Seven Minutes in Heaven tlg-6

by Sara Shepard

  Emma pushed herself up and walked across the green. The crowd was starting to thin. In the distant parking lot she could hear cars starting and doors slamming.

  She passed a cluster of Hollier students who were standing close together near a weather-beaten mausoleum with an urn of wilting lilies in front of it. Garrett Austin stood between his younger sister, Louisa, and Celeste, his current girlfriend. Garrett had been Sutton’s “official” boyfriend at the time of her death, although she’d been seeing Thayer secretly at the same time. When Emma had taken her place, he’d offered up his virginity to her as a birthday gift, and after she bolted in a panic, they’d broken up.

  Garrett looked devastated. His eyes were red, his blond hair lusterless and unwashed. He’d dated Nisha for a few weeks, and even though they’d broken up, he was obviously not taking her death well. He glanced up and noticed Emma, staring at her blankly, as though he didn’t quite recognize her.

  Caught, Emma took a tentative step toward him.

  “How are you holding up?” Emma asked awkwardly, touching his shoulder.

  Garrett blinked, and then all at once his face darkened into a scowl. He jerked away from her hand, his arms taut with anger. She instinctively took a step back. He looked for a moment like he wanted to take a swing at her.

  “What do you care? You barely even knew her,” he hissed.

  Behind him, Emma could see that Celeste looked shocked by his anger. Louisa glanced from Emma to Garrett, confused.

  Emma felt frozen in place. Barely knew her? Sure, Emma had only known Nisha for a few months. But Sutton had grown up with Nisha.

  “Garrett, I know you’re upset . . .” Celeste started, laying her hand on his arm. He whipped around violently so that his nose was inches from hers. Emma’s entire body tensed at the wild expression on his face. A nasty sneer twisted his lips.

  “You don’t know anything,” he snarled. “Would you just shut up for five minutes? I’m starting to think Nisha was right about you.”

  Emma’s jaw fell open. Celeste’s expression darkened. “Is that so?” she snapped, the airy quality gone from her voice. “When did you have this cozy little chat about me?”

  “It’s none of your business,” he shouted. By now most of the other students they’d been standing with had slunk away awkwardly. Louisa watched her brother with anxious, darting eyes.

  Laurel materialized at Emma’s side and grabbed her by the arm, steering her past them, toward the parking lot. “Come on,” she whispered, even as Celeste’s voice rose up angrily behind them. “Arguing at a funeral? How tacky.”

  “I can’t believe he’d yell at his girlfriend like that,” Emma said, feeling a little dazed. She let Laurel lead her past the rows upon rows of headstones.

  Laurel stopped for a moment, raising her eyebrow. “Excuse me? You two used to go at it all the time.”

  Emma stared at Sutton’s sister.

  Laurel shrugged. “Come on, Sutton, he used to freak out about everything. You not calling him back quick enough, you wearing too short a skirt, you not making one of his games. He’s not exactly even-keeled.”

  “Yeah,” Emma stammered, trying to cover her confusion. “I know. Come on, let’s go.”

  They started walking again. Across the graveyard, Celeste and Garrett’s voices were still audible, cutting tensely back and forth. Emma’s head spun. Why had he said that she barely knew Nisha?

  I didn’t know either. But something told me Emma had better figure it out quickly. Garrett obviously had a short fuse, and Emma didn’t want to be caught in the blast zone if he went off.

  3

  ALONE AT LAST

  The next afternoon, Emma and Ethan walked up a bare, hilly trail at Tucson Mountain Park. Emma tightened a gray cashmere scarf around her neck, shivering at the cool wintry air. The rocks glowed reddish gold in the late-day sun, and Emma and Ethan clasped hands as they walked, their fingers interlacing.

  Emma liked the barren landscape. She’d felt as if someone had been following her since the moment she arrived in Tucson, but there wasn’t much cover on this wide expanse of trail. Sutton’s killer would have a hard time sneaking up on her here.

