Shocking True Story

by Gregg Olsen

  “She's mine,” she told me the last time I saw her. “That's my baby they're trying to take away from me! What kind of mother would give up her baby?”

  “Your baby will be thirty when you get out,” I reminded her. “Maybe by letting her go, you'll be giving her more than if you kept her?”

  Janet didn't agree. Deke had fixed up an old swing set he bought at a yard sale for Lindy. He didn't understand that the little girl wouldn't be swinging at his place anytime soon.

  Neither one of them still got it.

  Sadly, the dumbest of the bunch was the greatest victim. His life ruined over the promise of a Las Vegas wedding, his mother dead because of a disturbed young woman. Danny Parker went from bad to worse to tragic. Danny was killed two days before Christmas in a prison brawl over an extra serving of tater tots. Danny had wanted more than his share, and was too naive or stupid to know that the fellow with the plastic gloves dishing out the potatoes was a lifer in prison on a double murder conviction. Danny reached into the steel tray of the potatoes and grabbed an extra handful. The server swatted him with a spatula and the rest of the debacle made NBC Nightly News two nights in a row.

  Danny's father Dwight Parker had his final limb amputated—his left arm. His depression over his wife's murder was unabated by a settlement with Weasel-Die, the source of the poison that weakened June Parker to the point of submission to the Ginsu knife-wielding Jett Carter. Now in a Timberlake nursing home that smells of Lysol and lavender sachets, Mr. Parker spends his days looking at the television. He does not understand that his son is dead. He thinks Danny's at summer camp.

  Anna Cameron, who had hounded my family for months with hang up calls and threats, pleaded no contest to phone harassment and lost her job with the school district. Last I heard, she was working at the Green Grasshopper café, where she was named waitress of the month on two different occasions (February and March).

  And finally, the others. The hangers-on. Those who were not involved in the action of the story, but who nevertheless were a part of it. At least, not in the way I had conceived Shocking True Story.

  The administrator at Riverstone received an anonymous tip that their top PR person, Muriel Constantine, was selling access to the inmates to the National Enquirer and Inside Edition. Muriel denied it, but her new BMW was a dead giveaway. No one earning what she supposedly took from her job could afford that kind of a car—and eat, too.

  Rita Adams's talk show was dropped by her syndicator when a wave of guest-and-audience-friendly shows swept on American television. After her show's cancellation, Rita ventured into talk radio with an ill-advised personal advice program, Ask Rita. It lasted fewer than two months. No one, it seemed, gave a hoot about asking Rita much of anything. The woman who gave me a double dose of my own medicine dropped out of sight for awhile only to resurface when she was tagged for a supporting role in Where Everyone Knows Your Name—The Cheers Movie.

  Martin Raines is still plugging along in law enforcement at the Pierce County Sheriff's Department. He made sergeant six months after the Parker murder case was closed when it was determined that Jett Carter, in fact, had acted alone. We see each other every three weeks or so and he keeps telling me he's going to work on a book about his experiences. I hate to encourage him or dissuade him.

  He'll end up like me or Wanda-Lou. I don't even know which would bother me more.

  Hollywood producer Monica Maleng came crawling back after Shocking True Story was sold, but I had signed that production deal with Silver Screen.

  “Too bad,” she told me. “We were talking series at the network. I pitched the idea over lunch at The Ivy...a kind of Murder, He Wrote concept, but harder-edged and skewed a bit younger. They loved it enough to bat around the idea of a ten-show commitment. Ten freakin' shows is unheard of.”

  “Which network?” I asked.

  Monica hedged. “Can't say, though it doesn't matter. I've got a deal there and they won't even look at your story without me.”

  Monica had always been such a good friend. I wished someone would kill her so that I could write a true crime tribute in her honor.

  There was nothing to be done about Jeanne Morgan's murder (Fatal Fan or Dedicated to Death?). I couldn't very well tell the cops to dig up her remains and do a proper tox screen. They'd want to know how I knew. Specifically, they'd want to find the source of my information.

