Closer Than Blood

hallway. She’d seen the way he’d looked at her. She could think of at least two million reasons why she was going to do what she must do. She thought of it as a test, a challenge to determine if she could still get the job done. She stripped off all her clothes and stood in her closet, facing a row of dresses. The black wouldn’t do. Neither would the white. But the red one, that one seemed perfect. Like the other two she considered, it was strapless. She slipped into the red dress, holding it close to her body as she walked into his room.

“Parker, will you zip me?” He looked up at her.

“Sure, hang on. I’m almost done.” She let her hand slip just a little so that from the boy’s vantage point on the bed he’d get a glimpse of her breast. It was a move that at once was both deliberate and devious.

“I don’t mind waiting,” she said, her voice soft.

“You’re so good at what you do. Keep playing, Parker.” By then, he’d stopped, of course. His eyes were fastened exactly where she wanted him to look. She didn’t say another word. She didn’t have to. The beginning was messy, awkward, and unfulfilling. But she never said so. That would ruin everything.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Seattle

Penny Salazar and Adam Canfield had been assigned the task of managing the incoming items for the Class of ’95’s Fifteen Minutes of Fame Auction. Adam knew that meant Penny would stake her claim as the “chairperson” of the event and “solely responsible” for making it a success. He was fine with that. It’s a bunch of crap anyway, he thought, as he surveyed the contents assembled in the hospitality manager’s office at the Gold Mountain Golf Club, the staging area for auction items.

“Awesome,” Penny said, pointing to a lacquered black box with a trio of white herons painted on its gleaming surface.

“This is going to bring in beaucoup bucks.” Adam pretended to agree, but he said softly, “If you have bad taste and twenty bucks, maybe.”

“Huh?”

“Love it, Penny,” he said.

“Love it.” She looked at him, not sure if he actually did love it. Adam was so hard for Penny to read. Adam knelt down to inspect the single item that caught his interest. It was a Victorian dollhouse that looked handcrafted in the way that suggested it could be pawned off as a piece of folk art. Folk art, the kitschier the better, appealed to Adam.

“I might bid on this myself,” he said.

“I didn’t know you still played with dolls.” He refused to take the bait.

“You’d be surprised, honey.” Penny shrugged and looked over a set of carnival-glass cat figurines that she thought she might bid on. Adam bent down and lifted the house.

“Wonder if there is a label here or if this thing is completely handmade.” When he scanned under the front porch he noticed the writing. It was written in red-brown.

“I know who killed Jason Reed.”

“Jesus, Penny, check this out.” He scratched it with the edge of a dime.

“It isn’t a red crayon. Something else.” Penny set down the glass cat and went over.

“That’s freaky,” she said, bending close to take a better look. Adam’s eyes met hers.

“I agree. But it’s more than that.” Penny stood.

“Just some kid saying something stupid. Mad at someone.” He shook his head and reached for his phone.

“I’m calling Kendall,” he said.

“She needs to see this.” Penny put her hand out and gently pushed the phone away from Adam’s ear.

“Wait a minute,” Penny said.

“We need the money for the auction. I overspent. We can’t have the cops involved here. They might confiscate this or something.” Adam ignored Penny and dialed Kendall. Of course she overspent. She ran the committee like she ran her life. Right into the ground. Fifteen Minutes of Lame, indeed.

Kendall Stark was running on fumes as she and Josh Anderson hovered over the dollhouse collected from the class reunion committee’s Adam and Penny. A phone call to the woman who’d donated the dollhouse for the fund- raiser revealed its chilling origin.

“My kids outgrew it, and we’re moving to a condo,” the woman said.

“I know that it was made by the prisoners at the reformatory. I never saw any writing on it.”

“Tori was there,” Kendall said as they turned the house on its side on the counter in the Kitsap County crime lab.

“Maybe she blabbed to someone there,” Josh said. Kendall prepared to swab the first letter of the message with leucomalachite green.

“We’ll have to send it out to the state crime lab for DNA testing,” she said.

“If it is blood,” Josh said. Almost instantaneously, the LMG turned the tip of the swab a pale green hue.

“It’s blood, all right,” she said, putting the swab into a tube and sealing it in a plastic bag. Next, she took photos of the text.

I KNOW WHO KILLED JASON REED.

“Written by a lefty,” he said, noting the smear and slant that came with each letter. Kendall nodded.

“The question is not only who wrote this, but when?”

“And why?” he asked. Kendall put the packet with the swab into an envelope and logged the date, her initials, and the case number for Jason Reed.

“Yes, why would someone write a message like this in the first place? Seems like a heavy burden,” she said, not wanting to say what was really on her mind. Not to Josh. Not to anyone. It was as if Jason were calling out to her.

Actually, it wasn’t fun to dream. Not when the dreams came at her like the most cunning stalker, through the darkness that swallowed every trace of their invasion before finding her under the covers. At first, Lainie O’Neal had begun to see insomnia as a gift, a respite from the dark dreams that ice-picked at her when sleep finally came. Doctors told her that her insomnia was something that she used as a defense mechanism, a response to real or perceived trauma. In one dream, the house in Port Orchard was very, very quiet. In her mind, Lainie thought that she and her sister would both select the phrase “quiet like a tomb.” That was when they still could joke about such things. The way that children sometimes do.

“Black makes you look thinner, you know,” Lainie said to Tori.

“Funny. I thought you were the fat twin.” Lainie spun around and looked in the mirror, her hand on her hip. She caught Tori’s gaze and flat lined her expression. Neither girl was fat. Both were lithe, blond, blue eyed, fine boned. They were petite for their age—fifteen—but there was nothing particularly fragile about them. The same could not be said for their mother—the reason they were dressing in black that morning. Vonnie O’Neal was an exceedingly tragic woman who’d suffered postpartum depression with the twins to such a severity, she never seemed to pull herself out of it. Having the twins was too much at once. More than she could bear. She once confided to a friend that her girls took her figure, stole her husband’s attention, and made her into “someone’s mother, nothing more.” She telegraphed her less-than-joyful take on motherhood with everything she did. No love was doled out without at least a sprinkling of resentment. For as long as they could remember, their mother had done nothing to give them much of a reason to love her. She slept most of the time. She abdicated most of the childrearing duties to a series of nannies and babysitters. She let her husband do all of the nurturing. Lainie put on a jacket for the ride to the memorial.

“Are you going to miss her?” she asked.

“A little,” Tori said, opening the bedroom door. They found their father at the kitchen table. His callused hands cradled his handsome face. Despite what she’d done and all he’d been through, it was obvious that Dex loved his wife.

“She was a fighter, girls, wasn’t she?” Dex said. Tori nodded.

“Yes, Daddy, she was. We were lucky to have her as long as we did.” Tori used the term “Daddy” as a way to endear her father to her. It was completely at odds with the way she talked about him behind his back. According to her, he was weak. He was not ambitious. He let a depressed woman chart the course of his