“That’s weird,” Hayley said. “When was that taken?”

“I don’t know,” Taylor answered. “I’ve never seen it in my life.”

HE LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW as the sun set over the Olympic Mountains, burnishing the overcast sky with a bloody red hue, and considered something that had never entered his mind before. He thought about just how easy killing had become. On purpose or by accident, it didn’t really matter. It was easy.

Murder, he’d come to know, was not about what he got from the act—not the act itself—but the way it made him feel. He was out of breath. He was sweaty. He had a layer of grime that coated all of his skin. His hands were sore and there was a tiny gash over his eye. She’d been a fighter. His dark eyes followed the trail of starlings as they began to land on the clothesline of the neighbor’s house. When he was a boy, he used to shoot birds with a slingshot and a BB gun. He remembered how their heaving bodies felt when he picked them up from the ground. Breathing hard. Trying to survive. Looking up at him with tiny, but very alert, black eyes until he crushed them in his bare hands.

Power. A taste of power. The first bite. The birds had been the beginning of what he was going to become. His family knew it. Friends could see it too.

His first human victim was like one of those birds. She was already halfway down for the count when he finished her off.

He reached for his phone and prepared to text a message.

Chapter 18

IT WAS EARLY SATURDAY MORNING. Cruelly early. Taylor Ryan took her mother’s car and drove to the North Kitsap School District pool in Poulsbo. It was just after six. She punched the keypad code used by the swim team and went inside. Chlorine and steam wafted through the air. The familiar smell was almost soothing. She liked how quiet the pool was when no one else was around—a refuge, a place to think. At that hour there were no pesky Kitsap Water Blossoms, the local synchronized swimming team, to tell her that she and her sister would be the ultimate addition to their team.

“You look alike. You swim. You even move the same. We can gel your hair in identical swirls. We, like, totally could use you on the team,” said Crystal Brennan, the team captain, who apparently didn’t know the only thing worse than synchronized swimming was, well, nothing could be worse.

As Taylor undressed in the locker room, she caught her reflection in the mirror. She thought about herself and Hayley. Where everyone else saw similarities between them, Taylor could see nothing but the differences.

A gazillion of them.

She knew what only identical twins knew with any genuine certainty: there was no such thing as “exactly alike.” Sure, Taylor and Hayley were genetic copies. That was a medical fact. They were the kind of twins that occurs in about one out of a hundred births. Twins with the same genes in the same sequence. As disgusting as the girls thought because it went back to their conception and the truly icky idea of their parents having sex, Hayley and Taylor were from the same egg and the same sperm.

Identical. Copies. That’s what the Ryan sisters were to the untrained eye of a singleton.

Thankfully, their differences, while many, were not of the kind that would have one be known as the “fat twin” or the “twin with the ugly birthmark” or the “twin with a peculiar left nostril.” Those were distinctions of other twin girls they’d known over the years, mostly through school and, when they were very young, through the Mothers of Multiples group that Valerie had joined in order to get good deals on double-castoffs of questionably adorable matchy-matchy clothing, highchairs, and tandem strollers.

Taylor and Hayley were the same but different.

In the scattershot sunny days of a Puget Sound summer, the bridges of both of their noses freckled and faded when fall came with its curtain pull of sunlight. For some reason, however, Taylor’s freckles didn’t fade to the same extent that Hayley’s did. There were seven stubborn specs of pigment that ran over her nose in what she was sure was the shape of the Aries constellation, which unfortunately was not her zodiac sign.

Taylor wrinkled her nose, making the spots disappear in the crinkles of the nasal crunch. Now you see them; now you don’t.

Her eyes still on the slightly foggy mirror, Taylor twisted her hair into a loose ponytail with a big black rubber band. Her hair, like her sister’s, was blond, thick, and sun-streaked—the kind of hair every girl in school coveted. One time, sick of their sameness, Taylor dyed her hair red with cherry Kool-Aid. That fit of rebellion looked terrible in seventh grade, but everyone had to admit that she smelled wonderful.

“Like the biggest cough drop ever,” Beth Lee had said.

And yet Taylor’s hair was different in that its natural part was on the left side, with Hayley’s on the right. As a mirror twin, logic would have Taylor left-handed and Hayley right-handed, but in that way they confounded twin experts. Both girls were right-handed. One thing dissimilar about them was that Taylor’s neck and shoulder were marked by a series of three tiny scars. She rolled her shoulder and turned her neck to take a full accounting of them in the mirror. Still there. Most people probably assumed the scars had come from an injury pertaining to the bus accident, but the truth was far more sinister. It was somewhere near the top of the list of things that the family didn’t like to revisit, talk about, or even admit had once occurred.

As she finished putting on her team suit—a burgundy one-piece with two yellow stripes down each side that made the girls look more like a half-naked road crew than a fiercely competitive swim team—Taylor Ryan considered something that she’d never really admitted to herself. She was jealous of Hayley. It was so stupid, so completely dumb of her to feel that way, and she knew it. It wasn’t her twin’s beauty—Starla was the most beautiful girl in town. It wasn’t that Hayley was adventurous when Taylor was a little cautious. Beth Lee was the girl who would do just about anything and had the attitude that came with that.

It felt dumb, but Taylor couldn’t help but envy Hayley for having Colton. Taylor had had a few boyfriends, or rather a few dates herself, but they didn’t go anywhere. She didn’t seem to mind. Whenever Beth complained about some boy, Taylor considered herself a little lucky not to be caught up in some idiotic drama in which having a boy “like” you was more important than anything else. More essential than your grades being in the top tier of your high school. Or the fact that you held a diving record for your district. Or maybe even that you were a good listener, kind to people, genuinely so and not because it was something that you could add to your college entrance applications. All of those things were Taylor Ryan. Her sister was some of those things too. But Hayley didn’t hold a diving record, and she had been too busy the past year dating Colton James to help out at the food bank or call times at the Special Olympics Games held every year south of Tacoma at Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

Taylor climbed up on the diving board and put her feet in perfect position. Her painted toenails looked like a row of bluebirds on a wire. She took a deep breath, bounced on the board, and flew toward the glassy surface of a pool that had been quiet all night.

As Taylor hit the water, Olivia Grant suddenly commanded the forefront of her thoughts.

Olivia, who did this to you?

Olivia, talk to me.

Olivia, I can help find your killer.

She kicked her legs and glided over the bottom of the pool, holding her breath and waiting for something to come. It was the “hope and focus” part of how she and her sister did whatever it was they did. Of the two, Taylor could outlast her sister underwater. She’d proven that in the bathtub at home and in the pool as a member of the Kingston swim team. Her record going without air was the entire length of Demi Lovato’s “Skyscraper,” a song she liked more for the positive message than its singer’s performance.