Текст книги "Envy"
Автор книги: Gregg Olsen
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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 20 страниц)
chapter 3
HAYLEY AND TAYLOR HAD SHARED A BEDROOM in house number 19 all through elementary school. It was big enough to accommodate two cribs, then later twin beds with matching sheets and identical duvets. Theirs was the larger of two upstairs bedrooms in the place they’d lived in since their parents brought them home from Harrison Medical Center in nearby Bremerton.
Their father had used the second, smaller bedroom as his office to decent effect. Kevin Ryan’s most successful crime book at that time, Gorgeous and Deadly—the true story of a beauty queen who’d murdered six of her rivals by poisoning them with strawberries dipped in chocolate and laced with rat poison—had been written there.
He always told his girls, “If only these walls could talk … the world would know just how hard it is to tell the truth in a story in which everyone’s a liar.”
But the walls didn’t talk.
One afternoon when the twins were in seventh grade, their best friend, Beth Lee, goaded them into asking for their own rooms. She sipped from a sports bottle—though she didn’t play any sports—as the trio sat in the Ryans’ family room watching a plastic surgery show on the Discovery Channel.
“People at school think you’re weird for sharing a room,” Beth said before the girl on TV went under the knife for a nose job.
“How could anyone at school possibly know?” Hayley asked.
Beth shrugged her knobby shoulders. “I might have mentioned it.” Taylor rolled her eyes. “’Course you did.”
“I’m just looking out for you, Hay-Tay,” Beth said, refusing to call the girls by their individual names.
“The other room is ridiculously small. Besides, it’s Dad’s office,” Hayley concluded.
“Take turns. Who cares? It is almost Siamese-twin creepy that you two can’t be apart.”
Taylor’s face went red. “Can too.”
“Someone’s upset,” Beth provoked. “Wonder why that is? Maybe because someone else is right? As usual.”
The twins didn’t argue, but that night they convinced their dad to move his work station downstairs. Then they flipped a coin and Taylor got the little room. They hated being apart, but they despised the idea of Beth Lee blabbing at school that they were weird.
Weren’t twins supposed to be close, after all?
They moved their beds—headboard to headboard—to the inside wall, where an old power outlet had been plated over on either side. The single screw that held each plate in place was nearly threadbare. It took only the slightest touch to swivel it aside. It wasn’t an intercom system, but it functioned like one. At night when their parents were downstairs, the sisters would talk about the things that troubled them: boys, Beth Lee, the weirdos their dad wrote about, the pasta dish that their mother didn’t know they absolutely hated, and the odd feelings and visions that came to them at inexplicable times. Those were harder to discuss because putting the unthinkable, the unbelievable, into words was extremely difficult.
How does one really describe a feeling? Or how can one know something with absolute certainty that one shouldn’t, couldn’t, possibly know?
THERE WERE DIFFERENCES IN THE TWINS, of course. They might have come from a split egg, but that didn’t mean they were identical beyond their carbon-copy genetics. Physical similarities aside, the girls were distinct and unwavering in their likes and dislikes.
Hayley leaned toward alternative music. She loved homegrown northwest bands like Modest Mouse, Fleet Foxes, and old-school Sleater-Kinney—anything off the beaten path, out of the mainstream. While their friend Beth gravitated toward whatever music was hot and trendy, Hayley was more interested in finding meaning and real, genuine voices.
If Taylor measured things in emotion, Hayley looked at ways to quantify life. Analytical in nature, her head almost always overruled her heart. Love it? Hate it? She wanted to know it. Her drive to know something at its very root was likely the reason the boy next door, Colton James, fell for her.
Taylor’s intelligence wasn’t as logic-based; it was more intuitive. She liked a color because it made her feel good, not because it made her eyes look pretty. She prided herself on being outspoken and socially conscious—often flip-flopping with vegetarianism, risking ridicule from Hayley. Words came easily to her, as opposed to her shier, more introspective twin.
But despite their differences, something more than mere twinship always bonded them together.
