Betrayal (25 page)

“Yeah, Mom,” Taylor said. “We panicked. Then we got separated in the woods.”

“Then Sidney found you?” Valerie asked.

“Sidney?” Taylor questioned.

Valerie pointed to Segway Guy.

Neither girl had known his real name.

“Right,” Taylor said, looking at Segway Guy. “
Sidney
found us.”

Kevin went off to talk to Annie, and Valerie went over to thank Sidney the Segway Guy. Nobody mentioned what they all thought: that the attacker might be the same person who murdered Olivia. Only Hayley and Taylor knew for sure that he wasn't. What he wanted had nothing to do with Olivia and Brianna. The parents huddled together for a while, watching their children and the thinning crowd in a place where they'd all played together. Things like what happened that afternoon didn't happen in Port Gamble. They just didn't.

TWO GIRLS WERE DEAD IN JUST OVER A WEEK. Even if the temperature dropped by twenty degrees, that day in Port Gamble could not have felt any colder. It was as if time had stood still. The moments after Ava, the German shepherd, found Brianna's grave in the woods behind town melded into that mix of fear and fascination that comes with a horrifying discovery. Some kids tweeted with the hashtag #EasyBreezyDead:

Taylor and Hayley followed the tweets from the warmth of their living room in house number 19. Neither thought for one minute that Brianna had killed herself.

“She
was
pretty selfish,” Taylor said, looking up from her phone after seeing the suicide suggestion tweet.

“I'll give you that, but no one digs a hole, kills herself, and falls into her grave like she was jumping into bed,” Hayley said.

“Right,” Taylor said, scrolling though the flurry of #EasyBreezyDead tweets.

“With Olivia, and now, Brianna,” Hayley said, “there can be no denying that there's a serial killer running around Kitsap County.”

“Right,” Taylor said again. “And one of us could be next. Any one of us.”

THE BRITISH TABLOIDS had immediately posted their take on the demise of Brianna Connors before the twins had even made it home. Reporters there didn't have the time or the interest to bother checking the police updates to present an unbiased story. From nearly the moment the story broke overseas, as far as they were concerned, Brianna and Drew had been arrested, tried, and proclaimed guilty. No one seemed to care who had killed Brianna—only that she got her just desserts. The headlines screamed:

TABLES TURN ON OLIVIA GRANT'S MURDERER

EASY-BREEZY GETS HER COMEUPPANCE

DEAD RIGHT: EASY-BREEZY GOT WHAT SHE DESERVED

The evening news also had a field day with the story, and, tired of following the deluge of hashtags on Twitter, Hayley, Taylor, and Beth watched TV, safe in the Ryans's living room.

“Wow,” Beth said, her eyes fixed on the screen.

“Double wow,” Taylor and Hayley agreed in unison.

“I hate it when you do that,” Beth said.

“So do we,” they both said and laughed.

Beth made an exaggerated expression of annoyance. “Knock it off. I want to hear this.”

Brianna's mom was on TV, dropping a bombshell in an interview recorded before her daughter was found in the woods of Port Gamble.

Brandy, whom nobody had seen in years in Port Gamble or Kingston, was a phantom mother in more than one sense of the word. Under the lights, she looked otherworldly as she stood in front of the TV camera. There was no doubt her face had gone under a plastic surgeon's knife, and it seemed that her nipping and tucking had gone a little too far.

Hayley and Taylor remembered seeing her last at a Parent's Night in junior high (an event later renamed Guardians' Night, a more inclusive title that made all the kids feel like they were either orphans or in special ed). Brandy Connors Baker seemed to be older back then. Not quite grandma-old, but not too far off.

Apparently, Brandy made the media rounds after Brianna had failed to show up for a shopping trip they'd planned in Seattle.

“Bree loves to get her nails done. She is a girly girl, and I promised her a day of pampering considering, you know, what you all have put her through,” she told a KING-TV reporter as a microphone was nearly shoved down her throat.

With the wind kicking up and the clouds threatening to unload, Brandy stood in a rose-colored Versace trench coat and gleaming black boots outside the Seattle Public Library, a striking building that looked like the result of a sight-challenged architect, a fistful of pills, and an Erector Set.

