Beneath Her Skin

by Gregg Olsen

  A very dead little girl.

  Hayley, Taylor and their parents sat in the third row, two rows back from the Berkley family. Colton James sat behind the Ryans, and three rows farther back were Beth Lee and her mother, Kim. The order was as it had been the night of Katelyn’s death: the closer the relationship with the deceased, the nearer to the casket.

  Occupying the seats across the aisle from the Berkleys were Starla and her family. Next to them mourned the rest of the Buccaneers cheer squad.

  Taylor whispered to Hayley, “Look, it’s the pom-pom posse. If you ask me, Katelyn’s spinning in her grave now.”

  “She’s not in her grave yet,” Hayley corrected.

  “Ya know what I mean. She hated it when Starla ditched her for cheer.”

  “She hated it even more that she didn’t get on the team.”

  Valerie put her finger to her lips but thankfully didn’t follow the gesture with the librarian’s shushing noise.

  Someone pushed a button and a CD recording of an abbreviated verse of Celine Dion’s bombastic classic, “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic, tinkled aloud.

  Hayley kept her mouth zipped, but she couldn’t help but think she’d rather be dead than have that song played at her memorial. And in which case, even if she were dead, she still didn’t want Celine, Mariah or Whitney piped into her service.

  * * *

  Valerie Ryan gripped her husband’s hand as they looked up at what had to be the saddest sight in the world: the pink casket in the front of the Port Gamble church, a place in which historically the denomination changed with the tide and the whims of the mill boss’s wife. St. Paul’s was home to an Episcopal congregation then, but it had once been a Lutheran, Catholic and even a Baptist church. It didn’t matter. The faithful went regularly, no matter what religion the wife had decreed for the town. Taylor and Hayley cried, not in the way that close friends shed a stream of tears, but tears born of a shared moment of tragedy. Some who lined the spaces in the old oak pews sobbed because they loved Katelyn. Others cried because of the overwhelming sadness that comes with a young life lost.

  Valerie’s own tears came from memories of when her girls were small, memories from the darkest time of her adult life.

  The event had been long ago, but the feelings of hopelessness and the fragility of life came to the mother easily while the minister talked about Katelyn’s abbreviated life. Valerie’s own girls had been side by side in Seattle’s Children’s Hospital for thirty-one days after the crash, their eyes fluttering, scanning under eyelids both parents prayed would open. The hospital wouldn’t allow another bed in the room. Apparently, fire codes were more important than an aching heart of a mother or father. So Valerie brought a foam mattress from their home in Port Gamble, and she and Kevin took turns sleeping on it in the space between the girls’ beds.

  “Why aren’t they waking up?” she asked, over and over.

  “We really don’t know,” said the doctor, a pleasant, bespectacled man with nicotine-stained fingertips. “It isn’t physiological.”

  “Why do you keep saying that?” Valerie caressed her girls, gently touching their cheeks to remind them that wherever they were right then… wherever their minds were… that she was with them and she would never leave.

  “I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “Sometimes medical science doesn’t seem very scientific.”

  Valerie positioned herself between the two beds. Twin beds. Hayley’s and Taylor’s beds were tucked into a web of tubes and wires. “I just want to know what you’re going to do to get them to…”

  “Snap out of this,” Kevin said, entering the room with two cups of coffee and a granola bar for Valerie, who’d stopped eating. The worry for all three of his girls was evident on his face—haggard eyes, dark circles. And as tired as he appeared to be, he never once wanted anyone to think he wasn’t grateful for what he had. Other parents had lost their children.

  Hayley and Taylor had been spared.

  But for what? What kind of life would this be if they never woke up?

  The Ryans’ prayers were answered, of course. The girls did recover and they did get out of that hospital and back home where they belonged. It was true that both parents knew their daughters were not the same as they had been before the bus crash that almost killed them, but they never talked about it. Not really. It was easy to avoid because the change was invisible.

