“What are you reading?” Hayley asked.
Valerie smiled and acknowledged the paperback she was carrying off to bed. “A murder mystery. Is there anything else?”
“Not lately,” Taylor commented, as their mother disappeared down the hall.
No words were said about the Scrabble game or why they’d chosen it that evening instead of the XBox Kinect console with its collection of video games, which had been a Christmas present. There was really no need to explain.
Valerie understood her girls in a way that most mothers couldn’t. There was a time when she was just like them. Even as a grown woman, she could still tap into the feelings she held when she was a young girl. It was more than her compassion that made her such a good psychiatric nurse or a mother, though she joked that the skills were interchangeable.
The twins picked out the tiny squares of pale, smooth wood.
“Let’s break it down,” Taylor said.
Hayley, who was busy turning all the letters so they were facing up, nodded. “All right. Why don’t you call them out?”
“Lewd hot rod,” Taylor said. “Sounds nasty.”
Hayley laughed. “Lewd anything would, but adding hot rod is particularly, well, you know.”
Next, Taylor set the appropriate letters in front of her, studying each as if they might literally speak to her.
She collected the T, H, E first.
“You’re the new Vanna White,” Hayley said.
“Huh?”
“You know, the helper on Jeopardy.”
“You mean Wheel of Fortune.” She moved the O, L, D next.
“The old …,” Hayley said, pulling up the final four letters. “W, O, R, D.”
Taylor looked at the unscrambled letters. “THE OLD WORD,” she said.
“Maybe Katelyn was a teen hooker,” Hayley surmised. “You know, the oldest profession in history? There are lots of those girls in Seattle and Portland.”
Taylor looked at her sister and shook her head. “Don’t think that’s it.”
The next words, KOALA and FURL, stared up at the teens.
This time, Taylor took on the task of moving them around. In a few moments she’d arranged the letters into LAURA FOLK. Taylor shifted away from the fire. “Never heard of her.”
“I don’t know of anybody named Laura Folk either. Maybe she’s a senior or something … but I think we know everyone from Port Gamble and Kingston. That’s one of the supposed good parts of living in a small town.”
They looked down at the tiles. Taylor carefully slid them aside and then laid out the last two words: SELF and IVORY.
“Maybe ivory is the color of something we need to know and self is about us.”
“You like it when the words need no interpretation, Hayley.”
“It is easier when you don’t have to read into anything or extrapolate an inference from the words.”
“Nah. These words aren’t in the right order,” Taylor said, moving the pieces around until it read: I’VE FOR SLY.
“That sounds stupid. It doesn’t even make sense,” Hayley said.
“Maybe I remembered it wrong?”
“Maybe you did. Or maybe it has nothing to do with Katelyn.”
“I’m not going back into the tub.”
“We’ll I’m not. I’m not as good at it as you are.”
Kevin went past the staircase and called over to them. “What are you two arguing about? Hayley, did you come up with some esoteric or scientific name to get a triple word score?”
The girls looked at him blankly, having never played the game the way it had been intended.
“Something like that, Dad. We were just about to call it a night anyway.”
“All right. Maybe I can play next time. You never ask me.”
Hayley smiled as she moved the wooden tiles back into the box. “Okay, next time, for sure.”
They turned off the lights, followed their father to the creaky stairs, and said good night.
From the outlet cover opening, Taylor whispered to her sister, “This isn’t right, Hayley. Something’s wrong.”
“What do you mean wrong? We’re doing great.”
“I feel it.”
“Well, I feel tired. Let’s let it sit and see what comes up.”
Taylor knew what that meant. Both girls did. They’d wait until something came to one of them. Something they could never directly ask for, but they knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt when it arrived.
That’s just the way things were.
chapter 15
MIRANDA “MINDEE” LARSEN WAS A HAIRSTYLIST at Shear Elegance in downtown, or rather, what approximated downtown Kingston, only a short drive from Port Gamble. Until recently, Mindee had been first chair in the salon for four consecutive years, a designation of power and excellent performance. She blamed herself only a little for her recent shift from first to second chair.
It had finally sunk in that the owner, a hard-bitten, humorless woman with blue-black hair named Nicola Cardamom, was never going to let her buy into the business, despite their agreement to the contrary. When Nicola wooed Mindee from a salon in Bremerton, promises had been made.
“A woman with your talent,” Nicola had said, “should be front and center.”
Mindee fell for it and packed her scissors, clippers, and color kit. Things weren’t great with her husband and she needed something to build upon. Just in case.
In time, Mindee finally understood how empty a promise could be. She’d been stuck in neutral for too long, and if things at home hadn’t been as complicated as they were, she simply would have quit. Doing head after head, day after day, for a lying boss like Nicola was exasperating and demoralizing. She found herself angry at everyone.
A few times she purposely let the tips of her sharp scissors nick a customer’s ear.
“You shouldn’t have moved!” she scolded.
The customer, ear bleeding, knew she hadn’t and decided never to return.
In the past year, Mindee had seen her client base drop. That’s when Nicola moved her to second chair, and took the number-one spot for herself.
Mindee imagined taking her scissors to Nicola’s lipo-sucked stomach, but she didn’t, of course. Instead, she continued styling hair, doing colors, and quietly and oh-so-discreetly bad-mouthing Nicola.
“I’m not sure where she is,” she told one longtime customer, a devoutly religious woman from Poulsbo. It was a lie. She knew Nicola had a dental appointment that morning. “Don’t make me tell you what I think she’s doing. I don’t even want to go there.”
Just a drop of poison. Nothing more. Mindee never said anything specific. She didn’t have to. She knew the power of suggestion, the impact of a hint dropped at the right time. The customer was a member of Living Christ, a mega-church. She was also an incorrigible gossip. A woman with a big mouth and a ready-made audience was a terrific and useful weapon.
The Larsens—Mindee and her two children, fifteen-year-old Starla and thirteen-year-old Teagan—lived in house number 21, right next door to the Berkleys. The two families had been friends for years. Close and trusted friends. After her husband Adam disappeared, Mindee increasingly relied on Harper Berkley to help with whatever heavy lifting she needed. Though nothing ever happened between them, there was talk. Small towns need barely a whisper to get things moving in the wrong direction.
Starla and Katelyn had been best friends forever back then. They’d grown up side by side, from Barbie to bras, and no one doubted that when one or the other got married, the maid of honor duties had already been secured.
That was never going to happen. Not now.
On the morning after Katelyn’s sudden death, Starla refused to get out of bed. She was racked with hurt, guilt, even some shame. She and Katelyn had had a falling-out several months back over, of all things, making the cheer team at Kingston High School. They’d tried out together as freshmen, and Katelyn again the year after when she didn’t make it, working on routines in the fenceless backyard that the two families shared as if it were their own private park.