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

the pheasant breeder sent a red glow over the sword ferns at the forest’s edge. The long shadows from the headlights turned every low-hanging cedar and fir bough into a crouching figure, moving in the wind.

A criminal.

An attacker.

Someone who would do evil.

A light in the kitchen turned on. Then another in the living room. As Hayley, Taylor, and Colton got out of the car, Savannah Osteen appeared in the doorway.

“Who’s there?”

“Hayley and Taylor Ryan,” Hayley called out. “We need to talk to you.”

Colton went to his mother’s door and opened it. “Mom, are you coming?”

“Just a minute,” Shania said, doing all that she could to steady herself. “Let me catch my breath.”

“Thank you for bringing us,” Hayley said, hugging her.

“Honey, don’t thank me,” she said. “At least, not yet. We don’t know exactly where this is going.”

The log cabin was warm, and stepping inside from the cold night air brought some relief. Shania had kept the air conditioner going full blast on the way from Port Gamble because she was sweating profusely and thought it would help her from passing out.

Savannah looked at the girls, one at a time. Back and forth.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” she asked.

Neither did.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Osteen,” Taylor said, “but, no, we don’t.”

“You were babies; of course you don’t. Extraordinary babies.”

For a second it felt as if the gathering were some kind of reunion. The kind of occasion in which a teacher meets her class years later to survey the results of the seeds she’d planted. Yet that wasn’t quite right, of course.

“What is it that Moira Windsor thinks is so newsworthy?” Hayley asked.

Savannah stared at both girls intently. As she scanned their faces, she wondered out loud. “You girls don’t know? Or is it that you don’t want to say?”

The former linguistics researcher put her fingers to her lips. She didn’t like the way her words came out and apologized. “I’m on your side, and I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry that I showed Moira the tape.”

Hayley wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly. “The tape?”

Savannah nodded. “Yes, that’s why you’re here… Taylor?”

“I’m Hayley,” she said, glancing at Taylor. “And this is Colton and Shania James.”

“Hello,” Savannah said before getting down to business. “Yes, it’s about the tape.”

Savannah told the girls about how she’d come from the University of Washington to videotape them for a language study.

“It was supposed to be ongoing,” she said. “Some kids were going to be followed until first grade. You two probably should have been.”

“We were that good?” Hayley asked. “I mean that proficient.”

“You were good, very good, but not more so than many other kids in the study.”

“Then what’s the big deal with this tape? And why did you stop coming around? My dad said you dropped us.”

Savannah picked up the tape and inserted it into the old Sony VCR; it clunked into position. She hit the POWER button. Then PLAY.

“Watch,” she said. As she had with Moira, Savannah provided a running narration, telling the girls what they were seeing and how the study was conducted. The tape started to play, and familiar bits of their home came into view. The framed embroidery that their grandmother had done after the girls came home from the hospital hung behind the girls and their high chairs. It said:

EXPECT A MIRACLE

They could hear their mother’s voice saying something off-camera.

“They can feed themselves,” she said.

Savannah looked at the TV and then turned to face the audience of four on the sofa behind her.

“See what Taylor is doing?” she asked.

Shania leaned forward. “Yes, I see it,” she said. Up until that point, Colton’s mom hadn’t said much of anything.

“I don’t get it,” Colton said, looking at the frozen image of the two babies, the pasta on the tray. “What’s the big deal?”

Savannah pointed to the screen and Hayley, Taylor, Colton, and Shania got up from the sofa and moved closer to see whatever it was that was written there. It was astonishingly clear. Seventeen tomato-coated letters spelled out five words:

TELL SERENA NOT TO GO

Savannah ran her fingers under the words. “See?” she asked.

They all did by then, but no one said anything. It was amazing, strange and scary at the same time. It was something that could have been faked, of course, but no one in the log cabin even considered that.

It was real. Frighteningly real.

“Who’s Serena?” Shania asked, without a hint of shock in her voice that the twins had left a message on the tray table of the high chair.

“My sister,” Savannah said, indicating the framed photograph above the TV.

Taylor and Hayley didn’t say a word. They just stared.

“Not to go where?” Colton asked, parroting the phrase seen in the videotape. “Where was she not supposed to go?”

Savannah stepped away from the TV and melted into the sofa. Alone. She scrunched up her body a little, as if she were trying to protect herself. That was exactly what she was doing; it was clear to all four of her visitors.

“Don’t go where?” Colton repeated.

Still quiet, Hayley and Taylor had a sense where this conversation was going—not in specific terms, but in the outcome. They glanced over at Shania, and she smiled warmly, comfortingly at them.

She knew.

“She had a blind date,” Savannah said. “Some guy her friends fixed her up with. He went to our church.” She stopped talking. It was clear that she was on the edge of a very bad memory, a place that she’d been many, many times, and despite that could not soften its hold on her.

Colton prodded her to continue. “And?”

Savannah moved her gaze from Colton and looked up at her sister’s portrait as she spoke, as if her eyes could see her.

“His name was Larry Milton,” she said, her words now clipped by emotion.

The name brought a chill into the room. It was almost like the fire was extinguished and the doors swung open, though that hadn’t happened at all. Not for real.

Larry Milton.

Everyone in the Pacific Northwest knew the name. Outside of deadly charmer Ted Bundy,