Cross My Heart, Hope to Die (23 page)

“He seems really sweet,” Emma offered. Laurel and Caleb had started dating right before Halloween, and Laurel had been really into him—until Thayer reentered the picture.

“He is.” Laurel smiled. “I’m glad he forgave me.”

“I wish Ethan would get over the whole Thayer thing, too,” Emma said, hoping it wasn’t too weird to talk about this with Laurel. “I really do want to be friends with Thayer, but whenever I talk to him, it feels like I’m sneaking around behind Ethan’s back.”

Laurel adjusted the gold tennis bracelet on her wrist. “That’s because you and Thayer can’t be friends,” she said matter-of-factly. Emma blinked. “Oh, come on,” Laurel pressed. “Just because you first dated him as a prank doesn’t mean we don’t all know that you two were crazy about each other. And Thayer’s
still
in love with you. Those kinds of feelings … they don’t go away easily. Maybe ever.”

Emma shook her head, sputtering. Sutton had first dated Thayer as a Lying Game prank? That was news. “You’re crazy. Thayer’s not still in love with me.”

“Whatever you say.” Laurel reached for a plastic bag and filled it with a few pomegranates. Emma looked away, out across the plaza, so she wouldn’t have to meet Laurel’s eyes.

And that was when she saw a woman with wild black hair, too-skinny arms, and a threadbare T-shirt sitting on a park bench on the other side of the plaza. Becky. A large family passed in front of Emma, and by the time they moved past, Becky had vanished.

Without thinking, Emma jumped to her feet, threw her purse into Laurel’s arms, and took off into the crowd. She passed a man wearing bright purple suspenders selling homemade ice cream in flavors like salted caramel fudge and ginger pear, then tore through a group of teenagers.

“Hey, watch it!” A girl riding a bike with yellow streamers swerved to avoid Emma, but Emma barely even flinched.

“Sorry,” she mumbled, still turning frantically around, trying to see where Becky had gone.

There
. She was walking toward the farthest row of booths. Her sneakers were held together with duct tape and didn’t match. Her hair was in pigtail braids, just how she used to do Emma’s hair before school every morning. Emma felt a pang in her chest. Becky looked so helpless—and innocent. Could she really be capable of murder?

Emma pushed through a group of college girls in front of a vegan candy booth, almost stepping into the open guitar case of a stubble-chinned street performer. “Mom!” she yelled. Several women looked her way but then turned back when they realized it wasn’t their daughter yelling. “Becky!”

Emma knew this was her last chance. She broke free from the crowd, running past an upscale pizza restaurant and a gallery that sold Hopi artwork, almost colliding with Becky from behind. She grabbed her mom’s arm and yanked her back.

“What are you …” The question died on her lips. The woman Emma had stopped was only a few years older than herself. She had a safety pin through her nose and deep purple shadow on her eyelids. Her T-shirt advertised a band called the Pukes, and up close Emma could see tattoos through the cigarette burns in the fabric.

She let go of the stranger’s arm.

“I’m so sorry. I thought you were someone else,” Emma muttered.

“Clearly,” the woman said, her voice ragged with hostility. “Keep your hands to yourself.”

Emma turned dazedly away in time to see Laurel running to meet her. The punk girl swore under her breath and stalked away.

“Who was that?” Laurel asked when she’d caught her breath.

“It was … I thought it was Rose McGowan.” Emma stood numbly in place. “I wanted to get her autograph.”

Laurel gaped at her in disbelief. “Why would Rose McGowan be wandering around the Tucson farmers’ market in November?”

“Well, obviously, she wasn’t,” snapped Emma. Her throat ached and she felt as if she was choking—it took her a minute to realize she was fighting back a sob. She took her purse back from Laurel. “Come on, we’d better get back.”

She turned on her heel and strode back to the plaza without another word. Laurel chased after her.

“I think you’re cracking up,” Laurel muttered.

Emma was starting to agree with her. She put her hand in her purse and felt the outline of the hospital key card. Nightmare or no, she had to act. If she sat around waiting any longer to see what Becky might do, she’d end up going crazy herself.

She had to keep it together. Her life depended on it—and any hope I had for justice depended on it, too.

25

Emma stepped off the elevator into the psych wing that afternoon for the third time. This time, though, she had a plan. She’d stopped on the basement level first, using Nisha’s passkey to get into the laundry so she could borrow a volunteer’s uniform. The only one she could find was a size too small, so it looked more like a naughty nurse costume, the red-and-white fabric clinging to her curves. She’d tied her hair back in a tight bun and wiped away all her makeup in the hope that the nurses wouldn’t recognize her as the girl who’d caused so much trouble earlier that week. Last but not least, she put on a pair of black-framed reading glasses she’d found on Mr. Mercer’s bedside table. If it worked for Clark Kent, it’d work for her.

