“Who,” Hayley added, “and why?”

“Are you going to do that all day?” Taylor asked.

“Maybe. I like precision and you know it.”

Even if they weren’t going to tell their parents about the texter, the girls decided they should share the news about what happened to Olivia before it reached their parents, Valerie and Kevin, through Port Gamble’s super-speedy grapevine.

Fifteen minutes before the first bell rang, the twins made the calls. Taylor called their mother, a psychiatric nurse, who was on the ferry headed toward her job at Puget Sound Hospital near Seattle. Because she worked such long hours, it was more like her second home. As the ship’s engines roared, Valerie Ryan soothed Taylor the best that she could.

“Are you girls all right?” she asked. “You just saw Olivia last night. You must be so upset. I wish this ferry was coming home.”

“It’s all right, Mom,” Taylor said. “There really isn’t anything you can do.”

Hayley had their father on her phone.

“Did they arrest someone?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Hayley said. “I don’t think so. Beth didn’t say much.”

“How is Beth?” Kevin asked.

“I don’t know. We haven’t seen her yet today.”

Hayley told their father they’d check in later if they heard anything. He said he’d do the same. On her phone, Taylor made the same promise to her mother.

“Love you, Mom,” Taylor said.

“Love you, Dad,” Hayley said.

The girls put down their phones and started for the restroom. The noise of kids talking was closing in on them, leaving them feeling shaky. They needed a place where they could pull themselves together and regroup.

Taylor, who internalized anxiety and was all but certain she would have an ulcer one day, splashed water on her face. The towel dispenser was empty, and she wasn’t about to stick her face in front of the hand drier.

“I can’t believe a kid could kill Olivia like that. I didn’t think she was here long enough to make enemies,” Taylor said, blotting the water with the sleeve of her purple fleece pullover, which was nearly like running a dry paint roller over her face—soft, but not absorbent.

Hayley swiped some concealer at the dark circles under her blue eyes. “I know,” she said.“And whoever did it is probably walking the halls right here, right now.”

“Maybe,” Taylor said. “Maybe not. If I killed someone I wouldn’t show up for school twelve hours later. I mean, if I did something that terrible, I would run away or at least need some serious downtime to get my act together.”

“Agreed. You would.”

Taylor looked at her sister. Sometimes, as smart as Hayley was, she just didn’t get the obvious.

“You work in the attendance office, Hayley,” she said, pushing the bathroom door open. “Find out who didn’t make it in today.”

ONE OF THE REASONS HAYLEY RYAN liked working in the high school attendance office was that it appealed to her slight tendency toward OCD. Every day, she got to run through the list of students and check off who was there and who wasn’t. The work was mundane but detailed, and Hayley found it extremely satisfying to keep her lists orderly and neat, much like the way organizing her french fries in perfect rows on the plastic tray at McDonald’s made her feel. Taylor thought it was a weird, annoying habit. But then again, she had her own food preferences, being a vegetarian who ate chicken and all.

The other reason was that the job was like being in the middle of a reality show. The attendance office was next to the school nurse’s office, which afforded the bonus of knowing who was sick, who had cramps, and who was trying to get out of giving a presentation in front of the class. Each morning brought just enough drama to keep the boring parts from being overly so. Kids who had missed the previous day were required to provide a written excuse signed by a parent, a guardian, or in rare cases in which the student had missed five days or more, a doctor.

It didn’t take a forensic handwriting expert to figure out when notes were forged:

Please excuse Sarah’s absence from yesterday. She had the flew.

The “flew”? What did she do, sprout wings and fly?

When Hayley made the calls to check on kids who weren’t in school, following the state law, sometimes she got the kid on the phone. When that happened, the call was predictable. The kid would say their mom was either in the shower, off getting meds at Rite Aid, or asleep. Hayley had been trained not to take no for an answer, but every once in a while she’d let one slide. You never knew when you might need the favor returned. “Attendance Chick,” as some boys called her, was decidedly better than “Attendance Bitch.”

Hayley sat down in her ergonomically molded chair in the cubicle in front of the vice principal’s office. The blonde administrator with an unflappable smile waved a cheery hello to Hayley through the glass and went about her business trying to make everything at Kingston High run as if perfection were a possibility—which, given the daily megadoses of high school drama, it wasn’t. Clearly, as indicated by her friendly smile, she hadn’t heard about Olivia’s murder yet. That was not surprising since the thorny tendrils of gossip tended to stay on Hayley’s side of the glass partition.

Adults, Hayley thought, are always the last to know just about everything.

Hayley thumbed through the roster of who had been reported absent that morning. Most of the list made complete sense. Alana, the girl who almost never came to school on time, was late again. Her mom was a total freak and never took care of the younger kids, so Alana pulled mom duty at the ripe old age of seventeen because someone in that family had to. Also on the list were a couple of stoner kids who rarely made an appearance—and when they did, they were usually mentally absent anyway. A freshman boy named Cody who was fighting leukemia was out again. Hayley’s already gray mood immediately darkened when she saw his name. Cody was a nice kid, and she had heard he was getting better.

She continued her way down the list while the girl she worked with, Tammi Mars, chatted with her college boyfriend like she did every day. Hayley was sure Tammi was checking up on him, because she initiated every call and kept the poor guy on the line for at least twenty minutes every morning.

Hayley’s eyes scanned the paper slips that came from each first-period class.

Brianna Connors was a no-show. That made total sense, considering she was the one who had found Olivia’s body.

Definitely an excused absence.

Drew Marcello was also gone. That fit. He was probably off somewhere consoling Brianna.

Hayley’s boyfriend Colton James was marked absent, which she already knew about. He had a dental appointment scheduled that morning.

Beth Lee was out sick. That would have made sense even without a murder. She was probably at home trying to pull herself together after a night of pre-funking with some plum wine and beer at the party.

There were three others, none of whom Hayley recalled being at the party: Susan Finholm, who was getting a nose job (deviated septum, such a liar!); Jacob Wexler, who was competing in the Science Olympiad Nationals in Spokane; and Meghan Aynesworth, whom Hayley had just seen heading toward the mall in her pale green VW bug.

After going through the list of that morning’s absentees, Hayley started losing faith in her sister’s theory. If the person who killed Olivia was a Kingston High student, then he or she wasn’t stressing out too much and skipping class.

Chapter 6

FINANCIAL WORRIES WERE A NOOSE around her bony neck and Brianna’s mom, Brandy Connors Baker, preferred a strand of pearls over a noose any day. A double strand, ideally black, would be her choice—that is, if she could still afford a choice. Judging by the state of things in her life right then, she couldn’t. Brandy had pored over the paperwork that Gloria Piccolo had set out in front of her. It had been an early morning meeting on a gorgeous day in mid-October. The Seattle law office smelled of Starbucks and pastries. Brandy had waved them all away. None of that for her.