by Gregg Olsen
FROM: Savannah Osteen
TO: UW Language Department Twin A seems slightly more dominant than her sister, Twin B. On at least two occasions Twin A cut off Twin B when she was speaking in the language that they’d developed. In addition, Twin A was somewhat aggressive with the evaluator. A second session will take that into consideration and will mitigate any potential conflict by separating the sisters during the evaluation. Keeping them apart is an optimal protocol for this particular case.
Valerie and Kevin never really got a sense for how the girls performed in relation to other early talkers in the study. A third session was scheduled for about three weeks after the second. Since this one called for the evaluator to join the family for a dinner-time observation, Valerie made her famous planked salmon with balsamic vinegar and shallots. She even sprang for a better bottle of wine—a California Chardonnay—than she would have if she and Kevin were dining alone.
Evaluator Savannah Osteen, however, never showed. She didn’t even call to say she wasn’t able to make it to the taping session. Port Gamble often felt like the ends of the earth for those who lived there or those who had to come and visit, but honestly, everyone knew phone service worked just fine there.
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 tee
nage 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.
