

  “It isn’t ugly. It comes from someplace good. I feel it. So should you.”

  “I’m not like you, Hayley.”

  The comment was funny, and both girls laughed.

  After that, they had settled on using their parents’ Scrabble game, a handmade relic from their mother’s childhood, to twist around and rearrange the letters that came to them. Kevin and Valerie shared a deep love of words. Whenever the twins were lying on the thick, powder blue Oriental carpet in the parlor playing Scrabble, it brought a smile to both parents. They could see that their daughters were engrossed in a different version of the game, but in a day of video-this and Internet-that, they didn’t say a single word about how they played.

  Flames crackled in the fireplace, and the smell of their parents’ nutmeg-laced eggnog wafted through the drafty house. It was the last gasp of leftover cheer in a holiday that had pulsed with an undercurrent of sadness. The family dog, Hedda, was curled up between the girls and the fireplace.

  “You girls want some company?” Kevin asked as he entered the room, mug in hand.

  “We’re good, Dad,” Taylor said. “Just messing around.”

  Kevin looked a little disappointed. He had work to do on his latest book and a distraction, apparently, was not in the cards.

  “Okay, I’m going to rewrite the discovery of the victim scene.”

  “That’s always my favorite part of your books, Dad,” Hayley said.

  He smiled. Those girls had been born into a life of crime. They had never known a moment when blood-spatter analysis, gunshot residue or chain of evidence was not a part of the family’s dinner table conversations.

  Valerie Ryan always tried to push dinnertime topics toward ponies, peonies or something lovely, especially when the girls were young. She did so as a mother, seeking to protect her children from the things that hurt deeply, things that pointed to the darkest side of humanity. It was easy to understand why she tried—and why she failed.

  Valerie had grown up on McNeil Island, the home of Washington State’s oldest penitentiary. Her father, Chester Fitzpatrick, was the warden (though, later, the governor changed the position’s title to superintendent, to better reflect a more clinical, institutional approach to incarceration). She’d grown up in what any outsider would consider a lonely, desolate place to raise a child. For Valerie, it was a town, and the guards, staff, and prisoners were its citizens. As a little girl, she watched wide-eyed as the Friday afternoon chain arrived—man after man tethered together to step off the prison boat to make their way past the big white house that her father, mother and sister called home. Valerie, a pretty towhead like the daughters she’d one day have, was riveted by the stream of men, faces haggard, angry or resigned, wondering what they’d done and how they’d done it.

  And some stared back at her. Occasionally, the looks in her direction caused her to turn away. A few times they’d even made her cry. It wasn’t fear that caused the tears, though her father and mother thought so. It was something else. She wasn’t sure what it was until many, many years later.

  Valerie found some things about the institution that were beautiful too.

  The razor wire coiled over the almost-tree-topping fences was a braid of tinsel at Christmastime. The bars over the windows that looked over the deep blue of Puget Sound were a steel version of cat’s cradle. Nothing, young Valerie came to believe, could match the splendor of the hallway that ran from her father’s enormous office down toward the cellblock. The shiny gold-hued-by-age linoleum was Dorothy’s yellow brick road.

  One day, she knew, it would lead her away from there.

  “I’m going up to read now,” Valerie said, casting a wary eye at the handmade Scrabble board Taylor and Hayley had arranged in front of the fire.

  “What are you reading?” Hayley asked.

  Valerie smiled and acknowledged the paperback she was carrying off to bed. “A murder mystery. Is there anything else?”

  “Not lately,” Taylor commented as their mother disappeared down the hall.

  No words were said about the Scrabble game or why they’d chosen it that evening instead of the Xbox console with its collection of video games, which had been a Christmas present. There was really no need to explain.

  Valerie understood her girls in a way that most mothers couldn’t. There was a time when she was just like them. Even as a grown woman, she could still tap into the feelings she held when she was a young girl. It was more than her compassion that made her such a good psychiatric nurse or a mother, though she joked that the skills were interchangeable.

  The twins picked out the tiny squares of pale, smooth wood.

  “Let’s break it down,” Taylor said.

  Hayley, who was busy turning all the letters so they were facing up, nodded. “All right. Why don’t you call them out?”

  “Lewd hot rod,” Taylor said. “Sounds nasty.”

  Hayley laughed. “Lewd anything would, but adding hot rod is particularly, well, you know.”

  Next, Taylor set the appropriate letters in front of her, studying each as if they might literally speak to her.

  She collected the T, H, E first.

  “You’re the new Vanna White,” Hayley said.

  “Huh?”

  “You know, the helper on Jeopardy.”

  “You mean Wheel of Fortune.” She moved the O, L, D next.