  As they walked she told Ethan about the Mercers’ family meeting. He listened carefully, his eyes ahead on the path. “They’re going to look for me, Ethan, and it’s not like I covered my tracks.” She thought about every CSI episode she’d ever seen. It was ridiculously easy to trace peoples’ whereabouts, if you had an Internet connection and a witness or two. “I don’t know how long I have before they figure it out. And if they do, I’ll be the number-one suspect. The killer has made sure of that.”

  They reached a promontory with a covered picnic area looking over the park. A fat raccoon glanced nonchalantly up from a McDonald’s wrapper as they approached, then waddled off into the underbrush. Emma sat on the top of the picnic table, rummaging in her backpack for a bottle of water. She took a long sip, then handed it to Ethan.

  “All of us are in danger.” She looked up at him miserably. “You, me, my family. We have to solve this, and fast.”

  He slid an arm around her and pulled her against his side protectively. She rested against his shoulder, breathing in the clean-laundry smell of his flannel shirt.

  “Okay, so we’ve ruled out Laurel, Thayer, Madeline, Charlotte, Mr. Mercer, Becky, and the Twitter Twins,” he said, ticking Sutton’s friends and family off one by one. “Are we totally sure it’s not, like . . . a random crime? I mean, maybe it was a drifter or something?”

  Emma shook her head. “The killer knows too much about Sutton for it to be random. Where she lives, what her schedule is, the importance of her locket . . . the killer took it right off her neck and left it for me, knowing that I wouldn’t be a realistic stand-in unless I was wearing it.” She shivered. “This murder was personal.”

  Ethan nodded. “I guess you’re right.”

  “You know who we haven’t looked into?” Emma said quietly. “Garrett.” She filled Ethan in on Garrett’s comment that she “barely knew” Nisha, and Laurel’s revelation that Garrett had a temper with Sutton.

  “Wow.” Ethan rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. “I don’t really know much about Garrett. We had AP History together last year, but we don’t really move in the same circles. I know he was out a lot for some kind of family emergency in the spring, but I never found out what the story was.”

  Emma chewed on her thumbnail. On the one real date she’d had with him, Garrett had mentioned something about his sister. Charlotte was there for me during everything that happened with Louisa, he’d said. At the time she hadn’t been able to come up with a subtle way to ask what he was talking about. “What about Louisa? Do you know her?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Not that well. She kind of keeps to herself.”

  “I’ve seen her with Celeste. I guess they’ve hit it off.” Emma took another sip of water and sighed. “Garrett doesn’t strike me as the mastermind type, though. Whoever did this has had to orchestrate a pretty complicated alibi—hiding Sutton’s body and her car, getting me to come to Tucson, watching me to make sure I was playing along. But Garrett couldn’t even pick a restaurant when we went out. He let me decide everything.” She twisted a lock of hair around her index finger so tightly it cut off the circulation. “Then again, maybe he’s just a really good actor. Isn’t that the thing with psychopaths? They’re manipulative, really good at putting up a front.”

  Ethan raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t know my girlfriend was an expert on criminal psychology.”

  Her lips twisted into a wry smirk. “If I wasn’t before, I will be by the time this is over.” Another thought popped into her head then, one that made her sit up straight. “You know, I haven’t been able to figure out how the killer got into Charlotte’s house that night he strangled me. But if it was Garrett . . .” She looked at Ethan significantly.

  His mouth fell open. “He dated her before he dated Sutton.”

  “He might have had
the alarm codes,” Emma agreed, then paused. “And then he dated Nisha.”

  They looked at each other uncertainly. And then Nisha died, too. The unspoken phrase hovered between them.

  Ethan licked his lips. “If it was Garrett, that makes sense. Maybe she saw something while they were dating, and only figured it out two weeks ago.”

  Emma sighed. “It’s all speculation, though, isn’t it? We don’t have any evidence putting him at the scene.”

  “Yeah, but we definitely have enough reasons to suspect him,” Ethan argued. “In murder cases the cops almost always look at husbands or boyfriends first.”

  Emma thought back to homecoming, when Garrett had cornered her in a broom closet to yell at her about their breakup. He’d been drunk, almost violent, twisting her wrist to hold her there against her will. And now she remembered something else—he’d mentioned Thayer. Everyone saw that fight between you guys just before he left. He loved you.

