Envy

chapter 6

WHAT REMAINED OF KATELYN BERKLEY was transferred onto a stainless-steel table ringed by a gleaming trough of running water. Gushing water. The rushing flow around Katelyn would help eliminate all the blood that would spew forth once deep, hacking cuts were made on her torso. Her eyes were closed and, even more positively and importantly, she was dead. And yet, for anyone who knew Katelyn, there was a deserved measure of empathy for the humiliation of it all. Indeed, it was only one of the many indignities that are required when a young, healthy person dies. Strangers would be looking at her body. Her naked body. Then they’d begin the practice of cutting her open like a split chinook salmon as they reviewed and measured the contents of her chest, her stomach, and even her brain. In the instance that she took her last breath, she’d unwittingly given herself over to strangers—strangers with blades. If she’d killed herself and sought refuge from pain, real or imagined, she’d made a mistake.

Katelyn didn’t fade away or cross over to some kind of nothingness. Instead, she ended up as a piece of evidence, a high beam of light on her, in the county morgue in Port Orchard—a place where she would have refused to be caught dead in … unless she were really dead.

And there’d be no say in it wherever she was.

While no one seriously suspected foul play in Katelyn’s death—there wasn’t any reason to, really—the Kitsap County coroner’s office protocol required the most invasive of techniques before Sandra and Harper Berkley could lay their only daughter to rest in Port Gamble’s Buena Vista Cemetery. And, what with reduced holiday staffing and ensuing police investigation, it would take a while.

Rest. As if rest were even possible since her parents were unable to stop arguing long enough to make sure that their baby was remembered for all the love she’d given them, rather than the pain she’d left them to endure.

There she was, on the pathologist’s table, her green painted toenails facing up, ready to relinquish any last shred of modesty. Katelyn Melissa Berkley had died a horrible, tragic death in the bathtub of her Port Gamble home. She’d arrived by ambulance late, late Christmas night, and, like some leftover holiday ham, she’d been held for three days in the cooler of the county’s basement morgue in an old house on Sidney Avenue, next to the Kitsap County Courthouse.

With her assistant looking on, county forensic pathologist Birdy Waterman passed an ultraviolet light over Katelyn’s skin. She started with the dead girl’s neck and moved the beam down her small breasts and stomach.

“There’s some cutting on her arms. More on her stomach. New ones on her arms,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice that was a mask for her emotions. Among the things that Dr. Waterman loathed above all others was a child on her stainless-steel table.

“Cause of death?” asked the assistant, a faux-hawked newbie to the office named Terry Morris.

Dr. Waterman shook her head. “No, no,” she said. “I’m sure you’d like to wrap this up so you can go text someone or something, but here we do things right, methodically, and by the book.” She looked over her glasses with a kind look.

No need to make the new kid hate me. There’s plenty of time for that later, she thought.

“Let’s get there one step at a time,” she said, returning her unflinching gaze back to the dead girl.

She pointed to the cuts on Katelyn’s thigh and frowned. They were the newest. Fresh.

“Not deep at all,” she said.

“The girl was f-ed up,” Terry said.

Dr. Waterman, a Makah Indian with a medical degree from the University of Washington in Seattle, was a serious woman who thought that death deserved respect one hundred percent of the time. She glared at Terry. He was going to be a challenge. But she was up for it.

“You don’t know me well yet, Terry. But I don’t talk like that. And I don’t want my assistants talking like that.”

“It isn’t like the dead can hear,” he said.

She shot a lightning-fast look at him with her dark eyes and immediately returned her attention to Katelyn.

“How do you know?” she asked.

Terry, a young man with large green eyes, maybe too large for his small face, rolled them upward, but kept his mouth clamped shut—for a change. He was learning.

Death by electrocution is exceedingly rare. Dr. Waterman could recall only two other examples of such cases in the county. One involved a Lucky Jim’s Indian casino worker who had become electrified when he was working with some faulty wiring that fed power to the slot machines. He had assumed his coworker had cut the power source.

It was, Dr. Waterman had thought at the time, a very unlucky way to die.

