The Lying Game #5: Cross My Heart, Hope to Die

by Shepard, Sara

  Emma stared at her. Was she joking? Was this some kind of game, an extension of the you-don’t-look-very-strong comment from earlier, her way of saying, There’s no way you’re going to be MVP this year. But Celeste’s eyes were round and ingenuous. She seemed to be looking right into Emma and struggling to understand what she saw there.

  “Obviously that’s Sutton. Who else could it be?” Nisha had come up behind them to peer over Emma’s shoulder. She curled her lip.

  Celeste shook her head, a pained crease between her eyes. “No, it’s not. The energy in this picture is nothing like yours, Sutton. You seem much … sweeter. Like you’ve lived a hard life and know what it’s like to suffer.”

  Oh, great—since I’d died I’d had to hear time and time again what a bitch I’d been, and now I had to listen to the fact that my energy was mean, too?

  Emma recoiled from the other girl’s gaze. It had been months since she’d been seen for herself by anyone except Ethan, and for better or worse she’d gotten used to being able to hide behind Sutton’s persona. Now she felt uncomfortably like someone was peeking behind her disguise, seeing how she really felt and what she really thought.

  She gave Celeste a cold sneer. “Whatever you say,” she said, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “Excuse me, I need to shower.” She sauntered past the other girl, forcing herself not to look at her again.

  Careful, sis, I thought. I didn’t believe in premonitions or astrology or auras either, back when I was alive. But then again, I didn’t believe in ghosts. Sometimes there are things in the world beyond what you can see with the naked eye.

  5

  DADDY-DAUGHTER DINE-AND-DASH

  Tuesday evening, the maître d’ of the La Paloma Country Club dining room hurried to the podium to meet Emma and her grandfather. Mrs. Mercer and Laurel had a mother-daughter community service meeting, so it was just Emma and Mr. Mercer for dinner that night.

  “Oh, Mr. Mercer, your knee!” the maître d’ cried.

  Mr. Mercer was propped up between two crutches, his knee buried in the straps and padding of a brace. He smiled ruefully. “You should see the other guy,” he said, wincing.

  The maître d’ laughed mirthfully and waved for him to follow her to the dining room. Luckily, the room wasn’t crowded, so Mr. Mercer was able to maneuver easily around the tables. A piano tinkled in the corner, blending in with the low conversations and scrape of silverware. A few men in suits sat at the bar, talking golf, while women in designer dresses and pearls nibbled on colorful salads, the dressing in cups to the sides of their plates. The big floor-to-ceiling windows on the far wall offered a panoramic view of the Catalina Mountains. As they passed a large gilded mirror, Emma studied their side-by-side reflections. She’d inherited Mr. Mercer’s straight nose and jawline. She smiled at her own reflection and saw the matching smile on his face. It seemed so obvious that they were related, now that she knew to look for it.

  “What happened?” a woman called out from a nearby table, glancing in concern at Mr. Mercer’s crutches. Mr. Mercer just smiled at her and passed on, but not before Emma noticed that a lot of the women in the dining room were eyeing Mr. Mercer appreciatively.

  Ew, were they ogling my dad? Sure, he was good-looking in that salt-and-pepper way, dignified and handsome in his tan sports coat and Italian leather shoes. But he was here with his daughter, for crying out loud—well, really his granddaughter. And he was on crutches.

  Emma helped Mr. Mercer into a chair at a large round table in the corner. “I’m so sorry again about your knee,” she mumbled.

  He shrugged. “It’s not your fault.”

  “It kind of is. If it wasn’t for me …” Emma trailed off, still annoyed at Thayer and Ethan.

  But Mr. Mercer waved her protestations away. “Let’s not talk about it anymore, okay?”

  A waitress handed them leather-bound menus, and Emma’s mouth started watering just reading her choices: portobello ragout in truffle oil, butter-poached lobster, rosemary-rubbed pork tenderloin, pecan-crusted snapper. Eating in nice restaurants instead of Jack in the Box was definitely on the list of Things That Do Not Suck About Being Sutton Mercer.

  But then Emma thought of the killer’s most recent note—YOU SHOULD THANK ME—and suddenly didn’t feel as hungry. The cost of her new life made it hard to enjoy the perks.