  “What if he found out about Sutton and Thayer?” Her throat went dry at the thought. “He could have followed her to the canyon that night and caught them together.”

  “That would be a real motive,” Ethan said.

  She nodded, the hairs on the back of her neck spiking up. Suddenly the memories of her brief “relationship” with Garrett looked a lot creepier. He’d acted like he really thought she was Sutton, but maybe he’d been testing her, training her so that no one would figure out Sutton was dead. The image of Sutton’s bed, covered in rose petals, floated back to her, and she shuddered. What if he’d been trying to turn her into the Sutton he’d wanted all along?

  I racked my brain for a memory of my summer with Garrett. I didn’t remember anything suspicious—but then, I didn’t remember fighting the way Laurel said we fought, either. In the days after I first woke up from my death, I’d felt a sort of warm tingle toward Garrett every time Emma saw him or spoke to him. I’d thought for sure I’d been in love with him in life, even if I couldn’t remember why. But now all I felt was an anxious flutter.

  “I’ll ask around,” she said finally. “Maybe Charlotte or Mads knows something that could be helpful.” Or Thayer, she thought, though she didn’t say that out loud. Ethan had been jealous of Thayer from the start—and it hadn’t helped matters when he’d caught Thayer kissing Emma a week ago. The very mention of his name was enough to provoke a good half hour of brooding silence from Ethan.

  She looked out over the landscape, the mountain air cool in her lungs. A few miles away she caught sight of a hawk drifting lazily on a gust of wind. Ethan opened a bag of gorp and picked out an M&M, popping it into Emma’s mouth. She crunched down on the candy shell and smiled at him. Suddenly she was simply happy to be with Ethan, away from prying eyes. They’d barely been alone since the night of Charlotte’s party, when they’d made love for the first time. The memory sent a flush of bashful pleasure through her cheeks and made her light-headed.

  “Did you grow up with all the playground folklore about M&M’s?” she asked coyly. He cocked his head at her.

  “Huh?”

  “You know, the urban legends about what the different colors mean?” She took the bag of gorp from him, picking past the nuts and raisins to find more candy. “Orange ones are good luck,” she said, holding one up. “I definitely need that.” She popped it in her mouth. “Yellow are what you give someone if you just want to be friends.” She dropped a yellow candy back in the bag distastefully. “Red are for confessing when you love someone. . . . Here, you can have this one. And green?” She gave him a wicked grin. “They’re for if you want to get someone . . . excited.”

  Ethan’s cheeks were pink, but a dazed grin spread across his face. “Excited, huh?”

  She held one up in front of his lips, but he shook his head, pulling her suddenly into his lap. “I don’t need that one,” he whispered against her ear. “You already make me crazy enough.”

  Emma’s skin tingled as he pulled her into a passionate kiss, one that gave way to more kisses. All her lingering worries—about the murderer, about Nisha, about her family—drifted away. While she was in Ethan’s arms, she was happier than she’d ever been.

  I was glad my sister was getting some action. Emma deserved whatever comfort she could get after all she’d been through, even if her lame attempt at dirty talk had me wishing I could stick my fingers in my ears. But she and Ethan were made for each other—and if there were no other silver linings to the trap my murderer had caught her in, I was at least grateful for that.

  4

  FAREWELL, MY FRENEMY

  A few hours later, Emma pulled Sutton’s vintage Volvo into Ethan’s driveway to drop him off. Across the street, Sabino Canyon loomed ominously. Next door, the Banerjees’ house was dark and silent.

  Ethan’s home, a sand-colored bungalow with paint chipping from the siding, was one of the smallest on the block. It looked like it had been nice at one point, but it’d fallen into disrepair. Emma suspected Ethan tried to maintain the place as well as he could, but it was hard for him to keep up with it with his dad gone—Mr. Landry had more or less walked out on them a few years ago, when Mrs. Landry had been diagnosed with cancer.

  Ethan turned toward her. “Good night,” he whispered, leaning across the gear shift and placing the softest kiss imaginable on her lips. She closed her eyes. For just a moment, nothing in the world existed beyond the place where her lips met his.