  So finally, that brings me to Jett Carter herself. In the weeks after she went over the bridge, a few things fell into place. Things that had meant nothing before. A phone call to the new Community Relations specialist at Riverstone confirmed Jett had not visited her sister and mother in prison. She couldn't. Because of her stay—incarceration, really—at Maplewood, she was ineligible for prison visits. Those days when she showed up at our doorstep in Port Gamble, dressed inappropriately for a prison visit, should have been been a clue. The only contact between Jett and Connie and Janet had been over the phone. I remembered one time going to Riverstone for an interview and scanning the pages of the visitor log and not finding her name. I thought nothing of it at the time.

  I also recalled how Connie said she was unfamiliar with one of the characters in one of my better books. She, in fact, hadn't read anything I had written. Jett had told me that her mom had read my entire list. Yet, it was Jett who had my books heaped at her bedside.

  Jett's body was never recovered from the swift waters under the bridge. Never popped to the surface of Puget Sound like a cork, like some suicides do. Never washed ashore. Never caught in the net of a fisherman. Never. Never found.

  In quiet tones, when we're alone, my family now talks about Jett and that cold night on the bridge, and I suppose we always will. Some things leave marks so indelible that time will never fade them from memory or remove them from the endless queue of discussion. Jett Carter, I am certain, is one of those topics.

  Whenever I approach the moon-scraping span of the Narrows Bridge, my knuckles still turn white as blackboard chalk. I try to fight the impulse to clamp on the wheel, but I can't help it. I still keep my eyes focused straight in front of me, never looking to the side at the water below or the boats cutting through the choppy blue of the channel. I am an expert at averting my eyes. I never look at the spot where the young woman went over the green-painted railing, though I sense its presence like a dawdling dread deep in the pit of my stomach. And, always, as I drive TRUCRYM across, a song runs through my mind like a clunky old, cassette tape player stuck on Play. It's an oldie by Jett Carter's namesake, the tough chick queen of black leather attitude herself.

  Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for Miss Joan Jett! She doesn’t give a damn about her bad reputation.

  And that’s just how I feel too. In fact, I kind of like it.

  Joan Jett - Bad Reputation

  — END —

  ENVY

  Gregg Olsen

  CHAPTER 1

  WATER GUSHED OUT OF THE CORRODED FAUCET into the chipped, porcelain tub, pooling at the bottom with a few tangled strands of long, brown hair. The water was easily 120 degrees—so hot that Katelyn Berkley could hardly stand to dip her painted green toenails into it. The scalding water instantly turned her pale skin mottled shades of crimson. Perched on the edge of the tub with her right leg dangling in the water, Katelyn smiled. It was a hurt that felt good.

  At fifteen, Katelyn knew something about hurt.

  Promises had been made…and broken. Things change. People let you down—even those closest to you. Promises, she realized, were very, very hard to keep.

  A blast of icy air blew in from her open bedroom window, the silver razor blade next to the half-empty bottle of Tea Tree shampoo glinted, beckoning her. Katelyn fantasized about taking control of the situation—of her pitiful excuse for a life—the only way she could.

  She looked in the full-length mirror across the room. The glass was starting to fog as the steam billowed from the tub’s rippling surface, but she could see that her eyes were red. There wasn’
t enough Smashbox on earth to cover the splotches that came with her tears.

  “Merry Christmas, loser,” she said.

  She pulled inside of herself, into that place where there was only a little relief.

  The bathtub was nearly full. Steaming. Just waiting.

  Katelyn had no idea that, not far away, someone else was doing the exact same thing—just waiting for the right time to make a move.

  As fresh tears rolled down her cheeks, Katelyn took off the rest of her clothes, threw them on the floor, and plunged herself into the tub

  Downstairs, Her mother, Sandra, stood in the kitchen and poked at the congealing remains of a prime rib roast. She yanked at her blue sweater as she pulled it tighter on her shoulders and fumed. She was cold and mad. Mad and cold. She searched her kitchen counters for the espresso maker.

  Where is it?