“When was the last time you saw or talked to Brianna?” asked the reporter.

“I saw her a few days ago. It's hard to say. We're so close. The last time I talked to her was this morning. And let me tell you, she was simply crushed by the media attention. You people should get a life. You have fanned the flames and made her the subject of scorn and ridicule all over the world. I got a call from a paper in Hamburg last night. It's a feeding frenzy, and my poor daughter is the shark bait.”

Shark bait?
There was no doubt in Taylor's mind that Brandy wouldn't hesitate to chomp on her young if she needed a little mid-morning snack.

“Your daughter is the prime suspect in Olivia Grant's murder and you're saying that she's been victimized because of it?”

Brandy looked right at the camera.

“I'm not really sure what I'm saying, because I have no idea what you're asking.”

“Do you think your daughter has run away, or do you think something else has happened to her?”

“How would I know? I have no idea what she's doing, but I can tell you that there is no way she would miss out on a mani-pedi with her mother. So yeah, something is very wrong.”

“What's very wrong is that Brianna had a mother like that,” Hayley said after the segment was over.

“Yeah,” Beth replied. “That lady doesn't look like she's too choked up about her kid going missing. Whenever I see moms like that, I'm glad that I have mine.”

“Me too,” said Taylor.

“Me three,” said Hayley. “Whenever I think Mom could be more forthcoming about something or maybe stop talking about the freaks at her work—and I don't mean the patients—I see someone like Bree's mom and I know how lucky we are.”

“Forthcoming about what?” Beth asked.

“Stuff,” Taylor said. “Nothing big.”

Taylor hated lying to Beth, but she knew that as close as the three of them were, they could never, ever share everything.

Chapter 26

THAT NIGHT HAYLEY AND TAYLOR, bandaged up and in bed, swiveled open their outlet covers and went over everything that had happened. Foremost on their minds was not the terror of the day—or how they'd led police to Brianna's grave.

Mostly, they talked about Taylor's vision of Moira and what happened after Shania's car had sent her tumbling into Paradise Bay last year.

The night Moira had threatened to expose their abilities, Colton's mom, Shania, had unexpectedly and intentionally gunned the gas and pushed the reporter into the bay. Afterward, Shania had come back from accidentally-on-purpose killing Moira, Colton's mom sat in her husband's black leatherette La-Z-Boy recliner and faced the trio of teens on the sofa.

“We shouldn't talk about this after tonight,” Shania had said, clasping her hands in her lap. Every word that came from her ached with sorrow. “It was an accident. Accidents happen. And sometimes what you think is an accident, really isn't accidental at all.”

Hayley flashed back to the vision she'd had of the shaking man pressing the button to open the bridge span just as the bus approached the gaping seam. She shook her head and tried to focus again on Shania's words:

“I did what I had to do to prevent Moira from knowing what was really behind the crash and to stop whoever hired her from getting his hands on you. He would stop at nothing to end what started before you were even born. This is bigger than all of us. Bigger than Port Gamble. I had to protect you girls. I can't exactly explain it. It isn't mine to explain even if I could. And if circumstances send me to jail, I'll go. I'm not proud of what I did tonight, but I don't regret it.”

But that was then. Before Taylor had seen what Text Creeper had done to Moira. Shania had not killed her after all.
He
had.

“Who do you think Text Creeper is, besides the super-scary ‘employer' who hired Moira to find out about us?” Taylor asked her sister as the dark sky started picking up the first hints of dawn.

“I don't know. But what worries me is he's after us and he knows who we are and what we can do. Clearly he knows a whole lot more about our past than we do.”

“He said that we aren't the ‘only ones.' He said there were others.”

“I know. But who are they? Where are they? How did this happen to us?” Hayley asked, hoping the answer would just come to her in a message or a feeling. So far, no luck.

“Part of me wishes that Colton's mom had not erased Moira's cell phone and laptop memory,” said Taylor. “We might have been able to find out a lot from her voice messages and emails.”

