Beneath Her Skin by Gregg Olsen (best smutty novels TXT) 📕

And without turning too much, because being a spectacle at someone’s funeral was the last thing Hayley Ryan wished for herself, she glanced back at Beth and her mom. Colton gave her a quick, supporting nod.

What had they all missed?

And yet it was more than the words spoken about a friend who’d become a stranger that tugged at Hayley’s emotions; she could feel something coming to her. Coming at her. Hard and fast. It was more than the emotions of the occasion or the sadness pouring at her from every direction as a teenager just like her was being mourned. That feeling was anguish, heartache, misery.

Instead, Hayley was feeling, of all things, fear.

Not from the dead girl in the pink casket—which might have made some kind of sense, given how she’d been abandoned by everyone—but from someone else in the church. Someone wasn’t sad at all. Someone was thinking that Katelyn Berkley had brought this on herself.

Hayley leaned very close to her sister and whispered in her ear. “Someone’s worried about all this,” she said. “About the truth of what happened.”

Taylor, her blue eyes welling with tears, nodded. “I know,” she whispered back.

In doing so, she happened to catch Sandra Berkley’s eye. She looked so sad, so completely broken. She was lost and alone in the middle of a crowded church. Something about Katelyn’s mother called out to Taylor.

It was as if she was beckoning her, asking her something.

* * *

Like a flock of crows against a stainless-steel sky, black processional umbrellas zigzagged along the trail up the hill to the Buena Vista Cemetery. The snow had turned to rain, which fell upon Katelyn’s family and a small group of friends from all stages of the dead teenager’s life. They had convened to watch her coffin slip quietly into the muddy earth above Port Gamble Bay. Harper, Sandra and even Katelyn’s kitchen-remodeling grandmother, Nancy, sobbed like they were at war with one another over who could be the most anguished.

Without question, Sandra was winning. She had her thin fingers interwoven and locked around her heaving chest.

The Ryans were there, too. They’d known Katelyn forever. Beth and her mother were also on hand, their eyes lingering on a small row of graves not far from Katelyn’s final resting spot. They knew that place so very well.

Starla’s family also showed up. They were joined by Jake, whom Mindee clutched like an accessory, which, of course, he was.

Because his dad was away fishing and his mom incapable of leaving the house, Colton had arrived with the Ryans. Throughout the brief and grim graveside ceremony, he held Hayley’s hand like a C-clamp. There was no way he was going to let go. If Hayley had thought she was all cried out, she was wrong. Katelyn might not have been her best friend, but she didn’t deserve any of this—not then, not ever.

Taylor’s tears mixed with the rain as she stood and looked at the casket while the minister said a few words. Inside, she felt nauseated. She wasn’t sure she could hold the contents of her stomach. The feeling was more than just sadness, grief or loss. Taylor could feel the presence of something dark and scary. She’d been deeply troubled since the church service. She had carried that feeling to the cemetery, and it intensified.

What she sensed was terror from someone fearful about being caught—from a person close by.

It can’t be.

Whoever had done this to Katelyn, whoever had resigned the teenager to a casket the color of a bakery box, was there… among them.

Chapter Twenty-Three

The excuse for revisiting the Berkley house was the hideous scarf that Taylor had purposely left behind. With her sister off somewhere with Colton, Taylor took it upon herself to do what needed to be done. First, she stopped by the Timberline, but its owner wasn’t there. She saw Katelyn’s mother in her office behind the hostess station, looking grim as she typed on the keyboard of the old CRT that filled half of her tiny desk. Since Taylor didn’t want to talk to her, anyway, she quietly departed for their home next door.

Rain had left the remnants of snow on the sidewalk between the restaurant and house number 23 like a gray Slurpee. With each soggy step, Taylor wished she’d sprayed her lavender Uggs with more water repellent when her mother had suggested it. Hayley did. Hayley always did the practical thing. Taylor could feel the cold wetness pick at the tips of her toes, the chill working its way up her legs and the rest of her body.

Harper Berkley answered the door. His face was ashen and the stubble on his chin suggested that he probably hadn’t shaved in at least a day or two. His eyes were the saddest Taylor had ever seen. Katelyn was always close to her father, in the way that teenage girls often are. It wasn’t because their fathers were so much more wonderful; it was just that mothers always seemed to think that whatever road map they’d taken to get where they were would have been smoother if only they’d listened to their own moms. Of course, no teenage girl really wants to know that her mom had lived a life much like her own—twenty or thirty years ago.

“I’m sorry to bug you, Mr. Berkley,” she said.

“Hi, Taylor.” Harper was one of the few in Port Gamble, outside of her own family, who usually got the twins’ names correct on the first attempt.

“That’s me,” she said, not sure about what more she should say that she hadn’t already. She was sad about what had happened to Katelyn. She was guilty that she hadn’t been “there” for her. Seldom at a loss for words, she was embarrassed after the service when it came time for people to file up and say something nice about the deceased, and she was unable to do so.

“What can I do for you?”

She took a breath.