Katelyn lit her cigarette from the ashy red tip of Starla’s smoke and kept her eyes on Teagan.
“He won’t tell, will he?”
Teagan was a wiry, fearless boy who seemed to delight in the attention of the older girls. He noticed the smoke.
“Are you watching me? Katelyn?” he called over from the rope.
“No, he won’t tell,” Starla said, before calling across the yard to her annoying brother. “We’re watching you, you little brat.”
“How can we not watch him?” Katelyn said, pulling a long drag through her cigarette. She was proud that she wasn’t coughing, but, of course, she didn’t say so. “He swings around like a crazy version of Tarzan.”
“Tarzan was a dork,” Starla said. “His best friend was a monkey.”
Katelyn smiled. She stifled her desire to correct her friend by letting her know that a monkey and chimpanzee were not of the same species. Not any closer than man and monkey.
Instead, she changed the subject.
“I like your hair a lot,” she said.
Starla fussed with it with her free hand. “I hate it. My mom cut it, and she’s not much of a stylist.”
Katelyn wanted to touch Starla’s hair, so golden and pretty, but she didn’t.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I think it’s hot.”
“You would. I mean,” she said, eyeing Katelyn with a cool look, “you don’t have to try as hard as I do to keep things going.”
It was a dismissive, snarky remark that on the surface seemed like a compliment, but both girls knew it really wasn’t.
“Nothing’s easy, Starla,” Katelyn said.
“I get that. Sorry,” she fake-apologized.
Katelyn reached down to pet the Larsens’ cat, Bobby, a vicious Manx, and, in doing so, the length of her arm was exposed.
“Jesus, Katie, what happened to your arm?”
Katelyn sat up ramrod-straight and tucked in her arm like a chicken wing. “Nothing,” she said.
Starla bent closer. “Bullshit. Let me see.” She pulled on her friend’s wrist to wrestle her arm from her body.
Katelyn didn’t put up much of a fight. Not really. She let her arm go limp as Starla pushed up her sleeve to reveal three small parallel cuts just below the elbow. The freshly scabbed-over redness popped against the whitest part of her skin.
“I wondered why you were wearing a sweatshirt on a day like today. You haven’t started up again, have you?”
“Your cat scratched me,” Katelyn said, her tone defiant and pleading at the same time, begging Starla to notice that the bloody mess had taken over once more.
Starla shook her head, her eyes worried. “If the cat was named Katelyn, I’d say so.”
Katelyn turned away, easing her arm from her friend’s not-sotight grip.
“You’re cutting again, aren’t you?”
Katelyn kept her focus on Teagan, performing his Tarzan spin on the rope.
“No, I’m not.”
“Don’t lie. We’re practically sisters.”
Weeks before, the comment might have resonated as being slightly genuine. But not then.
“Is it because you didn’t make cheer again?” asked Starla.
“A little, I guess,” she admitted.
Starla dropped her cigarette and crushed it with the toe of a tacky Candie’s sandal she’d borrowed from her mother’s closet. “I thought you stopped that,” she said.
“I guess I didn’t.” Katelyn faced Starla, before snuffing out her own butt. “Can we not talk about it? Please.”
“It isn’t normal and you know it.”
Katelyn had let loose a deep, throaty laugh at Starla, the ethereal beauty, the one all others wanted to be like or be with.
“Normal? What could you possibly know about normal?”
“You need to go to a shrink,” Starla said.
Katelyn’s expression flatlined. “You need to butt out.”
Starla shook her head. “Seriously, you need help. Does your mom know?”
Katelyn got up off the glider, her inert expression turned to anger.
“You tell her and one way or another I’ll never speak to you again,” she said.
“Like that would ever happen.” Starla stood her ground. “We’re tight, remember?” Starla said, knowing that it wasn’t really true. She never had time for Katelyn anymore. Now, she saw her only from her bedroom window or on the rare occasion when they met on the street on their way home, like that summer afternoon they spent on the porch glider.
Katelyn had bristled at the lie. Starla was no longer a friend. She was no longer anything. She was the enemy and, as far as Katelyn could tell, she was unstoppable. If Starla had viewed Katelyn as a backup dancer in her laser-fantastic arena show, she was wrong.
Dead wrong.
chapter 19
HAYLEY AND TAYLOR FOUND THEIR FATHER in his tiny office, which was decorated with paperback book covers that were so hideous they really couldn’t pass for art, even though they were professionally matted and framed. Kevin Ryan was bent over his computer. Approaching middle age, Kevin was holding his own in the looks and cool department—at least on the dad scale, which every teenager knew was not so demanding. His hair was no longer styled in a foppish ’90s haircut, but was cut short. He no longer sported the porn-star mustache that he’d worn throughout most of the girls’ younger years. His gray eyes looked up from the computer screen, and he grinned at his daughters.
Kevin always welcomed an intrusion.
“You talk to the police today?” Taylor asked.
He took his hands from the keyboard and swiveled around in his black leather office chair. “I talk to the police almost every day. It’s kind of my job.” He grinned.
Taylor pulled up a chair and scooted it closer to her father’s desk. Hayley took a space next to Hedda, who was laying on her back, deadopossum style, in the small window seat.
“We know, Dad,” Hayley said. “Did you find out anything about Katelyn?”
Kevin didn’t answer right away. He clicked the SAVE icon on the screen and took off his glasses, which he said he needed only for “computing” but the girls knew otherwise. Next to him was a faxed copy of a Kitsap sheriff detective’s report.
Katelyn’s name and the date—twelve days after her death—were smudged across the top.
“Look,” he said, “I want you to understand that what I’m about to tell you isn’t the kind of information anyone really needs to know. But I’ve trusted you with important stuff before, haven’t I?”
Their father could have been referring to a number of things right then, but more than likely it was the story of Donita Montero, a woman who’d abused her children before murdering one in a coin-operated washing machine in Duluth, Minnesota. His book Clean Getaway did not disclose the sexual abuse of the surviving daughter. While another author might have included it for shock value, Kevin Ryan took the higher ground and didn’t even tell his editor about it. To confide in an editor was, without a doubt, like opening the door a crack.
A crack was all it took to ruin someone’s life.
“Dad,” Taylor said, “we were friends with Katie. We want to know what happened to her. What really happened?”
Kevin weighed her request carefully. “They thought it was an accident at first, but it is possible—maybe even likely—that she killed herself.”
“Killed herself?” Taylor shook her head. “Doesn’t add up, Dad. She wouldn’t have done that.”
“She got some bad news the night she died,” he said.
“What bad news?” Hayley asked from the window seat.
“Her grandmother had promised to fund her college expenses but told her that night that the money was gone.”