Envy

word, he spun around, opened the woodstove, and shoved the tape inside.

“Don’t!” Savannah cried out.

But it was too late. Too, too late.

“Sorry about the carbon monoxide and the other toxins in the plastic,” Colton said.

Savannah sat back down and buried her face in her hands. There was nothing she could do. In a very real way, deep down, she was glad that the tape was gone. It had been like a finger pointing at her for almost fifteen years. As she looked back up and watched it melt, then burn, a sense of relief came over her.

Hayley hugged Colton. Taylor had wanted to do the same. Both understood his reasons for destroying it.

It was for them. To protect them.

“Who else has seen it?” Shania asked.

“No one,” Savannah said. “Just you three, me, and that reporter.”

“Why didn’t you show it to the university?” Taylor asked.

Tears came once more to Savannah’s sad eyes. “Because …”

Shania sat down and put her hand on Savannah’s knee. “Why?” she asked.

Although tears flowed, somehow Savannah pulled herself together and picked out the words she needed to say.

“Because I was ashamed,” she began. “Guilty. My sister was dead, and anyone else probably would have heeded the warning. I was operating under the assumption that logic should rule the day, not emotions. I messed up. What was on that tape was real. It wasn’t some mumbo-jumbo carnival game. Somehow you two sensed what was going to happen to Serena. Have you done that since? I mean, of course you have.”

Neither Hayley nor Taylor answered. They might have, if Colton and Shania hadn’t been standing there.

“My sister’s death is my shame, and it will be until the day I die,” Savannah said.

“You couldn’t have known,” Hayley said.

Savannah nodded. “But you knew. You were babies, and you knew.”

“We were babies,” said Taylor. “We didn’t know anything.”

Savannah didn’t seem convinced. Even in her shock and grief, she was able to process the past like the researcher she once had been.

“Your age has nothing to do with it, then or now.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Taylor said.

Savannah shook her head and dried her tears. “Of course you do. Everyone on the bus went into the water and died. But not you two.”

“I don’t like where this is going,” Colton said, actually meaning every word.

“Nothing like what happened with you when we were babies has ever happened since,” Taylor said.

Savannah remained unconvinced. “Really? That surprises me.”

“Be surprised then,” Taylor said.

As they sat there, the tape dissolved into the red and orange coals of the woodstove. The only trace that it had burned was a ribbon of dark soot along the top of the glass panel that allowed a peek inside.

“Really,” Hayley said, looking at Colton and hoping that he didn’t think she was some kind of freak, because she wasn’t. She and her sister did see things differently from others, but they figured they likely weren’t alone in that regard. Sure, they were special, but not any more so than anyone else who could pick up on the hidden hurt, the secret worries, and the dark plans that others foisted upon the unsuspecting.

While the four of them huddled around the woodstove, all could agree that its contents shouldn’t be disclosed, but there was that reporter and her ceaseless need for attention and recognition.

How in the world would they convince her to forget about it?

chapter 49

IT WAS AFTER 2:45 A.M. when Shania, Colton, Hayley, and Taylor got back into the car. For the first few moments, no one said another word. Even after what they’d seen on the video and heard from Savannah Osteen with their own eyes and ears, it seemed as if there were no words to convey whatever anyone was thinking. Hayley caught Colton’s dark eyes in the rearview mirror. He’d protected her and her sister by getting rid of the tape.

But what did he think of her now?

“How do we solve a problem like Moira?” Taylor asked.

In another time and place, Hayley might have teased her sister with singing some corrupted lyrics from their mother’s all-time favorite movie, The Sound of Music.

How do you crush a reporter with your hands?

But not then. She resisted the temptation. She kept her mouth shut.

“Let’s go talk to her,” Colton said, looking first at his mother before turning to face the girls.

Shania didn’t answer. She merely looked at her son and nodded. Her eyes were focused and free of the shock of the others in the car.

“When?” Taylor asked.

“Now,” he said.

“Now? It’s literally the middle of the night,” Hayley said, looking at her phone, grateful that their parents hadn’t discovered they’d slipped out of the house.

Shania put the car in gear—the wrong gear—and it lurched forward into the fringy bank of cedar boughs.

“Sorry,” she said, releasing a small laugh, a laugh that was almost a therapeutic exhale. “A little bit harder than riding a bike. I agree with Colton. We need to get to the reporter’s house.”

“We don’t know where she lives,” Taylor said.

Colton held up another MapQuest printout. “Oh, yes we do,” Colton said. “Moira must have left this at Savannah’s. We just have to follow it from here to her place in Paradise Bay.”

“We have to reason with her and tell her to back off,” Hayley said.

“That’s right,” Shania said.

The Camry headed up the highway, on its way to the seemingly wrongly named Paradise Bay.

VALERIE RYAN’S EYELIDS POPPED OPEN at 3:21 A.M. No sudden noise. No flash of light preceded it. Just the gentle and predictable unshuttering of her sleeping eyes as they had done countless times over the past decade.

Valerie lay in bed looking at the big, fat digital numbers on her bedside clock.

3:21. March 21. The first day of spring, the day when her daughters and the others from the Daisy Troop plunged over the side of the bridge into the choppy waters of Hood Canal.

Without waking Kevin, she got up and slipped on her bathrobe, a Christmas gift from her daughters the year before. That night, she felt a compulsion to check on the girls. It was as if she was being called to do so, quietly, maybe in the way that dogs can only hear certain whistles.

Valerie crept up the stairs and turned the low knob on Hayley’s door. Moonlight flooded the room, and it was clear that the bed was empty. Racing to Taylor’s room across the narrow landing of the staircase, she saw that Taylor’s bed was empty too.

Where on earth were they?

Her brown eyes puddled, but Valerie Ryan didn’t cry. And then she felt it: a mother’s intuition. She touched Taylor’s pillow, still molded with an imprint of her head.

My babies are OK.

LIGHTS FROM A DISTANT NEIGHBOR’S HOUSE sparkled against the black water of Paradise Bay as the tide slowly, sluggishly shifted in the stillness of the night. Shania cut the headlights and pulled into the driveway. No one in the car spoke—partly because there was no making real sense of what they’d seen, but also because they’d wanted to catch Moira off guard.

“I’m calling her,” Taylor said, as she pressed her ear to her phone. “Ringing now.”

“Moira Windsor? I know this is late. It’s Taylor Ryan,” she said.

“Taylor Ryan? Really?”