Envy

too.

While the French toast sizzled in a foamy sea of butter on the stovetop griddle, Taylor noticed her parents’ mugs were low on coffee and she topped them off with a splash more.

“Couldn’t sleep last night,” she said, returning the coffee carafe to the heating element.

Valerie turned from the griddle. “I know, honey,” she said. “I woke up thinking of Katelyn too.”

“A terrible tragedy,” Kevin said over the morning’s Kitsap Sun.

“An accident like that should never, ever have happened,” Valerie said. “Honestly, what in the world was Katelyn thinking?”

“An accident? Who says?” Taylor asked.

Valerie stacked three pieces of French toast on a plate and handed them to Taylor. “Your dad does.”

Kevin set down the paper. “I talked to the coroner. This one’s going to fall under the ‘tragedy’ heading, a freak accident. That doesn’t make things any better, of course, for the Berkleys.”

Hayley, who had been mostly silent, spoke up. “Do you know if suicide has been completely ruled out, Dad?”

Kevin’s lips tightened and he shook his head. “They don’t think so. Anything is possible, but only her history of …” He stopped, to search for the words. “Her history of emotional problems could be an indicator of suicide, but the evidence they’ve gathered doesn’t point to it.”

Hayley weighed her father’s words. “But if they aren’t sure it was a suicide and it could have been a freak accident, couldn’t it just have easily been a homicide?”

Kevin shook his head. “I don’t know, honey. I don’t think so. But really, we might never know what happened to Katelyn.”

Hayley looked into her sister’s eyes. There was no need to speak. Both of them knew what the other was thinking.

Oh yes, we will.

BETH LEE ACCEPTED THAT SHE WOULD NEVER BE TALL. Her parents were both short. She knew her wisp of physical presence might cause her to get shunted off to the side. Sure, she had great hair—black and thick, and near–mirror reflective. Besides the fact that she was the only Asian in her elementary school, she had seldom stood out. At her mother Kim’s insistence, Beth wore long pigtails and ribbons that matched her outfit until fourth grade, when she could no longer take it and took scissors to one side.

Her mother ripped her a new one when she got home and made her go to school for a week looking lopsided.

“You want to stand out, so now you do,” Kim Lee had said.

After her DIY haircut and resulting humiliation, a line in the sand had been forged, Hell’s Canyon deep. Beth Lee would never let anyone, not her mother, not her best friend, tell her how to look or dress. She didn’t want to be the dutiful daughter, the brainy Asian, the girl who was anything different than the others who lived in Port Gamble.

Hayley and Taylor Ryan were her best friends, though she seemed to consider them a single entity. Hay-Tay were the only ones in town who didn’t try to mold her into something she wasn’t. They simply let her be. If Beth wanted to be a vegan for a month, fine. If she wanted to go Goth and wear a dog collar around town, the Ryan twins didn’t make a big deal out of it.

Lately, she’d taken to shopping exclusively at Forever 21 in the Kitsap Mall in Silverdale, where she purchased outfit after outfit. She never saw a dress or shirt with a nonfunctioning zipper that she didn’t proclaim so totally her.

The only other Port Gamble woman who shopped regularly at Forever 21 was Starla Larsen’s mother, a woman about whom others gossiped, saying that she never saw a zipper she didn’t want to undo.

Beth remarked on it. “Saw Mrs. Larsen at Forever.”

“Was she shopping for Starla?” Hayley asked as the two sat on her bed waiting for Taylor to come upstairs with snacks so they could eat, chat, and waste the last few days before school restarted on January 3.

“Shopping for herself,” Beth said. “Same as always. She wears club clothes to work, I guess.”

Taylor entered the room carrying a couple of Diet Cokes and a can of Ranch Pringles.

“Who wears club clothes to work?” she asked.

“Starla’s mom.”

“Did you talk to her?”

Beth took a second. “Not really. I pretended I didn’t see her, but she nabbed me by the checkout counter.”

“Did she say anything about Katelyn?” Hayley asked.

“Something about how she saw it coming. Katelyn was a sad girl. Whatever.”

Taylor looked upset. “‘Saw it coming?’”

Beth shrugged. “I didn’t ask. I wanted out of there. I was afraid she was going to corner me and force me to come in for a haircut.”

“If she saw something was wrong, if she saw it coming, then she should have done something about it,” Hayley said.

“I guess so. Can we talk about something else? All this talk about Katelyn is kind of boring me.”

Taylor looked at Hayley, her eyes popping. Neither one of them knew how it was that Beth Lee could possibly be their best friend.

But she was.

chapter 10

BEFORE LEAVING FOR WORK at the hospital, Valerie Ryan made cookies, fresh— not Christmas retreads that had been moved from platter to smaller plate as their numbers declined. She boxed them up in a Tupperware container for the girls to run over to the Berkley place. There was no bow or ribbon. It was a gesture, not a gift, to the family down the lane who’d suffered the cruelest blow in a season meant for joy and togetherness. Valerie watched a row of cars head down the highway that morning, looking for places to park as Harper and Sandra gathered in their grief with family members and close friends.

The girls planned on paying their respects at Katelyn’s memorial service later in the week, but their mom’s cookies needed delivery.

Bundled up in North Face jackets, Taylor and Hayley slipped out the back door to the alleyway that was the shortest route to the Berkleys. Taylor wore Aunt Jolene’s hand-knitted scarf, a sad-looking strip of yardage in search of a color palette that didn’t suggest—as Taylor aptly assessed it—“a color wheel of different kinds of barf.” The air was bone-chilling, with the added jolt of a damp wind blowing off the bay, coating the shrubbery in a glistening sheath of ice. The weatherman had blabbed about an ice storm coming, but since he was seldom on target with his forecasts, no one really prepared for it.

The girls noticed right off that Mrs. James’s hundred-year-old camellia was encased in ice.

“She’s going to be way disappointed when she gets back from Florida and sees that no one put a blanket over it,” Taylor said. “She’s so possessive of that dumb bush.”

Hayley looked over the shimmering emerald form of the shrub and said, “I think it’s pretty.”

“You think everything is pretty, Hay.”

“Well, not everything,” she clarified, pointedly indicating Aunt Jolene’s scarf. “But yeah, a lot of things can be pretty. You just have to look at things the right way to see their beauty.”

“Mrs. James doesn’t own that bush. Nothing in this town of renters belongs to anyone.”

“That could be said of anything, Taylor. Whether you rent and live in Port Gamble or buy and live in a house in Seattle, ultimately you’re just visiting.”

Taylor changed the subject. “This is stupid. Bringing cookies over to our dead friend’s house? Lame.”

“Yeah, but Mom wanted us to, so we’re doing it.”

“Right. Because she thought it was a good idea. Like we can’t come up with our own?”

“I think that’s the point. We wouldn’t be going to the Berkleys if Mom hadn’t made the cookies.”

“Natch,” Taylor had to agree.

SANDRA BERKLEY PULLED OPEN THE FRONT DOOR and faced the Ryan twins. It had been a while since