Текст книги "Envy"
Автор книги: Gregg Olsen
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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 20 страниц)
Kevin called the university the following day to see if anything had happened to Savannah, and her advisor indicated in a somewhat curt manner that she was no longer working there.
“She abruptly quit the program,” he said. “Didn’t give us one bit of notice. Maybe we can reschedule?”
Kevin, the crime writer, was suspicious. He was good at that. It came with the territory. “Hope she’s all right. Safe?”
The advisor sighed. “She’s fine. Just undependable.”
“Really? She seemed to enjoy what she was doing,” Kevin said. “She said it was very rewarding, and she thought our daughters could be quite helpful in the study.”
“Changed her mind, I guess. Young people today don’t stick with anything.”
Kevin thanked the man and hung up the phone, a white kitchen wall mount that would stay put for five years before the standards committee of Port Gamble would rule it was not historic and could be removed after the Ryans switched to cell phones. Kevin thought the situation with the UW researcher was a little bizarre and certainly annoying, but ultimately he didn’t mind too much. He’d had second helpings of the salmon the night the observer didn’t show up. He normally hated leftovers. The sole exception was his wife’s planked salmon. Hot or cold, it didn’t matter; it was the best thing he ever ate.
Kevin was still relishing the meal when he took out the trash, which was heavier than usual. As the black Hefty dropped to the bottom of the metal garbage can, he heard the sound of glass-on-glass rattling, echoing in the night.
Curious, he tugged at the drawstring and peered into the bag. It was full of baby food jars—all of the same kind.
ABC pasta in organic tomato sauce.
chapter 24
TEAGAN LARSEN SAT IN FRONT of the computer. Next to his keyboard was a bowl of fluorescent-orange microwave macaroni and cheese—the only thing that his mother let him cook for fear that anything else would burn down the house. The computer was set up on a small table adjacent to the sofa in the living room. Mindee Larsen had worried about teens being victims of online predators, and while she was sure Starla was cautious, Teagan wasn’t. Since his father had left, he seemed more vulnerable than ever.
Although he’d brought a fork to jab at the sad bowl of pasta, he used his fingers to pick out one slimy, cheesy tube at a time. Each time he did so, he licked his digits with noisy and aggravating abandon.
“Teagan, you’re making me sick,” Starla said. She sat on the couch. “Your face makes me sick,” he said.
Starla didn’t even glance in his direction. “How original, Teagan,” she said. She continued flipping through the channels until she landed on America’s Most Wanted. It wasn’t her favorite show, but the idea of ordinary citizens rounding up the scum of the earth appealed to her.
“I wish Jake’s photo would show up here one of these days,” she said, barely looking over at her younger brother, who by now had started using his fork to eat the mac and cheese.
“I hate him too,” he said.
Starla turned down the volume. This was an interesting exchange with Teagan, and she liked what she heard.
“I thought you liked him,” she said.
Teagan nodded at his big sister. “I act like I like him because if I don’t ‘treat him with respect,’ he’ll beat my butt.”
“He’d better not,” she said, actually meaning it. Since making the cheer team, Starla had dialed down the pretense of being kind to everyone. She didn’t need to be that nice anymore. She was already on top, and that kind of position was very, very powerful.
“You know he was in jail?” Teagan asked.
She didn’t. If it were true, why didn’t she know about it? Her mom’s thug boyfriend was presented to both Starla and her brother as “a dear friend” before both of them realized he was staying over every night in their parents’ bedroom.
“How do you know that?” she asked, no longer interested in the creep du jour who was being profiled on TV—a big fat dude who’d killed his mother with a crowbar and then stolen her car (a measly hybrid, of all things!).
They had a creep du jour right there in their house.
“I heard him talking to mom about it. Said something about how he’d had his freedom taken away once and never, ever would allow that to happen again.”
“What did he do? Molester?”
Teagan went back to typing on the computer. “Dunno. Maybe. They didn’t say what.”
