by Sara Shepard
Page 18
Quinlan, meanwhile, was busy fidgeting with a digital recorder he’d set on the table. “Can you please state your name and date of birth, Miss Mercer?”
Emma repeated Sutton’s name and their birthday, and after he’d replayed the recording to make sure it was working, he clasped his fingers together and rested them on the table. “All right. Can you please tell me again what you know about Emma Paxton?”
Emma swallowed hard. The recorder both made her feel better and not—she didn’t like the thought of the lies she’d have to tell being recorded in her own voice, but on the other hand it would document anything Quinlan said, too. He wouldn’t be able to bully or intimidate her if he wanted to use the recording as any kind of evidence.
“Well, like I told you,” she said slowly, “I met my birth mom for the first time in Sabino Canyon on August thirty-first. She told me I had a twin named Emma. That same night I got a message on Facebook from a girl named Emma Paxton. Her picture looked exactly like me. We messaged back and forth a few times, and we made arrangements to meet the next evening back at Sabino. I went the next night to meet her, and she never showed up, so I went to Nisha Banerjee’s party instead. I didn’t really think about her after that—I assumed the Facebook messages were either a lame prank from my friends, or that Emma was just a flake like my birth mom. ”
“Can you show me those Facebook messages?” Quinlan asked. She nodded, pulling them up on her iPhone and handing it across the table. The night before, she’d sat up staring at her Facebook exchange with Sutton, trying to see if there was anything incriminating that she hadn’t realized. As far as she could see, the messages were safe.
Quinlan’s eyes flickered up to meet hers. “‘Don’t tell anyone who you are until we talk—it’s dangerous!’” he read out loud. “What was that all about?”
Emma’s throat felt dry. “I wanted to surprise my parents with her,” she said, beads of sweat gathering at her temple. “I was afraid someone else would find her before I did and think she was me. I didn’t want her to give it away. ”
Quinlan’s eyebrow twitched, but otherwise his face was motionless. Somewhere overhead the air conditioning kicked on, and a blast of cold turned her sweat clammy.
“Pretty weird coincidence,” Quinlan said. “The night you found out about her was the night she messaged you?”
Emma nodded, shrugging. “Yeah. I know it’s weird; I thought so, too. But like I already told you, Becky’s weird. Maybe she was in contact with Emma, too. ”
Quinlan pushed the phone back across the table. Emma slid it into her pocket, her skin crawling under his gaze. He was watching her intently, his gray eyes sharp and glinting. She tried not to squirm away from making eye contact.
“Do you know anything about her foster family?” he asked then. She shook her head.
“I saw them on TV yesterday, but she didn’t tell me anything about them. ” She frowned slightly. “I thought I saw her foster brother—what’s his name, Travis?—out front in the waiting area. Does he know anything about what happened to my sister?”
The corner of Quinlan’s eyebrow twitched again, but besides that his face didn’t move. “We’re hoping he can help us with a timeline,” he said. He picked up Emma’s file, opening it near his chest. She strained her eyes to try to see over the top of the page, but he kept it at a close angle to his body.
“Okay, now, what can you tell me about Nisha Banerjee?” Quinlan’s voice was almost conversational, his face neutral and earnest, but a blade of cold shot up Emma’s spine. She stared at him blankly.
“What about her?” she asked. She fought to keep her fingernails out of her mouth, instead sliding her hands under her butt on the chair. Quinlan gave her a disingenuously curious look.
“Well, her phone records show that she called you over and over the day she died. She apparently had something really important to tell you. What was so urgent?”
Emma shrugged, trying to look more wistful than terrified. “I’ve already told you, I wish I knew. She died before she could tell me. But what’s that got to do with Emma?”
“I don’t know, Sutton. You tell me. ” Quinlan closed the file and set it down, then crossed his arms over his chest. He stared at her for a long moment, as if expecting her to volunteer more information.
Alarm bells went off in my head. I knew this game too well. Quinlan and I had played cat and mouse for the past few years. His bullshit radar was hair-trigger keen. Emma needed to step very carefully.
Quinlan leaned back in his chair and interlaced his fingers behind his neck. “You know, when I first got word of this, I was sure it was a prank. Sutton can’t have a twin, I thought—one of you is more than enough. Still, something isn’t adding up. ”
Emma straightened in her chair. Her hands trembled, but she tossed her hair over her shoulder. “Hey, thanks for recording this. I’m glad whoever’s going to listen will hear you harassing a grieving teenager without her parents in the room. ”
That seemed to startle him. He glanced at the recorder, then back at her. “Look, I’m just saying, given your history the whole thing seems kind of far-fetched. ”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t get to write my own life,” Emma snapped. That was true enough, she thought. “Sorry you don’t like the plot. ”
Quinlan held up his hands defensively. “All right, I’m sorry. You’re right. ” He sighed. “Can you just do me one favor, though?”