  In the church pew alongside her grieving family, Valerie pushed those memories aside. She looked over at Sandra and Harper Berkley in the front row. Harper had his face buried in his hands; Sandra had tilted her head and was resting it awkwardly on his shoulder. Valerie could imagine how they were feeling sitting there, thinking about how cruel life had been to them.

  Katelyn had survived the crash, only to be snatched by death as a teenager. There was something very, very wrong with the world.

  Valerie just didn’t know how wrong.

  * * *

  Her tear-soaked tissue kneaded into a near-perfect sphere, Hayley looked on while the minister talked about Katelyn… her love of orcas, baseball, Claire’s boutique and Cinnabon rolls served hot at the mall in Silverdale. The list made her smile and cry at the same time. She and her sister—she and everybody—had let Katelyn down. What had they missed? How could it have been prevented?

  She looked at Taylor, her mother, her father. Over at the row of cheerleaders. She noticed how Katelyn’s grandmother, Nancy, seemed to just stare straight ahead, while her husband, Paul, let tears roll down his ruddy cheeks.

  And without turning too much, because being a spectacle at someone’s funeral was the last thing Hayley Ryan wished for herself, she glanced back at Beth and her mom. Colton gave her a quick, supporting nod.

  What had they all missed?

  And yet it was more than the words spoken about a friend who’d become a stranger that tugged at Hayley’s emotions; she could feel something coming to her. Coming at her. Hard and fast. It was more than the emotions of the occasion or the sadness pouring at her from every direction as a teenager just like her was being mourned. That feeling was anguish, heartache, misery.

  Instead, Hayley was feeling, of all things, fear.

  Not from the dead girl in the pink casket—which might have made some kind of sense, given how she’d been abandoned by everyone—but from someone else in the church. Someone wasn’t sad at all. Someone was thinking that Katelyn Berkley had brought this on herself.

  Hayley leaned very close to her sister and whispered in her ear. “Someone’s worried about all this,” she said. “About the truth of what happened.”

  Taylor, her blue eyes welling with tears, nodded. “I know,” she whispered back.

  In doing so, she happened to catch Sandra Berkley’s eye. She looked so sad, so completely broken. She was lost and alone in the middle of a crowded church. Something about Katelyn’s mother called out to Taylor.

  It was as if she was beckoning her, asking her something.

  * * *

  Like a flock of crows against a stainless-steel sky, black processional umbrellas zigzagged along the trail up the hill to the Buena Vista Cemetery. The snow had turned to rain, which fell upon Katelyn’s family and a small group of friends from all stages of the dead teenager’s life. They had convened to watch her coffin slip quietly into the muddy earth above Port Gamble Bay. Harper, Sandra and even Katelyn’s kitchen-remodeling grandmother, Nancy, sobbed like they were at war with one another over who could be the most anguished.

  Without question, Sandra was winning. She had her thin fingers interwoven and locked around her heaving chest.

  The Ryans were there, too. They’d known Katelyn forever. Beth and her mother were also on hand, their eyes lingering on a small row of graves not far from Katelyn’s final resting spot. They knew that place so very well.

  Starla’s family also showed up. They were joined by Jake, whom Mindee clutched like an accessory, which, of course, he was.

  Because his dad was away fishing
and his mom incapable of leaving the house, Colton had arrived with the Ryans. Throughout the brief and grim graveside ceremony, he held Hayley’s hand like a C-clamp. There was no way he was going to let go. If Hayley had thought she was all cried out, she was wrong. Katelyn might not have been her best friend, but she didn’t deserve any of this—not then, not ever.

  Taylor’s tears mixed with the rain as she stood and looked at the casket while the minister said a few words. Inside, she felt nauseated. She wasn’t sure she could hold the contents of her stomach. The feeling was more than just sadness, grief or loss. Taylor could feel the presence of something dark and scary. She’d been deeply troubled since the church service. She had carried that feeling to the cemetery, and it intensified.

  What she sensed was terror from someone fearful about being caught—from a person close by.

  It can’t be.

