“I don’t know. But what worries me is he’s after us and he knows who we are and what we can do. Clearly he knows a whole lot more about our past than we do.”

“He said that we aren’t the ‘only ones.’ He said there were others.”

“I know. But who are they? Where are they? How did this happen to us?” Hayley asked, hoping the answer would just come to her in a message or a feeling. So far, no luck.

“Part of me wishes that Colton’s mom had not erased Moira’s cell phone and laptop memory,” said Taylor. “We might have been able to find out a lot from her voice messages and emails.”

“No, Taylor,” said Hayley firmly. “Shania did the right thing—she was very clear that protecting us was top priority, and Moira definitely didn’t have that on her agenda.”

“Well, it leaves us no choice, then,” said Taylor. “If we want to find out what Text Creeper knows about what happened to us, we’ll have to find him.”

DOWNSTAIRS IN THE COZY RYAN FAMILY KITCHEN, Valerie and Kevin drank a glass of Oregon pinot noir from a bottle that they’d been saving for a special occasion. This most certainly wasn’t that occasion, but the need for a glass was undisputable. It had been a horrible day. They had been mostly silent since the ordeal with the girls, the man, and the discovery of the body.

“I feel so sorry for Brianna’s parents,” Valerie said. “I can’t imagine what they’ve been going through.”

Kevin finished his wine and poured another, his fingernails still grimy from gardening.

“Annie didn’t say so specifically,” he said, “but I got the impression that whoever had killed Brianna did so elsewhere and then dumped her body there. This whole thing is one damn big mess.”

Valerie swallowed her last sip and set down her glass. “Evil can’t be forced into neat order, Kevin. You of all people should know that.”

Kevin ignored Valerie’s last comment. He just couldn’t stop. “First Olivia gets stabbed and dies. Next, Brianna and Drew are questioned and made out to be the prime suspects. Then after a bunch of media attention they disappear, whereabouts completely unknown. And now Brianna’s body is found out here practically in our own backyard.”

Valerie set down her glass. “Find Drew, I guess, and you’ll find the killer.”

“Unless Drew’s dead too.”

Valerie looked surprised. “You don’t think he is, do you?”

“I don’t know,” Kevin said, narrowing his focus to meet her eyes. “What do you think, Val? You’re good at figuring things out.”

She got up and put her empty glass in the sink.

“I have no idea,” she said.

Her response was true now. But at another point in her life, Valerie knew her answer would have been different.

VALERIE MAY HAVE THOUGHT SHE’D ESCAPED a series of uncomfortable conversations with her daughters the night before. But bright and early the next morning, Hayley and Taylor found her at the kitchen table, her first cup of coffee not yet touched.

“Mom, we really need to talk,” Hayley began.

Taylor continued, “I was looking through our old photos for a school project and I found a bunch of newspaper clippings about the crash. About Timothy Robbinette. And about you when you were lost for two days on McNeil Island. Who’s Tony Ortega? What happened to you? You never told us that story.”

Valerie looked at her coffee cup, taking a beat to collect herself.

“It was nothing,” she said. “I was playing hide-and-seek, and I got lost and couldn’t find my way back. As for Tony Ortega, he was an inmate on death row who was later pardoned.” Valerie let out a nervous laugh, knowing she had given away too much information. She was holding her coffee cup so tightly that her fingers had turned white.

Both girls knew their mother was lying. She was the kind of person who didn’t use a map. She had an internal GPS that was never, ever wrong. Even blindfolded and spun in a circle a dozen times, Valerie Ryan would always be able to get where she needed to go.

“And what about us?” Taylor asked. “You know we’re not normal. Remember what happened to Grandpa?”

Valerie thought back to the day that her father almost died. The twins were in their last year at Port Gamble Elementary. It was a beautiful afternoon. She had been cutting a bouquet of rangy white roses that cascaded up and over the trellis by the back door when out of the blue the twins had said they had “a funny feeling about Grandpa.”

Chester Fitzpatrick had been suffering from Alzheimer’s, and when it became abundantly and tragically clear that Valerie’s mom could no longer care for her husband, the family had moved him to Cottesmore, an assisted living facility in Gig Harbor.

At the time, Valerie had shrugged her daughters’ worry off, telling them to go play. But the girls’ feeling had been so strong and unsettling, they had called Cottesmore to check on their grandfather—who had fallen in the bathroom two hours earlier and almost died from hypothermia. If it hadn’t been for that phone call, Valerie’s dad would have died then, instead of years later, peacefully in his sleep.

How did they know? she asked herself over and over. But just as she did all those years ago, she refused to face what she wasn’t sure she could handle.

“Girls, where is this all coming from? Does it have to do with the man in the woods?” Valerie hoped against hope for an answer she knew wasn’t coming.

Taylor put her elbows on the table and searched for the words. How do we say it? How do we not sound like morons?

“Sometimes we get messages, and we don’t know where they come from. It’s more like a feeling than anything else,” Hayley chimed in.

Valerie studied her daughters. “What do you mean, a ‘feeling’? You’re scaring me. That’s what I get at work from my patients all the time.”

“She means that sometimes we can catch a glimpse of the past, present, or future when we’re not even there. You know we can do it. We saw the video,” Taylor explained.

“What video?”

“The one of us as babies. The one that Savannah Osteen took of us. We warned her about her sister Serena . . . before she died. You were in the video, too,” Hayley said. “You know.”

Valerie’s eyes started to water. She looked out the window, toward the alley. Tiny tributaries of tears started down her high cheekbones. “I don’t want to talk about this, girls. I know you want to. You might even need to. But not now.”

Valerie grabbed her coat and keys from the little hooks by the kitchen door.

“Mom!” Hayley said.

“Please,” Valerie said. “Don’t. Don’t dig into the past.”

“Talk to us,” Taylor said, though Valerie Ryan couldn’t hear her.

The kitchen door shut and she was gone.

WHILE THEY WERE MAD AT THEIR MOM, Hayley and Taylor couldn’t shake off the anxiety and fear that came from the discovery of Brianna’s body. At their mother’s and father’s insistence, the girls skipped school that day, leaving Taylor to wonder if their excuse would be the best one the attendance office would get all year—better than “Garage-door opener didn’t work so couldn’t leave the house” or “Mom might be pregnant and I am too upset that I might have to share my room,” the top reigning contenders for the title.

The Ryan twins called this one in:

Found the remains of a missing student.

“I really can’t think of anything except Brianna,” Taylor said as they put on their coats and went outside in the cold. Sitting around the house was bad enough when you’re sick, but ten times more boring than when you’re completely well. Frazzled, yeah. Scared, sure. But all in all, feeling fine.

“And Olivia,” Hayley said as she shut the door.

Taylor nodded. “And their killer.”

Port Gamble was always a quiet place. Until lately. The girls took a walk and talked about what had happened in the woods with Text Creeper and Brianna. They also had another piece of business to attend to. Timothy Robbinette might be dead, but they could still track down Tony Ortega. If their mom wasn’t going to tell them the whole story, they’d have to find out on their own.