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

on which the town was built, was still the source of most of Port Gamble’s jobs and its pungent clouds of smoke. Green hats (those who actually worked in the mill) and white hats (those who told the greenies what to do) coexisted happily in the town’s company-owned neighborhoods of centuries-old homes.

Homes that were known by number.

Taylor and Hayley Ryan lived in number 19, the last house in Port Gamble before the highway’s march along the bay toward Kingston, the nearest town of any size. A two-story, chocolate-brown-and-white structure built in 1859 that had been added on to at least four times, number 19 was the oldest house in Washington State to be continually inhabited. It was drafty, quirky and certainly loved more than most rentals.

The conversation in that particular house was likely the same as others were having throughout Port Gamble that fateful night.

Maybe not exactly.

The Ryan family gathered around the old pine kitchen table. And despite the fact that it was Christmas night, the subject that held their attention wasn’t the gifts they’d received (a Bobbi Brown makeup collection for Taylor and a forensics book, The Science & History of the Dead, for Hayley), all they could think about was Katelyn Berkley and how it was that she had come to die that night in the bathtub.

Kevin Ryan, the twins’ father, was about to celebrate his thirty-eighth birthday and had taken to doing sit-ups every night and half-hour jogs around town. The girls had never known a time when their dad, a true-crime writer, wasn’t poking around an evidence box, hanging out with cops or prosecutors or, best of all, visiting some lowlife killer in prison. Every year at Christmas time, their mailbox was filled with cards from baby killers, stranglers and arsonists.

Have a Merry Christmas!

Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!

Their mother, Valerie, worked as a psychiatric nurse at a state mental hospital near Seattle. Hayley thought her parents had a symbiotic relationship, since her dad seemed to rely on her mom as a human wiki when he was trying to figure out the sociopaths he was writing about.

Valerie was a stunning blonde with brown eyes and delicate features. In elementary school, Taylor always thought her mom was the prettiest one in Port Gamble. Over time, she learned that her mother was also smart and accomplished—and that a person’s true character is more important than how they look.

Except on TV, of course.

Valerie blew on her hot chocolate—made with real milk, sugar and cocoa powder—scooting the froth to one side so she could drink it without getting a chocolate mustache. “What did Chief Garnett say?”

“Not much,” Kevin answered. “I mean, just that it was probably an accident.”

Valerie raised an eyebrow and passed out some candy canes. “I don’t see how. Honestly, Kevin, small kitchen appliances don’t get into a bathtub all by themselves.”

Kevin nodded in agreement and looked across the table at the girls, who’d endured a blizzard of text messages from friends about their suspicions of what had happened to Katelyn. “Was she upset about something? Do you guys know anything?”

Taylor hated cocoa but loved her mom too much to say anything. She stirred the steamy liquid with her candy cane. The only thing that could make homemade hot chocolate worse was a candy cane.

“Nah. Katie is—”

“Was,” Hayley corrected, always precise.

Taylor looked at her sister. “Right. Was. Anyways, Katie was super mad about something.”

“She allegedly had a boyfriend. I mean,” Hayley quickly corrected herself when Taylor shot her an exasperated look, “that’s what I heard. But I never met him. We didn’t really talk to each other in school.”

Kevin sipped his cocoa. “This has nonfat milk in it, right, Val?”

She nodded, turning to the girls and winking. “Yes, honey. Nonfat.”

The Ryans rinsed their mugs, and Kevin turned off the oversize multicolored lights that decorated the large, airy Douglas fir that filled the front window of the living room.

“Sure doesn’t feel like Christmas around Port Gamble,” he said, looking out the window at the street and the bay beyond it.

“I couldn’t imagine being without you girls,” Valerie said.

That was a little bit of a lie. There was a time when she had come very close to knowing exactly how Sandra Berkley was feeling right then. Hayley and Taylor had come within a breath of dying, an event that no one in the family ever really talked about. It was too painful and too fragile, like a crackly scab that had never fully healed.

No one knew it right then, but someone was about to pick at that scab, and when they did, many who lived in Port Gamble would face fears and consequences they’d never imagined.

Chapter Three

Hayley and Taylor had shared a bedroom in house number 19 all through elementary school. It was big enough to accommodate two cribs, then later twin beds with matching sheets and identical duvets. Theirs was the larger of two upstairs bedrooms in the place they’d lived in since their parents brought them home from Harrison Medical Center in nearby Bremerton.

Their father had used the second, smaller bedroom as his office to decent effect. Kevin Ryan’s most successful crime book at that time, Gorgeous and Deadly—the true story of a beauty queen who’d murdered six of her rivals by poisoning them with milkshakes laced with rat poison—had been written there.

He always told his girls, “If only these walls could talk… the world would know just how hard it is to tell the truth in a story in which everyone’s a liar.”

But the walls didn’t talk.

One afternoon when the twins were in seventh grade, their best friend, Beth Lee, goaded them into asking for their own rooms. She sipped from a sports bottle—though she didn’t play any sports—as the trio sat in the Ryans’ family room watching a plastic surgery show on the Discovery Channel.

“People at school think you’re weird for sharing a room,” Beth said before the girl on TV went under the knife for a nose job.

“How could anyone at school possibly know?”