“What?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.
“Can I swab your cheek?” She frowned, but he persisted. “I don’t want to go into details, but your sister’s body wasn’t in great shape when we found it. We just want to make sure that she is your biological twin. A quick DNA test will resolve the whole thing. ”
Emma bit her lip. There was something about it that she didn’t like—Quinlan’s rapid-fire questioning had left her feeling vulnerable and confused. But there was no way a DNA test could incriminate her—she and Sutton would be identical, and refusing would seem suspicious. She nodded.
Quinlan extracted a Q-tip from a clear plastic tube in his briefcase. She opened wide, and he ran it along the inside of her cheek, peering into her mouth like a dentist. Then he briskly slid the swab back in the tube and slammed his briefcase shut.
“Wait right here,” he said. “I’ll be back in just a few minutes. ”
With that he turned to the door and was gone.
An uneasy feeling descended on me in the silence left in his wake. I didn’t trust Quinlan. He was almost as crafty as I’d been. And now he was out of sight. But that also meant that Emma was alone—and he’d left the files on the table. It was finally time to see how I’d died.
17
BODY OF EVIDENCE
Emma counted to ten, holding her breath so she could hear Quinlan’s movements as he went down the hall. A distant door opened and shut, and then there was silence. When she was sure he was gone, she grabbed the file that listed her own name.
She flipped it open—and immediately dropped it. The file landed on the table in front of her, gaping open. Paper-clipped to the inside of the folder was a photo of a skeleton.
Emma’s throat went dry. She’d known there would probably be post-mortem pictures in the file, but she hadn’t stopped to imagine what they’d look like. She couldn’t swallow; her tongue felt like sandpaper inside her mouth. But she took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. What if there were clues the cops hadn’t known to look for? She had to see those pictures.
The body’s empty eye sockets stared straight up at the sky. Brightly colored leaves partially covered it, red and gold and brown. Scraps of skin still clung to the bones, and its long hair spread out behind it, dried out and bleached red by sun and exposure. The skull’s awful grin was a strange contrast to the faded pink hoodie still zipped around the corpse’s torso.
I gazed at the picture, unable to tear my eyes away from what little remained of the body I’d left behind.
Staring at the skull, I could just trace out the memory of my own features—there were my high cheekbones, my narrow chin. But I didn’t feel much connection with the bones in the picture. They didn’t have anything to do with me anymore. Weirdly, Emma’s body felt more like mine than my own did.
There were other photos, paper-clipped behind the first, capturing the body from different angles. It looked like Sutton had been wearing yellow cotton shorts the night she went to the canyon. Close-ups revealed splintered bones, and one showed a jagged hole near the crown of the skull.
The more she looked at the pictures, the stranger Emma felt. She’d known for months her sister was dead. Between the killer strangling her in Charlotte’s kitchen and dropping a theater light next to her in the school auditorium, and most recently, what happened to Nisha, there was really no room for doubt. But still, still, there had been some small, hopeful part of her that thought Sutton might walk back into town someday, laughing at the success of her best Lying Game prank yet. Staring down at the pictures of the body, though, there was no room left for hope or fantasy.
This was what had happened to her sister. This was all that was left of her.
Of course, everyone thought this was Emma’s body. There was nothing to tell them apart—not even the DNA in their bones. Looking at Sutton’s dead body was like looking at pictures of herself dead.
A dry spasm shot through her, and bile filled her mouth. She went to a low metal garbage can and spit into it, wishing desperately that she’d asked Quinlan for a glass of water before he’d left.
She went back to the table and sat down again, shaking slightly, fighting to suppress her nausea. On the other side of the folder were stacks of forms and reports, collated and stapled. She picked up a facial reconstruction sketch that showed a young woman’s features, from the front and then again in profile. It was almost spookier than the actual remains—there was something uncanny about seeing her own face, drawn by someone who had never actually seen her but who had built the image up from her sister’s bones. All the details were right. The artist had gotten the features perfectly, but something was off in the eyes and the lips. Of course, those would be the hardest things to imagine with only the skeleton for a guide.
Next she picked up a diagram of the crime scene, sketched from multiple angles, that showed both the body’s distance from the road and the spot the investigators thought she’d fallen from, high overhead. Her breath caught as she recognized the area on the map: Sutton had fallen from a precipice very close to the spot where the girls had held their fake séance just a few weeks earlier.
She thought back to the faint voice she’d heard in her head that night, so familiar in her ear. It had told her to run. It had sounded like it was coming from far, far away. But maybe it had been closer than she’d thought.
It had come from me.
Finally there was the coroner’s report. The medical examiner had enumerated Sutton’s injuries, and the list was long. On one page he’d sketched the locations of the wounds and fractures on a schematic outline of her body.
