Envy

“That’s it? Was there more?” Taylor asked, pushing.

“I really didn’t listen, Taylor,” Beth said, clearly ready to move on from the Starla/Katelyn drama. “I saw that new kid Eli there, and I was trying to get him to notice me.”

Taylor smiled to herself and looked at her sister. Despite Beth’s constant need to be aloof, pretending indifference all the time, she knew who was who. “Hay-Tay” had always been her way of pretending to put up a wall. So what if Beth was completely self-absorbed? She was also an astute judge of what was worth passing along and when. They liked her.

Besides, in Port Gamble there weren’t a lot of choices for the mantle of best friend.

“But, Beth, didn’t you really like Zander?” Hayley asked. “Of all your boyfriends, he seemed to stay in your good graces the longest.”

“And that’s no easy feat,” Taylor added.

Beth curled up on the couch. “Is this pick-on-me time or what?” “No, not at all,” Hayley said.

Beth shrugged a little. “Too bad. I like it when you tease me a little. Makes me feel kind of like I’m the third twin,” she said, pausing a beat. “The smart one. The pretty one.”

Both twins knew there was some truth to that. Not that Beth was prettier or smarter, but that Beth was sometimes lonely being an only child. They’d never known a moment when they hadn’t had each other.

“You can be whatever you want to be, Beth. But please, promise that next time you’ll pay attention when you’re in the vicinity of some good info.”

Beth smiled. “All right. And I’ll make sure that you’re two of the top ten people I’ll tell first.”

Hayley’s and Taylor’s phones buzzed.

“That must be Mom,” Hayley said. “She’s spamming us with mass texts.”

Taylor looked at the message from their mother and closed the phone. She looked a little upset, but she tried to hide it as she slid the phone back into her pocket.

“What’s up?” Beth asked, watching Hayley as she shut her phone with the same kind of reaction.

“A reporter found out that Katelyn was in the crash,” Hayley explained. “She’s writing a story about Katelyn, her death, and the crash.”

Again, the crash.

“Freak! Haven’t they milked that one for all it’s worth by now?” Beth asked.

“Not from this angle,” Taylor said. “Katelyn surviving the crash only to die now makes her death even sadder.”

Inside, she could feel her heart rate escalate. The idea of reliving the crash, talking about it, and having others talk about it again made her feel sick to her stomach too. It was funny how the word crash could have that strange effect on her. It didn’t have to be the crash. Just any crash. It wasn’t because the memories of what happened were so awful to relive.

It was because neither she nor her sister had any recollections whatsoever of what happened that rainy afternoon all those years ago.

Not a single one.

chapter 6

WHAT REMAINED OF KATELYN BERKLEY was transferred onto a stainless-steel table ringed by a gleaming trough of running water. Gushing water. The rushing flow around Katelyn would help eliminate all the blood that would spew forth once deep, hacking cuts were made on her torso. Her eyes were closed and, even more positively and importantly, she was dead. And yet, for anyone who knew Katelyn, there was a deserved measure of empathy for the humiliation of it all. Indeed, it was only one of the many indignities that are required when a young, healthy person dies. Strangers would be looking at her body. Her naked body. Then they’d begin the practice of cutting her open like a split chinook salmon as they reviewed and measured the contents of her chest, her stomach, and even her brain. In the instance that she took her last breath, she’d unwittingly given herself over to strangers—strangers with blades. If she’d killed herself and sought refuge from pain, real or imagined, she’d made a mistake.

Katelyn didn’t fade away or cross over to some kind of nothingness. Instead, she ended up as a piece of evidence, a high beam of light on her, in the county morgue in Port Orchard—a place where she would have refused to be caught dead in … unless she were really dead.

And there’d be no say in it wherever she was.

While no one seriously suspected foul play in Katelyn’s death—there wasn’t any reason to, really—the Kitsap County coroner’s office protocol required the most invasive of techniques before Sandra and Harper Berkley could lay their only daughter to rest in Port Gamble’s Buena Vista Cemetery. And, what with reduced holiday staffing and ensuing police investigation, it would take a while.

Rest. As if rest were even possible since her parents were unable to stop arguing long enough to make sure that their baby was remembered for all the love she’d given them, rather than the pain she’d left them to endure.

There she was, on the pathologist’s table, her green painted toenails facing up, ready to relinquish any last shred of modesty. Katelyn Melissa Berkley had died a horrible, tragic death in the bathtub of her Port Gamble home. She’d arrived by ambulance late, late Christmas night, and, like some leftover holiday ham, she’d been held for three days in the cooler of the county’s basement morgue in an old house on Sidney Avenue, next to the Kitsap County Courthouse.

With her assistant looking on, county forensic pathologist Birdy Waterman passed an ultraviolet light over Katelyn’s skin. She started with the dead girl’s neck and moved the beam down her small breasts and stomach.

“There’s some cutting on her arms. More on her stomach. New ones on her arms,” she said in a matter-of- fact voice that was a mask for her emotions. Among the things that Dr. Waterman loathed above all others was a child on her stainless-steel table.

“Cause of death?” asked the assistant, a faux-hawked newbie to the office named Terry Morris.

Dr. Waterman shook her head. “No, no,” she said. “I’m sure you’d like to wrap this up so you can go text someone or something, but here we do things right, methodically, and by the book.” She looked over her glasses with a kind look.

No need to make the new kid hate me. There’s plenty of time for that later, she thought.

“Let’s get there one step at a time,” she said, returning her unflinching gaze back to the dead girl.

She pointed to the cuts on Katelyn’s thigh and frowned. They were the newest. Fresh.

“Not deep at all,” she said.

“The girl was f-ed up,” Terry said.

Dr. Waterman, a Makah Indian with a medical degree from the University of Washington in Seattle, was a serious woman who thought that death deserved respect one hundred percent of the time. She glared at Terry. He was going to be a challenge. But she was up for it.

“You don’t know me well yet, Terry. But I don’t talk like that. And I don’t want my assistants talking like that.”

“It isn’t like the dead can hear,” he said.

She shot a lightning-fast look at him with her dark eyes and immediately returned her attention to Katelyn.

“How do you know?” she asked.

Terry, a young man with large green eyes, maybe too large for his small face, rolled them upward, but kept his mouth clamped shut—for a change. He was learning.

Death by electrocution is exceedingly rare. Dr. Waterman could recall only two other examples of such cases in the county. One involved a Lucky Jim’s Indian casino worker who had become electrified when he was working with some faulty wiring that fed power to the slot machines. He had assumed his coworker had cut the power source.