FROM HER BED, TAYLOR WATCHED A BOAT decorated with a Christmas tree on the bow glide across Port Gamble Bay toward the mill. It being Christmas night, the scene was deathly quiet. A faint plume of steam rose above the sprawling site with its rusty, tin-roofed shacks, a near-empty parking lot, and logs stacked everywhere like Jenga on ’roids. Taylor may have had the smallest room, but it offered the best view in the house. The boat, an old tug, left a trail of foam in its wake. It curled and undulated on the glassy black surface of the water. She sat up and stared at it more intently, her heart starting to beat a little faster.
On the water were the letters:
LOOK
Knowing this was one of those inexplicable moments, she turned, lifted the outlet plate, and called to her sister. “Hayley, come here! You gotta see something.”
“I’m tired,” Hayley said. “I’ve already seen that hideous scarf Aunt Jolene got you.”
Taylor spiked an exasperated sigh with a sense of urgency. “Nope, not it. Come. Now.”
A beat later, Hayley stood in the doorway and Taylor pointed out the window.
“Yeah, so it’s a boat with a pretty Christmas tree.” Hayley narrowed her brow and shot an impatient look at her twin.
“Check out the water behind the tug.”
“Can’t you just tell me what I’m looking for, Taylor?”
“Read it.”
Hayley glanced at her sister and then back at the bay. She looked more closely and nodded. The word on the water had morphed a little, but it was as clear as if a child had scrawled it on a tar-soaked pavement with a fat piece of chalk.
“What do you think it means?” Hayley asked.
Taylor drew back the curtain to widen the view, and then turned to face her sister. “It’s about Katelyn. I feel it.”
Hayley’s blue eyes, identical to her sister’s down to the golden flecks that speckled her irises, stared hard, searching. “What about her? Where are we supposed to look? And at what?”
Taylor shook her head. “Don’t know.”
They stood there a moment as the December wind kicked up and erased the message on the water.
“That scarf is pretty atrocious, Taylor.”
“Yeah, it is majorly fugly. I’ll wear it once for Aunt Jolene. Then I’ll ditch it on the bus. I’m just saying …”
Neither girl knew it right then, but the night Katelyn Berkley died was the beginning of something that would change everything.
Everything.
Every. Single. Thing.
chapter 4
THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS IN PORT GAMBLE was completely out of whack. Certainly, some things seemed the same on the surface. Plastic bags of gift-wrapping and ribbon were stuffed in alleyways or burned on the sly in backyard fire pits. Children re-examined their haul with an eye toward who’d given them the best gift and who’d screwed them over with something that wasn’t even worth returning. A few shoppers descended on the town to make the most difficult of returns: handcrafted items. It was hard to say a pair of mittens was the wrong size or the painted jacquard stemware was something one already had.
As the artist accepted the returns, the lies were told. On both sides.
“I love them, but I have six pairs already.”
“I have a matching hat that you might like to go with it.”
Pause.
“I wish I had known. I just bought one yesterday.”
Nothing was open on Christmas Day. Another lie.
The mittens were, indeed, ugly.
Lies on both sides. That happened in shops and households all over town.
Sandra and Harper Berkley had a Christmas holiday that not a soul on earth would want. Their daughter was dead. Gone. She was in the chiller at the Kitsap County morgue in Port Orchard waiting for the indignity of a knife tip down her skin, a saw through her skull, and the cool voice of the county’s forensic pathologist as she gently picked through the flesh and bone of what had once been a beautiful girl.
And while it was the end of Katelyn’s life, it was the start of something else.
Katelyn was Sandra’s last great hope. And a kitchen appliance in the bathtub had stolen it from her. She surveyed her situation and dealt with her disappointment and heartache the best way she could.
She threw a poison-tipped dart at Harper.
“You know, if we didn’t have that stupid restaurant, you’d have been around more.”
He shook his head. He’d expected her attack. “Everyone works, Sandy. Are you really going to blame me for Katelyn’s death?”
“Daughters need their fathers.”
Harper stared hard at his wife, weighing a rebuttal that would drive the point home without setting her off. “They also need a sober mother.”
It was the wrong response.
Sandra balled up her fist and jabbed at Harper. He stepped back, his wobbly wife no match for his still-agile reflexes. When the emotion of the moment cooled enough for her to realize what she’d done, Sandra started to cry.
Harper put his arms around her and cried too.
They’d been bonded by the joy of the birth of their daughter. She’d been the glue that held them together when their marriage was at its most fragile.
