March 16, 8 a.m.

Port Orchard

While the minivan idled, Paige Wilson looked in the handheld mirror and glowered. This was not the style she was going for. Teal eye shadow and an overly intense smear of slightly orange blush just above her cheekbones had been painted with a practiced hand, to be sure. There could be no faulting the skill of its application-if you liked that kind of look. There was no way out of it, and Paige knew it. She was seventeen, but the heavy hand of her “queen mother’s” Max Factor makeup made her look more like a TV hooker or someone’s washed-out mother looking for a third husband at the Bethel Saloon.

“When you are up on the float,” Maggie Thompson said in her deep smoker’s voice, “you have to use everything you’ve got to project a positive image.”

“Yeah, but I’m not going up on a float.” Paige climbed out of the minivan in the lot of the Port Orchard Lighthouse. “I’m giving an interview.”

“Oh, honey, every time someone is looking at you, you’re on a float.”

Maggie was overstuffed in a turquoise velour tracksuit that had never seen the track. She’d been serving as the queen mother for Port Orchard’s Fathoms o’Fun pageant for as long as anyone could remember. She was a pleasant but pushy woman in her sixties who knew that managing young beauty queens was akin to herding cats: damn near impossible.

Paige was an ash blonde with sparkling green eyes who had won the competition with a stirring rendition of the Dolly Parton sentimental charmer redone to utter bombast by Whitney Houston: “I Will Always Love You.” Paige missed most of the notes, of course, but she had the hand gestures down pat, the kind of big motions that made her look every bit a TV pop star wannabe.

Clutch fist. Raise arms. Hold out palms. Make a pushing motion.

Besides, her competition was a girl who demonstrated batik on a T-shirt and another who read a haiku dressed in a kimono. Batik and haiku were the runners-up, relegated to the back of the float and a mere $100 in scholarship money. Paige was crowned the winner, picking up a $1,000 scholarship and a rhinestone-studded tiara that she loathed, as it pinched the top of her head and nearly made her cry.

“I know it hurts a little,” Queen Mother Maggie had said, “but behind every beauty there is a little pain. Think of a rose. Thorns hurt, don’t they?”

When Lighthouse reporter Serenity Hutchins wrote a front-page article about Paige being crowned the previous summer, she headlined the article: FATHOM’S QUEEN TURNS A NEW ‘PAIGE.’

In the months of following her coronation, Paige and her court did the obligatory store openings, posed with Navy sailors in Bremerton, huddled on a parade float that showcased Port Orchard and its place as one of Kitsap County ’s most pleasant towns. Paige gamely did whatever Maggie and the creepy float driver requested. She thought that by being the best Fathoms Queen ever there would be some kind of a reward, that a glimmer of something good would present itself and lead to greater opportunities.

Anywhere but here, she thought. Anywhere but Port Orchard.

Despite the possible renewed activity of the Cutter that spring, Charlie Keller insisted that Serenity do the traditional follow-up story on the beauty queen and what she had learned in her yearlong “reign” representing Port Orchard and the festival.

So there she was. Paige Wilson, that damned torture device of a crown on her head, sash (“warm iron, never hot…the rayon will melt”) in place, and wearing a Target tea-length dress that her queen mother had insisted on, knew that she had to turn on the charm for the reporter. She had to tell Serenity just what she wanted to hear. Anything that approximated the truth was never to pass her lips.

She imagined how the interview would go if she could just tell it like it really was.

The guy who drives the float tried to have sex with one of my princesses.

The queen mother is a complete control freak. No wonder her kids are either in jail or never talk to her.

The lousy thousand bucks wasn’t worth all the aggravation they put me through!

Serenity approached and smiled at her by the front desk. The interior dialogue stopped.

“You look so pretty,” the reporter said.

The pageant automaton kicked in: “Thank you. It is a total honor to be here. I’m having quite a year and am so excited to tell you all about it.”

Serenity led Paige into an interview room and offered her coffee.

“We’re not allowed to,” she said. “Water would be great!”

Serenity smiled. “All right…let’s talk about your work with the South Kitsap Food Bank.”

Neither woman wanted to be there just then, but they both had their jobs to do.

And so did one of the Lighthouse’s most devoted readers.

The Fun House smelled of Clorox, sweat, and strawberries. Melody Castile was on her knees, scrubbing the floors of the mobile home while Sam Castile messed with some leather gear that he’d ordered from a bondage catalog he found on the Internet. While Max was off with his Aunt Serenity for a day at the Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, the Castiles focused on some housekeeping and role-playing.

Just another Saturday afternoon.

“What do you think of this, bitch?” Sam asked, planting his feet in front of Melody. He was naked except for a black leather jockstrap with a detail of silver studs across the pouch that formed the outline of a human skull. He folded his arms across his chest and flexed. His eyes glared at her.

Melody stopped scrubbing and looked up.

“Mmmm,” she said. “Love it. I want it.”

“I found something I want,” Sam said, stepping back and going toward the dining table next to the front door.

Melody felt a distinct coolness of her husband’s dismissal. It stung a little, but she didn’t say anything. She waited for Sam to continue.

“I’m thinking of something younger,” he said.

Melody nodded and went back to her cleaning, now running her sponge over the surface of the chest freezer. “Sounds like fun.”

Actually, it sounded like more trouble.

Sam walked back toward her, carrying a copy of the Lighthouse. “Let’s go get her,” he said, tapping his finger on the front page.

Melody acknowledged the black-and-white photograph of a young woman pushing several cans of tuna across a counter to an unkempt old man in a torn windbreaker.

“Pretty,” Melody said. She smiled.

Sam rubbed his hands over his hairy chest, letting his fingertips linger on his nipples.

“Yeah. And I hope stupid too. Hot and stupid. That’s how we like them, right?”

The article was headlined:

Fathom’s Queen Helped Feed the Hungry

“Yes,” Melody said. “That’s how we like them.”

Max Castile went into his father’s office to hunt for the video game that he’d been promised if he made his bed every single day for a full week, which he had. The room wasn’t necessarily off-limits-at least no key was required to get inside. The office was set up with three computers, a brand-new Sony DVR, a TV, a library of unmarked videos and DVR cases, and a jumble of wires that led from one machine to the next. His dad was at the shipyard, and his mother was out in the yard, digging a ditch alongside the old vegetable garden. Max had been helping her but made an excuse to go inside to use the bathroom.

Really, all he wanted was that video game disk.