Envy (10 page)

The water shut out all of her senses. No sound. No air upon her face. No sight. Just the stillness of a blanket of hot water. Taylor let it all go. She had been thinking of Katelyn all day, and her sister had brought them a bit closer to finding out what had happened. That evening, the water, the sensory deprivation, the forced concentration held the answer to questions that she and Hayley had asked over and over since their visit to the Berkley house.

What happened to Katelyn?

LIKE THE FLOOD OF IMAGES that sometimes came to Hayley through touch, what transpired underwater with Taylor couldn’t be explained—at least not to anyone’s satisfaction. Not that either of the twins ever tried to come up with the reasons for it or how they discovered it. In truth, they really weren’t sure of its origin. It just happened, like the random way things happen in nature.

All on their own.

They talked about it through their bedroom outlet intercom, but only occasionally, and always with great respect—respect that came from the fear of whatever it meant, whatever was happening to them.

Or where it came from.

Sometimes Taylor practiced immersions, but with the discretion that comes with keeping something secret. One time, Valerie came in and found Taylor floating under the surface of the bathtub, and her mother had screamed.

“Are you okay? What are you doing?”

The words came at the girl with a rifle-shot of panic that startled her so much, it had almost made Taylor ashamed of being naked.

Now, she lay perfectly still and dropped below the surface. Quiet. Focused. A surge of feelings that somehow translated into images emerged. What visual cues came at her were never from a memory of her own. These memories belonged to others. Sometimes they came in a steady stream, like swirling orbs linked up in a video shooting gallery game. They moved quickly. So fast, in fact, that she experienced a kind of upper neck pain akin to whiplash. Looking, following, trying to see whatever it was.

Other times the images were more static, without a sense of urgency.

Five seconds into the immersion.

Though her eyes were closed, Taylor felt tears underneath her eyelids. In front of her she saw a horizontal box of white light. Along the left side were tiny rows of black.

Ants on an envelope? That didn’t make sense at all.

Twenty seconds passed.

She turned her head in the water and imagined her eyes open, staring hard at the white block in front of her. The ants had moved. In fact, the ants were moving across the blank field, shifting in and out of focus.

What is it?

Forty-five seconds elapsed.

Her lungs were beginning to strain a little. It had been a long time since she’d held her breath for a minute or more.

I’m not ready to stop
, she thought.
And just what are those nasty ants doing?

Her hands floated toward the surface, a reflex to grab onto the edge of the tub and pull herself out. Taylor ignored the impulse and willed her body to stay just where it was.

A minute and fifteen seconds.

They weren’t ants, but letters.

Okay
, Taylor thought,
what are they saying?

Seven words spun by and she grabbed at them. The first five were easy, but she kept failing on the last two.

LEWD

HOT ROD

KOALA

FURL

Three minutes underwater.
Taylor’s lungs were going to explode. She strained as hard as she ever had.

I’m not giving up
, she thought as she fought the physical compulsion to rise up and breathe.
Katelyn’s dead. She’s got a messed-up family. She didn’t need to die. I need that last part of the message. She wants me to have the words! Give me those words, Katelyn!

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 14

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, powderblue 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 Internetthat, 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 Kinect 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.”

“We’ll
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 15

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.