Closer Than Blood. Gregg Olsen
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the stump of the madrona that had once arched over the backyard with its distinctive red-and-green striated bark and canopy of waxy green leaves. It had silvered in the weather of the past couple of seasons, and a series of fissures ran from the center of the cut outward, like spokes on the wheel of an old ten-speed bicycle. The cool air from Yukon Harbor blew against her face and she touched her damp hair, wondering if she’d be able to avoid the blow dryer and just tousle it with her fingertips. It was short and she could get away with that technique most days. She was still young and attractive, but time was creeping at her and she knew that fingertip hairstyling and a light swipe of lip gloss was no longer a wise go-to regimen for the morning.
She watched Steven and their nine-year-old son, Cody, burn deadfall in a fire pit on the edge of the yard. For most, it would have been too early in the morning for such an endeavor. But not for those two. Father and son were early risers. Kendall was the opposite—the last one out of bed on a Saturday morning. The one to turn out the lights of the house in the evening. The one to check the door locks and the security of the windows.
A smile broke out over her face as she caught her son’s gaze. Cody was quiet, leaving the conversation to his father.
As always.
“Let’s get that bunch of branches from over there, son. Let’s get this thing going good.”
Kendall moved across the wet grass. “Isn’t there a burn ban?” she said, half kidding.
“You going to arrest us?” Steven said, winking at his son.
Cody remained mute, but the flicker in his eyes indicated he’d understood the irony of his dad’s comment.
“I might have to,” she said.
Steven poked the fire and put out his hand to push Cody back a step. “Full plate today?”
“Barring a catastrophe with the committee at lunch, it won’t be a long day,” Kendall said. The reunion was a week from Saturday at the Gold Mountain Golf Club in Bremerton.
As far as Kendall was concerned, the next nine days couldn’t pass quickly enough.
“We’ve got it handled, babe,” Steven said, giving her a short kiss.
“You smell like smoke,” she said.
Steven grinned. “You smell beautiful.”
Cody set a nest of grapevines at the edge of the fire pit.
“Be careful, Cody.” The boy nodded and Kendall kissed him.
Steven patted their son on the shoulder. “He’s good.”
Cody’s autism was fickle, cruelly so. Sometimes he’d speak plainly, even spontaneously. Not that day.
Kendall climbed into her white SUV and started to back down the driveway, Cody and Steven looking smaller and smaller as she pulled away.
She hadn’t mentioned to Steven what she’d read about Tori and she knew the reason why. Tori was connected to a part of her past that she’d just as soon never revisit. She knew she’d have to say something eventually. Once it broke that their old high school friend was the wife of the murder victim, Tori’s name would surely find its way to the pages of the Lighthouse, the local paper.
She could feel her heart rate quicken and willed herself to relax. This was a stressor she didn’t need. She thought of a note on the back of a card that had come through the mail when the save-the-date and early head count cards went out six months prior. It too had bothered her. It made her a little paranoid. She hated even admitting to that kind of feeling. It was only eleven words.
I KNOW EVERYTHING. SEE YOU THERE. IT’LL BE LIKE OLD TIMES.
Just what did the sender mean? And to which committee member had it been directed?
Kendall wasn’t sure if the card was a threat or just someone’s idea of a joke. She didn’t tell anyone—not Sheriff McCray, not Josh, not even Steven—that she’d taken the card to the crime lab and processed it herself. No fingerprints but her own. No postmark. No identifier whatsoever. Later, she pored through the stack of cards to see if it had come in an envelope that she’d misplaced somehow, but she came up empty handed.
She wondered how that card got to her if it hadn’t been mailed. She also wondered if it was related to the Kinko’s e-mail.
THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE.
Earlier that same morning, a very tired Lainie O’Neal stared at the void of her computer screen. French roast coffee perfumed the confines of her home office, the second bedroom in a two-bedroom apartment she’d rented for five years on Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill. She watched her Siamese fighting fish, Rusty, blow bubbles on the surface of the brandy snifter that was his home. It was just before 7:00 A.M., and she had time to polish a chapter of a book that she’d been working on—with renewed vigor—since the Seattle P-I shuttered its newsroom after more than a century of being the “newspaperman’s newspaper.” She’d dreamed that a book would get her out of the endeavor that was killing her with each fifty-word nugget she had to write. She was a “content provider” for a number of travel websites. She was literally writing for food, each word, one bite at a time. On a good day she pounded out twenty-five of the inane little travel tips that the freelance employer sought. Everything from how many mint sprigs and limes should be muddled in a mojito to the best fish tacos in Los Cabos.
She hated the whole lot of what she was doing, but reporters like her had been shoved out the door in an age that no longer seemed to value context, nuance, and depth.
Everything was free, and fast. Even the news.
Her cell phone rang and her eyes darted to the tiny screen, but she did not recognize the number. It was too early for a source to phone. Neither was it the number for one of the other reporters who’d regularly called to commiserate about their bleak futures in a post-newspaper world. A moment later, the caller tried a second time.
It must be urgent, she thought. She clapped the phone to her ear.
“Hello?”
“Lainie?”
The voice was a whisper.
“Yes, this is Lainie O’Neal,” she said.
A second of silence and the sound of a deep breath.
“Lainie, it’s me. Your sister.”
Lainie no longer needed the early morning jolt of a mud-thick French roast coffee from Starbucks. The words were a cattle prod at her heart.
“Tori?”
Silence.
“Tori? Is that you?”
Another hesitation on the line. “I’m in the hospital. I’ve been hurt. I need you.”
“Where?”
“Tacoma. I’ve been shot.”
“Oh, wow, but no, where are you?”
“St. Joe’s.”
Lainie felt her adrenaline surge, slowly, then a tidal wave. She needed more information. She had no idea in which city her sister resided. They were twins, but they hadn’t spoken in years. Just how many, Lainie didn’t know. She refused to count the number anymore. It hurt too much.
“What happened?”
“An intruder last night. Late. I was shot. My husband was killed.”
Husband? Lainie had no idea that Tori had married again.
“Will you come? I need your help.”
Again, an awkward silence, the kind that invites the person waiting to hear to press the phone tighter to her ear.
“They’re whispering about me . . . I think they think I did this to myself,” Tori said. “To him.”
“I’ll be there,” Lainie