Envy

chapter 48

EVEN IN THE DARKNESS OF NIGHT, Shania James couldn’t conceal her anxiety as she led the trio of teens to the old Camry parked in the alley behind the house. Her legs looked like wobbly sticks, ready to snap with each step. Aside from the Christmas trip during which she was blindfolded and heavily medicated, Shania hadn’t been out of the house for years.

The car keys that she retrieved from the kitchen’s junk drawer shook like a jingling tambourine. It had been a long time since she held those keys; a Lucite red heart dangled like it had that afternoon so many years before. She remembered looking it at, sparkling happily in the worst moment of her life: the time she plotted whether she could summon the courage to gouge the eyes out of her attacker’s face.

She looked around nervously, and her son put his hand on her shoulder.

“Mom, you don’t have to do this.”

“I can and I want to,” she said. “Give me a second. Every time I go outside, the world seems so much bigger than I remember.”

Shania took several deep breaths and steadied herself before proceeding.

She opened the driver’s door and looked down at the seat and the steering wheel.

All three wondered what it was that she felt right then. Was she thinking about that afternoon when Colton was a baby? Was she thinking about her attacker? Was she thinking about what she did to save her life? And Colton’s?

“I can do this,” she said a second time.

Colton helped his mom into the driver’s seat. Taylor and Hayley slid into the backseat, while Colton went around to the other side to get in next to his mother.

“You’ve kept the car so clean,” Shania said, trying to take herself out of the moment, out of what she was about to do—and where she was sitting.

“Like you asked, Mom,” he said.

She smiled. But if ever there was a plastered-on smile, Shania James was wearing one just then. The keys and the Lucite heart jangled some more as she turned the ignition and put the car in gear, first in reverse by mistake, then in drive. It felt so strange and yet oddly beautiful to drive again, like a foreign language she managed to recall. Shania drove slowly, very slowly, down the alley and onto the highway. She gripped the wheel like she wanted to choke the life out of it.

Just maybe she did.

“There,” she said, trying effortfully to stay focused on the roadway in front of her and not on the reasons why she hadn’t been in that car. “I’m driving.”

Colton looked back at Hayley and Taylor. Neither said a word.

Hayley couldn’t have spoken just then if she had wanted to. The movie playing in her mind was a horror show of unimaginable depravity. A half-naked man. A knife. A scream. A baby’s scrunched-up face as he cried out. Colton’s face! A struggle. Another scream. In one flash, she saw Shania’s face, younger, prettier, as she mouthed the words: Help me.

“Are you all right?” It was Taylor nudging her twin.

Hayley nodded. “Think so.”

“I feel it too,” Taylor said. “Just so you know.”

“I know you do,” she said.

Colton read the directions off the MapQuest printout that Hayley had retrieved from her pocket, and Shania James did what she had to do. She had to protect the girls. Outside of the safety of her house, Shania recalled the promise she had made—a promise that lay dormant until it finally bubbled back up to the surface that night. Agoraphobic or not, Shania had no choice but to drive into the darkness of Port Gamble. Toward what? She wasn’t sure. No one in the car was.

THE WOODS OF KITSAP COUNTY WERE CREEPY enough in daylight. Add a wicked February wind and the black of night and it is the stuff of dark fairy tales, the kind of place where only a fool would wander. Shania pulled the Camry up the gravel driveway to Savannah Osteen’s cabin. A porch light blazed and the heat lamps of 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:

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 tomatocoated letters spelled out five words:

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, Larry Milton was likely the most notorious serial killer in a state that for some reason had more than its share of such predators. He stalked and murdered several young women before being convicted of killing two college girls in Pullman.

Larry Milton was definitely in the Infamy Hall of Fame.

“Your sister was killed by him?” Hayley asked in disbelief.

Savannah studied the teenage girl. She was blonde and pretty like her own sister. A few years younger than her sister had been at the time of her death, yes. But nevertheless, Hayley and Taylor were both reminders of a tragic loss.

“You know she was,” Savannah said, locking her eyes on Hayley. “You and your sister warned me.”

“That food message thing was random,” Colton said, almost wishing it to be true.