  “Good night,” she said, as he pulled away. He gave her a long look, then got out of the car and loped up the driveway to his house. The car’s headlights threw deep shadows around him—long, skinny abstracts of his body. His clean-laundry smell still lingering in the car, she watched him as he climbed the steps to the porch and let himself in.

  Emma smiled to herself, touching her mouth with her fingers as if she could somehow hold the memory of the kiss there. She watched as the light in Ethan’s room snapped on a moment later and imagined him sitting down at his desk, opening his calculus book or turning on his laptop, his dark blue eyes thoughtful under his furrowed brow.

  Cute Boy Hugely Distracting to Amateur Detective. The headline flashed before her eyes as if it were in print, an old habit of hers. She shook her head to clear it, then put the car in reverse and backed down the driveway.

  As she turned onto the street, her eyes fell on Nisha’s house. She paused with her foot on the brake. A low wall with wrought-iron filigree surrounded the yard, but she could see that most of the windows were dark. She could just make out the glimmer of the pool in the backyard. A sharp, painful ache cut through her heart. That was where it had happened.

  Emma thought of what Dr. Banerjee had said about Nisha’s room being ransacked. What if the killer hadn’t managed to find what he was looking for? If Dr. Banerjee and the cops had already gone over the room, it was a long shot. But it was still worth a try. She pulled the car to the curb and put it in park.

  The motion-activated porch light sprang to life when she was a few feet from the door. In contrast to Ethan’s weed-strewn yard, the Banerjees had a Xeriscaped garden full of white river stones and flowering cacti. But there were signs of neglect here, too—half-rotten fruit lay where it had fallen under a fig tree. Twigs and leaves floated on the brackish water in an austere marble birdbath. As Emma approached the porch, a large tabby cat with matted hair meowed piteously at her, its lamp-like eyes shining in the dark.

  Emma stopped at the door. The cat swam around her ankles, a low hopeful purr coming from its throat. She swallowed, her nerve faltering—was it insensitive to ask a grieving father questions about his daughter’s death? What would she even ask, anyway? She glanced behind her at the dark, hulking shape of the canyon. The murderer could be watching her, even now. What if she made things worse for Dr. Banerjee? What if Sutton’s killer decided that he, like Nisha, knew too much?

  She rang the doorbell before she could change her mind. The sound of the chime ringing out so suddenly in the quiet evening made her jump. After a long moment, she thought sh
e could hear footsteps, and then Dr. Banerjee flung open the door.

  Even though it was just a little past seven, he wore a long tartan bathrobe hanging open over a pair of mesh athletic shorts and a coffee-stained T-shirt that read HOLLIER TENNIS DAD. His thick glasses were askew on his face, making one eye look grotesquely magnified while the other squinted blearily. His hair stood up in a wild cloud around his head.

  Before Emma could say anything, the cat streamed past his legs into the dark hallway beyond. Dr. Banerjee watched it go with an abstracted frown. “Agassi?” Then he glanced up at Emma. For a moment he looked blank, as if he did not quite remember who she was. He blinked at her.

  “Sutton,” he said at last. “Hello. Did you bring Agassi home?”

  “Um, I actually wanted to ask you something. About Nisha.”

  His eyes seemed to focus sharply, his look of mild confusion evaporating at once. “What is it? Do you know what happened to her?”

  Emma bit her lip. “I’m sorry, Dr. Banerjee. I don’t understand it either.” She shifted her weight. “But I was wondering if I could . . . go in Nisha’s room? I won’t mess anything up. I just want to say good-bye.”

  Dr. Banerjee took off his glasses and polished them on the corner of his grimy shirt. When he put them back on, they looked more smeared than before. A sad smile quirked his lips upward ever so slightly. He reached out and patted her elbow. “Of course, Sutton.”

  Somewhere in the depths of the house, the cat let out a loud, pleading cry. Dr. Banerjee gave a start. “I suppose I should feed him,” he said vaguely. His vision went a little distant again, as if the effort required to focus his attention had finally exhausted itself. He ran his fingers through his hair and left it wilder than ever. “Just let yourself out when you’re done,” he said, then disappeared down the hall.