Closer Than Blood

book that she’d been working on—with renewed vigor—since the Seattle P-I shuttered its newsroom after more than a century of being the “newspaperman’s newspaper.” She’d dreamed that a book would get her out of the endeavor that was killing her with each fifty-word nugget she had to write. She was a “content provider” for a number of travel websites. She was literally writing for food, each word, one bite at a time. On a good day she pounded out twenty-five of the inane little travel tips that the freelance employer sought. Everything from how many mint sprigs and limes should be muddled in a mojito to the best fish tacos in Los Cabos. She hated the whole lot of what she was doing, but reporters like her had been shoved out the door in an age that no longer seemed to value context, nuance, and depth. Everything was free, and fast. Even the news. Her cell phone rang and her eyes darted to the tiny screen, but she did not recognize the number. It was too early for a source to phone. Neither was it the number for one of the other reporters who’d regularly called to commiserate about their bleak futures in a post-newspaper world. A moment later, the caller tried a second time. It must be urgent, she thought. She clapped the phone to her ear.

“Hello?”

“Lainie?” The voice was a whisper.

“Yes, this is Lainie O’Neal,” she said. A second of silence and the sound of a deep breath.

“Lainie, it’s me. Your sister.” Lainie no longer needed the early morning jolt of a mud-thick French roast coffee from Starbucks. The words were a cattle prod at her heart.

“Tori?” Silence.

“Tori? Is that you?” Another hesitation on the line.

“I’m in the hospital. I’ve been hurt. I need you.”

“Where?”

“Tacoma. I’ve been shot.”

“Oh, wow, but no, where are you?”

“St. Joe’s.” Lainie felt her adrenaline surge, slowly, then a tidal wave. She needed more information. She had no idea in which city her sister resided. They were twins, but they hadn’t spoken in years. Just how many, Lainie didn’t know. She refused to count the number anymore. It hurt too much.

“What happened?”

“An intruder last night. Late. I was shot. My husband was killed.” Husband? Lainie had no idea that Tori had married again.

“Will you come? I need your help.” Again, an awkward silence, the kind that invites the person waiting to hear to press the phone tighter to her ear.

“They’re whispering about me . . . I think they think I did this to myself,” Tori said.

“To him.”

“I’ll be there,” Lainie said.

“Right away.”

“No. Not now. Wait a day or two. I’ll be okay in the hospital. I’ll let you know when to come.”

“Are you sure? I can come visit you now.”

“No. Good-bye.” Lainie hung up and looked across the room at a photograph of two little girls posing in leotards on a balance beam. Their hair was blond, eyes blue. Everything about them was the same, but in reverse. Like looking into a mirror. Lainie’s hair parted naturally on the left side of her face, Tori’s on the right. Lainie’s upper left lip had a mole. Tori had had hers—on the right side—removed when she was fourteen. Their mother dressed them alike until fourth grade, when both girls rightly rebelled. No one could tell them apart. They were so close. So seemingly identical. Yet they were not the same. Not by a mile. She wondered about her sister living in Tacoma, too. An encounter with an old classmate the previous fall came to mind.

Lainie O’Neal felt a tap on her shoulder as she stood in line at a Queen Anne drycleaner. Her mind was on her job-hunting suit and the stuffed-mushroom stain from September’s “networking” meeting for displaced media professionals. She turned around to a somewhat familiar face.

“Lainie, it’s me. Deirdre Jericho, now Landers, from South Kitsap.” Lainie paused as the synapses fired and the memory returned. Fourteen years ago, Dee Dee was a sullen girl with blue streaks in her brunette hair and a penchant for scoop-neck tops that dropped a little low for South Kitsap dress codes. Except for the disappearance of those blue streaks, she hadn’t changed all that much.

“Oh, yes, Dee Dee! How are you?”

“Better than last time I saw you,” she said. Lainie nodded.

“Back in high school,” she said.

“It has been a long time.”

“No, not then. In Tacoma at the bar in El Gaucho. You were there with your boyfriend and you, well, you acted like you didn’t know me.” Lainie shook her head.

“I’ve never been to El Gaucho,” she said.

“It was you. I’m pretty sure. You treated me like a total bitch.”

“Honestly, Dee Dee, I never would have done that.” Dee Dee smiled.

“That’s what I thought.” Dee Dee Jericho had come in to South when the navy transferred her dad, a commander, in the beginning of her senior year of high school. She barely made an impression on anyone.

Kendall Stark knew she’d loathe the endeavor almost from the moment she agreed to do it. She would have rather been back home burning yard waste with Steven and Cody. In fact, she would rather be poking around the most gelatinous decomposing body than working on her South Kitsap High School class reunion committee during lunch. It was a quagmire of hurt feelings, unfinished business, and the kind of tedium that comes with agreeing on even the minutest of details. The news that one of their old classmates was involved in a shooting made all of it seem more trivial. Who cares about what color the napkins are? The question was rhetorical, of course. Penny Salazar’s steely stare and finger tapping on a planning binder said everything about what she thought commanded supreme importance.

“Look, people,” said Penny, who was a sawed-off, square-shouldered brunette and ran the Port Orchard deli that had been the committee’s meeting place since the first of the year, “details are what people remember when they remember a special event.” Kendall looked at the other committee member, Adam Canfield. Adam had always been a sensible ally, from high school on the drama team to the Kitsap Cutter serial-killer investigation when he supplied some key evidence from his Bay Street collectibles shop. He had texted Kendall with the news that Tori had been shot, but he and Kendall agreed not to mention it. Penny could find out about it in the Lighthouse. She was an incorrigible gossip. Adam tugged at his gray lamb’s-wool cardigan.

“Yes, details,” he said.

“I’m glad we approved maroon and white, with maroon the accent.” Adam swallowed the last of his Diet Coke and waited for Penny to disagree. She’d made it a point to disagree with anyone’s idea that didn’t mirror her own plan for the fifteen-year reunion. She’d even come up with a theme: Fifteen Minutes of Fame. Fifteen Minutes of Blame, Adam had thought before acquiescing to Penny’s ill-conceived plan.

“But shouldn’t the napkin design have been the other way around? I mean, our cheer uniforms weren’t white. We’d have looked like nurses if they had been.” It was Penny again, once more using the opportunity to remind the group that she’d been a cheerleader.

“Lainie texted me,” Adam said, not surprisingly, unable to hold his tongue.

“She’s not going to make it to the meeting.”

“The ferry?” Penny was referring to the most common excuses people employed when they gave their regrets about missing an event, party, or appointment on the other side of Puget Sound from Seattle.

“No. She wanted me to tell you that her sister’s in some kind of trouble.” Penny’s eyes widened.

“Tori?” she said, taken aback by the mention of the name. Lainie’s sister hadn’t been heard from for years. Not by Lainie, not by anyone in Port Orchard. She’d vanished.

“What kind of trouble?” Penny asked. Adam looked anxiously at Kendall, who had stuck to her word. She didn’t want to say anything about Tori O’Neal. Penny reached for her binder and started writing something down. She looked up, satisfied, and smiled.

“Now we can invite Tori. I thought she’d dropped off the face of the earth. You know, another dead end. About half the class is a dead end one way or another.”