  Sandra had a bottle of Bacardi spiced rum at the ready and a small pitcher of eggnog that she wanted to foam. It would be the last time she took a drink for the rest of the year. The promise was a feeble one, like many of Sandra’s. There was only a week left until the New Year. All night Sandra had been watching the bottle’s amber liquid drop like the thermometer outside the frost-etched window—single paned because the Berkleys’ was a historic home and could not be altered.

  Last drink. Promise. Where is that machine?

  Her parents, Nancy and Paul, had finally left after their holiday visit, and Sandra needed the calming effect of the alcohol. They always dropped a bomb at every social occasion, and the one they had offered up that evening was a doozy, even by their standards. They’d rescinded their promise to fund Katelyn’s college expenses, a promise made when their granddaughter was born. That night at dinner, Nancy had let it slip that they were no longer in the position to do so.

  “Sandra, my kitchen counters were Corian for goodness sake. I deserved granite. And, well, one thing led to another. A $10,000 remodel, you know, kind of ballooned into that $100,000 new wing. I really do love it. I know you will too.”

  Katelyn, suddenly in need of better grades, stellar athleticism, or richer parents, had left the table in tears and mouthed to her mother behind her grandmother’s back, “I hate her.”

  “Me too, Katie,” Sandra had said.

  “What?” Nancy asked.

  “Just telling Katelyn I love her too.”

  Sandra had acted as though everything was fine, the way that moms sometimes do. But inside she seethed. Her husband, Harper, had left just after dinner to check on a faulty freezer at the Timberline restaurant they owned next door.

  Every single day, even on Christmas, Harper has to find a reason to go to work.

  “Katelyn?” she called up the narrow wooden staircase that led to the second-floor bedrooms. “Have you seen the espresso machine?”

  There was no answer.

  Sandra returned to her outdated, worn-out kitchen and downed two fingers of spiced rum from a Disneyland shot glass. She screwed on the bottle cap, pretending she hadn’t had a drink. After all, it was almost like medicine.

  To steady my nerves. Yes, that’s it.

  Katelyn had been taking the espresso machine upstairs to make Americanos the week before Christmas. Sandra had scolded her for that.

  “It isn’t sanitary, Katie. We don’t bring food upstairs.”

  Katelyn had rolled her eyes at her mother. “Only a restaurant owner would call milk and sugar, ‘food,’ Mom.”

  “That isn’t the point.”

  “Yeah. I get it,” Katelyn said, feeling it unnecessary to point out that she’d been forced to have a food worker’s permit since she was nine and could recite safe temperatures for meat, poultry, milk, and vegetables in her sleep.

  The lights flickered and the breakers in the kitchen popped.

  Another reason to hate this old house, even if it does have an extra upstairs bathroom.

  Sandra started up the darkened stairs and made her way down the hallway. She could hear the sound of water running in the bathroom.

  She called out to Katelyn and knocked on her bedroom door.

  No answer.

  Sandra twisted the knob and, at once, a wall of icy air blasted her face. Katelyn had left the window open. The lights were out, too. Sandra flipped the switch up and down more times than she needed to, to prove the obvious. The room stayed dark.

  Lights from the neighbor’s house next door spilled onto the wooden floor.

  Sandra gripped the sill and pulled the window closed, shaking her head at her daughter’s escalating carelessness. It had to be forty degrees in that room. It would take all night to warm it up. She wondered how any teenager managed to survive to adulthood.

  “Katelyn Melissa, you’re going to catch a cold!”

  Sandra walked past the unmade bed—the one that looked good only on Sundays when she changed the sheets. Katelyn’s jeans and black Penney’s top—a Marc Jacobs knockoff—were heaped on the floor.

  What a colossal mess.

  The bathroom door was open a sliver and Sandra, still freezing, pushed it aside. Aromatherapy candles flickered.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked, her tone harsh and demanding.

  Katelyn wasn’t thinking at all.

  The fifteen-year-old was slumped over the edge of the old clawfoot tub, her eyes tiny shards of broken glass, her expression void of anything. Her long, wet hair dripped onto the floor.

  Instinct took over and Sandra lunged in the direction of her daughter, slipping on the wet floor and falling. As she reached for the rim of the tub, she yelled, “I could have broken my neck! What’s going on with you?”