  Whoever had done this to Katelyn, whoever had resigned the teenager to a casket the color of a bakery box, was there… among them.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The excuse for revisiting the Berkley house was the hideous scarf that Taylor had purposely left behind. With her sister off somewhere with Colton, Taylor took it upon herself to do what needed to be done. First, she stopped by the Timberline, but its owner wasn’t there. She saw Katelyn’s mother in her office behind the hostess station, looking grim as she typed on the keyboard of the old CRT that filled half of her tiny desk. Since Taylor didn’t want to talk to her, anyway, she quietly departed for their home next door.

  Rain had left the remnants of snow on the sidewalk between the restaurant and house number 23 like a gray Slurpee. With each soggy step, Taylor wished she’d sprayed her lavender Uggs with more water repellent when her mother had suggested it. Hayley did. Hayley always did the practical thing. Taylor could feel the cold wetness pick at the tips of her toes, the chill working its way up her legs and the rest of her body.

  Harper Berkley answered the door. His face was ashen and the stubble on his chin suggested that he probably hadn’t shaved in at least a day or two. His eyes were the saddest Taylor had ever seen. Katelyn was always close to her father, in the way that teenage girls often are. It wasn’t because their fathers were so much more wonderful; it was just that mothers always seemed to think that whatever road map they’d taken to get where they were would have been smoother if only they’d listened to their own moms. Of course, no teenage girl really wants to know that her mom had lived a life much like her own—twenty or thirty years ago.

  “I’m sorry to bug you, Mr. Berkley,” she said.

  “Hi, Taylor.” Harper was one of the few in Port Gamble, outside of her own family, who usually got the twins’ names correct on the first attempt.

  “That’s me,” she said, not sure about what more she should say that she hadn’t already. She was sad about what had happened to Katelyn. She was guilty that she hadn’t been “there” for her. Seldom at a loss for words, she was embarrassed after the service when it came time for people to file up and say something nice about the deceased, and she was unable to do so.

  “What can I do for you?”

  She took a breath. “I left my scarf here the other day. My aunt Jolene made it for me.”

  Katelyn’s dad opened the door wider and motioned for Taylor to come inside. “Cold out there,” he said. “Let’s look for it. I don’t know if I’ve seen it.”

  He shut the door behind them.

  “You’d know it if you had,” Taylor said, with a slight indication in her voice that the scarf might be memorable for the wrong reasons. “My aunt is nice, but the stuff she makes us…”

  Harper smiled faintly. “I understand.”

  Taylor looked beyond the foyer. The Christmas tree was still up, lights twinkling and casting a strangely cheery glow into the living room of what had to be the most pitiful place in Port Gamble. Through the kitchen doorway, she could see a mountain of dishes piled up everywhere. No sign of that obnoxious grandmother, which was good. Katelyn’s father led her to the hall tree a few steps inside the door, reached over to the top hook, and fished out the scarf, pushing aside a silver and black trench coat. Taylor knew the garment instantly. She hadn’t seen it in a while. It was a Burberry knockoff that Katelyn had bought on eBay. She remembered how Katelyn was showing off her purchase by her locker at Kingston High. She was beaming, but not overly so. After all, it was a knockoff, but a pretty good one.

  “Oh, Katie,” Starla Larsen had said as she passed by the show-and-tell scene. “Another one of your auction winnings? It is so cute. I love the slimming silhouette on you.”

  “Thanks, Starla,” Katelyn said, obviously unaware that her friend had dissed her.

  With an LED-bright smile, no less.

  Taylor remembered how she had felt when she observed that encounter. Starla was being cruel, needlessly so, and Katelyn just kind of stood there and let her be. Why didn’t she tell her to F-off or something along those lines? Katelyn had it in her to push back. But not then. It was as if Katelyn were some kind of abused child, seeking the approval of a parent who never loved her—trying, but failing, then doing it all over again.

  As the memory spun back into her consciousness, Taylor noticed a slip of paper protruding from a pocket of the faux Burberry trench.