  “The old…” Hayley said, pulling up the final four letters. “W, O, R, D.”

  Taylor looked at the unscrambled letters. “‘The old word’,” she said.

  “Maybe Katelyn was a teen hooker,” Hayley surmised. “You know, the oldest profession in history? There are lots of those girls in Seattle and Portland.”

  Taylor looked at her sister and shook her head. “Don’t think that’s it.”

  The next words, KOALA and FURL, stared up at the teens.

  This time, Taylor took on the task of moving them around. In a few moments she’d arranged the letters into LAURA FOLK. Taylor shifted away from the fire. “Never heard of her.”

  “I don’t know of anybody named Laura Folk either
. Maybe she’s a senior or something… but I think we know everyone from Port Gamble and Kingston. That’s one of the supposed good parts of living in a small town.”

  They looked down at the tiles. Taylor carefully slid them aside and then laid out the last two words: SELF and IVORY.

  “Maybe ivory is the color of something we need to know and self is about us.”

  “You like it when the words need no interpretation, Hayley.”

  “It is easier when you don’t have to read into anything or extrapolate an inference from the words.”

  “Nah. These words aren’t in the right order,” Taylor said, moving the pieces around until it read: I’VE FOR SLY.

  “That sounds stupid. It doesn’t even make sense,” Hayley said.

  “Maybe I remembered it wrong?”

  “Maybe you did. Or maybe it has nothing to do with Katelyn.”

  “I’m not going back into the tub.”

  “Well I’m not. I’m not as good at it as you are.”

  Kevin went past the staircase and called over to them. “What are you two arguing about? Hayley, did you come up with some esoteric or scientific name to get a triple word score?”

  The girls looked at him blankly, having never played the game the way it had been intended.

  “Something like that, Dad. We were just about to call it a night anyway.”

  “All right. Maybe I can play next time. You never ask me.”

  Hayley smiled as she moved the wooden tiles back into the box. “Okay, next time, for sure.”

  They turned off the lights, followed their father to the creaky stairs, and said good night.

  From the outlet cover opening, Taylor whispered to her sister, “This isn’t right, Hayley. Something’s wrong.”

  “What do you mean wrong? We’re doing great.”

  “I feel it.”

  “Well, I feel tired. Let’s let it sit and see what comes up.”

  Taylor knew what that meant. Both girls did. They’d wait until something came to one of them. Something they could never directly ask for, but they knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt when it arrived.

  That’s just the way things were.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Miranda “Mindee” Larsen was a hairstylist at Shear Elegance in downtown, or rather, what approximated downtown Kingston, only a short drive from Port Gamble. Until recently, Mindee had been first chair in the salon for four consecutive years, a designation of power and excellent performance. She blamed herself only a little for her recent shift from first to second chair.

  It had finally sunk in that the owner, a hard-bitten, humorless woman with blue-black hair named Nicola Cardamom, was never going to let her buy into the business, despite their agreement to the contrary. When Nicola wooed Mindee from a salon in Bremerton, promises had been made.

  “A woman with your talent,” Nicola had said, “should be front and center.”

  Mindee fell for it and packed her scissors, clippers and color kit. Things weren’t great with her husband and she needed something to build upon. Just in case.

  In time, Mindee finally understood how empty a promise could be. She’d been stuck in neutral for too long, and if things at home hadn’t been as complicated as they were, she simply would have quit. Doing head after head, day after day, for a lying boss like Nicola was exasperating and demoralizing. She found herself angry at everyone.

  A few times she purposely let the tips of her sharp scissors nick a customer’s ear.

  “You shouldn’t have moved!” she scolded.

  The customer, ear bleeding, knew she hadn’t and decided never to return.

  In the past year, Mindee had seen her client base drop. That’s when Nicola moved her to second chair, and took the number-one spot for herself.

  Mindee imagined taking her scissors to Nicola’s lipo-sucked stomach, but she didn’t, of course. Instead, she continued styling hair, doing colors and quietly and oh-so-discreetly bad-mouthing Nicola.

  “I’m not sure where she is,” she told one longtime customer, a devoutly religious woman from Poulsbo. It was a lie. She knew Nicola had a dental appointment that morning. “Don’t make me tell you what I think she’s doing. I don’t even want to go there.”

  Just a drop of poison. Nothing more. Mindee never said anything specific. She didn’t have to. She knew the power of suggestion, the impact of a hint dropped at the right time. The customer was a member of Living Christ, a mega-church. She was also an incorrigible gossip. A woman with a big mouth and a ready-made audience was a terrific and useful weapon.

