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 3
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 strawberries dipped in chocolate and 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?” Hayley asked.
Beth shrugged her knobby shoulders. “I might have mentioned it.” Taylor rolled her eyes. “’Course you did.”
“I’m just looking out for you, Hay-Tay,” Beth said, refusing to call the girls by their individual names.
“The other room is ridiculously small. Besides, it’s Dad’s office,” Hayley concluded.
“Take turns. Who cares? It is almost Siamese-twin creepy that you two can’t be apart.”
Taylor’s face went red. “Can too.”
“Someone’s upset,” Beth provoked. “Wonder why that is? Maybe because someone else is right? As usual.”
The twins didn’t argue, but that night they convinced their dad to move his work station downstairs. Then they flipped a coin and Taylor got the little room. They hated being apart, but they despised the idea of Beth Lee blabbing at school that they were weird.
Weren’t twins supposed to be close, after all?
They moved their beds—headboard to headboard—to the inside wall, where an old power outlet had been plated over on either side. The single screw that held each plate in place was nearly threadbare. It took only the slightest touch to swivel it aside. It wasn’t an intercom system, but it functioned like one. At night when their parents were downstairs, the sisters would talk about the things that troubled them: boys, Beth Lee, the weirdos their dad wrote about, the pasta dish that their mother didn’t know they absolutely hated, and the odd feelings and visions that came to them at inexplicable times. Those were harder to discuss because putting the unthinkable, the unbelievable, into words was extremely difficult.
How does one really describe a feeling? Or how can one know something with absolute certainty that one shouldn’t, couldn’t, possibly know?
THERE WERE DIFFERENCES IN THE TWINS, of course. They might have come from a split egg, but that didn’t mean they were identical beyond their carbon-copy genetics. Physical similarities aside, the girls were distinct and unwavering in their likes and dislikes.
Hayley leaned toward alternative music. She loved homegrown northwest bands like Modest Mouse, Fleet Foxes, and old-school Sleater-Kinney—anything off the beaten path, out of the mainstream. While their friend Beth gravitated toward whatever music was hot and trendy, Hayley was more interested in finding meaning and real, genuine voices.
If Taylor measured things in emotion, Hayley looked at ways to quantify life. Analytical in nature, her head almost always overruled her heart. Love it? Hate it? She wanted to know it. Her drive to know something at its very root was likely the reason the boy next door, Colton James, fell for her.
Taylor’s intelligence wasn’t as logic-based; it was more intuitive. She liked a color because it made her feel good, not because it made her eyes look pretty. She prided herself on being outspoken and socially conscious—often flip-flopping with vegetarianism, risking ridicule from Hayley. Words came easily to her, as opposed to her shier, more introspective twin.
But despite their differences, something more than mere twinship always bonded them together.
FROM HER BED, TAYLOR WATCHED A BOAT decorated with a Christmas tree on the bow glide across Port Gamble Bay toward the mill. It being Christmas night, the scene was deathly quiet. A faint plume of steam rose above the sprawling site with its rusty, tin-roofed shacks, a near-empty parking lot, and logs stacked everywhere like Jenga on ’roids. Taylor may have had the smallest room, but it offered the best view in the house. The boat, an old tug, left a trail of foam in its wake. It curled and undulated on the glassy black surface of the water. She sat up and stared at it more intently, her heart starting to beat a little faster.
On the water were the letters:
LOOK
Knowing this was one of those inexplicable moments, she turned, lifted the outlet plate, and called to her sister. “Hayley, come here! You gotta see something.”
“I’m tired,” Hayley said. “I’ve already seen that hideous scarf Aunt Jolene got you.”
Taylor spiked an exasperated sigh with a sense of urgency. “Nope, not it. Come. Now.”
A beat later, Hayley stood in the doorway and Taylor pointed out the window.
“Yeah, so it’s a boat with a pretty Christmas tree.” Hayley narrowed her brow and shot an impatient look at her twin.
“Check out the water behind the tug.”
“Can’t you just tell me what I’m looking for, Taylor?”
“Read it.”
Hayley glanced at her sister and then back at the bay. She looked more closely and nodded. The word on the water had morphed a little, but it was as clear as if a child had scrawled it on a tar-soaked pavement with a fat piece of chalk.
“What do you think it means?” Hayley asked.
Taylor drew back the curtain to widen the view, and then turned to face her sister. “It’s about Katelyn. I feel it.”
Hayley’s blue eyes, identical to her sister’s down to the golden flecks that speckled her irises, stared hard, searching. “What about her? Where are we supposed to look? And at what?”
Taylor shook her head. “Don’t know.”
They stood there a moment as the December wind kicked up and erased the message on the water.
“That scarf is pretty atrocious, Taylor.”