Envy

chapter 35

TEAGAN KNOCKED ON STARLA’S BEDROOM DOOR and opened it before she had time to call out an answer. Brothers across the world routinely did that. Girls routinely got special treatment like that. No sister ever has to knock to get into her brother’s room, that is, if she’d ever want to actually go into the gross, stinkfest lair that is usually on the other side of such a barrier.

Starla was sitting on the floor in that god-awful beanbag chair texting and listening to her iPod. The room smelled of strawberry incense, and whoever thought that torching strawberries was a good idea was completely devoid of any good sense or scents. The only thing worse was tea rose incense, which Taylor was convinced smelled like a burning grandmother. Starla had taken to burning incense to round out what she called her “spiritual” side.

“Hayley and Taylor are here,” Teagan announced.

“Oh, hi,” Starla said, not looking particularly happy to see them. She reached up through her cascade of golden hair and pulled out her earbuds. “What’s going on? You two look like crap.”

Teagan disappeared into his room next door, and Hayley and Taylor went inside.

“What’s up is that five minutes ago Mrs. Berkley just asked us if we knew who Katelyn was having sex with,” Hayley said.

Starla didn’t get up and the twins didn’t sit. “Oh, that must be why she’s been calling me,” she said.

“So spill the beanbag,” Hayley said. “Who was she sleeping with?”

“Sleeping with? A pillow is about it,” Starla said. “Probably a blanket.” If Starla had meant to be ironic just then, it fell flat.

“Honestly, you don’t know?” Taylor said.

Starla’s phone buzzed with a text, and, ignoring the two girls in her room, she went about the business of answering it. Without looking up, she said, “As far as I know she’d met that guy online but not in person. He stood her up.”

“Right,” Taylor said. “But how come her mom found a pregnancy test kit in her room?”

Starla looked up startled and then returned to her texting. “Beats me. I mean, maybe Katelyn was playing around more than we thought. Sometimes quiet girls are the wildest ones, right?” Turning, she specifically directed her gaze at Hayley. “How’s Colton doing?”

Hayley smartly refused to take the bait. “Look, we thought you liked Katelyn,” she said instead. “We thought that you’d want to know how she died. If she was pregnant, she might have felt there was no way out.”

“No way but a suicide,” Taylor said.

Starla shrugged slightly. “That seems dumb, but maybe.”

“Or maybe she didn’t want anyone to know because the guy that got her pregnant was someone older, someone she was protecting,” Hayley said, a little proud that she refrained from saying something snarky to Starla in retaliation for the crack about Colton.

“But I don’t know anything,” Starla said. “I’ve got ten thousand messages to answer.”

It was Starla’s way of dismissing them, and it worked. Taylor and Hayley turned to leave. Teagan emerged from his room as they were heading out.

“You were right, Teagan,” Taylor said. “Your sister is a total B.”

“The biggest B in the history of Port Gamble,” Hayley added.

“No argument from me,” he said with an undisputed grin on his face. “I heard you asking about Katelyn. What’s up?”

“What’s up?” Taylor asked. “She’s dead, and we don’t think she killed herself. What do you know?”

Teagan watched as Hayley hesitated in front of the door.

“Me? Nothing,” he said. “She was depressed. I guess that’s something.”

Taylor pushed a little. Maybe the kid was more observant than his sister and actually knew something. “Did she have a boyfriend?”

He shook his head. “I think that’s why she was depressed. She didn’t have one.”

LATER THAT EVENING, HAYLEY AND COLTON looked at the screen on Hayley’s computer. They’d opened up the files from the thumb drive, and with a few clicks went a little deeper, beyond the contents of the messages themselves to the source files. What they were seeing was baffling beyond belief. The IP address for all the messages sent to Katelyn came from the Larsens’ house. All of them.

Including the “meet me in Seattle” message.

“Jake,” Colton said. “That creep was stalking Katelyn.”

“Jake,” Hayley repeated. She avoided saying something stupid like the fact that she’d always had a “funny feeling” about Jake Damon, but she had. So had her sister. Beth too. One time the previous summer, Beth had complained that he drove by her house very slowly as she washed the car in the alley.

“Outside of Segway Guy, he’s the creepiest person in Port Gamble. I’m glad that Jake’s boning Starla’s mom. She deserves it,” Beth had said.

“That’s harsh, Beth. Even for you,” Hayley said.

Beth barely blinked. “That’s me, I guess. Harsh.”

As Colton scrolled through code, Hayley thought some more about Jake, and the pieces began to fall into place. It wasn’t a perfect fit but the kind that inspired more digging. There had always been talk about Jake Damon and his supposedly lurid past. No one really knew exactly what it was, and they assumed all sorts of nefarious possibilities—drug-running from Seattle to Alaska, motorcycle gang activity (derived from his first appearance in Port Gamble on a BSA Chopper), and even the suggestion that he’d been in prison (one of his tattoos looked suspiciously homemade). Hayley’s dad took the bait on that one, but after computer research and a couple of phone calls, the only criminal activity that came up for Jake was traffic related.

And none of that involved a motorcycle gang.

Jake was handsome, kind of shiftless, and never seemed to need fulltime employment. When he hooked up with Mindee Larsen around the time her husband left town, most people saw him as an opportunist.

“Mindee’s drowning her sorrows in a six-pack of steel,” Sandra Berkley had blurted to Valerie when she and the twins were shopping the previous autumn at Central Market in Poulsbo.

Valerie had remained silent. The scene was too sad.

Sandra had the last word, though. “I know what kind of a guy Jake Damon is. I’ve seen the way he looks at our daughters.”

Of course, Sandra knew something about drowning her own sorrows. Her idea of a six-pack had nothing to do with abs, either. In her cart were half a dozen bottles of Yellowtail Shiraz—on sale with a ten-percent discount for shoppers who bought six.

Sandra Berkley had a lot to forget. And not all of it had to do with her daughter’s death. No, Sandra’s regrets went back almost a decade, and no amount of cheap wine could ever let her truly forget.