Savannah shook her head. “I let myself think that for a while. But it wasn’t,” she said, turning to face the twins. “The two of you were working together. You were both trying to help me do something to save her. I just dismissed it.” She stopped as a tear rolled down her cheek. “She was dead two days later, and I could have stopped it.”

Colton wanted to ask what happened to her, but he thought better of it. The woman with the corkscrew hair and sad face was falling apart right in front of their eyes.

“I’m glad you came. I’m glad you’re all right,” she said. She got up and went for the tape, pulling it from the VCR. “I never should have showed that reporter this.”

“You didn’t give her a copy?” Shania, who’d been mostly silent, asked. Savannah shook her head. “No, this is the only copy.”

“Good,” Colton said, snatching the tape.

“Hey!” Savannah called out, lunging at Colton.

He held the tape from her, like a game of keep-away.

“You care about these girls,” he said. “You said so yourself.”

“Give it to me,” she said.

Colton pushed her, and Savannah slumped back down onto the sofa. It wasn’t a hard shove, but the fact that he’d knocked down a stranger drew a gasp from his mother. What he did next, however, shocked everyone in the log house.

“I don’t want to see this on Entertainment Tonight,” he said. Without another word, he spun around, opened the woodstove, and shoved the tape inside.

“Don’t!” Savannah cried out.

But it was too late. Too, too late.

“Sorry about the carbon monoxide and the other toxins in the plastic,” Colton said.

Savannah sat back down and buried her face in her hands. There was nothing she could do. In a very real way, deep down, she was glad that the tape was gone. It had been like a finger pointing at her for almost fifteen years. As she looked back up and watched it melt, then burn, a sense of relief came over her.

Hayley hugged Colton. Taylor had wanted to do the same. Both understood his reasons for destroying it.

It was for them. To protect them.

“Who else has seen it?” Shania asked.

“No one,” Savannah said. “Just you three, me, and that reporter.”

“Why didn’t you show it to the university?” Taylor asked.

Tears came once more to Savannah’s sad eyes. “Because …”

Shania sat down and put her hand on Savannah’s knee. “Why?” she asked.

Although tears flowed, somehow Savannah pulled herself together and picked out the words she needed to say.

“Because I was ashamed,” she began. “Guilty. My sister was dead, and anyone else probably would have heeded the warning. I was operating under the assumption that logic should rule the day, not emotions. I messed up. What was on that tape was real. It wasn’t some mumbo-jumbo carnival game. Somehow you two sensed what was going to happen to Serena. Have you done that since? I mean, of course you have.”

Neither Hayley nor Taylor answered. They might have, if Colton and Shania hadn’t been standing there.

“My sister’s death is my shame, and it will be until the day I die,” Savannah said.

“You couldn’t have known,” Hayley said.

Savannah nodded. “But you knew. You were babies, and you knew.”

“We were babies,” said Taylor. “We didn’t know anything.”

Savannah didn’t seem convinced. Even in her shock and grief, she was able to process the past like the researcher she once had been.

“Your age has nothing to do with it, then or now.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Taylor said.

Savannah shook her head and dried her tears. “Of course you do. Everyone on the bus went into the water and died. But not you two.”

“I don’t like where this is going,” Colton said, actually meaning every word.

“Nothing like what happened with you when we were babies has ever happened since,” Taylor said.

Savannah remained unconvinced. “Really? That surprises me.”

“Be surprised then,” Taylor said.

As they sat there, the tape dissolved into the red and orange coals of the woodstove. The only trace that it had burned was a ribbon of dark soot along the top of the glass panel that allowed a peek inside.

“Really,” Hayley said, looking at Colton and hoping that he didn’t think she was some kind of freak, because she wasn’t. She and her sister did see things differently from others, but they figured they likely weren’t alone in that regard. Sure, they were special, but not any more so than anyone else who could pick up on the hidden hurt, the secret worries, and the dark plans that others foisted upon the unsuspecting.

While the four of them huddled around the woodstove, all could agree that its contents shouldn’t be disclosed, but there was that reporter and her ceaseless need for attention and recognition.

How in the world would they convince her to forget about it?