As they lay in bed in the early morning hours after their daughter had died, Sandra cried quietly into her pillow. Her eyes were red, a color borne of agonizing grief and too much alcohol. She wondered how Harper could find enough solace to actually sleep.
Yet, Harper was far from asleep. He was only pretending to avoid talking to Sandra. Everything out of her mouth was tinged with anger and blame. Sandra was that kind of person: bitter, jealous, and completely unsatisfied with her lot in life. Where some might have found pleasure from seeing the joy on others’ faces, Sandra merely wondered why God hadn’t given her whatever it was that they had.
A new car.
A bigger house.
Diamonds instead of CZs.
The happiness that came with relationships.
A daughter who would lift her out of Port Gamble.
Side by side in silence, both wondered if the death of their daughter would bring them closer.
Or would it be the excuse they’d sought to end their marriage?
ALL OVER PORT GAMBLE, the young, the old, and those close and distant to Katelyn thought about her. As she lay on her bed and typed on her laptop, Taylor Ryan could see the inky water of Port Gamble Bay. She had been overcome by emotion in a way that seemed more painful than cathartic. Her eyes finally stopped raining.
She IM’d Beth:
I FEEL SELFISH. 4COL! SEMZ RONG 2 GRIEVE 4 K & B GR8FUL 4 MY LYF & MY SISTER’S LYF. I KNOW ACDNTS HPN EVRY DY. I ALSO KNW DAT K WZ
On the other hand, Hayley didn’t fight her thoughts about Katelyn. She let them tumble from her, texting her ponderings to Colton about what could possibly have led to this very moment.
KATELYN WAS IMPLODING OVER STARLA. SEEMS SO UNFAIR. INSTEAD OF GETTING HELP, SHE WAS SHOVED ASIDE LIKE TRASH. PEOPLE AREN’T TRASH. NO ONE DESERVES TO BE DISSED LIKE THAT. KATELYN JUST WANTED STARLA TO LIKE HER AGAIN. I KNOW SOME PEOPLE THINK THAT KATELYN HAD SOME KIND OF GIRL CRUSH ON STARLA, BUT THAT’S NOT TRUE. THAT’S JUST THE KIND OF THING MEAN GIRLS SAY TO MAKE EVERYONE LAUGH.
Night owls Beth Lee and her mother, Kim, were still very much awake in house number 25 on Olympian Avenue. While they watched lateevening TV together (something that Kim said provided mother-daughter bonding time), Beth got out her phone and started texting. She was a facile texter, easily keeping an eye glued to the movie and the other on the task at hand. Every once in a while, Kim would chuckle and pat her daughter on the leg, and Beth would pause her texting to make eye contact. The minute Kim looked over at the screen, Beth would start up again.
MIGHT NOT ACT BUT I AM. DON’T DO WELL. MAKS MY IZ PUFF ^ N L%K EVN SMALR THN THYRE. COUNSELOR AMY :-p! SAID I MASK MY FEELINGS W/SARCASM. SAW K’S MOM CRYING. THINK WE ALL LET K DOWN.
As her husband buzz saw-snored next to her, Valerie Ryan said a silent prayer. She wanted to send something out into the universe that would provide some healing. She was a believer in the power of a positive message.
Katelyn, stay close to your mom and dad. They need you and they will never stop loving you. Where we are living now is not the end of things. You aren’t dust. You aren’t alive only in a memory.
Almost two hundred miles away in Portland, Colton James felt sick to his stomach about what had transpired just a few doors down from his house in Port Gamble. He wasn’t stunned about it, like his mother and father were. Colton had seen Katelyn over the past few months as she declined from a reasonably upbeat, moody teenager to a more sullen and distracted person. He read the text message from Hayley and texted back. Usually he was a brief texter, just a few words or even a solitary letter to convey what he wanted to say. This time he wrote out his thoughts more fully. He wanted to share. He needed to make a point.
I’M BUMMED ABOUT HER 2. SHE WZ WEIRD LATELY, BUT ALW NICE 2 ME & MY MOM. SHE 1CE GOT MY MOM’S PAMPERED CHEF PIZZA CRAP @ HER HOUSE. SHE MADE 4 KINDS OF PIZZA W/MY MOM. SHE REALLY LYKD KATELYN. SAID SHE WZ SPECIAL. WISH WE CUD TURN BACK TYM & CHNG THE 1 LIL THING THAT WUD CHNG EVRYTING. DUM, RIGHT? THINGS LYK THAT CAN’T HPN.
