Beneath Her Skin

by Gregg Olsen

Genres: Mystery; Amateur Sleuth; Thrillers; Crime Fiction; Psychological Thrillers; Supernatural suspense; Suspense

Synopsis

“Absolutely amazing. Just Wow!” NetGalley reviewer ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“I couldn’t read this fast enough!” KKEC Reads ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“I loved it!” Goodreads reviewer ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“A definite page-turner!” Goodreads reviewer ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The girl was slumped over the edge of the old clawfoot tub, her eyes tiny shards of broken glass, her expression void of anything. Her long, wet hair dripped onto the floor. She was dead. The night Katelyn Berkley died, everything changed… For as long as they can remember, twins Hayley and Taylor Ryan have been able to hear the dead. With a true crime writer and psychiatric nurse for parents, the twins were taught to use their gift to give a voice to the innocent. When the body of troubled teen Katelyn Berkley is found in her bathtub, the small town of Port Gamble is shaken to its core. The Berkley family had many problems and on the surface Katelyn’s death appears to be a cry for help gone wrong. But soon the twins begin to receive messages from Katelyn. Something darker was behind her death. As the halls of Kingston High are rocked by the scandal, everyone from the most popular cheerleader to the class outcast could have reason to want her dead. And as the twins get closer to the truth, it becomes clear that someone is watching them. Are they next on the hitlist? From the #1 New York Times bestselling author comes an addictive thriller about toxic friendships, dark secrets and the hunt for an unlikely killer. Perfect for fans of Melinda Leigh, James Patterson and ONE OF US IS LYING. This book was originally published as ENVY. This new edition has been re-edited since its publication in 2011. Read what everyone is saying about Beneath Her Skin: “Wow Wow Wow! Absolutely heart pounding, tense and fast paced. A book I just couldn't put down. Brilliant writing, great story.” NetGalley reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“ Will leave you utterly speechless… I couldn’t read this fast enough … This story is fast-paced —all the way to the end. Once the twist hits, you will be left gasping for air. ” KKEC Reads ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“A fantastic thriller … full of twists, thrills and questions that need to be answered … pick this one up and enjoy staying up way to late at night to finish it! ” Goodreads reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“ YES!!! Gregg Olsen is back with another must read! He has become one of my favorite authors…amazing.” Heidi Lynn’s Book Reviews, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“Loved… will keep you turning pages to the end!” Goodreads reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“ Kept me guessing until the end! ” Tara’s Book Reviews, ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Release date: February 2, 2021

Publisher: Bookouture

Print pages: 350

Sample

Water gushed out of the corroded faucet into the chipped, porcelain tub, pooling at the bottom with a few tangled strands of long, brown hair. The water was easily 120 degrees—so hot that Katelyn Berkley could hardly stand to dip her painted green toenails into it. The scalding water instantly turned her pale skin mottled shades of crimson. Perched on the edge of the tub with her right leg dangling in the water, Katelyn smiled. It was a hurt that felt good.

At fifteen, Katelyn knew something about hurt.

Promises had been made… and broken. Things change. People let you down—even those closest to you. Promises, she realized, were very, very hard to keep.

As a blast of icy air blew in from her open bedroom window, the silver razor blade next to the half-empty bottle of tea tree shampoo glinted, beckoning her. Katelyn fantasized about taking control of the situation—of her pitiful excuse for a life—the only way she could.

She looked in the full-length mirror across the room. The glass was starting to fog as the steam billowed from the tub’s rippling surface, but she could see that her eyes were red. There wasn’t enough Smashbox on earth to cover the splotches that came with her tears.

“Merry Christmas, loser,” she said.

She pulled inside of herself, into that place where there was only a little relief.

The bathtub was nearly full. Steaming. Just waiting.

Katelyn had no idea that, not far away, someone else was doing the exact same thing—just waiting for the right time to make a move.

As fresh tears rolled down her cheeks, Katelyn took off the rest of her clothes, threw them on the floor, and plunged herself into the tub.

Downstairs, her mother, Sandra, stood in the kitchen and poked at the congealing remains of a prime rib roast. She yanked at her blue sweater as she pulled it tighter on her shoulders and fumed. She was cold and mad. Mad and cold. She searched her kitchen counters for the espresso maker.

Where is it?

Sandra had a bottle of Bacardi Spiced rum at the ready and a small pitcher of eggnog that she wanted to foam. It would be the last time she took a drink for the rest of the year. The promise was a feeble one, like many of Sandra’s. There was only a week left until the New Year. All night Sandra had been watching the bottle’s amber liquid drop like the thermometer outside the frost-etched window—single paned because the Berkleys’ was a historic home and could not be altered.

