Envy (19 page)

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.

Katelyn hated to admit it, but it was the truth.

KATIEBUG:
NO $$$.

CULLANT:
GET SOME.

She hesitated only a moment.

KATIEBUG:
WHERE?

And then the words that would motivate her to do the unthinkable:

CULLANT:
FIGURE IT OUT, BABE.

chapter 27

THE WOOD-FIRED PIZZERIA in Poulsbo was one of those strange restaurants in that its appearance didn’t match its cuisine—like a sushi bar in a log cabin. The tiny building on Front Street was like a lot of the themed edifices there, a Norwegian-style facade with stucco and exposed beams. The Ryans didn’t care how the restaurant looked as long as the pizza was good, which, thankfully, it usually was.

The outing was supposed to help cheer everyone up. Hedda still had not returned, and Valerie in particular thought a change of scenery was in order. However, Hedda was just one item on the twins’ growing list of worries.

Hayley texted Taylor in the car on the way over.

HAYLEY:
YOU BRING IT UP.

TAYLOR:
CAN’T U?

Kevin, Valerie, and Hayley shared the spicy Portuguese sausage, the Linguica, while vegetarian flip-flopper Taylor ordered a small Herbivore. While they waited for the pizzas to bake, all melty and crispy in the woodfired oven, Kevin and Valerie talked about the events of the day over a couple of beers. Ordinarily the girls didn’t mind hearing such updates. Their mother was very discreet about the patients at the institution. She never mentioned a name or any specifics that anyone could use to positively identify who it was she was talking about. She dropped a few words, however, that usually ensured that the interest meter was going at full speed.

“A screamer today stabbed a student nurse with a plastic fork,” she said. “Other than that it was the same crazy, just a different day.”

Kevin set down his beer and surveyed the quiet restaurant. A couple two tables away sat side-by-side, a seating arrangement that was meant to be cozy but always looked like another party had stood them up.

“Mine wasn’t much better,” he said. “Except my crazy is my editor who thinks my book is going to be done on time. Still can’t get the perp to give me an interview. Now she wants the questions in advance.”

“You’ll charm your way around that,” Valerie said. “You always do.”

With her sister engrossed in texting Colton, Taylor saw a break in the conversation and she went for it.

“Mom, Dad, we need to talk about something.” Her tone came off as a little strange and she worried for a second that her parents would think she was going to drop some major bomb on them—that she was pregnant, gay, or both.

“What is it?” Valerie asked, clearly anxious as she reached for her drink.

Kevin didn’t say a word. This was Valerie’s territory.

“Wait, it isn’t anything about me or Hayley.”

Both parents deflated a little and relaxed in their chairs.

“Of course not,” Kevin said. “Didn’t think anything was up, not at all.”

Our parents are such dorks! Cool sometimes, but dorks!
Taylor thought.

“We need your help. We think—” Taylor said, noticing that Hayley had finally put down her phone. She thought Hayley’s thumbs must need a good soaking after they’d had such a workout texting. “We think,” she repeated, “it’s really only a hunch …”

Kevin narrowed his focus on the girls, looking at one, then the other, ping-pong style. “What is it?”

It popped into Hayley’s mind right then that they could say Katelyn was gay and pregnant, just as a way of getting out of a conversation that didn’t seem to be going as they’d planned. But she didn’t.

Taylor took up the slack. “Dad, Mom, we think that someone was playing Katelyn. Messing with her. Mindf—” She wisely cut herself short.

The waiter brought their pies and the family sat in silence for a beat.

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” Valerie said. She wasn’t mad, but a slight reprimand went with the business of being the mother of a teenager. In her case, times two.

“I didn’t say the entire word,” Taylor said, passing napkins around the table.

“You have a better vocabulary than that,” Valerie said.

Taylor nodded emphatically. “Someone was scamming her, playing her.”

“So what’s up with Katelyn, besides the fact that she’s dead?” Kevin asked, a remark far more flippant than he’d meant it to be.

Valerie shot him a look, and then looked over at her girls. “Tell us. We’re listening.”

Taylor told them about the note she’d found in Katelyn’s coat, and how she and Hayley had gone to see Starla and what she’d said about Katelyn’s supposed rendezvous in Seattle with her mystery boyfriend.

“You don’t think there was a boyfriend at all,” Kevin said.

“No, we don’t,” Taylor confirmed, picking at the crust of her slice.

“I think she thought she had one,” Hayley added.

Taylor nodded emphatically. “Someone was playing her.”

