Betrayal (19 page)

As she finished putting on her team suit—a burgundy one-piece with two yellow stripes down each side that made the girls look more like a half-naked road crew than a fiercely competitive swim team—Taylor Ryan considered something that she'd never really admitted to herself. She was jealous of Hayley. It was so stupid, so completely dumb of her to feel that way, and she knew it. It wasn't her twin's beauty—Starla was the most beautiful girl in town. It wasn't that Hayley was adventurous when Taylor was a little cautious. Beth Lee was the girl who would do just about anything and had the attitude that came with that.

It felt dumb, but Taylor couldn't help but envy Hayley for having Colton. Taylor had had a few boyfriends, or rather a few dates herself, but they didn't go anywhere. She didn't seem to mind. Whenever Beth complained about some boy, Taylor considered herself a little lucky not to be caught up in some idiotic drama in which having a boy “like” you was more important than anything else. More essential than your grades being in the top tier of your high school. Or the fact that you held a diving record for your district. Or maybe even that you were a good listener, kind to people, genuinely so and not because it was something that you could add to your college entrance applications. All of those things were Taylor Ryan. Her sister was some of those things too. But Hayley didn't hold a diving record, and she had been too busy the past year dating Colton James to help out at the food bank or call times at the Special Olympics Games held every year south of Tacoma at Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

Taylor climbed up on the diving board and put her feet in perfect position. Her painted toenails looked like a row of bluebirds on a wire. She took a deep breath, bounced on the board, and flew toward the glassy surface of a pool that had been quiet all night.

As Taylor hit the water, Olivia Grant suddenly commanded the forefront of her thoughts.

Olivia, who did this to you?

Olivia, talk to me.

Olivia, I can help find your killer.

She kicked her legs and glided over the bottom of the pool, holding her breath and waiting for something to come. It was the “hope and focus” part of how she and her sister did whatever it was they did. Of the two, Taylor could outlast her sister underwater. She'd proven that in the bathtub at home and in the pool as a member of the Kingston swim team. Her record going without air was the entire length of Demi Lovato's “Skyscraper,” a song she liked more for the positive message than its singer's performance.

She stayed calm, allowing the water to hold her as she moved through her lane.

And as she knew they would, with her goggled eyes wide open, letters came at her like a swarm of bees.

Atone.

Buffy.

Kinin.

Taylor held on to the first two words, convinced her observation was correct. But the last one? It didn't seem like a real word. Maybe it was a name? Buffy Kinin? No one at Kingston had that name. Atone for what?

Taylor held the words in her thoughts.

Atone Buffy Kinin.

Gasping for breath, Taylor shot through the water's surface and pulled herself up and out of the pool. Tracking water all over the pool deck, she hurried back to the locker room. The warmth of her body instantly fogged the mirror. The teenager wrote the phrase with her index finger. Her eyes reflected in the two
Fs
staring back at her.

She didn't need a Scrabble board to mentally unscramble the letters:

KNIFE BY FOUNTAIN

Taylor didn't even bother to shower. She didn't care if the chlorine turned her hair green. She hastily dried off and dressed. There was no doubt about what knife and what fountain. Grabbing her duffel bag, she sat on the bench and retrieved her phone. A second later, she logged on to the Crime Stoppers website. It guaranteed anonymity and was the only way she could think of to tell Annie Garnett without having to answer a bunch of questions for which she really didn't have answers.

Before she pushed the
S
end button, she deleted the word
tacky.
She wanted to stick to the facts.

Just like a cop.

LUCKILY FOR ANNIE GARNETT, finding the murder weapon only took twenty minutes and two antacids to calm her roiling stomach. After receiving the tip from the Crime Stoppers site about its whereabouts, a Kitsap County Sheriff's deputy, crime scene tech, and the police chief herself made fast work of the search in front of the Connorses' house, converging there after meeting at her office in Port Gamble. They recovered a knife from the lush green folds of landscaping, adjacent to the imported Italian fountain of three cherubs.