Next door to the Berkleys, Starla Larsen picked up her phone and touched the Facebook icon. There were lots of messages posted about Katelyn on her wall, as well as just about every other wall belonging to anyone who attended Kingston High. She went over to Katelyn’s wall. Starla hadn’t been there in a while.
Katelyn’s profile picture was of the two of them together, taken when they were Girl Scout Daisies. Both little girls were smiling widely to show off their missing front teeth. Starla hated that photograph for the longest time, but just then it brought a sad smile to her face. She decided she should weigh in with a post on Katelyn’s wall too. She liked to post snarky things about people and then add a smiley face to act like she was joking when she really wasn’t. She knew she did that because other kids expected her to be sharp, funny, and a little caustic; it was because of the way she looked—she was better than just pretty.
SO ABOUT KATIE. DON’T KNOW HOW I WILL SLEEP 2NIGHT.
THE WORLD WAS NEVER VERY KIND 2 HER. HUGS 2U, KATIE.
Starla reached for the nail-polish remover while she sat there for a while watching the “Likes” come one after another. Several kids posted comments too.
WE’RE THINKING OF U, STARLA.
KATIE SEEMED SWEET. WISH I KNEW HER BTR.
WORLD SUX BIG TIME.
LUV U, STAR! BE STRONG!
Starla looked over at her cache of Sephora nail lacquers set up like a ten-pin bowling alley. In the back she saw the green polish that she and Katelyn had used in eighth grade when they each bought bottles and decided to glam up for St. Patrick’s Day. The color was more evergreen than kelly. The memory brought a genuine smile to her face as she turned the Rimmel London bottle in her hands. The color was called Envy.
Tears came to Starla’s crystal-blue eyes, brought on by a mix of regret, sorrow, and guilt.
I’m so sorry, Katie, she said to herself. I wish you knew that.
And finally, not far away, one person got online and started deleting the contents of a file folder marked katelyn. Inside were copies of e-mails, messages, and photographs that had meant to trap and hurt the girl. Each item had been designed as payback.
Delete.
Delete.
Delete.
chapter 5
IT WAS THE DESTINY OF A PLACE LIKE PORT GAMBLE. It snowed hard after Christmas. The land management company that kept the town in pristine and marketable form would have offered up a virgin (if there was one handy, that is) to have a little snow sprinkle the town the week before the holidays when it had its annual old-fashioned Christmas celebration, “In the St. Nick of Time.” But no such luck. It had been cold, wet, and rainy. When the snow finally came, it dumped five inches—a blizzard by western Washington standards. If school had been in session, it easily would have been canceled.
Kids in the area were annoyed about the timing of it all as well. Snow was no good to them if it didn’t mean a snow day or two. They were already on vacation. It was an utter waste of an arctic blast.
Hayley and Taylor trudged through the snow to hang out with Beth Lee for the afternoon. Beth and her boyfriend, Zander Tomlinson, had broken up the day before Christmas and, with Katelyn Berkley’s unexpected death, the topic outside of rampant text messages had been tabled.
“I had no choice but to drop him,” Beth told them, elaborating on her text message: DUMPED Z. DEETS L8R.
Hayley was the first to pounce. “What did you mean you dumped him? Clearly, you had a choice.”
Beth, who seemed fixated on a zit on her chin, didn’t look at the twins as she spoke. She sat on the floor in front of the fireplace with a mirror in her hand and a pair of tweezers in the other. “I found a really cute dress and I had to have it.”
“Yeah?” Taylor said, taking a seat on the Lees’ way-too-big-for-theroom brown velvet sectional in house number 25. “Go on.”
Beth tightened her chin and picked at her pimple. “I didn’t have any money left over. I knew he was going to get me something for Christmas and I didn’t have a thing to give him. So I dumped him. Called him from the mall and said I wasn’t feeling it anymore.”
Taylor shook her head. “You’re so not kidding? You dumped him because you spent your Christmas cash?”
Beth looked up. “Yeah. So what? I’d rather hurt him than look stupid or cheap.”
