Envy (2 page)

Katelyn had loved white chocolate. Even though Sandra had insisted it wasn’t really chocolate at all.

“Baby, what happened?” Instinctively, Sandra turned off the slowly rising water. “Tell me you’re going to be all right!”

At first, Sandra only heard dead silence. Then the quiet drip, drip, drip of the tub’s leaky faucet. There was no answer to her question. There never could be. Never again.

Sandra shook her daughter violently, a reflex that she hadn’t had since Katelyn was a little girl and had lied about something so inconsequential that the terrified mother couldn’t retrieve the full memory of what had made her so angry.

As she spun around to go for a phone, Sandra Berkley noticed there was something else in the tub. It was hard to see. It was so dark in that bathroom. Through her thickening veil of tears, she leaned over and scooted the suds away.

The mini espresso machine.

Her eyes followed the electrical cord. Like a cobra that had recoiled in to strike, the plug sat upright, still firmly snug in the wall outlet at the side of the tub.

IN SMALL TOWNS LIKE PORT GAMBLE, Washington, news travels fast. 4G fast. Within moments of the reverberating echoes of Sandra Berkley’s anguished screams, residents had begun to gather outside the tidy red house with white trim and pineapple shutters. Christmas lights of white, green, and red sparkled in the icy night air. A passerby might have mistaken the gathering for a large group of carolers.

Port Gamble was that kind of place. At least, it tried to be.

An ambulance siren wailed down the highway from Kingston, growing louder with each second.

That the teenager had died was known by everyone. What exactly happened, no one was certain.

Someone in the crowd whispered that Katelyn had fallen in the tub and split her head open. Another suggested that the girl had “issues” of some sort and had taken her own life.

“Maybe she offed herself? Kids do that a lot these days. You know, one final grasp for attention.”

“I dunno. She didn’t seem the type.”

“Kids are hard to read.”

“True enough, but even so, I don’t think she was the kind of girl who would hurt herself.”

Scenes of sudden tragedy have their macabre pecking order when it comes to who stands where. Closest to the doorway were those who knew and loved the dead girl: her mother, father, a cousin or two. In the next wave were the friends, the church pastor, and a police deputy, who was there to make sure that the scene stayed orderly. Beyond that were casual acquaintances, neighbors, even the occasional lookie loo who was on the scene because it was better than a rerun of one of the various incarnations of
Real Housewives
.

There was a time when Hayley and Taylor Ryan might have been in the grouping closest to the Berkleys’ front door. Though they were no longer
that
close, the twins had grown up with Katelyn. As it often seems to be, middle school became the great divider. What had once been a deep bond shared by three girls had been shattered by jealousy and the petty gossip that predictably turns friends into enemies.

What happened among the trio was nothing that couldn’t have faded by the end of high school. The girls could have reclaimed the friendship they’d had back in the days when they used to joke about Colton James’s stupid sports T-shirts, which he wore every single day in fifth grade.

“Only a loser would support the Mariners,” Katelyn had once said, looking over at Colton as he stood in defiance, his scrawny arms wrapped around his small chest, nodding as if he were defending his team.

But that was then. A million years ago, it seemed. Since then, Port Gamble’s youths had grown into pubescent teenagers. Taylor and Hayley, still mirror images of each other, had blonde hair, blue eyes, and the occasional pimple. Colton had traded in sports T-shirts for ’80s relic rock bands’ insignias and was dating Hayley. And Katelyn was dead.

“When was the last time you actually talked to her?” Hayley asked, already trying to piece together what had happened.

Taylor brushed aside her annoying bangs, which she was growing out, and shook her head.

“Not sure.” A puff of white vapor came with Taylor’s warm breath. “Last month, I guess.”

“Do you think she was depressed? I read somewhere that suicide rates are highest at Christmas.”

Taylor shook her head. “Depressed? How would I know?”

“You have a better pulse on the social scene than I do,” Hayley said matter-of-factly. “They’re saying she killed herself because she was upset about something.”

“Was Katelyn still cutting?”

Hayley looked surprised. “You knew about that too?”

“Duh,” Taylor said, wishing that she’d brought gloves like her sister had. Taylor’s fingertips were numb. “Everyone knew. Dylan, that sophomore with a shaved head and earlobes he’s been gouging since Halloween, called her
Cut-lin
last week.”

Hayley looked down at the icy pavement and said quietly, “Oh … I was under the impression she had stopped.”

Taylor shook her head, then shrugged her shoulders. “I remember her telling people that she liked cutting. Liked how it made her feel in control.”

“That doesn’t make sense. Cutting made her feel in control of what?”

“She never said.”

The crowd contracted to make room for a gurney. Covered from head to toe was the figure of the dead girl. Some people could scarcely bear the sight and they turned away. It felt invasive. Sad. Wrong to even look.

The ambulance, its lights rotating red flashes over the bystanders, pulled away. There was no real urgency in its departure. No sirens. Nothing. Just the quiet slinking away like the tide.

A few moments later, the crowd surged a little as the door opened and Port Gamble Police Chief Annie Garnett’s imposing frame loomed in the doorway. She wore a dark wool skirt and jacket, with a knitted scarf around her thick neck. She had long, dark hair that was pulled back. In a voice that cracked a little, Chief Garnett told everyone they should go home.

“Tragedy here tonight,” she said, her voice unable to entirely mask her emotions. Annie was a big woman, with baseball-mitt hands, a deep, resonant voice, and a soft spot for troubled young girls. Katelyn’s death would be hard on her, especially if it turned out to be a suicide.