Starla paused, weighing other scenarios before settling on the molester theory.
“I don’t like the way he looks at me,” she said, slumping her head back onto the sofa pillow and wiggling her toes. Her nail polish, OPI’s I’m Not Really a Waitress red, was looking a little tired. She’d attend to that later on that evening.
Teagan was only thirteen, but he almost had to laugh at his sister’s remark. Starla didn’t lift a finger, say a word, or take a gulp of air without someone watching her. She lived for an audience—creepy or not. She just did.
He hated her and admired her for that.
VALERIE RYAN FELT THE STREAM OF COLD AIR coming from the kitchen and knew immediately that the back door had popped open. Kevin was no Mr. Fixit, and it didn’t even occur to her to call him into service. Instead, she went for the junk drawer next to the stove and retrieved a screwdriver. It wasn’t really anyone’s fault. The door handle was always loose.
She noticed the girls’ coats and shoulder bags on the bench by the door.
They must have taken Hedda for a walk, she thought. The dog was lazy but dependable when it came to doing her business on the end of a leash.
“Hi, Mom,” echoed at her, which meant that both girls were right behind her.
“Oh,” Valerie said, slightly startled. “I thought you were out walking the dog.”
Hayley and Taylor shook their heads in unison.
“Nope. We haven’t seen her,” Taylor said, suddenly feeling a little worried. Hedda was loved by everyone, but no one thought she was particularly smart. A lot of people liked to chuckle at the slightly dense, long-haired doxie with a dappled silver and black coat, which had made her look old even when they first got her.
“We thought you were,” Hayley said.
The three of them went outside in the mid-January frost and stood on the back porch calling for Hedda. Hayley went down the alleyway looking, and Taylor canvassed the road along the bay in front. Their mother stayed put, calling for Hedda to come home.
Their dog was gone.
Deep down, mother and daughters knew that something bad had happened. Hedda was a homebody who didn’t go far. She just didn’t. Besides that, the little stub of a dog never missed a meal.
Ever.
chapter 25
AT THE TIME OF HER DEATH, Katelyn Berkley was no longer close friends with any of the Port Gamble girls she’d known since grade school. It wasn’t that the other girls didn’t want to be tight anymore. They did. Some even tried. But the more they tried, the more she seemed to retreat. No one really understood why. Hayley and Taylor assumed that it was because of the situation between her parents. When Katelyn was in middle school, the Port Gamble police made at least two trips to the Berkley residence to defuse what busybodies liked to call a “domestic disturbance.” The Ryan twins, having learned from their father’s work, knew that “domestic disturbance” was the PC way of saying “knockdown, drag-out argument.” There might have been other occasions in which intervention was needed, but no one knew for certain.
The teen gossip line said that Katelyn had been the one to call the police, saying she was fearful that her parents would end up hurting each other.
Hayley felt sick about what had happened to Katelyn in the years since those physical altercations. Katelyn had once told her that things were better at home.
“My mom’s getting help,” she said.
“What kind of help?”
Katelyn pretended to hold a glass and tipped it to her lips.
“Oh,” Hayley said, because the gesture needed a response. But she didn’t know what else to say. Sandra Berkley was a sad woman and, like her daughter, she was good at building walls around herself. Alcohol made a great barrier.
Maybe we should have tried harder, Hayley thought.
She fingered the note that her sister had recovered from Katelyn’s trench coat.
She’d slept on the little slip of paper the night before, as had Taylor the night before that, but nothing had come to either one of them.
Instead, she found her thoughts drifting back to the state of things in the Berkley household before Katelyn’s life began to unravel. She recalled the time she heard her mother talking with her father about what was going on over at house number 23.
“Things like that happen everywhere,” Valerie had said.
“I know. But, honestly,” Kevin said, “I never would have suspected the Berkleys.”
“With all you know about violent crime, you ought to know that it thrives wherever it can.”