  When the waitress returned, they put in their orders: fettuccine alfredo for Emma, a filet mignon, rare, for Mr. Mercer. Then Mr. Mercer reached into his coat and pulled out a folded manila envelope. He looked down at it in his hands for a moment. “I found these for you,” he said, setting it on the table between them.

  Emma opened it to find a thick pile of photographs. On the top was a glossy picture of Becky around age twelve or thirteen. She was sitting on a horse and grinning broadly, braces glinting on her teeth. The next was of Becky in a Girl Scout uniform, pointing proudly at a merit badge on her sash. Becky in a cat costume for Halloween. Becky on a beach building an elaborate sand castle. There were a few of an older Becky, sixteen or seventeen years old. She’d lost all her baby fat and had a pale, waifish beauty. She no longer smiled for the camera. Emma paused at a picture of her mother in an oversized plaid flannel shirt, standing on a canyon trail in California. The expression on her face was hard to read. Sad, maybe, or just distant.

  A wave of sorrow washed over Emma, too. What had happened to that smiling girl on horseback? How had she become the haggard woman she’d seen in the Buick?

  It was hard for me to look at them, too. All my life, I’d wondered who my birth mother was. Admittedly, I’d pictured someone amazing: an international reporter called away to cover a dangerous war zone that was no place for a child, or a fashion model working the runways in Paris. But Becky was so ordinary, plain. Damaged.

  “There are more in the attic, if you’d like to see them,” Mr. Mercer offered.

  “I would,” Emma said, flipping through the photographs again. She paused on a picture of a junior-high-age Becky scowling playfully from a tent, perhaps on a camping trip. “She’s really pretty.”

  The Becky she’d known had been beautiful, with her big blue eyes and milky white skin. But there was a brittleness to her, an unease that kept most people at a distance, as though some tangible sadness clung to her. Emma remembered being at a playground once when a man in a basketball jersey had tried to flirt with her mother. Becky had stared silently at him from within the depths of her long, loose hair until he’d moved nervously away.

  Mr. Mercer nodded as the waitress set down their appetizers. “She is. She looks a lot like her mother. So do you, for that matter.”

  Emma could see it: All three generations of Mercer women had the same eyes, the same cheekbones. In one of the pictures, Becky sat side by side with her mother at the end of a dock. Mrs. Mercer’s smile looked forced, while Becky just stared blankly at the camera. She looked as if she might be around Emma’s age.

  “When was the last time Mom saw Becky?” she asked, picking up her fork to spear a piece of lettuce from her salad.

  Mr. Mercer dipped a bite of calamari into marinara sauce, frowning. “Not long after she left you with us, Sutton.” He sighed. “Becky had a way of hitting her mom just where it would hurt her the most.”

  Emma swallowed a crouton. “Shouldn’t we tell her that Becky’s been in town? It’s been a long time. Maybe things have changed.”

  Mr. Mercer shook his head. “I know it’s difficult, but we have to keep this a secret. Things haven’t been easy for any of us, but your mom has taken it especially hard. Promise me you won’t tell her.”

  “I promise,” Emma said softly. She hesitated, biting her lip, then forged ahead. “I think I saw Becky the other day. She drove past me, but I know it was her.”

  To her astonishment, he nodded. “I guess I’m not surprised by that.”

  “You’re not? You mean she’s hung around here before, spying?”

  The waitress swooped in at that very moment to ask if everything
was okay. “Fine,” Mr. Mercer said, giving her a clipped smile. When she vanished, he turned back to Emma. “She’s come back into town a few times.”

  “She clearly saw me.” Emma felt the hurt on the surface of her skin, like a physical wound. “Why did she drive off? Why did she pretend I didn’t exist?”

  Mr. Mercer sighed heavily. “Becky’s life has never been easy.”

  “Sure it has.” Emma suddenly felt angry. She grabbed the pile of pictures and started to flip through them. “Horseback riding. Dance lessons. Presents at Christmas. Ski vacation, beach vacation, Disneyland vacation. She had …” Emma swallowed hard. She’d almost said more than I ever did. “She had everything anyone could want. Don’t make excuses for her.”

  She’d managed to keep her voice from climbing higher, from echoing through the entire dining room, but it shook dangerously. She pinched her forearm under the table to hold back her tears. Mr. Mercer’s eyes were sad behind his glasses, and for a moment he seemed older and more tired than Emma had ever seen him.