“Right,” Taylor said. “Looking cheap or selfish is way worse than hurting someone. He really liked you!”
Beth ignored the sarcasm and Hayley spoke up. “I hate to say it, but you’re acting like Starla, Beth.”
“I’ll take that as kind of a compliment,” she said.
“It wasn’t meant to be a positive reflection on you or the situation.”
“Whatever. Anyway, I heard something about her,” Beth said, changing the subject like she was baiting a hook.
Of course Starla Larsen-centric gossip was always good. She was the Port Gamble girl everyone love-hated.
Taylor leaned forward expectantly. “Are you gonna tell us or what? Just pop that disgusting zit already and spill it!”
“That’s so gross,” Beth said. “And kind of mean.” She waited a beat, watching the twins, measuring their interest in all she had to say. The hook had been set.
Another beat.
“Starla and Katelyn had a major falling out,” she finally said.
“How major?” Taylor asked.
“Big time. Before she died, Katelyn told her mother that she hated Starla and that she wished Starla was dead or something.”
This time Hayley pressed for more. Her father would have been proud. “How do you know she said that?”
Beth rotated the hand mirror to get a better look at herself. “I heard Mrs. Larsen and Mrs. Berkley talking a few weeks ago. They were in the store buying coffee or hairspray or whatever it is women of their age need to get through the day. Mrs. Larsen was defending Starla, saying that it had been a big misunderstanding. But Mrs. Berkley wasn’t having any of it.”
Beth stopped talking. Her face beamed with a satisfied grin. “Got it,” she said, as she held out her tweezers. “Popped and no nasty hole. Who wants something to eat?”
Hayley and Taylor, thoroughly grossed out by what they’d seen, shook their heads in unison.
“That’s it? Was there more?” Taylor asked, pushing.
“I really didn’t listen, Taylor,” Beth said, clearly ready to move on from the Starla/Katelyn drama. “I saw that new kid Eli there, and I was trying to get him to notice me.”
Taylor smiled to herself and looked at her sister. Despite Beth’s constant need to be aloof, pretending indifference all the time, she knew who was who. “Hay-Tay” had always been her way of pretending to put up a wall. So what if Beth was completely self-absorbed? She was also an astute judge of what was worth passing along and when. They liked her.
Besides, in Port Gamble there weren’t a lot of choices for the mantle of best friend.
“But, Beth, didn’t you really like Zander?” Hayley asked. “Of all your boyfriends, he seemed to stay in your good graces the longest.”
“And that’s no easy feat,” Taylor added.
Beth curled up on the couch. “Is this pick-on-me time or what?” “No, not at all,” Hayley said.
Beth shrugged a little. “Too bad. I like it when you tease me a little. Makes me feel kind of like I’m the third twin,” she said, pausing a beat. “The smart one. The pretty one.”
Both twins knew there was some truth to that. Not that Beth was prettier or smarter, but that Beth was sometimes lonely being an only child. They’d never known a moment when they hadn’t had each other.
“You can be whatever you want to be, Beth. But please, promise that next time you’ll pay attention when you’re in the vicinity of some good info.”
Beth smiled. “All right. And I’ll make sure that you’re two of the top ten people I’ll tell first.”
Hayley’s and Taylor’s phones buzzed.
“That must be Mom,” Hayley said. “She’s spamming us with mass texts.”
Taylor looked at the message from their mother and closed the phone. She looked a little upset, but she tried to hide it as she slid the phone back into her pocket.
“What’s up?” Beth asked, watching Hayley as she shut her phone with the same kind of reaction.
“A reporter found out that Katelyn was in the crash,” Hayley explained. “She’s writing a story about Katelyn, her death, and the crash.”
Again, the crash.
“Freak! Haven’t they milked that one for all it’s worth by now?” Beth asked.
“Not from this angle,” Taylor said. “Katelyn surviving the crash only to die now makes her death even sadder.”
Inside, she could feel her heart rate escalate. The idea of reliving the crash, talking about it, and having others talk about it again made her feel sick to her stomach too. It was funny how the word crash could have that strange effect on her. It didn’t have to be the crash. Just any crash. It wasn’t because the memories of what happened were so awful to relive.
It was because neither she nor her sister had any recollections whatsoever of what happened that rainy afternoon all those years ago.
Not a single one.