“I feel like the dope who says that their serial killer neighbor seemed so nice, but when they look back on it they can remember a cat squealing and they wonder if he’d just killed it.”
Valerie laughed. “It isn’t that bad, Kevin.”
“No,” he said. “I hope not.”
Hayley remembered how she’d seen Katelyn the day following a police intervention and asked her if everything was all right.
“I’m fine,” she had said. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” Hayley admitted, feeling like she’d intruded on something private. “If you ever need someone to listen …”
Katelyn had stared hard at her, sizing her up, weighing her somewhat cryptic response.
“I don’t need anyone’s help,” she said, finally and quite firmly. The wall was up, and it was made of brick, stone, steel, and tank armor.
Hayley had stood there a second. The words that came from Katelyn were completely at odds with her appearance. She looked incredibly sad, worn down, and very afraid.
“Are you sure?” Hayley asked, pushing only a little. “Can I help?”
Katelyn turned away to answer a text message. “There’s no problem,” she said, without looking up. “No one but me.” And then she walked off, toward her class, toward the cafeteria.
Somewhere away from Hayley.
Hayley let it go that day at school and regretted it years later. She hadn’t pressed her further because it just seemed too private. Later, when she heard that Katelyn was cutting herself, she assumed what everyone who watched daytime TV did about cutters and their motivation to selfmutilate. They did it to control their pain, to let out the hurt one slice at a time.
Hayley hadn’t dug deep enough to think about the root cause of Katelyn’s problems.
She thought about how middle-school hierarchy ensures that a good number of kids are relegated to loser or outsider status. Katelyn, the cutter, was never really viewed by anyone as a loser. Few knew that secret. Katelyn was engaging. She was pretty. She still had her funny, bright side. And most of all, she still had the ear of her best friend, Starla.
Starla’s friendship, no matter how tenuous, was nearly a guarantee that Katelyn could still get a passkey into something better than her miserable life back home or in the restaurant where she worked.
Still mulling over those memories, Hayley looked up as her sister entered her bedroom.
“What’s up?” Taylor asked, finding a place on the corner of her sister’s cozy bed.
“I was just thinking about Katelyn,” she said.
Taylor ran her fingers over the old chenille bedspread that instantly, tactilely, reminded her of their grandmother on their mother’s side.
“I know,” Taylor said. “Me too.”
Hayley studied the folded paper held in her fingertips. Taylor’s eyes landed there, taking in its contents, and she wondered out loud, “Do you think we could have saved her?”
Hayley shook her head. To think that they could have done something but didn’t was an immense burden. “I don’t know,” she responded. “But maybe Starla could have.”
VALERIE GLANCED DOWN at Hedda’s water and food dishes. There was still some reduced-calorie kibble in the dog’s white ceramic dish, but it was stale. So was the water. She often complained that she was the only person in the family who thought to keep things fresh. It was only a flash of a thought, the kind that came and went with the bruising realization that Hedda had vanished.
The dog had been a part of the family for almost ten years. The day she had come to the Ryans was a day wrought with unthinkable tragedy and heartache. Valerie had returned home from the hospital for a change of clothes, when Kevin phoned her to say he’d seen on the news that they were recovering the bus. She drove over to the crash site, out of curiosity and the need to be there. She parked the car on the east side of the bridge and made the long walk toward the center of the span. The wind was blowing softly and the craggy Olympic Mountains lifted the sky. It was beautiful, but she barely noticed. In fact, Valerie was in such a state as she stood behind a barricade watching the recovery of the short bus that when a young deputy officer handed the dog to her, she took it.
“She’s one scared pup,” he said, “but now that she’s back with you, look at that tail wag!”
Valerie didn’t even think to say the dog didn’t belong to her.
Because the dog did.
The Ryans loved Hedda, though no one else seemed to. They weren’t sure of her age, but a vet in Kingston put her at five or six when she was found on the bridge. The suggested age made the Ryans sad, as they knew that under the best of circumstances Hedda would be theirs for only a short time.
