Beneath Her Skin, Gregg Olsen [ereader with android .txt] 📗

come closer. She drew a deep, calming breath and touched the keyboard. Nothing. She closed her eyes and ran her fingers over the screen like a blind girl might do with a book in Braille. She could feel her heart rate surge a little more. It was a peculiar feeling that had more to do with fear than excitement.

Something. She felt something. She imagined the folds of her brain tightening around something.

Taylor put her hand on her sister’s shoulder, and Hayley spun around.

“Holy crap, Tay! I hate it when you do that.”

“Then keep your eyes open. Time to get out of here.”

Hayley shook her head and felt the keyboard once more. “I’m almost there. I need just a second more.”

“Now!” Taylor said without any ambivalence in her voice.

Hayley pushed back at her sister. She didn’t want to leave. Not just then. “We can’t leave yet. I’m not ready.”

“You don’t get it, Hayley,” Taylor said, her voice rising louder; loud enough to drive the point without alerting the odd cadre of mourners downstairs. “We’re not wanted here.”

Hayley had thought the same thing, especially about Katelyn’s grandmother, but she needed more time.

“This is where Katelyn was murdered,” she said.

Taylor’s eyes widened. “Murdered?”

“That’s the feeling I’m getting. You try it.”

As Taylor nodded and braced herself, the bedroom door swung open. Both girls screamed.

“Who said you two could come up here?”

It was Katelyn’s mom, wobbling in the doorway.

“Sorry,” Taylor said, unconsciously inching back, away from her. “We just wanted to—”

Hayley interrupted her sister. “To be close to Katelyn.”

Sandra Berkley looked over at the laptop, which was still open and emitting the telltale glow that it was in use.

“Were you trying to read her private journal?” Sandra’s eyes were rheumy, and it was obvious that it was more than the effects of a mixed drink that had brought her to tears that day.

Taylor snapped the lid shut. “No. No. Not at all. We didn’t even, um, know she had a journal.”

Hayley nodded briskly. “We had no idea Katelyn wrote anything down,” she said.

Sandra walked over to the window and looked out across the yard to the Larsens’ place. Her eyes lingered for a moment before she turned around to face the girls.

“Oh,” she said, as if searching for the words. “It was stupid, really. The ramblings of a silly girl, I guess. I never read it.”

It was an odd way to refer to a dead daughter. A silly girl.

Hayley couldn’t take it.

“Katelyn wasn’t that silly, Mrs. Berkley,” she said. “On the contrary, she was a sad girl. I think we all know that.”

Wow. Taylor couldn’t believe her sister said that. Quiet and sometimes a little reserved, Hayley usually kept things much closer to the vest.

“We’re leaving now,” Hayley said, and the pair brushed right past the surprised woman. They hurried down the steps, no longer trying to tread lightly. Everyone in the living room looked up, but the girls didn’t say a word to any of them.

“You sure told her off,” Taylor said proudly as they went outside.

Hayley allowed the flicker of a smile. “Yes, well, we just had to get out of there, didn’t we?”

Taylor nodded.

“I really don’t believe that Katelyn’s death was just an accident. There’s more to it,” Hayley said, though she didn’t have to say it out loud.

Taylor didn’t need to reply either, but she did. “I know. Felt it the night she died.”

“Tay,” Hayley said as she glanced at her sister’s bare neck, “I think you might have forgotten your scarf.”

Taylor smiled. “Like hell I did. That’s our excuse to go back. It may be the ugliest rag in Port Gamble, but it’s getting us back into that house.”

As they walked through the alleyway toward home, neither Taylor nor Hayley were aware that a pair of eyes was riveted to their every move. Studying them. Wondering from a dark place just what the twins’ rekindled relationship with the dead girl’s family was all about.

Chapter Eleven

Kingston High was one of those schools built with a tip of the architectural hat to its location. That was usually the intention of school district review boards, but it rarely worked as well as it did in Kingston. Just eight miles from Port Gamble, Kingston was a rolling rural landscape dotted with subdivisions and family farms that dipped at its very eastern edge to Puget Sound. The front entryway of the school was reached by crossing a footbridge over a shallow ravine of sword ferns, cedars, and winter-bronze cattail stalks.

By the time Hayley and Taylor graduated from the middle school just down the road, Kingston High was only four years old. Classrooms were segregated into pods, each known by the dominating color of its paint scheme. Rough-hewn cedar planks artfully lined portions of the interior corridors, and wide expanses of pebbly finished polished concrete swirled in browns and greens like a Northwest stream. In the mornings, the espresso stand adjacent to the student store, the Treasure Trove, did Starbucks-style business, sending a geyser of steaming milk into the air as it caffeinated one teenager after the next. Even those who didn’t need coffee got in line—like Beth Lee, who never arrived at school without a Rockstar drink in her purse and a triple tall latte from Gamble Bay Coffee. She’d pay a visit to the student-run coffee stand after lunch for her always-needed midday pick-me-up.

Each pod featured its own teacher’s resource room, with their cubicles all crammed with the things they didn’t want to take home. Some teachers put up baby pictures of their children. Students who saw them often remarked how surprising it was that one teacher or another had found someone to have a child with.

“Did you see that photo? The kid looks completely normal. Almost cute,” one girl, a willowy redhead in overalls, said as she made her rounds, dropping off the latest Buccaneer Broadcast, the school newsletter.

“Yeah,” said her friend, a pudgy junior wearing tights, short-shorts, black patent leather ankle boots, and an inch of mascara on each clumped-up eyelid.