Envy

“Who was that?” Hayley asked as her father turned around.

“Reporter,” Kevin said.

“Why was she talking about Katelyn?”

“Looking for a story, that’s all.”

“Oh,” she said.

Kevin started toward the kitchen, but Hayley’s words stopped him like a rope of razor wire.

“When are you going to talk to us about the crash, Dad?”

He turned around, his heart beating faster and his face now flushed. “We’ve talked about it already.”

“Really, Dad? I still have questions about it,” Hayley said.

“Look,” he said, clearly not wanting to have another word about it with Hayley, Taylor, or probably anyone else, “can we just table it?”

Now Hayley’s red face signaled her own frustration. “Table it for how long? Are we not going to talk about it for the rest of our lives?”

Kevin refused to answer. Instead he put his hand up as if the act could really just push it all away. Dads all over the world thought they could win an argument with a teenage girl. Those dads were pretty stupid.

“Sorry, honey,” he said. “But not right now. Please don’t ask again.”

SOMETIMES GOOD NEEDED A HAND in dealing with evil. Both Taylor and Hayley knew that statement to be truer than the fact that their eyes were blue or that their dog, Hedda, a long-haired dachshund, was a bed hog of the highest order. They did wonder, however, if it had always been that way in the outside world. Sometimes it seemed that beyond the borders of Port Gamble, people were caught up in so much conflict, so much hate, incessant evil—whatever word a person would choose to call the ugly that was routinely done to each other.

The Ryan twins had a slightly warped front-row seat to evil and the criminal-justice system. As a little girl, their mom lived in a prison run by her father, and she now worked as a psychiatric nurse. Their dad made his living writing about murderers. What they unequivocally knew from their parents was that there were two kinds of evil: accidental and intended.

The twins, and especially Taylor, could empathize with the drunk driver in Seattle who staggered behind the wheel and plowed into a group of teenagers waiting to get into a dance club. Accidental evil might occasionally be forgiven; the driver had not killed on purpose. Plus, there was hope for the truly sorry.

However, the girls felt no mercy for those who perpetrated evil intentionally. Their souls were dark and always would be.

chapter 8

HAYLEY RYAN COULD FEEL A TWINGE OF PANIC as she turned into the alley that ran behind the houses on Olympian Avenue. She felt it in her bones. Her father always told her and her sister to listen carefully to what their hearts and minds might be telling them.

“There’s a reason your hair stands up on the back of your neck,” he had said, affecting his best Investigation Discovery voice, an octave deeper, but still Dad. “It’s a warning to be careful. Trust your feelings.”

“Hair standing up anywhere is gross, Dad,” Taylor said.

Kevin Ryan would not be denied his point. “Maybe so,” he replied. “But survivors of a serial killer are the ones who heed the feeling and act on it. Saving your life, Taylor, is never gross.”

Hayley smiled. It was a slightly tight grin, the kind meant to contain a more overt response, like an out-and- out laugh. She and her sister had grown up with a father who made his living telling the stories of the vilest things people do to others. In doing so, he never missed the opportunity to push advice on how to survive even the scariest, most dangerous situation.

“See that guy in the camo jacket over there?” he asked the twins one time when the family was shopping at Central Market in nearby Poulsbo. “Say he’s a serial killer and he corners you in this parking lot.”

Valerie rolled her eyes upward. “Why does everyone have to be a serial killer?”

Taylor piped up. “Because they’re the best, right, Dad?”

“Yes, the best,” Kevin said, nodding at what he knew was a tiny dig. “The best in terms of sales for books, but more important, they’re the best in making sure their victims are never left alive to tell their stories.”

“Let’s get back to the camo guy,” Hayley said, eager to continue the role-play. “What about him?”

Kevin lingered by the car door and spoke quietly, watching the kid with the carts, trying to keep his eye contact on his girls. Eye contact, he always said, was very, very important. “Say he helps you to your car and when you open the trunk he pushes you inside.”

“Easy,” Taylor said. “Jab his eyes out with the car keys.”

“I would scream as loud as I could,” Hayley said, sure that her response was the better of the two. After all, car keys might not be handy—especially if you’re a teenager and don’t have a car or even a learner’s permit.

Valerie shifted on her feet, eager to get going. “You shop somewhere else,” she said flatly.

Kevin made a face at Valerie. “All except your mom’s are the right answers. But there’s one thing to remember above all others.”

The girls waited. Their dad was big on the cliffhanger. Sometimes his sentences ended in such a way that the pause invited more curiosity, a kind of verbal begging to turn the page.

“You only have one second to save yourself,” he said. “And that’s before camo guy is pushing you into the trunk. If the trunk goes down on top of you, well, you’re probably as good as dead.”

“Only one in a thousand abducted girls lives if taken to a new location,” Hayley said, recalling a dinner-table conversation.

“Right,” Kevin confirmed, satisfied that the day’s spur-of-the-moment crime safety lesson had yielded the correct response. “And I can’t have either of you girls be the one who doesn’t make it.”

The camo guy who’d been the focus of the girls’ attention was about thirty-five, with pockmarked skin and scraggly red hair. He smiled warily in their direction as he pushed his cart toward his truck. He certainly looked creepy.

“I bet he lives with his mother,” Hayley said.

Taylor nodded. “Yeah, probably.”

Those lessons and countless others came back to Hayley as she made her way home from Beth’s house, four days after Katelyn died.

It was undeniable. The feeling. The damned hair standing up.

Someone was watching her, tracking her. It was that strange feeling, that compulsion that causes someone to suddenly cross to the other side of the street.

Some girls actually courted the feeling and found some kind of bizarre romanticism in being stalked. The Ryan twins never felt that—not once, and especially not when their dad had had a stalker and the fallout from the woman’s twisted fantasies had been devastating to the family. Years later, it was still remembered—quietly so, but nevertheless never forgotten.

Hayley saw nothing that evening as she hurried home on Olympian Avenue. She just had the feeling. She didn’t really hear anything. It could have been the winter wind or an animal moving in the half-frozen ivy.

Whatever it was, it nipped at her consciousness and it chilled her to the bone.

A moment later, a thread of a thought sped through her mind. It was about Katelyn, Starla, and Robert Pattinson, of all people.

Hayley was sure she didn’t get it all right. Robert Pattinson?

chapter 9

NEW YEAR’S DAY AT THE RYAN HOUSEHOLD smelled of coffee, orange juice, and maple syrup. Valerie had sliced a loaf of brioche and had the already eggy bread soaking in a mixture of eggs, cream, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Taylor loved the way their mother fixed French toast. It was the best breakfast thing she made, by far. Hayley was more of a waffle girl, but French toast with maple syrup and peanut butter was pretty hard for her to resist