“Right there,” the deputy said, pointing with the shiny tip of his black boot. He aimed the beam of his Maglite. Glinting under the edge of a spindly branch of a sprawling juniper was the elongated and bloody edge of an expensive butcher knife.

“I'll bag and tag it,” he said.

“How could we have missed it?” Annie said, knowing that the media would bash the police for the rookie mistake. Searching a crime scene twice or even many more times wasn't unusual, but missing something as crucial as the probable murder weapon was a big blunder—the kind of mistake that would call into question whether or not it had been collected properly. The crime scene, after all, had been abandoned. She'd added that error to the growing list of screw-ups that would give any defense lawyer ammunition against the prosecution. The evidence had been trampled, contaminated, compromised.

All of those adjectives would surely be hurled at her if the case got to court.

Chapter 19

THEY'D BEEN DRIVING FOR HOURS, first across the Hood Canal Bridge and then onto the back roads along the tree-shrouded edges of the inland waterway that was America's answer to a Norwegian fjord. Drew Marcello had ditched his tricked-out black Honda Civic for his mother's old commuter car, a burnt-orange Accent, a vehicle he considered a complete dorkmobile. But he was willing to drive it, as he was all but certain that no one would ever be looking for that car. His mom would never, ever turn him in. Of that he was certain.

“You want me to tell Dad?” he had said, a threat implicit in his tone.

Marsha Marcello didn't need to ask what her son was getting at. She fished her key ring out of her purse and pulled off the key.

She looked over at Brianna, who was standing next to Drew's car.

Brianna's stare was ice. Green ice.

“I suppose you need some money too,” Marsha said. She held out four twenties and a ten. “That's all the cash I have.”

Drew snatched the money from her fingers. “Wow, you're really coming through for me now, Mom. ‘Bout time.”

Marsha, a spiny woman with small birdlike eyes, couldn't resist a jab back at her son. They'd played a kind of mean version of verbal ping-pong for years. It wasn't so much as a game between them, either. It was the way they related to each other.

“Which one of you killed Olivia, Drew?” she asked, her tone pointed and hurtful.

Drew shook his head and started walking toward the garage. He waved for Brianna to get behind the wheel and follow him there. Under his arm he carried a dark-blue plastic tarp—one of two he'd purchased at the Home Depot in Silverdale.

“Talk to me,” Marsha called out, but her son kept going. She hurried toward Drew, her arm on his shoulder to stop him from going a step further. Drew turned around and gave her a little push, which sent her onto the soaking wet grass. She looked up, disbelieving what was happening.

What had happened.

Drew's eyes were fixed, dark, swimming in anger.

Marsha stretched out her hand to have Drew help her up, but the teenager ignored her. He hadn't meant to cause her to fall, but he kind of liked seeing her there on the muddy lawn.

“If the girl did it, you need to turn her in. That's the right thing to do,” she said.

“Really, Mom? You're going to give me tips on morality?”

“I want the best for you,” she said.

Drew's impulse was to laugh out loud, and that's exactly what he did.

“You were never, ever there for me,” he said. “You don't know what the best for me is. You don't even know who I am. All you've ever cared about is yourself. I'd tell Dad everything I know, but I don't want to hurt him like you have.”

The clouds opened, and Marsha looked up at the sky, cowering from the onslaught of rain. She looked small, helpless, and afraid. Seeing that, Drew felt a surge of power and it felt good. It was the way it should be.

He was cutting ties. With his mother. With his school. With his old life.

It felt good to be him just then.

There was no uncertainty anymore.

“Thanks for that,” Brianna said as they pulled the blue tarp first over the hood, then the rest of Drew's car.

“For what?” he asked.

Brianna got into the passenger seat of the golf cart-sized Accent. “For defending me,” she said. “The whole world hates me right now.”

Drew looked right at her and put his hand on her knee. “I don't, Bree,” he said.

