“Was she shopping for Starla?” Hayley asked as the two sat on her bed waiting for Taylor to come upstairs with snacks so they could eat, chat, and waste the last few days before school restarted on January 3.

“Shopping for herself,” Beth said. “Same as always. She wears club clothes to work, I guess.”

Taylor entered the room carrying a couple of Diet Cokes and a can of Ranch Pringles.

“Who wears club clothes to work?” she asked.

“Starla’s mom.”

“Did you talk to her?”

Beth took a second. “Not really. I pretended I didn’t see her, but she nabbed me by the checkout counter.”

“Did she say anything about Katelyn?” Hayley asked.

“Something about how she saw it coming. Katelyn was a sad girl. Whatever.”

Taylor looked upset. “‘Saw it coming?’”

Beth shrugged. “I didn’t ask. I wanted out of there. I was afraid she was going to corner me and force me to come in for a haircut.”

“If she saw something was wrong, if she saw it coming, then she should have done something about it,” Hayley said.

“I guess so. Can we talk about something else? All this talk about Katelyn is kind of boring me.”

Taylor looked at Hayley, her eyes popping. Neither one of them knew how it was that Beth Lee could possibly be their best friend.

But she was.

chapter 10

BEFORE LEAVING FOR WORK at the hospital, Valerie Ryan made cookies, fresh—not Christmas retreads that had been moved from platter to smaller plate as their numbers declined. She boxed them up in a Tupperware container for the girls to run over to the Berkley place. There was no bow or ribbon. It was a gesture, not a gift, to the family down the lane who’d suffered the cruelest blow in a season meant for joy and togetherness. Valerie watched a row of cars head down the highway that morning, looking for places to park as Harper and Sandra gathered in their grief with family members and close friends.

The girls planned on paying their respects at Katelyn’s memorial service later in the week, but their mom’s cookies needed delivery.

Bundled up in North Face jackets, Taylor and Hayley slipped out the back door to the alleyway that was the shortest route to the Berkleys. Taylor wore Aunt Jolene’s hand-knitted scarf, a sad-looking strip of yardage in search of a color palette that didn’t suggest—as Taylor aptly assessed it—“a color wheel of different kinds of barf.” The air was bone-chilling, with the added jolt of a damp wind blowing off the bay, coating the shrubbery in a glistening sheath of ice. The weatherman had blabbed about an ice storm coming, but since he was seldom on target with his forecasts, no one really prepared for it.

The girls noticed right off that Mrs. James’s hundred-year-old camellia was encased in ice.

“She’s going to be way disappointed when she gets back from Florida and sees that no one put a blanket over it,” Taylor said. “She’s so possessive of that dumb bush.”

Hayley looked over the shimmering emerald form of the shrub and said, “I think it’s pretty.”

“You think everything is pretty, Hay.”

“Well, not everything,” she clarified, pointedly indicating Aunt Jolene’s scarf. “But yeah, a lot of things can be pretty. You just have to look at things the right way to see their beauty.”

“Mrs. James doesn’t own that bush. Nothing in this town of renters belongs to anyone.”

“That could be said of anything, Taylor. Whether you rent and live in Port Gamble or buy and live in a house in Seattle, ultimately you’re just visiting.”

Taylor changed the subject. “This is stupid. Bringing cookies over to our dead friend’s house? Lame.”

“Yeah, but Mom wanted us to, so we’re doing it.”

“Right. Because she thought it was a good idea. Like we can’t come up with our own?”

“I think that’s the point. We wouldn’t be going to the Berkleys if Mom hadn’t made the cookies.”

“Natch,” Taylor had to agree.

SANDRA BERKLEY PULLED OPEN THE FRONT DOOR and faced the Ryan twins. It had been a while since they’d seen Mrs. Berkley outside of the family’s restaurant, the Timberline, a breakfast and burger place with good food and a sign over the counter:

Neither could be sure when the last time was they’d come over to visit. It might have been back in middle school. Katelyn had sort of slipped away insofar as their friendship was concerned. For most of Port Gamble Elementary, they had been in the same circle of happy little girls that once filled the front row of Ms. Paulson’s second-grade class. Mrs. Berkley had been their Daisy troop leader. She was different then, prettier, more serene. Watching her and the other moms of Port Gamble, Hayley and Taylor understood as well as any young girl that with beauty came power. This was before Disney princesses could get what they wanted without having to resort to kicking serious butt.

And yet, kicking butt, the Ryans knew from experience, definitely had its own set of empowering charms.

Mrs. Berkley, on the other hand, had let her strong points fade since the crash. Gossip all over town had it that she was a big drinker, and there was little in the way of excuses one could conjure to suggest otherwise.

When she opened the door, she didn’t speak for a moment. Her hair was a black octopus, her makeup was raccoon-smudged, and her bird legs shook under her crumbling frame. She was the sum of animal parts, like a mutant cross-breeding experiment gone completely haywire.

Hayley and Taylor, shivering on the doorstep, proffered the cookies.

“Come inside,” Sandra said, a sharp waft of booze emitting with her breath.

Hayley looked at Taylor, then back at Mrs. Berkley.

“We don’t want to be in the way,” she said, pushing the cookies at the dead girl’s mother once more.

Mrs. Berkley took the container and smiled faintly.

Was it wistful? A sad smile? A reaction to the kindness of Valerie Ryan?

“I was hoping some of her good friends would come by. Katelyn’s friends meant so much to her.”

The twins stepped into the house, and before they could say something about the fact that they hadn’t seen much of Katelyn lately, they were in the middle of a swarm of relatives and friends who had convened to support the family during the most difficult of circumstances.

“These are two of Katelyn’s best friends,” Sandra Berkley said to an older woman with thin lips and a wattle-neck whom the girls presumed to be Katelyn’s grandmother, Nancy.

“Hayley?” the grieving mom asked, pointing tentatively. “And Taylor, right?”

She was wrong, but it didn’t matter. After all, they were suddenly “best friends” of the girl they no longer really knew.

“They’ve brought some treats,” Sandra said.

“This isn’t a party.” The older woman sniffed.

Hayley didn’t know what to say. Even though she had agreed to bring them over, she had thought the cookies were a crappy idea in the first place.

“My mom made them,” Taylor said. “They were Katelyn’s favorite whenever she hung out at our place. Always had at least two.”

It was a good save. Taylor was like that. She could always be counted on to think fast on her feet. If Mrs. Berkley was so deluded as to think that she and her sister and Katelyn were the best of friends, she could go along with it.

“Katelyn never knew when to quit. If she hadn’t been eating all the time she would have made cheer,” the grandmother said.

“That’s enough, Mom,” Sandra said, shooting what had to have been a practiced glare in the direction of a woman who’d clearly been more interested in bitching about something than grieving.

And yes, both girls thought, Katelyn had put on a few pounds. She wasn’t mom-jeans fat, but she was a few cookie trays short of it.

“Really sorry about Katelyn,” Taylor said.