Last drink. Promise. Where is that machine?

Her parents, Nancy and Paul, had finally left after their holiday visit, and Sandra needed the calming effect of the alcohol. They always dropped a bomb at every social occasion, and the one they had offered up earlier that evening was a doozy, even by their standards. They’d rescinded their promise to fund Katelyn’s college expenses, a promise made when their granddaughter was born. That night at dinner, Nancy had let it slip that they were no longer in the position to do so.

“Sandra, my kitchen counters were Corian, for goodness’ sake. I deserved granite. And, well, one thing led to another. A $10,000 remodel, you know, kind of ballooned into that $100,000 new wing. I really do love it. I know you will too.”

Katelyn, suddenly in need of better grades, stellar athleticism or richer parents, had left the table in tears and mouthed to her mother behind her grandmother’s back, “I hate her.”

“Me too, Katie,” Sandra had said.

“What?” Nancy asked.

“Just telling Katelyn I love her too.”

Sandra had acted as though everything was fine, the way that moms sometimes do. But inside she seethed. Her husband, Harper, had left just after dinner to check on a faulty freezer at the Timberline restaurant they owned next door.

Every single day, even on Christmas, Harper has to find a reason to go to work.

“Katelyn?” she called up the narrow wooden staircase that led to the second-floor bedrooms. “Have you seen the espresso machine?”

There was no answer.

Sandra returned to her outdated, worn-out kitchen and downed two fingers of spiced rum from a Disneyland shot glass. She screwed on the bottle cap, pretending she hadn’t had a drink. After all, it was almost like medicine.

To steady my nerves. Yes, that’s it.

Katelyn had been taking the espresso machine upstairs to make Americanos the week before Christmas. Sandra had scolded her for that.

“It isn’t sanitary, Katie. We don’t bring food upstairs.”

Katelyn had rolled her eyes at her mother. “Only a restaurant owner would call milk and sugar ‘food,’ Mom.”

“That isn’t the point.”

“Yeah. I get it,” Katelyn said, feeling it unnecessary to point out that she’d been forced to have a food worker’s permit since she was nine and could recite safe temperatures for meat, poultry, milk and vegetables in her sleep.

The lights flickered and the breakers in the kitchen popped.

Another reason to hate this old house, even if it does have an extra upstairs bathroom.

Sandra started up the darkened stairs and made her way down the hallway. She could hear the sound of water running.

She called out to Katelyn and knocked on her bedroom door.

No answer.

Sandra twisted the knob and, at once, a wall of icy air blasted her face. Katelyn had left the window open. The lights were out too. Sandra flipped the switch up and down more times than she needed to, to prove the obvious. The room stayed dark.

Lights from the neighbor’s house next door spilled onto the wooden floor.

Sandra gripped the sill and pulled the window closed, shaking her head at her daughter’s escalating carelessness. It had to be forty degrees in that room. It would take all night to warm it up. She wondered how any teenager managed to survive to adulthood.

“Katelyn Melissa, you’re going to catch a cold!”

Sandra walked past the unmade bed—the one that looked good only on Sundays when she changed the sheets. Katelyn’s jeans and black Penney’s top—a Marc Jacobs knockoff—were heaped on the floor.

What a colossal mess.

The bathroom door was open a sliver and Sandra, still freezing, pushed it aside. Aromatherapy candles flickered.

“What are you thinking?” she asked, her tone harsh and demanding. Katelyn wasn’t thinking at all.

The fifteen-year-old was slumped over the edge of the old clawfoot tub, her eyes tiny shards of broken glass, her expression void of anything. Her long, wet hair dripped onto the floor.

Instinct took over and Sandra lunged in the direction of her daughter, slipping on the wet floor and falling. As she reached for the rim of the tub, she yelled, “I could have broken my neck! What’s going on with you?”

No answer, to a very stupid question.

Sandra, her heart racing and the rum now gnawing at the walls of her stomach, tried to steady herself in the candlelight. She tasted blood. Her own. She’d cut her lip when she’d fallen, and several red drops trickled to the floor. She felt tears, fear and panic as she looked at Katelyn in the faint candlelight. Her lifeless daughter. It was so very hard to see with the lights out. Katelyn’s dark-brown hair, highlighted by a home kit, hung limp, curling over the edge of the tub. One arm was askew, as if flailing at something unseen.

The other was hidden in the sudsy water.