  He reached across the table and took her hand. “Sutton, believe me, I know how you feel. Your mom and I have never stopped talking about this. Wondering if we could have done more for her, wondering if any of her … of her behavior is our fault. But some people just have a hard time in the world, no matter how many advantages they have, no matter how loved they are. Someday you’ll understand that. Not everybody is as strong as you are.”

  Emma pulled her hand from his. “You’re talking like she’s damaged. Like she’s some kind of freak.”

  Again he hesitated. Then he turned back to his appetizer and gracefully speared another piece of calamari with his fork. “She’s not a freak. You shouldn’t talk about anyone that way—especially not Becky. But, honey, she has a lot of problems. Difficulties socializing or living with other people. It’s one of the reasons she’s moved so often, one of the reasons she keeps to herself. She can be unpredictable when she’s not on her medication.”

  Emma’s blood chilled. Becky took medication? For how long? “Unpredictable how?” she asked.

  Mr. Mercer shifted in his seat. “Well, sometimes she’d be despondent for days on end. Hiding in her room, crying at the drop of a hat. Sometimes she was destructive. She broke things out of spite. She punched a hole in the wall, just because she was asked to clear the table.”

  “Oh,” Emma said quietly. She thought about her mother’s habits, things she’d always thought of as strange or irresponsible more than dangerous. Like how she’d spend a week at a time in the same pair of pajama bottoms. How she’d stolen candy by the pocketful from the corner store, or gleefully lit their unopened utilities bills on fire with a match.

  Mr. Mercer cleared his throat uncomfortably. “But despite all that, Becky can also be creative and warm and wonderful. In her own way she loves you—I know she does. That’s why she gave you to us, because she knew we’d take better care of you than she could. She wanted to talk to you that night in the canyon, but she wasn’t ready. Maybe she’s watching you now because she’s trying to build up the courage to finally see you.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that. Becky hadn’t looked shy or nervous, exactly, more like caught. Or annoyed, perhaps, that Emma was running after her.

  Emma was thinking the same thing. And she couldn’t help thinking about what Ethan had said at the studio, about how Becky might have played a role in Sutton’s disappearance. More memories started flooding back as though released from a dam, all the ones Emma usually tried not to think about. Like the night Becky caught her boyfriend Joe cheating. He was a mild-mannered guy with a goatee who watched Saturday morning cartoons with Emma before Becky crawled out of bed. Becky had intercepted a call on his phone from someone named “Rainbow” and had gone crazy, her eyes rolling madly as she paced the apartment and screamed at Joe. Emma hid under the bed when Becky picked up a folding chair to clobber her boyfriend over the head. Emma could still remember the terrible crunch of impact. She’d curled up, hugging her Socktopus for dear life and praying for everything to be over soon.

  She shuddered. She wanted to be able to dismiss Ethan’s suspicions, but maybe she didn’t actually know what her mother was capable of.

  The waitress appeared again, this time with their entrées. Just as Emma was twirling a bite of pasta, Mr. Mercer’s phone jangled from his pocket. He glanced at the screen and frowned. “The hospital,” he murmured. “Sorry, honey, I need to grab this.”

  Even through the bustle and clatter of the busy dining room, Emma could hear the crisp, calm voice on the other end of the phone. “Dr. Mercer, I’m with the University of Arizona Hospital. We have your daughter. We have Rebecca. There’s been an incident. Can you come in right away?”

  Almost before the woman had finished her sentence, Mr. Mercer was scrambling for his crutches. Emma knocked over her chair as she jumped to her feet to help him. A single thought cycled in her mind again and again. Something has happened to Becky.

  I flew behind them both as they hurried out of the club, straining my ears to hear what else the nurse had to say and bracing for whatever they’d find in that hospital bed only a few miles away.

  6

  THE FOURTH FLOOR

  Mr. Mercer found a parking spot near the entrance of the University of Arizona Hospital and Medical Center, and they hurried into the lobby of the ER. A blast of air conditioning greeted them. “We’re here for Rebecca Mercer, please,” Mr. Mercer said to the woman at the triage desk.