She smiled, leaned over and kissed him. “I know.”

“I'll figure out a way to take care of everything,” he said. “That's what I do. For now, let's drive and get the hell out of Kingston. We need us some downtime.”

“Your mom just had some downtime,” Brianna said grinning as she watched Marsha Marcello scramble back toward the house, her backside all covered in mud. “You really don't think she'll turn us in?”

Drew smiled. “Not if she wants to keep her job and her marriage,” he said.

“You'll have to fill me in sometime,” Brianna said, trying to snuggle next to the window. “Right now, I'm beat. I'm going to try to sleep. Can you turn the seat warmers on?”

“Sorry, Bree. No seat warmers in this piece-of-crap car.”

He reached into the backseat and pulled out a blanket with the Buccaneers logo. “Use this. Mom bought it from the Kingston Athletic Boosters two years ago. Never came to any of my games. She was always about acting like an interested parent to other parents who actually cared about their kids.”

“Nice,” Brianna said, drifting off to sleep. “Sounds familiar.”

An hour later, Drew pulled the orange compact car over to the side of a soggy logging road not far from Brinnon. He looked down at his phone.

“Damn,” he said, his eyes fixed on the tiny screen. “Reception sucks out here. I need to check my messages to see what's up.”

Brianna stirred and opened her eyes. “What's up is that people are so judgy and they think we're garbage,” she said, also pissed off that she couldn't use her phone to text, log on to Facebook, or tweet about whatever it was that was on her mind. Instead, she pulled out a copy of
Lucky
magazine and a can of Pringles they'd picked up at a convenience store. She twisted her long reddish-blond hair on top of her head and then let it fall over her shoulders.

He opened the car door and went up an incline above the roadway. Brianna glanced up from the article that detailed how a girl could buy designer clothes at a fraction of the price. She wasn't sure how long she was going to be on the run with Drew, but she put a sticker on the page just in case she had to learn to make do. She glanced up at Drew, who must have managed to get reception and was talking and waving his arms in the air wildly.

“Talk with your mouth, not your hands,” she wanted to say.

A minute later, he got back into the car.

“Who was that?” she asked.

“Nobody,” he said.

“You looked pissed,” she said.

“Just listening to voice messages.”

“Really? From down here in this crappy car it looked like you were fighting with someone, Drew.”

“Things aren't always as they seem,” he said, turning the ignition and putting the car in gear.

Brianna nodded. “Yeah. I get that. That's why everyone is saying I'm a cold-blooded killer. And I'm not.
We're
not.”

She'd added his name into the mix, even though the TV and newspaper coverage had really focused its hate lasers on her.

“We gotta figure out what we're going to do,” he said.

“When you say
we
, I guess you're making me come up with it. You haven't had a good idea since the ninth grade,” she said, only half teasing.

Drew glanced at her. “I think we should go back.”

“Like that's going to help me? They'll put me in jail. I'll have to rot there with a bunch of women who will want to pet my hair. No thanks.”

“No,” he said. “I know a place. I think we can hide in plain sight until your dad fixes everything. If we keep running, they'll find us. Or even worse, some creep will pull a gun thinking he's destined for
America's Most Wanted
type fame.”

Brianna nodded. “I guess. But where? Where are we gonna go?”

Drew leaned closer and tried to kiss her, but this time she pulled away. “I think I know a place where no one will find us until this mess blows over.”

She turned her attention and started to type on her phone's keyboard.

Drew reached over and put his hand on hers.

“We can't use our phones anymore,” he said.

“I want to text my mom.”

Drew nodded. “I know, but you can't. From now on, we have to stop texting, calling, Facebooking.” He pointed to a cell tower they whizzed past along the roadside. It had been painted green and out-fitted with branches so fake they looked like throwbacks to the seventies, when synthetic trees were in their beginnings. “Everything we do can be tracked off those towers. They will find us.”

“I can't live without my phone,” Brianna said, in a statement that was true for just about everyone she knew.