And yet, the tubby little dachshund kept going. She was fifteen or sixteen and really no worse for wear than a dog half her age. Her fur had grayed quite a bit and her hearing had dulled, but her eyes were bright and unmistakably alert.
Valerie picked up the water dish and rinsed it in the sink. She washed out the food dish too. Instead of putting them away, she refilled both and set them on the place mat that the girls had bought at Petco in Silverdale. The mealtime mat read:
Valerie disregarded the words and smiled for the first time in a long while.
The dog might be gone, but she’s definitely coming back.
chapter 26
TALKING WITH STARLA AT SCHOOL would never, ever happen. Even though she was only a sophomore, she was always surrounded by gatekeepers, wannabes, and hangers-on. Hayley and Taylor knew they had to go over to her house to see her, which always meant the risk of running into Port Gamble’s resident sleaze. Not Mindee Larsen—though a case could be made for that—but Jake Damon, a man who left footprints of slime in his wake.
At least, that’s what most Port Gamble teenage girls thought whenever he was brought up in casual conversation. Even a blind girl with a halfway decent service animal could detect how Jake’s hooded eyes traveled over a female’s body, as if he were taking a tour of what he’d like to touch. They noticed how, at the first hint of warmish weather, he’d plant himself along the edge of the bay to smoke and watch the girls as they lay out on blankets to suntan Washington-style—which usually meant a bad sunburn under overcast skies. No one could argue that Jake wasn’t good-looking. He was. He had nice eyes and straighter teeth than most handymen, with their picket-fence grins. He had a better body than those whose stomachs overhung dinner plate-sized belt buckles. Jake never wandered around town in butt-crack-revealing, lowslung jeans.
Taylor and Hayley, however, didn’t think Jake was hot in the least. In fact, behind Jake’s back the twins referred to Starla’s “momster’s” boyfriend as “Mr. Yuk,” because of the smiley-face tattoo on his right bicep. That undoubtedly was meant to be ironic, as it looked more like a poison-control sticker when he flexed, which was constantly.
When the twins arrived at the Larsen house a few days after Katelyn’s funeral, they were relieved to see that Mindee’s car, a late-model red Cabriolet with a ragtop she’d repaired herself with duct tape after her husband ditched her, was gone. Also missing was Jake’s Toyota Tacoma, a dumb name for a small pickup truck if ever there was one. Who, Beth Lee once wondered aloud, would ever want to drive a pickup named after Tacoma?
It made as much sense as calling a sexy sports car a Boise.
Starla opened the door. She was wearing a pale pink top and darkdyed jeans. The top, like most of the things she wore around the house, was her mother’s. Mindee could be trashy, but she had good stuff among the crap that she’d collected from the middling boutiques at the Kitsap Mall. Starla wore whatever she could hustle from her mom’s wardrobe because it meant less wear and tear on her own things.
“Are you two collecting for something?” Starla asked.
Somehow Starla could always manage a few words that rubbed their recipient the wrong way. Next to mounting the top of the human pyramid on the football field, it was one of her best talents.
“That was last year,” Hayley said. “By the way, we never did get that money for the breast cancer walk. But that’s not why we’re here.”
Starla made an annoyed face as she one-handedly clipped her tangle of long hair into a messy bun.
Another skill.
“You want to come inside?”
Taylor pushed past the cheerleader. “It’s super cold out here. Thanks for inviting us in.”
The Larsen house was as it always was—a total mess. Mindee wasn’t a hoarder, per se. But she was an incorrigible collector of the kinds of things that Valerie Ryan liked to call “dust catchers.” On the table next to the front door was Mindee’s collection of Scottie dogs. She seemed to embrace the concept that if one was good, fifty was awesome. Her kitchen was done up with more chickens and roosters than a KFC. The living room was less cluttered, save for the sofa table and its clutch of glass egg-shaped paperweights.