Kevin swallowed a big bite of pizza. He’d been taking in the conversation, watching his girls and wife as they circled around what had happened to Katelyn and, if, just if, there was some reason behind it. He was a little skeptical.

“All right, I know we run on feelings around here quite a bit, but what proof do you have that something like that was going on?”

“We don’t have any proof,” Hayley said. “I mean none that would hold up in court, if that’s what you’re asking.”

It was kind of a dig, but he let it slide.

“If you think someone had been pushing her, abusing her,” he said, “then we need to know who. And we need proof.”

“Not everything has to end up in court,” Valerie said, eyeing her husband. She’d have preferred a more supportive approach with the girls.

“Who would play a cruel game like that?” he asked.

Neither girl had an answer.

“No idea,” Taylor said.

“But we want to find out. It isn’t right, Dad,” Hayley added.

He nodded.

No, it wasn’t.

“But you need proof. Something more than a feeling,” he said.

Neither girl said so, but both knew that the answer to their father’s challenge rested back with Starla Larsen. She had been close to Katelyn and she had to know what Katelyn’s state of mind was at the time of her death. She’d also be the best bet for knowing the source of the taunts, but if she knew, she wasn’t talking. Indeed, she’d blown them off at the pink beanbag interrogation in her bedroom.

Just as the family was leaving, Kevin excused himself to talk to a pretty young woman with red hair who’d been sipping wine of the same hue all night at another table.

“A fan,” he said, exchanging looks with Valerie. “Give me a minute.”

Valerie and the girls headed out the door. As they crossed the parking lot, Taylor caught a glimpse of her dad and the woman through the restaurant’s window.

Kevin was animated, but not in a happy way. He was moving his hands to make a point. Even from that distance, Taylor could see the vein that popped in his temple whenever he was angry. It looked like he was scolding the young woman. She didn’t seem the least bit put off by whatever he was saying.

When he returned to the car, he had a worried look on his face.

“What was that about, Dad?” Taylor asked.

Kevin exhaled—a sure sign that he was angry—and turned the key to start the car.

“Nothing,” he said.

“You look really upset,” Taylor said.

“People always expect you to give them a free book, and when you don’t, they get mad,” he said.

Valerie exchanged a quick look with Kevin and turned on the car radio, a not-so-subtle signal that the conversation was over.

From their places in the backseat, Hayley turned to Taylor, pointed to her phone, and started to text.

HAYLEY:
WHO WAS DAD TALKING 2?

TAYLOR:
THAT WZ NO FAN. 2 YOUNG 4 DAD’S BKS. WNDR WAT PISSED HIM OFF SO MUCH?

chapter 28

THE WORDS CHURNED IN HER HEAD as Taylor lay in her bed staring into the darkness of her tiny bedroom. She knew that whatever she and her sister had hoped to find in the letters that came to her underwater was still there to be unscrambled. The letters by themselves were absolutely correct. It was the order that was all wrong. Maybe they’d tried too hard to make sense of them? Some things were better if they didn’t push so hard.

If there was a Laura Folk, for example, she surely never lived in Port Gamble.

“Hayley,” she whispered into the hole in the wall. “You awake?”

No answer.

“Are you up?”

Hayley murmured something about needing to get some sleep. “Big test tomorrow,” she mumbled.

“Going to get the Scrabble.”

“Why can’t you just use an app?”

Taylor allowed a slight smile. Her sister was off in slumberland if she thought that even for a minute. “Doesn’t work like that. Go back to sleep.”

“All right. Good night.”

Taylor grabbed her favorite fuzzy yellow robe, stuck her feet into her fleece-lined slippers, and padded down the hall. She could hear her dad snoring and the insufferable wall clock ticking. It was after 1:00 a.m. Even though they were twins, Taylor didn’t require as much sleep as her sister. She was a night owl. The darkness, the calming quiet, the sense of being alone resonated in her soul in a way that even Hayley didn’t understand. From the base of the staircase, she looked out the frontdoor window at the bay.

The water was still, glass, and very sad.

Taylor conjured up some memories of Katelyn and the last time she had seen her. They were riding the bus home the Friday before the holiday break. Katelyn sat in the front, her head leaning against the fogged-up window. In the din of the kids yammering about their holiday plans, Taylor remembered how she had tried to say hello to Katelyn but the other kids pushed her past her seat. They had locked eyes for only a second and Katelyn managed a smile.

A sad smile, Taylor remembered just then, though she wondered if her memory had been tainted by what happened on Christmas night. Her father told her that nothing turns a victim into a saint faster than his or her untimely and unexpected demise. After a crime took place, good and evil were always rendered in bold strokes.