“No, Taylor,” said Hayley firmly. “Shania did the right thing—she was very clear that protecting us was top priority, and Moira definitely didn't have
that
on her agenda.”

“Well, it leaves us no choice, then,” said Taylor. “If we want to find out what Text Creeper knows about what happened to us, we'll have to find
him
.”

DOWNSTAIRS IN THE COZY RYAN FAMILY KITCHEN, Valerie and Kevin drank a glass of Oregon pinot noir from a bottle that they'd been saving for a special occasion. This most certainly wasn't that occasion, but the need for a glass was undisputable. It had been a horrible day. They had been mostly silent since the ordeal with the girls, the man, and the discovery of the body.

“I feel so sorry for Brianna's parents,” Valerie said. “I can't imagine what they've been going through.”

Kevin finished his wine and poured another, his fingernails still grimy from gardening.

“Annie didn't say so specifically,” he said, “but I got the impression that whoever had killed Brianna did so elsewhere and then dumped her body there. This whole thing is one damn big mess.”

Valerie swallowed her last sip and set down her glass. “Evil can't be forced into neat order, Kevin. You of all people should know that.”

Kevin ignored Valerie's last comment. He just couldn't stop. “First Olivia gets stabbed and dies. Next, Brianna and Drew are questioned and made out to be the prime suspects. Then after a bunch of media attention they disappear, whereabouts completely unknown. And now Brianna's body is found out here practically in our own backyard.”

Valerie set down her glass. “Find Drew, I guess, and you'll find the killer.”

“Unless Drew's dead too.”

Valerie looked surprised. “You don't think he is, do you?”

“I don't know,” Kevin said, narrowing his focus to meet her eyes. “What do you think, Val? You're good at figuring things out.”

She got up and put her empty glass in the sink.

“I have no idea,” she said.

Her response was true now. But at another point in her life, Valerie knew her answer would have been different.

VALERIE MAY HAVE THOUGHT SHE'D ESCAPED a series of uncomfortable conversations with her daughters the night before. But bright and early the next morning, Hayley and Taylor found her at the kitchen table, her first cup of coffee not yet touched.

“Mom, we really need to talk,” Hayley began.

Taylor continued, “I was looking through our old photos for a school project and I found a bunch of newspaper clippings about the crash. About Timothy Robbinette. And about you when you were lost for two days on McNeil Island. Who's Tony Ortega? What happened to you? You never told us that story.”

Valerie looked at her coffee cup, taking a beat to collect herself.

“It was nothing,” she said. “I was playing hide-and-seek, and I got lost and couldn't find my way back. As for Tony Ortega, he was an inmate on death row who was later pardoned.” Valerie let out a nervous laugh, knowing she had given away too much information. She was holding her coffee cup so tightly that her fingers had turned white.

Both girls knew their mother was lying. She was the kind of person who didn't use a map. She had an internal GPS that was never, ever wrong. Even blindfolded and spun in a circle a dozen times, Valerie Ryan would always be able to get where she needed to go.

“And what about us?” Taylor asked. “You know we're not normal. Remember what happened to Grandpa?”

Valerie thought back to the day that her father almost died. The twins were in their last year at Port Gamble Elementary. It was a beautiful afternoon. She had been cutting a bouquet of rangy white roses that cascaded up and over the trellis by the back door when out of the blue the twins had said they had “a funny feeling about Grandpa.”

Chester Fitzpatrick had been suffering from Alzheimer's, and when it became abundantly and tragically clear that Valerie's mom could no longer care for her husband, the family had moved him to Cottesmore, an assisted living facility in Gig Harbor.

At the time, Valerie had shrugged her daughters' worry off, telling them to go play. But the girls' feeling had been so strong and unsettling, they had called Cottesmore to check on their grandfather—who had fallen in the bathroom two hours earlier and almost died from hypothermia. If it hadn't been for that phone call, Valerie's dad would have died then, instead of years later, peacefully in his sleep.

How did they know?
she asked herself over and over. But just as she did all those years ago, she refused to face what she wasn't sure she could handle.