Betrayal (18 page)

If Olivia in her shipping-crate coffin could have commented on her current accommodations, she would have been mortified that she was now considered a biohazard. It seemed like a mean designation to put on a girl. She also might have taken some delight in her traveling companions in cargo. Olivia's body was stored next to a series of crates containing four miniature poodles and a golden retriever. Olivia loved animals. She really did. She also would have told her father that she loved him if she had had one more chance. Winnie, not so much.

Just because she was dead didn't mean she had to lie.

IN THE DAYS AFTER HER DEATH viewership of Olivia Grant's YouTube videos went up exponentially. She had posted them under the name Cher Boynton for her friends back in London, and by the Thursday after her murder they were making the rounds of the Facebook and Twitter accounts of Kingston High students faster than the Missoni line at Target had sold out.

Hayley and Taylor kept track on their phones during the break between first and second period. Brianna and Drew were now officially MIA and APB'd and if anyone had any real leads as to who might have killed Olivia and why, they weren't talking. The twins hoped the videos would shed some light on who might have wanted Olivia dead. While lots of people had the opportunity at the party, the girls had no idea who might have had a motive. Their dad's latte stand chat with Police Chief Annie Garnett didn't get them any closer to finding out, either. With what one blogger was calling “ice-cold lovebirds” gone, suspicion and worry focused on Brianna and Drew—big-time.

“This is so Brianna,” Hayley said. “Olivia gets murdered and Brianna steals the spotlight from her.”

“Maybe she's been kidnapped?” Taylor said, scrolling through the video, and only momentarily being distracted by a clip featuring four hundred Filipino kids singing a Kesha song.

“Maybe she's dead?”

“Then she'd really get some attention, wouldn't she?”

“Yeah, but not of the type she could brag or whine about,” Hayley said.

Taylor clicked Play on the video. Olivia waited for a musical interlude (a snippet of a Jessie J song) before she started talking. She moved her fingertips through her long cinnamon hair and spoke.

“Hello, kitties,” she said, her eyes fixed on the lens of her webcam. “I've been immersing myself in so-called American culture in the most miserable place on the planet. All right, maybe not as miserable as Birmingham, but close enough.”

She caught herself in the reflection of the computer screen and paused long enough to adjust her hair again before carrying on with her video blog. Her face went from interested to dour as she composed her thoughts.

“Nothing but rain and wind. I haven't felt warm in three days. No kidding. The bedroom, which I call DSB for ‘dead sister's bedroom,' is a freezer. Now I'd like to update you on the people I've met here. First of all, there's Beth, whom I consider to be a nice but confused girl. She seems to want to fit in so badly she'll be whatever anyone wants her to be. I like her. At least, I like some of her divergent personalities, but sometimes she tries too hard. There's also Beth's friends who keep coming ‘round: the Ryan twins, Hayley and Taylor. Beth can't seem to tell them apart, but it's obvious to me. Hayley has a boyfriend, Colton, who is pretty cute, and Taylor has no one. Taylor is always fussing around like she's mad at her sister, and her sister is always trying to appease her. They act all close and everything, but I'd bet that they'd take each other out if they were locked in the same room. Colton is part American Indian, and he's been nice to me.
Really
nice, if you know what I mean. I like him. The good news is I have a new best friend. Her name is Brianna, and she's exactly the sort of girl you'd expect me to hang with. She's popular, fun, and so like moi. I've got to run, but I'll be reporting more when I can. Beth's mom is fixing some kind of hideous dumpling for lunch, and I promised to help. More later.”

“Wow,” Taylor said. “She's mean. At least Colton got a nice shout-out.”

Hayley shook her head and glowered. “Yeah, a little too nice, if you ask me.”

Taylor clicked on Olivia's second video. Like the first, it was filmed in Christina Lee's old bedroom. One of Beth's drawings, a dark and brooding piece with a ghostly figure in a bramble forest, filled the background.

“Hello, kitties, it's me, Olivia. I'm a little down today. I had to spend the day with Beth, her mother, and those Ryan twins at the Silverdale Mall.”

