Envy

chapter 8

HAYLEY RYAN COULD FEEL A TWINGE OF PANIC as she turned into the alley that ran behind the houses on Olympian Avenue. She felt it in her bones. Her father always told her and her sister to listen carefully to what their hearts and minds might be telling them.

“There’s a reason your hair stands up on the back of your neck,” he had said, affecting his best Investigation Discovery voice, an octave deeper, but still Dad. “It’s a warning to be careful. Trust your feelings.”

“Hair standing up anywhere is gross, Dad,” Taylor said.

Kevin Ryan would not be denied his point. “Maybe so,” he replied. “But survivors of a serial killer are the ones who heed the feeling and act on it. Saving your life, Taylor, is never gross.”

Hayley smiled. It was a slightly tight grin, the kind meant to contain a more overt response, like an out-and-out laugh. She and her sister had grown up with a father who made his living telling the stories of the vilest things people do to others. In doing so, he never missed the opportunity to push advice on how to survive even the scariest, most dangerous situation.

“See that guy in the camo jacket over there?” he asked the twins one time when the family was shopping at Central Market in nearby Poulsbo. “Say he’s a serial killer and he corners you in this parking lot.”

Valerie rolled her eyes upward. “Why does everyone have to be a serial killer?”

Taylor piped up. “Because they’re the best, right, Dad?”

“Yes, the best,” Kevin said, nodding at what he knew was a tiny dig. “The best in terms of sales for books, but more important, they’re the best in making sure their victims are never left alive to tell their stories.”

“Let’s get back to the camo guy,” Hayley said, eager to continue the role-play. “What about him?”

Kevin lingered by the car door and spoke quietly, watching the kid with the carts, trying to keep his eye contact on his girls. Eye contact, he always said, was very, very important. “Say he helps you to your car and when you open the trunk he pushes you inside.”

“Easy,” Taylor said. “Jab his eyes out with the car keys.”

“I would scream as loud as I could,” Hayley said, sure that her response was the better of the two. After all, car keys might not be handy—especially if you’re a teenager and don’t have a car or even a learner’s permit.

Valerie shifted on her feet, eager to get going. “You shop somewhere else,” she said flatly.

Kevin made a face at Valerie. “All except your mom’s are the right answers. But there’s one thing to remember above all others.”

The girls waited. Their dad was big on the cliffhanger. Sometimes his sentences ended in such a way that the pause invited more curiosity, a kind of verbal begging to turn the page.

“You only have one second to save yourself,” he said. “And that’s before camo guy is pushing you into the trunk. If the trunk goes down on top of you, well, you’re probably as good as dead.”

“Only one in a thousand abducted girls lives if taken to a new location,” Hayley said, recalling a dinner-table conversation.

“Right,” Kevin confirmed, satisfied that the day’s spur-of-the-moment crime safety lesson had yielded the correct response. “And I can’t have either of you girls be the one who doesn’t make it.”

The camo guy who’d been the focus of the girls’ attention was about thirty-five, with pockmarked skin and scraggly red hair. He smiled warily in their direction as he pushed his cart toward his truck. He certainly looked creepy.

“I bet he lives with his mother,” Hayley said.

Taylor nodded. “Yeah, probably.”

Those lessons and countless others came back to Hayley as she made her way home from Beth’s house, four days after Katelyn died.

It was undeniable. The feeling. The damned hair standing up.

Someone was watching her, tracking her. It was that strange feeling, that compulsion that causes someone to suddenly cross to the other side of the street.

Some girls actually courted the feeling and found some kind of bizarre romanticism in being stalked. The Ryan twins never felt that—not once, and especially not when their dad had had a stalker and the fallout from the woman’s twisted fantasies had been devastating to the family. Years later, it was still remembered—quietly so, but nevertheless never forgotten.

Hayley saw nothing that evening as she hurried home on Olympian Avenue. She just had the feeling. She didn’t really hear anything. It could have been the winter wind or an animal moving in the half-frozen ivy.

Whatever it was, it nipped at her consciousness and it chilled her to the bone.

A moment later, a thread of a thought sped through her mind. It was about Katelyn, Starla, and Robert Pattinson, of all people.

Hayley was sure she didn’t get it all right. Robert Pattinson?