Teagan was playing a video game on the computer in the family room. He brightened a little when he saw Hayley and Taylor.
“Double trouble,” he said, trying to be cool.
“Hey, that’s clever. Let me write that down,” Hayley said, pretending to smile. “You are so funny.”
Taylor smiled, trying to defuse her sister’s annoyance at the kid she’d babysat a couple of times—and never wanted to again. “Actually, we’re twice as nice,” she said.
“Whatever,” Teagan said, as he went back to bombing New York City with a scary kind of enthusiasm.
“What do you two want?” Starla asked.
“I’d like a diet soda, please,” Hayley said.
“Water for me,” Taylor added.
Starla made a face. “Okay, but I didn’t mean that. Why are you here? Not that it’s not nice to see you, but we really don’t hang out anymore. Not since I made cheer.”
You have to throw that out as if it were winning the Pulitzer, Hayley thought.
“We’re here about Katelyn,” Hayley said. “Can we talk in your room?”
Starla eyed her warily. “I guess, but do you still want the drinks?”
“No,” Taylor said. “We’re good.”
They followed Starla upstairs. It had been a couple of years since they’d been in Starla’s inner sanctum. The last time they’d been there, she had posters of pop stars and hippy-dippy beaded curtains she bought at Spencer’s back in seventh grade.
This time it was completely different. Taylor almost gasped when Starla swung open the door.
The walls looked like mirrors. Everywhere they turned were pictures of … Starla. She was posing in her Buccaneers’ uniform (with and without pom-poms) and in some ridiculous evening-wear attire that reminded Hayley of getups she’d seen in kids’ pageants on TV. There were even some images of Starla practicing her cheer routine in the backyard.
“Motivation,” Starla explained, picking up on the girls’ obvious stares. “I read in a magazine that if you surround yourself with the best that you are, you’ll get even better. I have a lot more to work with, but you two should give it a try.”
You’re a real piece of work, Taylor thought, but thankfully she managed to hold her tongue. She and her sister were there for a reason—and an important one at that.
Hayley studied the photo of Starla in the backyard. In the background, off to the side, was Katelyn, standing with slumped shoulders and a sad look on her face.
The reason they were there.
“We wanted to talk about Katelyn,” Hayley said. “Do you think she actually killed herself?”
“I don’t know. I guess she had a lot to live for,” Starla said halfheartedly, as though she was not sure if that was true. She planted herself on a big pink beanbag, the only item that either visitor remembered. Beth Lee had once hurled all over it during a sleepover when Mindee served salmon cakes (“made up of two cans of salmon—the good kind”) and Tater Tots. The memory was disgusting, but it still made Taylor smile. Just the idea of Beth retching over a beanbag was awesome enough, but the fact that it was Starla Larsen’s made it absolutely sweet.
“I heard Hedda went missing. Did she come home yet?”
“No,” Taylor said. “Have you seen her?”
Starla shook her head. “Oh, no! What kind of a friend would I be if I didn’t call you the very second I saw her?”
You would be a rotten friend, thought Hayley.
A friend like Starla Larsen, thought Taylor.
Like most bedrooms in the historic district, Starla’s room was small and there weren’t many places to sit. Hayley slid to the floor, resting her back against Starla’s white wrought-iron daybed. It had a lemon-and-cherry-print duvet and enough ruffled pillows that it seemed it would take an hour to scoot them aside to make space to sleep at night. Taylor swiveled the white and black plastic IKEA desk chair around to face the other two.
“Katie was pretty messed up,” Starla said.
Hayley tried to get comfortable by shifting her weight. The hardwood floor was, well, hard.
“Messed up enough to kill herself?” Taylor asked.
“Teen suicide is rampant in this country,” Starla said, readjusting her messy bun. “I did a paper on it.”
Hayley gave up on being comfortable. “Katelyn was your best friend.”
Starla shook her head. She did so slowly and without making eye contact.