Hayley nudged her sister, who had started to cry. “We probably should go home, Tay,” she said gently.

In that instant, shock had turned to anguish. Hayley’s eyes also welled up, and she ignored a text from her boyfriend, Colton, who was out of town and missing the biggest thing to happen in Port Gamble since the devastating bus crash. The twins looked over the crowd to see the faces of their friends and neighbors.

Hayley jammed her hands inside her coat pockets. No Kleenex. She dried her eyes with a soggy gloved fingertip. It could not have been colder just then. The air was ice. She hugged her sister.

“I feel sick,” Taylor said.

“Me too,” Hayley agreed. Curiosity piercing through her emotions, she added, “I want to know what happened to her and why.”

“Why do you think she did it?” Taylor asked.

“Did what?” Hayley argued levelly. “We don’t know what happened.” “I’m just saying what they’re saying.” Taylor indicated those in the outer ring of grief, just beyond their own.

“I’d rather know
how
. I mean, really, an espresso machine in the bathtub? That’s got to be a first ever.”

Taylor nodded, brushing away her tears. She could see the absurdity of it all. “Some snarky blogger is going to say this is proof that coffee isn’t good for you.”

“And write a headline like ‘
PORT GAMBLE GIRL MEETS BITTER END
,’” Hayley added.

The spaces in the crowd began to shrink as people pushed forward. All were completely unaware that someone was watching them.
All of them.
Someone in their midst was enjoying the tragic scene that had enveloped Port Gamble as its residents shivered in the frigid air off the bay.

Loving the sad moment to the very last drop.

chapter 2

SOME SAY PORT GAMBLE WAS CURSED from the moment
they
came. The S’Klallam Indian tribe had made its home on the bay’s shores for hundreds of years, finding food from the sea, shelter from storms, and the tranquility that eluded other isolated locations along the Pacific’s rugged coastlines.

The place, the earth, the universe was in perfect harmony.

The way it was always supposed to be.

And then the early explorers arrived at the jagged edge of Hood Canal, an offshoot of the Pacific Ocean that pokes into Washington with the force of an ice pick.

That was a century and a half ago, a very long time by West Coast standards. The sawmill, located below the bluff on which the town was built, was still the source of most of Port Gamble’s jobs and its pungent clouds of smoke. Green hats (those who actually worked in the mill) and white hats (those who told the greenies what to do) coexisted happily in the town’s company-owned neighborhoods of centuries-old homes.

Homes were known by number.

Taylor and Hayley Ryan lived in number 19, the last house in Port Gamble before the highway’s march along the bay toward Kingston, the nearest town of any size. A two-story chocolate brown and white stucture built in 1859 that had been added on to at least four times, number 19 was the oldest house in Washington State to be continually inhabited. It was drafty, quirky, and certainly loved more than most rentals.

The conversation in that particular house was likely the same as others were having throughout Port Gamble that fateful night.

Maybe not exactly.

The Ryan family gathered around the old pine kitchen table. And despite the fact that it was Christmas night, the subject that held their attention wasn’t the gifts they’d received (a Bobbi Brown makeup collection for Taylor and a forensics book,
The Science & History of the Dead
, for Hayley) All they could think about was Katelyn Berkley and how it was that she had come to die that night in the bathtub.

Kevin Ryan, the twins’ father, was about to celebrate his thirty-eighth birthday and had taken to doing sit-ups every night and half-hour jogs around town. The girls had never known a time when their dad, a truecrime writer, wasn’t poking around an evidence box, hanging out with cops or prosecutors, or, best of all, visiting some lowlife killer in prison. Every year at Christmas time, their mailbox was filled with cards from baby killers, stranglers, and arsonists.

Their mother, Valerie, worked as a psychiatric nurse at a state mental hospital near Seattle. Hayley thought her parents had a symbiotic relationship since her dad seemed to rely on her mom as a human wiki when he was trying to figure out the psychos he was writing about.

Valerie was a stunning blonde with brown eyes and delicate features. In elementary school, Taylor always thought her mom was the prettiest one in Port Gamble. Over time, she learned that her mother was also smart and accomplished—and that a person’s true character is more important than how she or he looks.

Except on TV, of course.

Valerie blew on her hot chocolate—made with real milk, sugar, and cocoa powder—scooting the froth to one side so she could drink it without getting a chocolate moustache. “What did Chief Garnett say?”

“Not much,” Kevin answered. “I mean, just that it was probably an accident.”

Valerie raised an eyebrow and passed out some candy canes. “I don’t see how. Honestly, Kevin, small kitchen appliances don’t get into a bathtub all by themselves.”

Kevin nodded in agreement and looked across the table at the girls, who’d endured a blizzard of text messages from friends about their suspicions of what happened to Katelyn. “Was she upset about something? Do you guys know anything?”

Taylor hated cocoa but loved her mom too much to say anything. She stirred the steamy liquid with her candy cane. The only thing that could make homemade hot chocolate worse was a candy cane.

“Nah. Katie is—”

“
Was
,” Hayley corrected, always precise.

Taylor looked at her sister. “Right.
Was
. Anyways, Katie was super mad about something.”

“She allegedly had a boyfriend. I mean”—Hayley quickly corrected herself when Taylor shot her an exasperated look—“that’s what I heard. But I never met him. We didn’t really talk to each other in school.”

Kevin sipped his cocoa. “This has nonfat milk in it, right, Val?”

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.