“Katie. Katie. Katie!” With each repetition of her daughter’s name, Sandra’s voice grew louder. By the third utterance, it was a scream that probably could be heard all over Port Gamble.

Katelyn Melissa Berkley, just fifteen, was dead.

“It can’t be,” Sandra said, tears now streaming down her face. She was woozy. Sick. Scared. She wanted to call for Harper, but she knew he had gone. She was alone in the house where the unthinkable had occurred. She slipped again as she pulled at Katelyn’s shoulders, white where the cold air had cooled them, pinkish in the still-hot bathwater. Two-tone. Like a strawberry dipped in white chocolate.

Katelyn loved white chocolate. Even though Sandra insisted it wasn’t really chocolate at all.

“Baby, what happened?” Instinctively, Sandra turned off the slowly rising water. “Tell me you’re going to be all right!”

At first, Sandra only heard dead silence. Then the quiet drip, drip, drip of the tub’s leaky faucet. There was no answer to her question. There never could be. Never again.

Sandra shook her daughter violently, a reflex that she hadn’t had since Katelyn was a little girl and had lied about something so inconsequential that the terrified mother couldn’t retrieve the full memory of what had made her so angry.

As she spun around to go for a phone, Sandra Berkley noticed there was something else in the tub. It was hard to see. It was so dark in that bathroom. Through her thickening veil of tears, she leaned over and scooted the suds away.

The mini espresso machine.

Her eyes followed the electrical cord. Like a cobra that had recoiled, ready to strike, the plug sat upright, still firmly snug in the wall outlet at the side of the tub.

In small towns like Port Gamble, Washington, news travels fast. Within moments of the reverberating echoes of Sandra Berkley’s anguished screams, residents had begun to gather outside the tidy red house with white trim and pineapple shutters. Christmas lights of white, green and red sparkled in the icy night air. A passerby might have mistaken the gathering for a large group of carolers.

Port Gamble was that kind of place. At least, it tried to be.

An ambulance siren wailed down the highway from Kingston, growing louder with each second.

That the teenager had died was known by everyone. What exactly happened, no one was certain.

Someone in the crowd whispered that Katelyn had fallen in the tub and split her head open. Another suggested that the girl had “issues” of some sort and had taken her own life.

“Maybe she offed herself? Kids do that a lot these days. You know, one final grasp for attention.”

“I dunno. She didn’t seem the type.”

“Kids are hard to read.”

“True enough, but even so, I don’t think she was the kind of girl who would hurt herself.”

Scenes of sudden tragedy have their macabre pecking order when it comes to who stands where. Closest to the doorway were those who knew and loved the dead girl: her mother, father, a cousin or two. In the next wave were the friends, the church pastor and a police deputy, who was there to make sure that the scene stayed orderly. Beyond that were casual acquaintances, neighbors, even the occasional rubbernecker who was on the scene because it was better than a rerun of one of the various incarnations of Real Housewives.

There was a time when Hayley and Taylor Ryan might have been in the grouping closest to the Berkleys’ front door. Though they were no longer that close, the twins had grown up with Katelyn. As it often seems to be, middle school became the great divider. What had once been a deep bond shared by three girls had been shattered by jealousy and the petty gossip that predictably turns friends into enemies.

What happened among the trio was nothing that couldn’t have faded by the end of middle school. The girls could have reclaimed the friendship they’d had back in the days when they used to joke about Colton James’s stupid sports T-shirts, which he wore every single day in fifth grade.

“Only a loser would support the Mariners,” Katelyn had once said, looking over at Colton as he stood in defiance, his scrawny arms wrapped around his small chest, nodding as if he were defending his team.

But that was then. A million years ago, it seemed. Since then, Port Gamble’s kids had grown into pubescent teenagers. Taylor and Hayley, still mirror images of each other, had blonde hair, blue eyes and the occasional pimple. Colton had traded in sports T-shirts for ’80s relic rock bands’ insignias and was dating Hayley. And Katelyn was dead.

“When was the last time you actually talked to her?” Hayley asked, already trying to piece together what had happened.

Taylor brushed aside her annoying bangs and shook her head.

“Not sure.” A puff of white vapor came with Taylor’s warm breath. “Last month, I guess.”

“Do you think she was depressed? I read somewhere that suicide rates are highest at Christmas.”

Taylor shook her head. “Depressed? How would I know?”

“You have a better pulse on the social scene than I do,” Hayley said matter-of-factly. “They’re saying she killed herself because she was upset about something.”

