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

Her lungs were beginning to strain a little. It had been a long time since she’d held her breath for a minute or more.

I’m not ready to stop, she thought. And just what are those nasty ants doing?

Her hands floated toward the surface, a reflex to grab onto the edge of the tub and pull herself out. Taylor ignored the impulse and willed her body to stay just where it was.

A minute and fifteen seconds.

They weren’t ants, but letters.

Okay, Taylor thought, what are they saying?

Seven words spun by and she grabbed at them. The first five were easy, but she kept failing on the last two.

LEWD HOT ROD KOALA FURL

Three minutes underwater.

Taylor’s lungs were going to explode. She strained as hard as she ever had.

I’m not giving up, she thought as she fought the physical compulsion to rise up and breathe.

Katelyn’s dead. She’s got a messed-up family. She didn’t need to die. I need that last part of the message. She wants me to have the words! Give me those words, Katelyn!

The last two pounced at her.

SELF IVORY

Taylor clawed at the surface of the water, her eyes open with the kind of fearful look that beach lifeguards know all too well. She wasn’t drowning. Even so, more than three minutes without a breath underwater was frightening beyond words. Coughing, choking on oxygen, Taylor pulled herself to the side of the tub and tried to breathe.

What was Katelyn telling her?

Chapter Fourteen

There were ways to figure out what messages Katelyn had left behind. That was if, presumably, the words transmitted under the waters of the bathtub were truly from her. Taylor knew that the seven little words she had received underwater probably didn’t mean what they said. They were only a clue to put her on the right path. Figuring it all out was the hard part.

When Hayley and Taylor had first started receiving messages, they played around with index cards. Even with a half-dried Sharpie, Taylor had better handwriting, so it was she who wrote down each word in crisp black printed letters. Whenever they’d unscrambled the true meaning of each message, they tore up the cards and flushed them down the toilet—despite the historic district’s rule against the disposal of anything other than toilet paper and “personal waste,” as it taxed Port Gamble’s sewage system.

“Isn’t this personal waste?” Taylor asked, looking down at the confetti of index cards.

Hayley nodded. “It is personal—though we’re not always sure what person we’re hearing from. And it is waste, but I think we could come up with a more eco-friendly way.”

“E-occult-friendly. I like that. We should copyright that one.”

Hayley gave her sister an irritated look. “It has nothing to do with the occult.”

“Kidding,” Taylor said.

“I hate it when you make comments like that. It makes all of this seem so ugly.”

“Maybe it is.”

“It isn’t ugly. It comes from someplace good. I feel it. So should you.”

“I’m not like you, Hayley.”

The comment was funny, and both girls laughed.

After that, they had settled on using their parents’ Scrabble game, a handmade relic from their mother’s childhood, to twist around and rearrange the letters that came to them. Kevin and Valerie shared a deep love of words. Whenever the twins were lying on the thick, powder blue Oriental carpet in the parlor playing Scrabble, it brought a smile to both parents. They could see that their daughters were engrossed in a different version of the game, but in a day of video-this and Internet-that, they didn’t say a single word about how they played.

Flames crackled in the fireplace, and the smell of their parents’ nutmeg-laced eggnog wafted through the drafty house. It was the last gasp of leftover cheer in a holiday that had pulsed with an undercurrent of sadness. The family dog, Hedda, was curled up between the girls and the fireplace.

“You girls want some company?” Kevin asked as he entered the room, mug in hand.

“We’re good, Dad,” Taylor said. “Just messing around.”

Kevin looked a little disappointed. He had work to do on his latest book and a distraction, apparently, was not in the cards.

“Okay, I’m going to rewrite the discovery of the victim scene.”

“That’s always my favorite part of your books, Dad,” Hayley said.

He smiled. Those girls had been born into a life of crime. They had never known a moment when blood-spatter analysis, gunshot residue or chain of evidence was not a part of the family’s dinner table conversations.

Valerie Ryan always tried to push dinnertime topics toward ponies, peonies or something lovely, especially when the girls were young. She did so as a mother, seeking to protect her children from the things that hurt deeply, things that pointed to the darkest side of humanity. It was easy to understand why she tried—and why she failed.

Valerie had grown up on McNeil Island, the home of Washington State’s oldest penitentiary. Her father, Chester Fitzpatrick, was the warden (though, later, the governor changed the position’s title to superintendent, to better reflect a more clinical, institutional approach to incarceration). She’d grown up in what any outsider would consider a lonely, desolate place to raise a child. For Valerie, it was a town, and the guards, staff, and prisoners were its citizens. As a little girl, she watched wide-eyed as the Friday afternoon chain arrived—man after man tethered together to step off the prison boat to make their way past the big white house that her father, mother and sister called home. Valerie, a pretty towhead like the daughters she’d one day have, was riveted by the stream of men, faces haggard, angry or resigned, wondering what they’d done and how they’d done it.

And some stared back at her. Occasionally, the looks in her direction caused her to turn away. A few times they’d even made her cry. It wasn’t fear that caused the tears, though her father and mother thought so. It was something else. She wasn’t sure what it was until many, many years later.

Valerie found some things about the institution that were beautiful too.

The razor