“Correction,” she said. “And I know this will sound harsh, and harsh is not at all what I’m about, but she was most definitely not my best friend. I might have been her best friend, but not the other way around.”
“All right,” Taylor said. “But you knew her better than anyone. You would have noticed it if she was spiraling downward, thinking of killing herself. Right?”
Starla punched at the beanbag to spread its flattened Styrofoam beads. “Look, I’ve been busy. I feel horrible about what happened to Katie. But if you’re looking for me to give you some insight—and I don’t even know why you’d care—I can’t do that.”
“What about last fall? Can you tell us about that?” Hayley asked. “What happened?”
Starla refused to meet Hayley’s gaze. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Taylor picked up the beat in the conversation. “Something happened. Her mother was really mad about it.”
“Her mother was always pissed off at something,” Starla said. Her tone was dismissive and mean.
“Right,” Taylor said. “But what happened, Starla?”
Starla appeared to think for a moment. It was hard to tell sometimes—not because she wasn’t smart; she was. She was just very, very cagey.
“I don’t know,” she said, hesitating a little. It was clear the Ryan twins weren’t going to leave her alone without some kind of revelation.
“Tell us, Starla. Katie would want us to know,” Taylor said, nearly wincing at her own words. Who knew what anyone would want, especially a dead girl?
Well, maybe she and her sister could.
“It might have to do with stealing that money from the till at the Timberline,” Starla said, getting up from the giant pink beanbag.
“What money? What are you talking about?” Hayley asked.
“She took some cash out of the register so she could get away.”
Taylor leaned closer. “Run away?”
“Not really,” Starla said. “She took the money and caught the Bainbridge ferry to Seattle to see her boyfriend.”
“Boyfriend?” Taylor asked.
Starla looked around, refusing to meet either girl’s piercing gaze. “Some online guy,” she said. “I don’t know any more about it.”
Again, Taylor pushed. “She never told you his name?”
Starla got up and started walking toward her bedroom door, her very clear signal that the conversation was over.
“Cullen Anthony, I think,” she said. “But, I don’t even know if the dude is real or not. Katelyn had gotten weirder.”
“How weird? What do you mean?” Hayley asked.
“She was so, I don’t know … it seems embarrassing to admit it, but she seemed so jealous of me.”
Like that was some kind of admission she didn’t want to make. Starla reveled in the jealousy that swirled around her. She didn’t always live in What-About-Me-City, but she’d done a good job finding a spot on the town’s main drag.
Taylor picked up on the meat of what Starla had said. “Weirder, how?”
“I don’t even think the boyfriend she wanted to meet was real.”
“No?” Hayley asked, interested in that repeated disclosure.
Starla continued talking as she walked down the hallway, down the stairs. Teagan was hovering by the entrance to the kitchen.
“It is so sad,” she said. “But I think Katie just kind of lost it after she didn’t make cheer again this year. I wanted her to … I did everything I could. And when she didn’t make it, I had to distance myself from her a little—for obvious reasons.”
Obvious reasons? Like the fact that if you were a bigger biatch you’d have to sleep in a kennel at night? That kind of obvious reason? thought Hayley.
Before Starla opened the front door to shove the twins back out into the cold air, Hayley reached into her pocket and pulled out the WATCHING YOU note.
“I don’t think she made up her boyfriend,” she said.
Starla took the note and warily eyed Hayley, then Taylor.
“What’s this?” she said, taking the message.
“What do you think it is?” Taylor said, in a voice unable to mask her anger. “Your best friend—or rather, the girl who considered you her best friend—had someone in her life.”
Starla looked up from the paper and twisted the doorknob.
“I don’t know anything about this,” she said as the winter air blasted inside. “I’m sorry that we have to cut our visit so short. I have some chores to do before Mom and Jake come home.”
Taylor scoffed but said nothing. Chores? When did Starla go all Little House? Or when did she do anything but worship her face in the mirror?