  The Larsens—Mindee and her two children, fifteen-year-old Starla and thirteen-year-old Teagan—lived in house number 21, right next door to the Berkleys. The two families had been friends for years. Close and trusted friends. After her husband, Adam, disappeared, Mindee increasingly relied on Harper Berkley to help with whatever heavy lifting she needed. Though nothing ever happened between them, there was talk. Small towns need barely a whisper to get things moving in the wrong direction.

  Starla and Katelyn had been best friends forever back then. They’d grown up side by side, from Barbie to bras, and no one doubted that when one or the other got married, the maid of honor duties had already been secured.

  That was never going to happen. Not now.

  On the morning after Katelyn’s sudden death, Starla refused to get out of bed. She was racked with hurt, guilt, even some shame. She and Katelyn had had a falling-out several months back over, of all things, making the cheer team at Kingston High School. They’d tried out together as freshmen, and Katelyn again the year after when she didn’t make it, working on routines in the fenceless backyard that the two families shared as if it were their own private park.

  Most people in Port Gamble seldom used their front yards anyway. If they did, they’d end up having to give a nosy tourist a mini history lesson on their house, the mill, the school or whatever it was the interloper wanted to know. While it certainly wasn’t Colonial Williamsburg, with its phony blacksmiths and chambermaids running around with beeswax candles and a request for “all ye gather ’round,” it was annoying residing in a living museum like Port Gamble.

  The only Port Gamble residents who could escape incessant scrutiny were the 115 people in Buena Vista Cemetery. And, of course, they were dead.

  Starla was a hot blonde. Not model pretty, but more like reality-TV beautiful. Almost everyone knew that her mother was a colorist and assumed that Starla’s shimmering golden hair had a lot of help. There was more to be coveted than just her pretty face. In fact, in the world of teens at Kingston High, a pretty face was only as good as the boobs that went under it. At least, most girls knew that’s where the boys’ eyes seemed to always land.

  Like a fly on a slice of cherry pie.

  Starla had hit puberty earlier than her best friend, and by the time they got to Kingston Middle School it was clear that Katelyn was never going to quite measure up. Although she was pretty, she was just a shadow of Starla’s beauty. Nobody had the power that Starla commanded by the mere virtue of just breathing and being. When Starla didn’t have time to have her 7 For All Mankind jeans altered, she rolled up the hems—and all the other girls in her class did the same thing.

  Almost all of them. Katelyn resisted.

  When Mindee cut Starla’s bangs for the last time, ever, the other girls followed suit. Even the older ones thought Starla Larsen was the real deal. No one could say for sure what direction Starla would go. Music? Acting? America’s Got Talent? There was a reason why they called her SuperStarla—and she allowed it.

  She was, no doubt, going to put Port Gamble on the map.

  It was funny, some would later say, how it was her decidedly less glamorous former BFF who actually put the place on the map. Yet it would never be funny how she did it.

  Not far from Port Gamble, Moira Windsor pecked the headline of her story onto her faded keyboard:

  DEATH OF A SURVIVOR

  It was absolutely perfect. Se
nsitive. Moving. Even a little shocking. Everything she thought her story would be. If she could just get the interviews. She wasn’t asking for all that much. She needed the story. Why was Kevin Ryan being so damned difficult?

  Moira looked at her headline once more. She loved the idea of plucking the heartstrings of her readers—while giving them a story that only she could tell. Plus, she needed to find out more about these girls. The Katelyn story was an entrée into something a lot bigger, a toehold into a tale so fantastic that she was surely going to get that spot next to Savannah Guthrie with a single flick of her finger. She had been leaked a tip—and if it was true, it would blow Katelyn’s death story out of the water. These stupid twins were all that separated her from her coveted success in uncovering the truth. That job would be hers. She deserved it. She wanted it bad. And Moira always got what she wanted. Always.

  She dialed Kevin Ryan’s number. He answered the phone on the second ring.

  “Hi, Mr. Ryan,” she said. “Moira Windsor here.”

  There was silence for a beat, before Kevin said anything. “Moira,” he said coolly, “I thought I was clear the other day.”

  Moira drummed her chipped nails on her out-of-town aunt’s kitchen table, where she’d set up her office.

  “You were, but I was hoping you’d change your mind. I really want to do a good job. You were young once. You know the importance of a good story, how it can help you.”

  Kevin hesitated again as he contemplated an answer that would shut her down and get her to go away. “I don’t want you writing about something so personal and tragic,” he finally said.

  Wrong answer.

  “Look who’s calling the kettle black,” Moira retorted. “You’ve made big bucks off writing about crime victims and their families. Always there with the personal detail.”

  “This is supposed to win me over? You really need to work on your technique, Moira.”

  “How about your wife? Maybe I could talk to her?”