“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.