None of the nurses reacted as she passed the station, barely even glancing up from their filing and typing. The ward was as quiet as ever, a silence heavy with drugged sleep and barely suppressed panic. Emma heard a voice in one of the bedrooms chanting a children’s rhyme. “Ring around the rosy, a pocket full of posies. Ashes, ashes …” The person trailed off into garbled laughter, or maybe it was sobs. Emma couldn’t tell. She forced herself not to walk too quickly away from the sound. She was supposed to look like she belonged here.

The now familiar pulse of the ward’s emotions thudded dully around me. It felt like quicksand, pulling me down. I hovered close to my sister, clinging to her thoughts and feelings, trying to stay afloat.

As she passed the common room, she saw the same blank faces angled toward the television set, the same dark-haired woman rocking herself violently in the corner. Mr. Silva sat in the armchair he’d occupied two nights earlier. His eyes met hers and narrowed suspiciously. She held her breath, half expecting him to get out of his chair, to come toward her sniffing like a dog.

But after a moment, he turned back to the television set, his black eyes losing focus. She wiped the sweat off her forehead and kept moving.

Around a few more corners she found it: a wooden door labeled
RECORDS
. She swiped her card against the reader and heard the lock click. Glancing up the hallway to make sure no one had noticed, she slid in and shut the door behind her.

The light fluttered on, revealing a narrow closet filled with dusty metal cabinets reaching from floor to ceiling. Carefully typed alphabetic labels were affixed to the front of each drawer. Emma took a moment to listen to the room’s deep silence, her blood pounding in her ears. For better or worse, she was moments from finding out the truth about her mother.

She traced her fingers over the letters on the cabinets until she found a drawer labeled
L–N
. She gave the drawer a firm tug. It didn’t budge.

Then she noticed the LED screen blinking on the top of the cabinet.
PLEASE ENTER CODE
, read the message. She stared blankly at it. What was it Nisha had said?
My mother’s birthday is September seventh
. Emma reached a trembling finger up to type 0907 on the keypad. The drawer slid smoothly open.

Inside, it bulged with files, each one packed with documents, forms, and even photos. Emma scanned the labels quickly, trying to get her bearings in the dense forest of alphabetized folder tags. Her eyes darted over a particularly fat file. Then she did a double take. Her gaze shot back to the file. “Landry,” she whispered.

She thought of Ethan’s mother shuffling past the living room window, wearing a threadbare robe. She’d had cancer … but did she also have psychological issues? Before Emma could stop herself, her fingers reached for the file and pulled it out. Her breath caught in her throat when she saw the patient’s first name printed precisely on the cover. It wasn’t Mrs. Landry’s file at all. It was Ethan’s.

Emma’s fingers tightened around the edge of the manila folder. Maybe it was a different Ethan Landry. It had to be a common name. There had to be an explanation.

Deep in her gut, though, she knew. This was Ethan’s file.
Her
Ethan.

Ethan had told her not to come here, and now she knew why. What was in it? What had he hidden from her? Suddenly Emma felt angry and deeply hurt. She had shared
everything
about herself with Ethan—things she’d never told anyone, the worst stories from her foster homes, stupid childhood fantasies, her most private secrets.

Emma took a shuddering breath, then slipped Ethan’s file back where it belonged. She couldn’t betray his privacy, no matter how betrayed she herself felt.

“It doesn’t matter,” I told her. “It’s not why we’re here. Now hurry,” I said, as we both heard footsteps approaching. Emma tensed. But whoever it was walked past the records room, and she let out a breath of relief.

Emma shook her head quickly to clear it, then flipped to the back of the drawer.
MELVILLE, MENDEL, MENDOZA
—there it was:
MERCER
. She pulled out the file and laid it flat across the drawer. On top was Becky’s most recent admittance form and a scrawled copy of her prescriptions. Behind that were her session notes, stapled into a clear plastic folder like a kid’s book report. They were written in Dr. Banerjee’s neat, slanting cursive.

Patient is despondent and unresponsive
, was all that was written under one day. Another note read:

Some of Becky’s sketches were included in the notes, the same intricate and abstract filigree that filled the notebook Emma had found in the attic.
Patient’s art shows both incredible creativity and crippling level of compulsion
, Dr. Banerjee had written on the back of one of them.
Increased dosage recommended
.

None of this was anything Emma didn’t already know. She turned a few pages.

The paper rattled in Emma’s hand as she started to tremble. A daughter taken from her? Did that mean Sutton? Had she come back to Tucson in August to take Sutton away from the Mercers? Had Sutton fought her—and lost? Emma kept reading.

Twelve years ago this month. That couldn’t mean Sutton or Emma.

There’d been another baby.

I inhaled sharply. Becky had
another
daughter?

The world spun around Emma. She clung to the file cabinet, feeling as if she might fall and bring the whole room crashing down on top of her. Rapid calculations shot through her mind. Becky had left Emma when she was five—thirteen years ago exactly. Right around the time she would have realized she was pregnant again.