Beneath Her Skin by Gregg Olsen (ebook reader for manga txt) 📗

a homebody who didn’t go far. She just didn’t. Besides that, the little stub of a dog never missed a meal.

Ever.

Chapter Twenty-Five

At the time of her death, Katelyn Berkley was no longer close friends with any of the Port Gamble girls she’d known since grade school. It wasn’t that the other girls didn’t want to be tight anymore. They did. Some even tried. But the more they tried, the more she seemed to retreat. No one really understood why. Hayley and Taylor assumed that it was because of the situation between her parents. When Katelyn was in middle school, the Port Gamble Police made at least two trips to the Berkley residence to defuse what busybodies liked to call a “domestic disturbance.” The Ryan twins, having learned from their father’s work, knew that “domestic disturbance” was the PC way of saying “knock-down, drag-out argument.” There might have been other occasions in which intervention was needed, but no one knew for certain.

The teen gossip line said that Katelyn had been the one to call the police, saying she was fearful that her parents would end up hurting each other.

Hayley felt sick about what had happened to Katelyn in the years since those physical altercations. Katelyn had once told her that things were better at home.

“My mom’s getting help,” she said.

“What kind of help?”

Katelyn pretended to hold a glass and tipped it to her lips.

“Oh,” Hayley said, because the gesture needed a response. But she didn’t know what else to say. Sandra Berkley was a sad woman and, like her daughter, she was good at building walls around herself. Alcohol made a great barrier.

Maybe we should have tried harder, Hayley thought.

She fingered the note that her sister had recovered from Katelyn’s trench coat.

She’d slept on the little slip of paper the night before, as had Taylor the night before that, but nothing had come to either one of them.

Instead, she found her thoughts drifting back to the state of things in the Berkley household before Katelyn’s life began to unravel. She recalled the time she heard her mother talking with her father about what was going on over at house number 23.

“Things like that happen everywhere,” Valerie had said.

“I know. But, honestly,” Kevin said, “I never would have suspected the Berkleys.”

“With all you know about violent crime, you ought to know that it thrives wherever it can.”

“I feel like the dope who says that their serial killer neighbor seemed so nice, but when they look back on it they can remember a cat squealing and they wonder if he’d just killed it.”

Valerie laughed. “It isn’t that bad, Kevin.”

“No,” he said. “I hope not.”

Hayley remembered how she’d seen Katelyn the day following a police intervention and asked her if everything was all right.

“I’m fine,” she had said. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” Hayley admitted, feeling like she’d intruded on something private. “If you ever need someone to listen…”

Katelyn had stared hard at her, sizing her up, weighing her somewhat cryptic response.

“I don’t need anyone’s help,” she said, finally and quite firmly. The wall was up, and it was made of brick, stone, steel and tank armor.

Hayley had stood there a second. The words that came from Katelyn were completely at odds with her appearance. She looked incredibly sad, worn down and very afraid.

“Are you sure?” Hayley asked, pushing only a little. “Can I help?”

Katelyn turned away to answer a text message. “There’s no problem,” she said without looking up. “No one but me.” And then she walked off, toward her class, toward the cafeteria.

Somewhere away from Hayley.

Hayley let it go that day at school and regretted it years later. She hadn’t pressed her further because it just seemed too private. Later, when she heard that Katelyn was cutting herself, she assumed what everyone who watched daytime TV did about cutters and their motivation to self-mutilate. They did it to control their pain, to let out the hurt one slice at a time.

Hayley hadn’t dug deep enough to think about the root cause of Katelyn’s problems.

She thought about how middle-school hierarchy ensures that a good number of kids are relegated to loser or outsider status. Katelyn, the cutter, was never really viewed by anyone as a loser. Few knew that secret. Katelyn was engaging. She was pretty. She still had her funny, bright side. And most of all, she still had the ear of her best friend, Starla.

Starla’s friendship, no matter how tenuous, was nearly a guarantee that Katelyn could still get a passkey into something better than her miserable life back home or in the restaurant where she worked.

Still mulling over those memories, Hayley looked up as her sister entered her bedroom.

“What’s up?” Taylor asked, finding a place on the corner of her sister’s cozy bed.

“I was just thinking about Katelyn,” she said.

Taylor ran her fingers over the old chenille bedspread that instantly, tactilely, reminded her of their grandmother on their mother’s side.

“I know,” Taylor said. “Me too.”

Hayley studied the folded paper held in her fingertips. Taylor’s eyes landed there, taking in its contents, and she wondered out loud, “Do you think we could have saved her?”

Hayley shook her head. To think that they could have done something but didn’t was an immense burden. “I don’t know,” she responded. “But maybe Starla could have.”

Valerie glanced down at Hedda’s water and food dishes. There was still some reduced-calorie kibble in the dog’s white ceramic dish, but it was stale. So was the water. She often complained that she was the only person in the family who thought to keep things fresh. It was only a flash of a thought, the kind that came and went with the bruising realization that Hedda had vanished.

The dog had been a part of the family for almost ten years. The day she had come to the Ryans was a day wrought with unthinkable tragedy and heartache. Valerie had returned home from the hospital for a change of clothes, when Kevin phoned her to say he’d seen on the news