AFTER DINNER, TAYLOR PUT UP a second LOST DOG posting on Craigslist, this time with a photo of Hedda taken by their mother on Christmas Day. The dog was curled up like a kielbasa in front of the crackling fireplace, looking cozy and reasonably alert—at least for Hedda. Hayley created a LOST DOG flyer using the same photo and, by the end of the day, Beth, Colton, and the girls had plastered it all over Port Gamble.
None of their friends thought that Hedda was a particularly goodlooking or smart dog, because, to be completely fair, she wasn’t. Beth, in particular, had been merciless in teasing Taylor and Hayley about the dog over the years.
“I saw a dog just like yours that used a skateboard to get around because it had no legs,” she said one time.
“She has legs, Beth,” Taylor said, a little defensively.
Another time …
“The Ugliest Dog in America is ramping up again. It’s time that disgusting Chinese Crested with the overbite is given the boot. I was thinking that Hedda has a shot at the title.”
“She’s not ugly, Beth.”
“I’m just saying,” Beth said.
As they stapled flyers to the kiosk by the General Store, Beth admitted something that surprised the others.
“I hope we find her. I really, really like that little dog.”
“I thought you hated her,” Colton said.
“Tells you how much you know about me, Colt. I’m more than what I say,” she said, before waving good-bye from the corner and heading home.
Taylor walked a few steps ahead of her sister and Colton, who always found a moment to linger alone together. She looked up at Katelyn’s bedroom as they passed the Berkley house. She wondered if Mr. Berkley was watching from the darkened room. She nodded in the direction of Jake, next door, who, despite the weather and the season, was barbecuing something that actually smelled pretty good.
For meat, anyway.
She wondered if they’d ever learn what really happened to Katelyn on that awful night.
Talk to us, Katie, she said to herself.
As the three of them walked to their side-by-side houses, no one called out to Hedda. There was no point in it. Hedda was half-deaf. There was a more disquieting reason too. The air was so cold that if the missing dog had been outside, she’d have frozen to death by then. The wind blew hard across the water. It was harsh and decisive. Port Gamble on a cold winter’s night was no place for a short-legged dog, ugly or not.
LATER THAT NIGHT, AS TAYLOR BURROWED under her blankets and drifted off to sleep, Katelyn remained on her mind.
And so did someone else. Someone she could not see as her eyes fluttered behind her shut eyelids.
Fingertips moved slowly across the keyboard, stopping and starting as if each keystroke were a separate word followed by a period. Stop. Start. In a way, it was almost like Morse code. Rat. Tat. Tat. It was as though whoever was writing the message used the depression of each key to shoot anger at a target far away in cyberspace.
Katelyn stared at the computer screen, her heart beating faster. She knew she was moving closer and closer to something a little dangerous. But danger was needed. Her life had become pathetic on every front. Her mom was drinking more often. Her dad was growing more distant. Starla, her best friend, could no longer see fit to even smile in her direction.
Not that she deserved a smile, but even so, one would have been welcomed.
A flurry of messages zipped across the screen in the chat window:
CULLANT: MEET ME @ SEATTLE CTR. BY THAT UGLY ASS FOUNTAIN. U KNOW THE 1.
KATIEBUG: I CLIMBED IN IT LAST MAY @ FOLK LIFE WHEN IT WZ REALLY HOT.
CULLANT: THAT’S LAME
KATIEBUG: I KNOW. MY PARENTS LYK THAT CRAP. FLUTES. LATVIAN DANCING. WHATEVER.
Finally this came across her computer screen:
CULLANT: ONLY A RENAISS FAIR WUD B WRSE. MEET ME. LET’S GET AWAY FRM EVRY1—ESP PARENTS. LET’S GET THE HELL OUTTA HERE.
She liked that he used the word parents, because part of her still held the possibility that he was some old freak messing with her. She’d watched Dateline and knew “To Catch a Predator” episodes never failed to showcase some beer-guzzling creep with a sackful of Four Lokos and a pocketful of roofies.