  Emma looked around, wrinkling her nose at the antiseptic hospital smell. Just one week before, she’d come here to investigate her grandfather’s involvement in Sutton’s disappearance, breaking into his office in the orthopedic wing and rifling through his desk—that was how she’d tracked down Becky in the first place.

  The ER lobby was full of orange plastic chairs, dilapidated coffee tables, and out-of-date magazines. A young man sat with a bloody towel wrapped around one finger, a woman who must have been his mother speaking rapidly in Spanish at his side. A man with several small children sat under a poster that showed how to sneeze in to your elbow to prevent spreading germs. A TV bolted to the ceiling was tuned to a classic movie channel—Emma recognized Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak from Vertigo, which she’d seen in a class a few years before in Henderson.

  Something has happened to Becky. She and her grandfather hadn’t spoken a word on the drive over, both of them too terrified of what might greet them when they got here, but Emma’s imagination had whipped through a thousand terrible scenarios. She pictured Becky’s legs crushed under the wheels of a car, Becky sick with a mystery illness no one could cure, Becky missing limbs or plugged into life-support machines. Twenty minutes earlier she’d been angry and frustrated with her mother, but now she hated herself for even thinking it. What if she was going to lose her for real?

  Even though Becky still made me feel uneasy, I was worried about the same thing.

  The woman in triage said something to Mr. Mercer in a low voice that Emma couldn’t hear. He nodded, then hobbled across the lobby to a gleaming bronze elevator. With a ping, the doors slid open, and he got inside. Emma followed him. “Where are we going? I thought she was in the ER.”

  Mr. Mercer didn’t answer. She could see their blurred reflections in the dented metal of the doors, but unlike in the mirror at the restaurant, here they looked warped and eerie. A Muzak version of “Bad Romance” oozed out of the speakers. The elevator crept up an inch at a time.

  “Have they checked her in already?” Emma asked again. “Is it serious?”

  Mr. Mercer just pressed his lips into a white line. Then the elevator dinged and the doors slid open. Gold letters spelled out the name of the ward on the sage green wall facing them: PSYCHIATRIC AND MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES.

  Emma grabbed her grandfather’s arm and forced him to look at her. “What are we doing here? You have to talk to me.”

  Mr. Mercer adjusted his crutches under his arms. “I don’t know much more than y
ou do, honey. The nurse on the phone said it was bad. Becky’s had some kind of … episode.”

  “Some kind of episode?” Emma’s voice sounded shrill in the quiet hallway. “What does that mean?”

  Her grandfather opened his mouth to answer, but before he could, a thickset nurse with a stiff gray bouffant hairdo came around the corner to meet them. She glanced at her clipboard. “Dr. Mercer?” she asked, her voice brisk and efficient.

  Mr. Mercer stepped forward. “Yes. How is she?”

  “Follow me.”

  Wordlessly, they trailed the nurse through the waiting room and down a wide green hallway. The nurse’s rubber-soled clogs made no sound on the linoleum, but Emma’s heels clicked loudly. Otherwise, the ward was quiet. Instead of medical charts or germ prevention posters on the walls, there were soothing pastel landscapes and the kind of motivational posters you saw in a junior high classroom. One was even that gray tabby dangling from a tree limb with the words HANG IN THERE.

  A strange sensation settled over me, sort of like a deep, vibrating hum. The farther we went into the ward, the stronger it became. “Be careful,” I whispered to my twin, wishing she could hear me. “Something isn’t right.”

  They passed a nurse’s station, and Emma stared disinterestedly at a bulletin board that said VOLUNTEER OF THE MONTH in glittery letters across the top. But when she saw the girl’s picture hanging below, she stopped short. It was Nisha Banerjee, smiling almost shyly in her candy-striper uniform. Emma cocked her head. Nisha volunteered here? Emma remembered that Nisha’s dad worked in psychiatrics, but a stint on the psych ward seemed like a strange after-school activity.

  You wouldn’t have caught me volunteering here in a million years, not even if it guaranteed me admission to the college of my choice.

  When Emma looked up, the nurse was escorting Mr. Mercer around another corner. All the doors on the ward had a window near the top, so the patients could be watched when the door was closed. She was too afraid to peek inside, but she could hear one man singing softly in a language she didn’t recognize. Behind another door, a woman babbled something that sounded like “You have to find them in your hair, that’s where they like to hide.... They spy on you, so you have to pull them out by the root.”