Envy

Teagan watched as Hayley hesitated in front of the door.

“Me? Nothing,” he said. “She was depressed. I guess that’s something.”

Taylor pushed a little. Maybe the kid was more observant than his sister and actually knew something. “Did she have a boyfriend?”

He shook his head. “I think that’s why she was depressed. She didn’t have one.”

LATER THAT EVENING, HAYLEY AND COLTON looked at the screen on Hayley’s computer. They’d opened up the files from the thumb drive, and with a few clicks went a little deeper, beyond the contents of the messages themselves to the source files. What they were seeing was baffling beyond belief. The IP address for all the messages sent to Katelyn came from the Larsens’ house. All of them.

Including the “meet me in Seattle” message.

“Jake,” Colton said. “That creep was stalking Katelyn.”

“Jake,” Hayley repeated. She avoided saying something stupid like the fact that she’d always had a “funny feeling” about Jake Damon, but she had. So had her sister. Beth too. One time the previous summer, Beth had complained that he drove by her house very slowly as she washed the car in the alley.

“Outside of Segway Guy, he’s the creepiest person in Port Gamble. I’m glad that Jake’s boning Starla’s mom. She deserves it,” Beth had said.

“That’s harsh, Beth. Even for you,” Hayley said.

Beth barely blinked. “That’s me, I guess. Harsh.”

As Colton scrolled through code, Hayley thought some more about Jake, and the pieces began to fall into place. It wasn’t a perfect fit but the kind that inspired more digging. There had always been talk about Jake Damon and his supposedly lurid past. No one really knew exactly what it was, and they assumed all sorts of nefarious possibilities—drug-running from Seattle to Alaska, motorcycle gang activity (derived from his first appearance in Port Gamble on a BSA Chopper), and even the suggestion that he’d been in prison (one of his tattoos looked suspiciously homemade). Hayley’s dad took the bait on that one, but after computer research and a couple of phone calls, the only criminal activity that came up for Jake was traffic related.

And none of that involved a motorcycle gang.

Jake was handsome, kind of shiftless, and never seemed to need fulltime employment. When he hooked up with Mindee Larsen around the time her husband left town, most people saw him as an opportunist.

“Mindee’s drowning her sorrows in a six-pack of steel,” Sandra Berkley had blurted to Valerie when she and the twins were shopping the previous autumn at Central Market in Poulsbo.

Valerie had remained silent. The scene was too sad.

Sandra had the last word, though. “I know what kind of a guy Jake Damon is. I’ve seen the way he looks at our daughters.”

Of course, Sandra knew something about drowning her own sorrows. Her idea of a six-pack had nothing to do with abs, either. In her cart were half a dozen bottles of Yellowtail Shiraz—on sale with a ten-percent discount for shoppers who bought six.

Sandra Berkley had a lot to forget. And not all of it had to do with her daughter’s death. No, Sandra’s regrets went back almost a decade, and no amount of cheap wine could ever let her truly forget.

chapter 36

MOIRA WINDSOR NEVER TOLD ANYONE she was interviewing that she wasn’t exactly an employee of the Herald. She was a stringer, a freelance writer. She thought that particular term made it sound like no one would hire her, so she never mentioned it when she was out talking with sources.

After speaking with Kevin Ryan, whom she thought was a royal jerk in the way he just brushed her aside, the pretty twenty-three-year-old returned to her aunt’s house in Paradise Bay, just across the Hood Canal Bridge. The name of the place always made her wince a little when she told people where she lived. The view of the bay was lovely, but it was far from paradise. Her aunt was off snowbirding in Tucson, Arizona, and she’d left Moira to house-sit. The word house was a bit of a stretch. It was really more of a cabin with a woodstove for its sole heat source. Outside in the crusty snow were fourteen bird feeders, eight garden gnomes, and two bleach bottles cut and bent to allow the wind to spin them as they hung from the eaves.

Moira was sure that Ann Curry never had to live like this.

She lined up two bottles of sparkling water, turned on some background TV, and sat down at her computer to search for whatever she could find about the infamous Port Gamble crash. She’d grown up in Bremerton and had vague memories about it, but as a pudgy teenager back then she likely gave it two minutes of thought: Wow, that’s terrible! I feel sorry for those kids and their families!

And then she went back to her life and her dreams of getting out of naval-gray Bremerton, the county’s largest city.

With a cooking show playing in the background, she went onto the search engine and put in the words: Port Gamble + Daisy + Crash.

The host was talking about ways to cut calories out of her “nice spice” Indian cuisine, but as a former fatty, Moira wanted to fantasize about the real thing. Bring on the fat! She guzzled her sparkling water and looked longingly at a bottle of red wine.

Seventeen articles popped up. She clicked on the first one that had appeared on the Kitsap Sun site.

HOOD CANAL BRIDGE CRASH KILLS FIVE

A Port Gamble school bus being used by a Girl Scout Daisy Troop for an ill-fated picnic at Indian Island careened over the Hood Canal Bridge yesterday afternoon, killing the driver and four girls, ages 5-7. Three children and an adult were airlifted to area hospitals.

Motorists on the scene indicated that the draw span had been retracted when the bus crashed in heavy rain and wind. State engineers say retracting the span is done to relieve pressure on the bridge.

“They were right in front of me,” said Cindy Johnston of Bainbridge Island. “I was following them pretty closely because I could barely see. The rain was coming down so hard. In one second, the bus just disappeared.”

Sustained winds of 50 mph, with gusts of 65 mph, were reported in the region by the National Weather Service.

The Washington State Department of Transportation and the State Patrol are investigating.

MOIRA KNEW THAT THE CRASH had killed several people, but she thought it was only two. Four plus the bus driver … it was beyond tragic. She tried to process the depth of that kind of loss on a small town like Port Gamble. It had to have touched almost everyone who lived there.

She read the next article, which indicated that two children were recovered from the water as well as one child and an adult who’d been thrown from the bus to the bridge deck. The article also went on to say that the recovery of the North Kitsap School District’s short bus and the bodies would likely take several days as the depth of the water was three hundred feet or more.

She clicked on another article, one from the Daily Olympian.

ELECTRICAL FAILURE LED TO

FATAL HOOD CANAL CRASH

A spokesman for the Washington State Department of Transportation said today that the school bus crash killing five was a “tragic combination of the weather and an electrical fault that caused the span to open.”

It had not been opened by the bridge tender, as previously reported.

Among the dead were Christina Lee, 7; Sarah Benton, 6; Violet Caswell, 5; and Emma Perkins, also 5. Also killed was bus driver Margie Jones, 29. Jones, according to the North Kitsap School District records office, was an exemplary employee. She was completing her master’s degree in education and was working as an activity bus