She held up a pale orange, scoop-necked top. “I got this top, which I think is brilliant, from the Gap. Love it? I do. We had lunch at the Red Robin restaurant, and I had the worst thing ever. Something called a Banzai Burger, which is a Japanese take on a hamburger, America's national dish. They make fun of British cooking all the time in America, but at least we've never come up with an abomination combination like hamburger, teriyaki, and pineapple. I can almost feel it rising up from my stomach to my throat right now. Also on the down side, things have been getting a little weird with my new best friend, Brianna. Her boyfriend, I fear, isn't all that he's cracked up to be. I heard him talking to another girl on the phone the other day. He definitely thinks he's a player, though in a kind of common, dull sort of way. I think I'm in the middle of something. Of course, I like to be where all the excitement is. Except not like this. Just too much drama for me. Sending kisses across the pond.”

“Drew
is
a player, if you ask me,” Hayley said.

“Maybe last year,” Taylor said. “This year he seems to have settled down. Getting Brianna was definitely a level above the girls he'd dated before.”

“Two levels,” Hayley said, thinking. “Remember Jennie O'Hara?”

“‘Jennie the Skank?' Yeah, I remember her. The reality was she wasn't a skank, just the victim of trashy taste. She's going to a school in Gig Harbor now. We're Facebook friends.”

Hayley didn't know any of that. Taylor had her own life too.

Taylor waited for the next video to load.

“Olivia looks different in that video we just watched,” Taylor said.

“How?” Hayley asked.

“A little scared. Did you see how her eyes kept straying from the camera lens?”

“I guess so,” Hayley said. “I thought maybe she was annoyed by someone else in the room.”

Taylor shrugged. “Maybe. Let's watch the next one.”

Finally, for the third time, Olivia Grant took to her computer video cam. It was a different kind of Olivia this time, quite a bit less focused, almost frazzled. She didn't adjust her hair. She didn't pause for a musical interlude. She just started talking.

“Hello, kitties, Olivia here. Just a few words about Kingston High School. Not sure why they call it Kingston High. There's nothing high about it. Don't get me wrong. I think the school itself is pretty decent, but the students seem to spend half their time talking about the football game and what Katy Perry song they like the best. Between us, they all seem the same to me. The classes aren't challenging at all. I'm surprised how much these kids don't know about the world. I was talking about the euro the other day, and one girl said her brother drove a Euro and had nothing but problems with it. No joke! It was all I could do to stop myself from laughing right in her dull face. In case you don't get the reference, she thought the euro was a car! I'll bet she thinks Greece is a musical. I'm getting really close with someone, but for now it has to be a secret. Not my choice, but I guess if I actually lived here I'd be more wary of any repercussions.”

Taylor set down her phone and met her sister's gaze.

“Wow,” she said.

“Yeah, wow,” Hayley said. “Olivia seemed so nice, so classy.”

“It was that accent of hers,” Taylor said. “The accent made her seem regal.”

“Did she always talk that way?”

“With the accent? Yeah. Trashing everyone? Probably.”

“I wonder who she pissed off. Because someone must have been pretty mad to do what they did to her that night.”

Taylor agreed. “Yeah. And who was she getting close to?”

“No idea,” Hayley said. “But it sounds like whoever it was had a reason for nobody finding out.”

Taylor looked back at the cell phone screen, frozen on Olivia's face. Behind her in Christina's bedroom was a bulletin board with a series of photos pinned neatly along the edge. Even in the minuscule format of her cell phone she could easily make out a shot of Olivia and Drew. She pointed it out to her sister.

“That's weird,” Hayley said. “When was that taken?”

“I don't know,” Taylor answered. “I've never seen it in my life.”

HE LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW as the sun set over the Olympic Mountains, burnishing the overcast sky with a bloody red hue, and considered something that had never entered his mind before. He thought about just how easy killing had become. On purpose or by accident, it didn't really matter. It was easy.