“Was Katelyn still cutting?”

Hayley looked surprised. “You knew about that too?”

“Duh,” Taylor said, wishing that she’d brought gloves like her sister had. Taylor’s fingertips were numb. “Everyone knew. Dylan, that sophomore with a shaved head and earlobes he’s been gouging since Halloween, called her Cut-lin last week.”

Hayley looked down at the icy pavement and said quietly, “Oh… I was under the impression she had stopped.”

Taylor shook her head, then shrugged her shoulders. “I remember her telling people that she liked cutting. Liked how it made her feel in control.”

“That doesn’t make sense. Cutting made her feel in control of what?”

“She never said.”

The crowd contracted to make room for a gurney. Covered from head to toe was the figure of the dead girl. Some people could scarcely bear the sight and they turned away. It felt invasive. Sad. Wrong to even look.

The ambulance, its lights rotating red flashes over the bystanders, pulled away. There was no real urgency in its departure. No sirens. Nothing. Just the quiet slinking away like the tide.

A few moments later, the crowd surged a little as the door opened and Port Gamble Police Chief Annie Garnett’s imposing frame loomed in the doorway. She wore a dark wool skirt and jacket, with a knitted scarf around her thick neck. She had long, dark hair that was pulled back. In a voice that cracked a little, Chief Garnett told everyone they should go home.

“Tragedy here tonight,” she said, her voice unable to entirely mask her emotions. Annie was a big woman, with baseball-mitt hands, a deep resonant voice and a soft spot for troubled young girls. Katelyn’s death would be hard on her, especially if it turned out to be a suicide.

Hayley nudged her sister, who had started to cry. “We probably should go home, Tay,” she said gently.

In that instant, shock had turned to anguish. Hayley’s eyes also welled up, and she ignored a text from her boyfriend, Colton, who was out of town and missing the biggest thing to happen in Port Gamble since the devastating bus crash. The twins looked over the crowd to see the faces of their friends and neighbors.

One of the paramedics whispered to another.

“Girl was found in the tub with an espresso machine.”

Hayley jammed her hands inside her coat pockets. No Kleenex. She dried her eyes with a soggy gloved fingertip. It could not have been colder just then. The air was ice. She hugged her sister.

“I feel sick,” Taylor said.

“Me too,” Hayley agreed. Curiosity piercing through her emotions, she added, “I want to know what happened to her and why.”

“Why do you think she did it?” Taylor asked.

“Did what?” Hayley argued. “We don’t know what happened. Not really.”

Taylor indicated those in the outer ring of grief, just beyond their own.

“I mean, really, an espresso machine in the bathtub? That’s got to be a first ever.”

Taylor nodded, brushing away her tears. She could see the absurdity of it all. “Some snarky blogger is going to say this is proof that coffee isn’t good for you.”

“And write a headline like ‘Port Gamble Girl Meets Bitter End,’” Hayley added.

The spaces in the crowd began to shrink as people pushed forward. All were completely unaware that someone was watching them. All of them. Someone in their midst was enjoying the tragic scene that had enveloped Port Gamble as its residents shivered in the frigid air off the bay.

Loving the sad moment to the very last drop.

Some say Port Gamble was cursed from the moment they came. The S’Klallam Tribe had made its home on the bay’s shores for hundreds of years, finding food from the sea, shelter from storms and the tranquility that eluded other isolated locations along the Pacific’s rugged coastlines.

The place, the earth, the universe were in perfect harmony.

The way it was always supposed to be.

And then the early explorers arrived at the jagged edge of Hood Canal, an offshoot of the Pacific Ocean that pokes into Washington with the force of an ice pick.

That was a century and a half ago, a very long time by West Coast standards. The sawmill, located below the bluff on which the town was built, was still the source of most of Port Gamble’s jobs and its pungent clouds of smoke. Green hats (those who actually worked in the mill) and white hats (those who told the greenies what to do) coexisted happily in the town’s company-owned neighborhoods of centuries-old homes.

Homes that were known by number.

Taylor and Hayley Ryan lived in number 19, the last house in Port Gamble before the highway’s march along the bay toward Kingston, the nearest town of any size. A two-story, chocolate-brown-and-white structure built in 1859 that had been added on to at least four times, number 19 was the oldest house in Washington State to be continually inhabited. It was drafty, quirky and certainly loved more than most rentals.

The conversation in that particular house was likely the same as others were having throughout Port Gamble that fateful night.

Maybe not exactly.

