“Isn’t this personal waste?” Taylor asked, looking down at the confetti of index cards.

Hayley nodded. “It is personal—though we’re not always sure what person we’re hearing from. And it is waste, but I think we could come up with a more eco-friendly way.”

“E-occult-friendly. I like that. We should copyright that one.”

Hayley gave her sister an irritated look. “It has nothing to do with the occult.”

“Kidding,” Taylor said.

“I hate it when you make comments like that. It makes all of this seem so ugly.”

“Maybe it is.”

“It isn’t ugly. It comes from someplace good. I feel it. So should you.”

“I’m not like you, Hayley.”

The comment was funny, and both girls laughed.

After that, they had settled on using their parents’ Scrabble game, a handmade relic from their mother’s childhood, to twist around and rearrange the letters that came to them. Kevin and Valerie shared a deep love of words. Whenever the twins were lying on the thick, powderblue Oriental carpet in the parlor playing Scrabble, it brought a smile to both parents. They could see that their daughters were engrossed in a different version of the game, but in a day of video-this and Internetthat, they didn’t say a single word about how they played.

Flames crackled in the fireplace, and the smell of their parents’ nutmeg-laced eggnog wafted through the drafty house. It was the last gasp of leftover cheer in a holiday that had pulsed with an undercurrent of sadness. The family dog, Hedda, was curled up between the girls and the fireplace.

“You girls want some company?” Kevin asked as he entered the room, mug in hand.

“We’re good, Dad,” Taylor said. “Just messing around.”

Kevin looked a little disappointed. He had work to do on his latest book and a distraction, apparently, was not in the cards.

“Okay, I’m going to rewrite the discovery of the victim scene.”

“That’s always my favorite part of your books, Dad,” Hayley said.

He smiled. Those girls had been born into a life of crime. They had never known a moment when blood-spatter analysis, gunshot residue, or chain of evidence was not a part of the family’s dinner-table conversations.

Valerie Ryan always tried to push dinnertime topics toward ponies, peonies, or something lovely, especially when the girls were young. She did so as a mother, seeking to protect her children from the things that hurt deeply, things that pointed to the darkest side of humanity. It was easy to understand why she tried—and why she failed.

Valerie had grown up on McNeil Island, the home of Washington State’s oldest penitentiary. Her father, Chester Fitzpatrick, was the warden (though, later, the governor changed the position’s title to superintendent, to better reflect a more clinical, institutional approach to incarceration). She’d grown up in what any outsider would consider a lonely, desolate place to raise a child. For Valerie, it was a town, and the guards, staff, and prisoners were its citizens. As a little girl, she watched wide-eyed as the Friday afternoon chain arrived—man after man tethered together to step off the prison boat to make their way past the big white house that her father, mother, and sister called home. Valerie, a pretty towhead like the daughters she’d one day have, was riveted by the stream of men, faces haggard, angry, or resigned, wondering what they’d done and how they’d done it.

And some stared back at her. Occasionally the looks in her direction caused her to turn away. A few times they’d even made her cry. It wasn’t fear that caused the tears, though her father and mother thought so. It was something else. She wasn’t sure what it was until many, many years later.

Valerie found some things about the institution that were beautiful too.

The razor wire coiled over the almost-tree-topping fences was a braid of tinsel at Christmastime. The bars over the windows that looked over the deep blue of Puget Sound were a steel version of cat’s cradle. Nothing, young Valerie came to believe, could match the splendor of the hallway that ran from her father’s enormous office down toward the cellblock. The shiny gold-hued-by-age linoleum was Dorothy’s yellow brick road.

One day, she knew, it would lead her away from there.

“I’M GOING UP TO READ NOW,” Valerie said, casting a wary eye at the handmade Scrabble board Taylor and Hayley had arranged in front of the fire.

“What are you reading?” Hayley asked.

Valerie smiled and acknowledged the paperback she was carrying off to bed. “A murder mystery. Is there anything else?”

“Not lately,” Taylor commented, as their mother disappeared down the hall.

No words were said about the Scrabble game or why they’d chosen it that evening instead of the XBox Kinect console with its collection of video games, which had been a Christmas present. There was really no need to explain.

Valerie understood her girls in a way that most mothers couldn’t. There was a time when she was just like them. Even as a grown woman, she could still tap into the feelings she held when she was a young girl. It was more than her compassion that made her such a good psychiatric nurse or a mother, though she joked that the skills were interchangeable.

The twins picked out the tiny squares of pale, smooth wood.

“Let’s break it down,” Taylor said.

Hayley, who was busy turning all the letters so they were facing up, nodded. “All right. Why don’t you call them out?”

“Lewd hot rod,” Taylor said. “Sounds nasty.”

Hayley laughed. “Lewd anything would, but adding hot rod is particularly, well, you know.”

Next, Taylor set the appropriate letters in front of her, studying each as if they might literally speak to her.

She collected the T, H, E first.

“You’re the new Vanna White,” Hayley said.

“Huh?”

“You know, the helper on Jeopardy.”

“You mean Wheel of Fortune.” She moved the O, L, D next.

“The old …,” Hayley said, pulling up the final four letters. “W, O, R, D.”

Taylor looked at the unscrambled letters. “THE OLD WORD,” she said.

“Maybe Katelyn was a teen hooker,” Hayley surmised. “You know, the oldest profession in history? There are lots of those girls in Seattle and Portland.”

Taylor looked at her sister and shook her head. “Don’t think that’s it.”

The next words, KOALA and FURL, stared up at the teens.

This time, Taylor took on the task of moving them around. In a few moments she’d arranged the letters into LAURA FOLK. Taylor shifted away from the fire. “Never heard of her.”

“I don’t know of anybody named Laura Folk either. Maybe she’s a senior or something … but I think we know everyone from Port Gamble and Kingston. That’s one of the supposed good parts of living in a small town.”

They looked down at the tiles. Taylor carefully slid them aside and then laid out the last two words: SELF and IVORY.

“Maybe ivory is the color of something we need to know and self is about us.”

“You like it when the words need no interpretation, Hayley.”

“It is easier when you don’t have to read into anything or extrapolate an inference from the words.”

“Nah. These words aren’t in the right order,” Taylor said, moving the pieces around until it read: I’VE FOR SLY.

“That sounds stupid. It doesn’t even make sense,” Hayley said.

“Maybe I remembered it wrong?”

“Maybe you did. Or maybe it has nothing to do with Katelyn.”

“I’m not going back into the tub.”

“We’ll I’m not. I’m not as good at it as you are.”

Kevin went past the staircase and called over to them. “What are you two arguing about? Hayley, did you come up with some esoteric or scientific name to get a triple word score?”

The girls looked at him blankly, having never played the game the way it had been intended.

“Something like that, Dad. We were just about to call it a night anyway.”