Murder, he'd come to know, was not about what he got from the act—not the act itself—but the way it made him feel. He was out of breath. He was sweaty. He had a layer of grime that coated all of his skin. His hands were sore and there was a tiny gash over his eye. She'd been a fighter. His dark eyes followed the trail of starlings as they began to land on the clothesline of the neighbor's house. When he was a boy, he used to shoot birds with a slingshot and a BB gun. He remembered how their heaving bodies felt when he picked them up from the ground. Breathing hard. Trying to survive. Looking up at him with tiny, but very alert, black eyes until he crushed them in his bare hands.

Power. A taste of power. The first bite.
The birds had been the beginning of what he was going to become. His family knew it. Friends could see it too.

His first human victim was like one of those birds. She was already halfway down for the count when he finished her off.

He reached for his phone and prepared to text a message.

Chapter 18

IT WAS EARLY SATURDAY MORNING. Cruelly early. Taylor Ryan took her mother's car and drove to the North Kitsap School District pool in Poulsbo. It was just after six. She punched the keypad code used by the swim team and went inside. Chlorine and steam wafted through the air. The familiar smell was almost soothing. She liked how quiet the pool was when no one else was around—a refuge, a place to think. At that hour there were no pesky Kitsap Water Blossoms, the local synchronized swimming team, to tell her that she and her sister would be the ultimate addition to their team.

“You look alike. You swim. You even move the same. We can gel your hair in identical swirls. We, like, totally could use you on the team,” said Crystal Brennan, the team captain, who apparently didn't know the only thing worse than synchronized swimming was, well,
nothing
could be worse.

As Taylor undressed in the locker room, she caught her reflection in the mirror. She thought about herself and Hayley. Where everyone else saw similarities between them, Taylor could see nothing but the differences.

A gazillion of them.

She knew what only identical twins knew with any genuine certainty: there was no such thing as “exactly alike.” Sure, Taylor and Hayley were genetic copies. That was a medical fact. They were the kind of twins that occurs in about one out of a hundred births. Twins with the same genes in the same sequence. As disgusting as the girls thought because it went back to their conception and the truly icky idea of their parents having sex, Hayley and Taylor were from the same egg and the same sperm.

Identical. Copies.
That's what the Ryan sisters were to the untrained eye of a singleton.

Thankfully, their differences, while many, were not of the kind that would have one be known as the “fat twin” or the “twin with the ugly birthmark” or the “twin with a peculiar left nostril.” Those were distinctions of other twin girls they'd known over the years, mostly through school and, when they were very young, through the Mothers of Multiples group that Valerie had joined in order to get good deals on double-castoffs of questionably adorable matchy-matchy clothing, highchairs, and tandem strollers.

Taylor and Hayley were the same but different.

In the scattershot sunny days of a Puget Sound summer, the bridges of both of their noses freckled and faded when fall came with its curtain pull of sunlight. For some reason, however, Taylor's freckles didn't fade to the same extent that Hayley's did. There were seven stubborn specs of pigment that ran over her nose in what she was sure was the shape of the Aries constellation, which unfortunately was not her zodiac sign.

Taylor wrinkled her nose, making the spots disappear in the crinkles of the nasal crunch.
Now you see them; now you don't.

Her eyes still on the slightly foggy mirror, Taylor twisted her hair into a loose ponytail with a big black rubber band. Her hair, like her sister's, was blond, thick, and sun-streaked—the kind of hair every girl in school coveted. One time, sick of their sameness, Taylor dyed her hair red with cherry Kool-Aid. That fit of rebellion looked terrible in seventh grade, but everyone had to admit that she smelled wonderful.

“Like the biggest cough drop ever,” Beth Lee had said.

And yet Taylor's hair was different in that its natural part was on the left side, with Hayley's on the right. As a mirror twin, logic would have Taylor left-handed and Hayley right-handed, but in that way they confounded twin experts. Both girls were right-handed. One thing dissimilar about them was that Taylor's neck and shoulder were marked by a series of three tiny scars. She rolled her shoulder and turned her neck to take a full accounting of them in the mirror.
Still there.
Most people probably assumed the scars had come from an injury pertaining to the bus accident, but the truth was far more sinister. It was somewhere near the top of the list of things that the family didn't like to revisit, talk about, or even admit had once occurred.