  She looked over at Katelyn’s dad and gently touched her throat with her fingertips. “Mr. Berkley, I’ve got something stuck in my throat. Can I have a glass of water, please?”

  “Of course,” he said, turning in the direction of the cluttered kitchen.

  Taylor lingered a half a second and grabbed the paper. It had been wadded, smoothed out and carefully folded. She didn’t know why, but her heart started to beat faster as she unfolded it. Her eyes widened.

  In typed, block letters it said:

  I’M WATCHING YOU & LIKE WHAT I SEE

  DON’T LET ME DOWN

  “Coming?” Harper called from the kitchen sink.

  Without a second of hesitation, Taylor shoved the paper into the pocket of her jacket and secured it decisively with the pull of a zipper.

  “No need,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m good. Thanks for the scarf. Take care, Mr. Berkley.”

  Taylor didn’t wait for a response. She wanted to get out of there, right then. She twisted the doorknob and hurried outside into the slushy afternoon, her hand touching the pocket holding the note. Some younger kids were throwing wet snowballs in the field next to what had been old stables—before horses ceded their role to automobiles in Port Gamble. The kids’ laughter was wholly at odds with what Taylor was feeling right then.

  Fear.

  The note was like a heartbeat in her pocket, pulsing, and urging her to get home. Its discovery was huge. It told Taylor that whoever had been talking to Katelyn online, had been close enough to her to give her a written, real message.

  It wasn’t a long walk to number 19 by any means, but Taylor made it there in record time. She called hello to her father typing in his office and ran upstairs to her sister’s bedroom. Hayley barely looked up. She was immersed in the forensics book she got for Christmas.

  “Taylor,” she said, her eyes transfixed to the contents of the page, “did you know forensic science was first used to solve a crime that occurred in 44 BC?”

  Taylor knew better than to cut her sister off. Hayley liked to share her little factoids. And there was no sign of Colton, which was kind of a relief. Despite the bombshell in her pocket, a little slack was in order.

  “Not since CSI went on the air?” she pondered, sure her sister didn’t hear her.

  “You know, when Caesar was stabbed to death by Roman senators, a doctor named Antistius looked at the body and determined who the guilty senators were. Nobody’s sure how, but he did it.”

  “Fascinating,” Taylor said, pulling out the slip of paper.

  “Yeah, that’s how forensic science got its name. The doctor, medical examiner, or whatever he was, presented his findings in the Roman forum. Forensics is
Latin for ‘belonging to the forum.’”

  Satisfied that she’d imparted some amazing information, Hayley finally looked up from the book.

  “Gotcha. I’ll remember that for Jeopardy,” Taylor said, “but for now let’s deal with something a little more current.” She pushed the note to Hayley.

  “What is this?”

  “Read it.”

  Hayley unfolded the paper and read, her face growing grim and excited at the same time. “Where did you get this?”

  “From Katelyn’s trench coat.”

  “I liked that coat. She looked great in it.”

  “She did look fab. Anyway, you know what the note means—at least, what I think it means?”

  Hayley nodded. “Yeah, it means that the person playing games with Katelyn was close by. Close enough to give it to her.”

  “It could have been mailed,” Taylor said.

  Hayley got up and held the paper toward the window. “It wasn’t mailed,” she concluded, indicating a rectangular smudge of glue. “It was taped to something.”

  “Her door?”

  Hayley didn’t think so. “No, then anybody could have found it.”

  “Like her mom and dad,” Taylor said.

  Hayley handed over the paper. “Yeah, them. Maybe it was taped to her locker at school?”

  “Feel anything just now?” Taylor asked.

  “No, did you?”

  Taylor shook her head, carefully folding the paper along its original creases. “Should I sleep on it?”

  For most, that particular phrase was a call to mull over a problem. For the Ryan girls, it was more literal. “Sleeping on it” meant just that. One or the other twin would put the paper under her pillow and try to sync her dreams to the document, its writer and the recipient. Taylor was better at that than Hayley, having discovered it when a note was left by the tooth fairy under her pillow when she was seven.