The Ryan family gathered around the old pine kitchen table. And despite the fact that it was Christmas night, the subject that held their attention wasn’t the gifts they’d received (a Bobbi Brown makeup collection for Taylor and a forensics book, The Science & History of the Dead, for Hayley), all they could think about was Katelyn Berkley and how it was that she had come to die that night in the bathtub.

Kevin Ryan, the twins’ father, was about to celebrate his thirty-eighth birthday and had taken to doing sit-ups every night and half-hour jogs around town. The girls had never known a time when their dad, a true-crime writer, wasn’t poking around an evidence box, hanging out with cops or prosecutors or, best of all, visiting some lowlife killer in prison. Every year at Christmas time, their mailbox was filled with cards from baby killers, stranglers and arsonists.

Have a Merry Christmas!

Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!

Their mother, Valerie, worked as a psychiatric nurse at a state mental hospital near Seattle. Hayley thought her parents had a symbiotic relationship, since her dad seemed to rely on her mom as a human wiki when he was trying to figure out the sociopaths he was writing about.

Valerie was a stunning blonde with brown eyes and delicate features. In elementary school, Taylor always thought her mom was the prettiest one in Port Gamble. Over time, she learned that her mother was also smart and accomplished—and that a person’s true character is more important than how they look.

Except on TV, of course.

Valerie blew on her hot chocolate—made with real milk, sugar and cocoa powder—scooting the froth to one side so she could drink it without getting a chocolate mustache. “What did Chief Garnett say?”

“Not much,” Kevin answered. “I mean, just that it was probably an accident.”

Valerie raised an eyebrow and passed out some candy canes. “I don’t see how. Honestly, Kevin, small kitchen appliances don’t get into a bathtub all by themselves.”

Kevin nodded in agreement and looked across the table at the girls, who’d endured a blizzard of text messages from friends about their suspicions of what had happened to Katelyn. “Was she upset about something? Do you guys know anything?”

Taylor hated cocoa but loved her mom too much to say anything. She stirred the steamy liquid with her candy cane. The only thing that could make homemade hot chocolate worse was a candy cane.

“Nah. Katie is—”

“Was,” Hayley corrected, always precise.

Taylor looked at her sister. “Right. Was. Anyways, Katie was super mad about something.”

“She allegedly had a boyfriend. I mean,” Hayley quickly corrected herself when Taylor shot her an exasperated look, “that’s what I heard. But I never met him. We didn’t really talk to each other in school.”

Kevin sipped his cocoa. “This has nonfat milk in it, right, Val?”

She nodded, turning to the girls and winking. “Yes, honey. Nonfat.”

The Ryans rinsed their mugs, and Kevin turned off the oversize multicolored lights that decorated the large, airy Douglas fir that filled the front window of the living room.

“Sure doesn’t feel like Christmas around Port Gamble,” he said, looking out the window at the street and the bay beyond it.

“I couldn’t imagine being without you girls,” Valerie said.

That was a little bit of a lie. There was a time when she had come very close to knowing exactly how Sandra Berkley was feeling right then. Hayley and Taylor had come within a breath of dying, an event that no one in the family ever really talked about. It was too painful and too fragile, like a crackly scab that had never fully healed.

No one knew it right then, but someone was about to pick at that scab, and when they did, many who lived in Port Gamble would face fears and consequences they’d never imagined.

Hayley and Taylor had shared a bedroom in house number 19 all through elementary school. It was big enough to accommodate two cribs, then later twin beds with matching sheets and identical duvets. Theirs was the larger of two upstairs bedrooms in the place they’d lived in since their parents brought them home from Harrison Medical Center in nearby Bremerton.

Their father had used the second, smaller bedroom as his office to decent effect. Kevin Ryan’s most successful crime book at that time, Gorgeous and Deadly—the true story of a beauty queen who’d murdered six of her rivals by poisoning them with milkshakes laced with rat poison—had been written there.

He always told his girls, “If only these walls could talk… the world would know just how hard it is to tell the truth in a story in which everyone’s a liar.”

But the walls didn’t talk.

One afternoon when the twins were in seventh grade, their best friend, Beth Lee, goaded them into asking for their own rooms. She sipped from a sports bottle—though she didn’t play any sports—as the trio sat in the Ryans’ family room watching a plastic surgery show on the Discovery Channel.

“People at school think you’re weird for sharing a room,” Beth said before the girl on TV went under the knife for a nose job.

“How could anyone at school possibly know?” Hayley asked.

Beth shrugged her knobby shoulders. “I might have mentioned it.”

Tayl. . .