The other involved a pretty, young Bremerton woman who was out walking her Dalmatian after high winds pummeled the region, dropping power lines and blacking out half the county. When her exuberant dog ran ahead, the woman used the moment to tie a loosened shoelace. When she bent down, her knee made contact with a thousand volts of electricity from a power line obscured by fallen tree branches.

Katelyn’s case was different, of course. Her death was the result of a household appliance coming into contact with the water in her bathtub.

Dr. Waterman pointed to obvious burns on the right side of Katelyn’s torso. “The contact with the voltage was there,” she said. The burns were severe, leaving the skin so red it was nearly cooked.

“Yeah, I see,” Terry said, not wanting to get slapped down for any editorializing or joke making. It took a lot of personal restraint for him not to say, for example, Watt are you talking about?

Next, the cutting and the sawing. The noise of a human body being violated by steel is horrendous—even for those who do it every day. The saw Birdy Waterman used emitted a noise somewhere between a Sears electric carving knife and a small chainsaw. Some medical examiners pipe music into their autopsy suites, turning them into hell’s concept of a downtown after-hours club. Way after-hours. Others turn up the volume on their iPods during the internal exam. Not Birdy Waterman. She hummed a little and watched her assistant’s green eyes turn a little greener.

“Some fractured ribs here,” she said, indicating faint lines where the bones had mended.

“Abuse?” Terry asked, peering over the pathologist’s shoulder to get a better look.

Dr. Waterman shook her head. “Medical history from the father says that Katelyn was in a bus accident when she was five. No other hospitalizations.”

Katelyn’s heart and other organs were removed from her body, weighed, measured, and examined.

What Birdy Waterman saw confirmed her suspicions. Katelyn Berkley’s heart had stopped beating because of trauma resulting from the electric shock.

“So is it a homicide?” Terry asked. “Accidental death? Suicide?”

Dr. Waterman raised the plastic shield that had kept the spatter of blood and tissue from her face.

“The girl had emotional problems,” she said, indicating the scars from the cuts the victim had made on herself. Most were old and faded, but some were quite new. “And while it is highly unlikely that she tried to kill herself with the espresso machine, it appears that’s what happened.”

“So how are you going to rule?” Terry asked.

Dr. Waterman took more photos and removed her green latex gloves and face mask, which were splattered with brain matter and bone chips.

“Accidental,” she said. “The police saw no evidence of foul play at the scene to indicate homicide. And the parents don’t need to live with the added heartache of wondering what they did wrong—even if they did something wrong. She’s dead. It’s over.”

She started toward the door of the shower and dressing room.

“You can close. No staples. Small stitches, Terry. She’s a young girl. I don’t want the funeral home to think we do the work of a blind seamstress. Katelyn …” She paused and looked at the paperwork that came with the body. “Katelyn Melissa Berkley deserves better. She’s only fifteen.”

“So? She’s dead,” Terry muttered under his breath, hoping the woman with the sharp scalpel and soft heart didn’t hear him.

But she did.

“I’ll remember that when I see you on my table,” she said.

IF THERE WAS A CASE TO BE MADE for waiting out the geekdom that is middle school before writing someone off as a complete loser, Colton James was Exhibit A. During the summer between middle school and high school, Colton had morphed into something of a hottie.

Colton was one-sixteenth S’Klallam Indian, the native people who’d lived in Port Gamble when it was called Memalucet. He had tawny skin, a mass of unusually unruly dark hair, and the kind of black eyes that looked almost blue in the sunshine. He’d been the skinny boy who dragged the girls to the edges of Port Gamble Bay in search of crabs, oysters, or anything else that might be good to eat. He joked that he did so because he was Native American, but really it was because his parents didn’t always have much money. Colton’s dad, Henry, was an Inuit fisherman, often in Alaska for the season, and his mother, Shania, was a woman who suffered from agoraphobia. She almost never left the house. People whispered that Shania James was a hermit and that she was lazy and too fat to do anything.

None of that was true, of course. The truth was far more sinister. Shania had been carjacked in a Safeway parking lot in Silverdale when Colton was two. With Colton secured in his car seat, the man who held Shania captive did things to her that she never talked about. Not to the police. Not to her family. At least, not that anyone had ever heard. Only the Ryans had a clue that Shania had been the victim of a violent crime; once, when Kevin was mowing the lawn, she had called over to him from the window.

