Betrayal by Gregg Olsen Read Free Book Online

down their phones and started for the restroom. The noise of kids talking was closing in on them, leaving them feeling shaky. They needed a place where they could pull themselves together and regroup.
    Taylor, who internalized anxiety and was all but certain she would have an ulcer one day, splashed water on her face. The towel dispenser was empty, and she wasn’t about to stick her face in front of the hand drier.
    â€œI can’t believe a kid could kill Olivia like that. I didn’t think she was here long enough to make enemies,” Taylor said, blotting the water with the sleeve of her purple fleece pullover, which was nearly like running a dry paint roller over her face—soft, but not absorbent.
    Hayley swiped some concealer at the dark circles under her blue eyes. “I know,” she said.“And whoever did it is probably walking the halls right here, right now.”
    â€œMaybe,” Taylor said. “Maybe not. If I killed someone I wouldn’t show up for school twelve hours later. I mean, if I did something that terrible, I would run away or at least need some serious downtime to get my act together.”
    â€œAgreed. You would.”
    Taylor looked at her sister. Sometimes, as smart as Hayley was, she just didn’t get the obvious.
    â€œYou work in the attendance office, Hayley,” she said, pushing the bathroom door open. “Find out who didn’t make it in today.”
    ONE OF THE REASONS HAYLEY RYAN liked working in the high school attendance office was that it appealed to her slight tendency toward OCD. Every day, she got to run through the list of students and check off who was there and who wasn’t. The work was mundane but detailed, and Hayley found it extremely satisfying to keep her lists orderly and neat, much like the way organizing her french fries in perfect rows on the plastic tray at McDonald’s made her feel. Taylor thought it was a weird, annoying habit. But then again, she had her own food preferences, being a vegetarian who ate chicken and all.
    The other reason was that the job was like being in the middle of a reality show. The attendance office was next to the school nurse’s office, which afforded the bonus of knowing who was sick, who had cramps, and who was trying to get out of giving a presentation in front of the class. Each morning brought just enough drama to keep the boring parts from being overly so. Kids who had missed the previous day were required to provide a written excuse signed by a parent, a guardian, or in rare cases in which the student had missed five days or more, a doctor.
    It didn’t take a forensic handwriting expert to figure out when notes were forged:
    Please excuse Sarah’s absence from yesterday. She had the flew.
    The “flew”? What did she do, sprout wings and fly?
    When Hayley made the calls to check on kids who weren’t in school, following the state law, sometimes she got the kid on the phone. When that happened, the call was predictable. The kid would say their mom was either in the shower, off getting meds at Rite Aid, or asleep. Hayley had been trained not to take no for an answer, but every once in a while she’d let one slide. You never knew when you might need the favor returned. “Attendance Chick,” as some boys called her, was decidedly better than “Attendance Bitch.”
    Hayley sat down in her ergonomically molded chair in the cubicle in front of the vice principal’s office. The blonde administrator with an unflappable smile waved a cheery hello to Hayley through the glass and went about her business trying to make everything at Kingston High run as if perfection were a possibility—which, given the daily megadoses of high school drama, it wasn’t. Clearly, as indicated by her friendly smile, she hadn’t heard about Olivia’s murder yet. That was not surprising since the thorny tendrils of gossip tended to stay on Hayley’s side of