However, the girls felt no mercy for those who perpetrated evil intentionally. Their souls were dark and always would be.
chapter 8
HAYLEY RYAN COULD FEEL A TWINGE OF PANIC as she turned into the alley that ran behind the houses on Olympian Avenue. She felt it in her bones. Her father always told her and her sister to listen carefully to what their hearts and minds might be telling them.
“There’s a reason your hair stands up on the back of your neck,” he had said, affecting his best Investigation Discovery voice, an octave deeper, but still Dad. “It’s a warning to be careful. Trust your feelings.”
“Hair standing up anywhere is gross, Dad,” Taylor said.
Kevin Ryan would not be denied his point. “Maybe so,” he replied. “But survivors of a serial killer are the ones who heed the feeling and act on it. Saving your life, Taylor, is never gross.”
Hayley smiled. It was a slightly tight grin, the kind meant to contain a more overt response, like an out-and-out laugh. She and her sister had grown up with a father who made his living telling the stories of the vilest things people do to others. In doing so, he never missed the opportunity to push advice on how to survive even the scariest, most dangerous situation.
“See that guy in the camo jacket over there?” he asked the twins one time when the family was shopping at Central Market in nearby Poulsbo. “Say he’s a serial killer and he corners you in this parking lot.”
Valerie rolled her eyes upward. “Why does everyone have to be a serial killer?”
Taylor piped up. “Because they’re the best, right, Dad?”
“Yes, the best,” Kevin said, nodding at what he knew was a tiny dig. “The best in terms of sales for books, but more important, they’re the best in making sure their victims are never left alive to tell their stories.”
“Let’s get back to the camo guy,” Hayley said, eager to continue the role-play. “What about him?”
Kevin lingered by the car door and spoke quietly, watching the kid with the carts, trying to keep his eye contact on his girls. Eye contact, he always said, was very, very important. “Say he helps you to your car and when you open the trunk he pushes you inside.”
“Easy,” Taylor said. “Jab his eyes out with the car keys.”
“I would scream as loud as I could,” Hayley said, sure that her response was the better of the two. After all, car keys might not be handy—especially if you’re a teenager and don’t have a car or even a learner’s permit.
Valerie shifted on her feet, eager to get going. “You shop somewhere else,” she said flatly.
Kevin made a face at Valerie. “All except your mom’s are the right answers. But there’s one thing to remember above all others.”
The girls waited. Their dad was big on the cliffhanger. Sometimes his sentences ended in such a way that the pause invited more curiosity, a kind of verbal begging to turn the page.
“You only have one second to save yourself,” he said. “And that’s before camo guy is pushing you into the trunk. If the trunk goes down on top of you, well, you’re probably as good as dead.”
“Only one in a thousand abducted girls lives if taken to a new location,” Hayley said, recalling a dinner-table conversation.
“Right,” Kevin confirmed, satisfied that the day’s spur-of-the-moment crime safety lesson had yielded the correct response. “And I can’t have either of you girls be the one who doesn’t make it.”
The camo guy who’d been the focus of the girls’ attention was about thirty-five, with pockmarked skin and scraggly red hair. He smiled warily in their direction as he pushed his cart toward his truck. He certainly looked creepy.
“I bet he lives with his mother,” Hayley said.
Taylor nodded. “Yeah, probably.”
Those lessons and countless others came back to Hayley as she made her way home from Beth’s house, four days after Katelyn died.
It was undeniable. The feeling. The damned hair standing up.
Someone was watching her, tracking her. It was that strange feeling, that compulsion that causes someone to suddenly cross to the other side of the street.
Some girls actually courted the feeling and found some kind of bizarre romanticism in being stalked. The Ryan twins never felt that—not once, and especially not when their dad had had a stalker and the fallout from the woman’s twisted fantasies had been devastating to the family. Years later, it was still remembered—quietly so, but nevertheless never forgotten.
Hayley saw nothing that evening as she hurried home on Olympian Avenue. She just had the feeling. She didn’t really hear anything. It could have been the winter wind or an animal moving in the half-frozen ivy.
Whatever it was, it nipped at her consciousness and it chilled her to the bone.
A moment later, a thread of a thought sped through her mind. It was about Katelyn, Starla, and Robert Pattinson, of all people.
Hayley was sure she didn’t get it all right. Robert Pattinson?
chapter 9
NEW YEAR’S DAY AT THE RYAN HOUSEHOLD smelled of coffee, orange juice, and maple syrup. Valerie had sliced a loaf of brioche and had the already eggy bread soaking in a mixture of eggs, cream, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Taylor loved the way their mother fixed French toast. It was the best breakfast thing she made, by far. Hayley was more of a waffle girl, but French toast with maple syrup and peanut butter was pretty hard for her to resist too.
While the French toast sizzled in a foamy sea of butter on the stovetop griddle, Taylor noticed her parents’ mugs were low on coffee and she topped them off with a splash more.
“Couldn’t sleep last night,” she said, returning the coffee carafe to the heating element.
Valerie turned from the griddle. “I know, honey,” she said. “I woke up thinking of Katelyn too.”
“A terrible tragedy,” Kevin said over the morning’s Kitsap Sun.
“An accident like that should never, ever have happened,” Valerie said. “Honestly, what in the world was Katelyn thinking?”
“An accident? Who says?” Taylor asked.
Valerie stacked three pieces of French toast on a plate and handed them to Taylor. “Your dad does.”
Kevin set down the paper. “I talked to the coroner. This one’s going to fall under the ‘tragedy’ heading, a freak accident. That doesn’t make things any better, of course, for the Berkleys.”
Hayley, who had been mostly silent, spoke up. “Do you know if suicide has been completely ruled out, Dad?”
Kevin’s lips tightened and he shook his head. “They don’t think so. Anything is possible, but only her history of …” He stopped, to search for the words. “Her history of emotional problems could be an indicator of suicide, but the evidence they’ve gathered doesn’t point to it.”
Hayley weighed her father’s words. “But if they aren’t sure it was a suicide and it could have been a freak accident, couldn’t it just have easily been a homicide?”
Kevin shook his head. “I don’t know, honey. I don’t think so. But really, we might never know what happened to Katelyn.”
Hayley looked into her sister’s eyes. There was no need to speak. Both of them knew what the other was thinking.
Oh yes, we will.
BETH LEE ACCEPTED THAT SHE WOULD NEVER BE TALL. Her parents were both short. She knew her wisp of physical presence might cause her to get shunted off to the side. Sure, she had great hair—black and thick, and near–mirror reflective. Besides the fact that she was the only Asian in her elementary school, she had seldom stood out. At her mother Kim’s insistence, Beth wore long pigtails and ribbons that matched her outfit until fourth grade, when she could no longer take it and took scissors to one side.