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

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 workstation 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 steroids. 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.”

“I’ll wear it once for Aunt Jolene. Then I’ll ditch it on the bus. I’m just saying…”

The night Katelyn Berkley died was the beginning of something that would change everything.

Everything.

Every. Single. Thing.

Chapter Four

The day after Christmas in Port Gamble was completely out of whack. Certainly, some things seemed the same on the surface. Plastic bags of gift-wrapping and ribbon were stuffed in alleyways or burned on the sly in backyard fire pits. Children re-examined their haul with an eye toward who’d given them the best gift and who’d screwed them over with something that wasn’t even worth returning. A few shoppers descended on the town to make the most difficult of returns: handcrafted items. It was hard to say a pair of mittens was the wrong size or the painted jacquard stemware was something one already had.

As the artist accepted the returns, the lies were told.

“I love them, but I have six pairs already.”

“I have a matching hat that you might like to go with it.”

Pause.

“I