Gloria, Brandy’s latest lawyer, had marked with bright yellow stickers cut in the shape of arrows all the spaces in which her client needed to sign.

“Sign here, here, and here . . . and over here,” the lawyer had said, pointing with a gold Cross pen.

Brandy looked past Gloria, through her expansive window as a familiar white and green Washington State ferry glided through Elliott Bay to Colman Dock. The sight was stunning from the high-rise—even better than the view from the condominium a few blocks away that Brandy could no longer afford.

“I see where to sign, Gloria,” Brandy had said, her voice holding a sharp edge.

Gloria ignored the tone of her client’s remark. She hadn’t worked with Brandy long, but the woman had come with a Ryder truck of personal baggage and was well known in Seattle legal circles as a client who made them earn every second of their billing. Calling Brandy “demanding” was the polite way of calling her impatient, aggressive, and completely unaware that anyone else existed. Because of her obvious and maddeningly overt sense of entitlement, Brandy’s downfall had been met with more glee than tears.

“Great,” Gloria had said. “But still, as you know, I’m not advising you that this is a good move for you, Brandy.”

Brandy stopped the sweeping loops of her signature in midscrawl.

“I don’t recall asking your advice a second time,” she said.

Gloria had tried to smile, but it wasn’t easy. “I’m just doing my duty, Brandy.”

“Who pays your fees?” Brandy asked, pretending to think. “I believe that’s me. I hired you for your services. This is how it works. I ask you for something, you do it, and then I pay you.”

Gloria could have said something about the fact that Brandy hadn’t paid her for anything for three months, but she thought better of it. She’d leave that to the law firm’s collection department. Brandy Baker was experiencing hard times like a lot of people since the housing bubble burst and the disastrous economy followed.

The documents were stacked in neat and perfect order. Her will, insurance policies—both personal and homeowner’s—were pushed across the mahogany table that served as Gloria’s desk. Brandy’s financial portfolio had been hit hard. She didn’t need an accountant or a lawyer to figure out that part.

Brandy got up and grabbed her coat from the silver hook next to the heavy glass door. “How long until all this is settled?” she asked.

Gloria looked at her watch. “Should be in the system this afternoon.”

Brandy nodded. “That’s fine. No real rush. It just feels really good to move things along.”

Her phone vibrated, indicating a text message.

She looked down. An annoyed look swept over her face and she started texting.

“What is it?” Gloria asked. “Is everything all right?”

Brandy shook her head. Her eyes were no longer full of condescending ire. She just looked hassled.

“My daughter, Brianna,” she said as she rolled her eyes. “I’m supposed to go shopping with her for a Halloween costume. Teenagers can be so needy. If you were a mother, you’d understand that.”

Brandy pushed open the door with a whoosh and disappeared down the hallway toward the bank of stainless-steel elevators, where she would check her hair and makeup. No matter if her ship was sinking, Brandy cared about appearances.

She always did.

A part-time clerk named Ted came into Gloria’s office.

“Jeesh,” he said, setting the day’s mail down, “that woman’s a real piece of work.”

Gloria took off her glasses and flipped through the stack of mail he’d delivered. “Look, Ted, I know you’re only twenty-four and from Idaho, but that’s no excuse. That’s not the way we talk about our clients in this office.”

“Sorry,” Ted said, his face reddening as he backed out of her office. “Just saying . . .”

Gloria put her glasses back on and returned to the files arranged in front of her. Ted was right. She’d thought the same thing, of course. Everyone in the office did. Brandy Connors Baker was nothing if not a piece of work.

Chapter 7

BETH LEE PUT DOWN HER PHONE after texting most of the day away with Hay-Tay, her singleton name for the Ryan twins. Fittingly, Halloween night had, indeed, been a nightmare. She was definitely too sick to go to school, and it wasn’t because of the alcohol. Or puking at the party. It wasn’t from the monster fight that she’d had with Olivia or Brianna after the hostess with the killer party had stolen Olivia right out from under her nose. It wasn’t any one of those things but surely the combination of all of them that had kept the sixteen-year-old home. The sum of each item had conspired to make her feel sicker and sadder than she had in a very long time. Above all of it was Olivia’s murder. Olivia Grant was dead. Beth was sick, devastated, and sad. Beth never, ever wanted the world to see that side of her. She was Tough Beth. Unpredictable Beth. Retrendy (a word she’d tried—and failed—to coin to describe a mash-up of retro and trendy) Beth.

She was the girl who didn’t ever want anyone to see the hurt behind her lovely almond eyes. Luckily, Hayley and Taylor knew that about her and always, no matter what, just let her be. That’s exactly why when Hay-Tay texted and asked to come over after school and Taylor’s swimteam practice, Beth had answered:

WHAT’S TAKING U SO LONG?

She sat on her bed in her small room in the Lees’s daffodil-yellow house number 25 and faced the drawing that she’d completed the day before—the day before the whirlpool that was her life sucked her down into the darkness. Again. Beth had always been a doodler, but over the summer as she agonized over the parallel parking mishap of her Driver’s Ed training (she knocked the cones over and somehow managed to run over a chipmunk at the same time), she took up drawing. Sketching turned into a full-on hobby. At first, it was a series of drawings of chipmunks pleading for their lives, which then morphed into scenes from Port Gamble, and finally, into images that depicted a kind of other-worldly sensibility that she called Gotharamic.

“Think what Freddy Krueger would paint if he had paintbrushes stitched on his fingers instead of knives,” she once explained to Hay-Tay.

The picture in front of her that late afternoon showed two figures in the middle of a forest rendered in moody charcoal and black crayon.

Beth took her eyes off the drawing as her mother, Kim, entered her bedroom. Beth’s eyes were nearly fused from crying. She hated how her eyes looked when she cried.

“I brought you a Red Bull,” Kim said.

Beth looked surprised—shocked, actually. According to her mom, Red Bull was practically a gateway drug. She knew her mother would never have offered an energy drink if she didn’t think her daughter was in a bad way. A very bad way.

Beth took the slender blue and silver aluminum can from Kim’s out-stretched hand. “Why do the people I care about keep dying, Mom?”

Kim, an impeccably groomed Chinese American woman who almost never went anywhere without heels (mostly because she was just shy of being five feet tall and hated being asked if she and her daughter were sisters), moved her head sadly.

“Don’t say that, Beth,” Kim said. “It isn’t true.”

Beth was close to tears, but she wasn’t about to cry again. Tears did nothing for anyone other than the Kleenex manufacturing company, in her opinion. There had been so much death in her young life. “Christina,” Beth said, her voice splintered with emotion, “then Dad and Katelyn, now Olivia.”

Kim considered listing all the names of people who were among the living, but she thought better of it. It seemed a little too defensive.

“I have no answers, baby,” she said, finally. “No one does. Tragedy isn’t a stalker. It doesn’t come looking for someone. There’s no reason for it. It just happens.”