She had held a copy of his book Innocence Delayed and waved it at him.

“You got it right, Kevin.”

“What’s that, Shania?”

“The author’s note in your book. That’s what. Sometimes people can’t get over things done to them. Dr. Phil is wrong. We can’t always get better.”

“Screw Dr. Phil,” Kevin said.

Shania gave a slight nod of agreement. She closed the window and disappeared into the house.

Colton had always been the boy next door, literally. Hayley and Taylor never knew a summer’s day when they didn’t chat with Colton, get into some harmless trouble at the Port Gamble General Store, or sleep out under the stars.

He in his yard; they in theirs.

And then all of a sudden he seemed to have grown up. Both Hayley and Taylor noticed it. The girls found themselves attracted to him, a quasi-brother or sidekick at best, in a way that was unsettling and peculiar.

One day when he was out in his backyard washing the old Toyota Camry that his mom never drove but couldn’t get rid of, Colton called over to Hayley. She’d just come home from the beach in a tangerine bikini top and faded denim shorts, all sticky and smelling of sunscreen. Her hair had lightened, and the bridge of her nose was sprayed with brand-new freckles.

“You want to help me dry?” he asked.

She didn’t want to, but because he had his shirt off, she’d found reason enough to cross the yard and pick up a chamois.

It turned out it was more buffing than drying, but Hayley didn’t mind. She stooped down low and started on the wheel well.

“I was thinking,” Colton said, his teeth all the more white as they contrasted with his deeply tanned skin, “maybe you would want to go out sometime.”

“You want to go out with me? What do you mean out?” she asked.

“Out.”

“You mean like on a date?”

“Call it whatever. But, yeah,” he said, now crouching close to her. “What do you think?”

What Hayley really thought was that it was strange. She liked Colton. She always had. Taylor liked him too. They’d even talked about how he’d changed and looked older, stronger, and sexier, which trumped all previous feelings they had had that he was like a brother to them.

“What about Taylor?” she finally asked.

Colton laughed. “I’m not into that.”

Hayley narrowed her blue eyes. “You’re not into what exactly?”

“Never mind. I was asking you out. Just you and me.”

Hayley wanted to drop the chamois and rush home to ask Taylor if she minded. She hoped she wouldn’t. She knew she might. Her mind was reeling.

“Yes, I would like that,” she said. “When?”

He smiled broadly. “How about tomorrow night? Want to see what’s playing in Poulsbo?”

Hayley didn’t answer right away. The only movies out were dumb romantic comedies, but she didn’t want to turn Colton down.

Colton immediately caught her vibe. “Nah, never mind. There’s nothing but trash out. Let’s bag the movies and do something else.”

In that moment, Hayley Ryan really saw Colton James as someone more special, more in sync with her than just about anyone she could name.

“It’s a date,” she said, turning her attention to the car but watching Colton in the reflection of the shiny hubcap. Her thoughts were a jumble just then and she couldn’t make sense of her feelings. There was no doubt she was jubilant over the fact that he had asked her out, but as she touched the car and moved the chamois in small circles against the chrome, she felt tiny pricks of sadness in her fingertips.

What was it, she would always wonder, about that car that made me feel that way?

The night Katelyn died, Hayley thought about that feeling she’d had back when they were polishing the Toyota and planning that first date. The energy that came to her was similar to something she was feeling now.

She also thought of Colton, whom she texted the minute she heard the news about Katelyn. He was in Portland with his dad’s relatives and wouldn’t be home until the day after school started. His mother had to be coaxed out of the house for the trip.

HAYLEY: THINKING OF KATELYN. SAD, SAD, SAD.

COLTON: SRY. W@ HPND?

HAYLEY: NOT SURE. NO1 REALLY KNOWS. SUICIDE? ACCIDENT?

COLTON: SUX.

HAYLEY: MISS U

COLTON: U2

When Taylor caught Hayley texting Colton, she just rolled her eyes. Sometimes those two were just SO annoying.