  No answer, to a very stupid question.

  Sandra, her heart racing and the rum now gnawing at the walls of her stomach, tried to steady herself in the candlelight. She tasted blood. Her own. She’d cut her lip when she’d fallen, and several red drops trickled to the floor. She felt tears, fear, and panic as she looked at Katelyn in the faint candlelight. Her lifeless daughter. It was so very hard to see with the lights out. Katelyn’s dark-brown hair, highlighted by a home kit, hung limp, curling over the edge of the tub. One arm was askew, as if flailing at something unseen.

  The other was hidden in the sudsy water.

  “Katie. Katie. Katie!” With each repetition of her daughter’s name, Sandra’s voice grew louder. By the third utterance, it was a scream that probably could be heard all over Port Gamble.

  Katelyn Melissa Berkley, just fifteen, was dead.

  “It can’t be,” Sandra said, tears now streaming down her face. She was woozy. Sick. Scared. She wanted to call for Harper, but she knew he was gone. She was alone in the house where the unthinkable had occurred. She slipped again as she pulled at Katelyn’s shoulders, white where the cold air had cooled them, pinkish in the still hot bathwater. Two-tone. Like a strawberry dipped in white chocolate.

  Katelyn had loved white chocolate. Even though Sandra had insisted it wasn’t really chocolate at all.

  “Baby, what happened?” Instinctively, Sandra turned off the slowly rising water. “Tell me you’re going to be all right!”

  At first, Sandra heard dead silence. Then the quiet drip, drip, drip of the tub’s leaky faucet. There was no answer to her question. There never could be. Never again.

  Sandra shook her daughter violently, a reflex that she hadn’t had since Katelyn was a little girl and had lied about something so inconsequential that the terrified mother couldn’t retrieve the full memory of what had made her so angry.

  As she spun around to go for a phone, Sandra Berkley noticed there was something else in the tub. It was hard to see. It was so dark in that bathroom. Through her thickening veil of tears, she leaned over and scooted the suds away.

  The mini espresso machine.

  Her eyes followed the electrical cord. Like a cobra that had recoiled in to strike, the plug sat upright, still firmly snug in the wall outlet at the side of the tub.

  In small towns like Port Gamble, Washington, news travels
fast. 4G fast. Within moments of the reverberating echoes of Sandra Berkley’s anguished screams, residents had begun to gather outside the tidy red house with white trim and pineapple shutters. Christmas lights of white, green, and red sparkled in the icy night air. A passerby might have mistaken the gathering for a large group of carolers.

  Port Gamble was that kind of place. At least, it tried to be.

  An ambulance siren wailed down the highway from Kingston, growing louder with each second.

  That the teenager had died was known by everyone. What exactly happened, no one was certain.

  Someone in the crowd whispered that Katelyn had fallen in the tub and split her head open. Another suggested that the girl had “issues” of some sort and taken her own life.

  “Maybe she offed herself? Kids do that a lot these days. You know, one final grasp for attention.”

  “I dunno. She didn’t seem the type.”

  “Kids are hard to read.”

  “True enough, but even so, I don’t think she was the kind of girl who would hurt herself.”

  Scenes of sudden tragedy have their macabre pecking order when it comes to who stands where. Closest to the doorway were those who knew and loved the dead girl: her mother, father, a cousin or two. In the next wave were the friends, the church pastor, and a police deputy, who was there to make sure that the scene stayed orderly. Beyond that were casual acquaintances, neighbors, even the occasional lookie loo who was on the scene because it was better than a rerun of one of the various incarnations of Real Housewives.

  There was a time when Hayley and Taylor Ryan might have been in the grouping closest to the Berkleys’ front door. Though they were no longer that close, the twins had grown up with Katelyn. As it often seems to be, middle school became the great divider. What had once been a deep bond shared by three girls had been shattered by jealousy and the petty gossip that predictably turns friends into enemies.

  What happened among the trio was nothing that couldn’t have faded by the end of high school. The girls could have reclaimed the friendship they’d had back in the days when they used to joke about Colton James’s stupid sports T-shirts, which he wore every single day in the fifth grade.