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

trashed,” Beth said, glancing at her mother. “What did they make you do now? Re-add everything five minutes before shift change? Your job so sucks.”

Kim had hoped the short walk in the night air would take some of the puffiness from her eyes.

“Nothing ever adds up,” she said, going into the kitchen. “Pizza tonight?”

Beth looked back down at her phone. “All right. I’ll call it in. You always get thick crust because you think it’s a better value because it weighs more. I like thin crust.”

“Fine,” Kim said, heading into the kitchen. She braced herself on the counter a little and steadied herself by taking in a deep breath. She unfolded the letter and read it one more time. After seeing Sandra, it no longer seemed like a suicide note.

I want you to know I’m so sorry that I didn’t save your daughter or the other girls. Sometimes, I wish I could go back to that day and do it all over. I’d do things differently. Please forgive me. I don’t know how much longer I can live with what I did. Sandra

Kim shredded the note and stuffed it down the garbage disposal. She turned on the water and, as the noisy contraption did its thing, she wondered if it was worse to lose a child or live with the guilt that yours had survived. She was glad that she never had to face that. Sandra’s cross to bear weighed a million pounds.

Later, after a couple of slices of thin-crust pizza and some distracted conversation between mother and daughter, Beth excused herself to her bedroom and texted Hayley and Taylor.

Beth: Mom is stranger than normal 2nite. Boss prob yelled @her. Wish i had her probs. Her life is so easy.

Hayley: Tell me about it. They keep saying that things r harder in the “real world” but they have no idea how f’ed up it is @kingston.

Taylor: def the worst.

As Kim Lee placed her head on the pillow, she was transported back to that day almost ten years ago, standing on the Hood Canal Bridge as the sirens wailed and all the mothers cried. Seeing Sandra hadn’t brought it all back because it had never really left her. She, like all the other moms, hated that damn bridge. Just hated it.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Some bridges, like the nearby Tacoma Narrows or its far sexier cousin, the Golden Gate in San Francisco, are a marvel for their stunning beauty, arching over dangerous waters or defying gravity as they connect two high points over a deep chasm.

The Hood Canal Bridge is a marvel too, though not for how it looks. It literally floats atop the water for which it is named as it carries Washington State Route 104 across Hood Canal and connects the Olympic and Kitsap Peninsulas. At the time of its construction in 1961, depths of more than three hundred feet made it impossible for a suspension bridge to be built there. So it floats. Concrete pontoons hold up the roadway just above water level.

Fifteen thousand cars cross it every day, its drivers and passengers thinking nothing more than how beautiful the Olympic Mountains are, with the eagles soaring overhead, and the occasional submarine cruising for the navy base in Bangor.

A few families cross the bridge and remember the darkest days of their lives. The Ryan family was one of those. Valerie Ryan in particular couldn’t stand driving over the span. It was the primary reason why she went back to school to complete her psychiatric nursing degree. All of those jobs were on the Seattle side of the bridge. She didn’t want to find herself crossing Hood Canal for the mundane reason that her job was there.

The girls knew about the accident, of course, but traversing the bridge on those rare trips to Port Townsend or Port Angeles brought the occasional questions about what happened that rainy, windy March 21 years ago. For some reason, the girls sought clarity of only one detail—not of what happened but of exactly where it had been.

Taylor, in particular, seemed to hone in on the spot where the draw span connected with the main bridge deck.

“It was here,” she said when she was seven and they were heading home from a visit in Port Townsend.

“Somewhere around here, yes,” Valerie had said.

“No,” Taylor said, “it was right here.”

Hayley looked at the water. It was glass that late afternoon.

“She’s right, Mom. Right at that spot where those birds are floating. That’s where it happened.”

Valerie glanced in the direction of gulls bobbing on the surface as their car sped past. She didn’t like to think about it at all. She wanted everyone to just forget it.

“I don’t remember,” she lied. “But yes, right around here.”

Kevin’s eyes met his daughters’ in the rearview mirror.

“Look at the snow on the mountains,” he said. “Must have had a storm last night.”

The girls turned their attention to the view on the other side of the bridge. It was a distraction, and they knew it. Inside, both understood that their mother and father were as damaged by the events of the crash as they were.

For as many people who’d lived and died in Port Gamble, the number of the dead buried in the Buena Vista Cemetery was exceedingly tiny. Among the more notable was Gustav Englebrecht, the first member of the United States Navy to be killed in action in the Pacific. His death was less heroic than foolish. He met his maker during an attack at Port Gamble in 1856 when he hoisted himself up over a log to get a better view of the battle at hand only to be finished off by a young man from the S’Klallam Tribe.

There were older graves there too. Early settlers, workers who died at the mill, and so on. And, mixed in among many, there was also a modest plaque—one so small, worn, and faded that unless one knew of the legend, you’d never be able to decipher the inscription:

PETER O’MALLEY, 15,

was interred in