Never Have I Ever (8 page)

Madeline disappeared down one of the back aisles.

“Mads!” Emma called, sweeping past a low shelf of atlases and encyclopedias. “Mads, come on!”

The librarian put her finger to her lips. “
Quiet!
” she ordered from behind the checkout desk.

Emma hurried past posters of the Twilight and Harry Potter series, which gave her a tiny twinge of longing. Becky used to read Harry Potter to her, making up the voices for each of the characters and wearing a dingy black velvet cape she’d picked up at a garage sale after Halloween. Emma had loved being read to; she didn’t care that the cape kind of smelled like mildew.

Emma turned down the aisle Madeline had veered into. Madeline had stopped at the very end of the row, next to a bunch of copies of
The Riverside Shakespeare
. Her long, dark hair cascaded down her back, her posture ramrod-straight.

All of a sudden I had a sharp, distinct memory of Madeline standing in that same taut but wounded pose. We were in her bedroom, and there was a commotion coming from down the hall, muffled voices gaining in volume. I’d heard tiny gasps, as though she was trying to stifle tears.

“Mads?” Emma whispered. Madeline didn’t answer. “Come on, Mads. Whatever I said, I’m sorry.”

Madeline whipped around and stared at Emma with red-rimmed eyes. “Look, I called you first, okay?” Her voice caught, and she pressed her lips together. “You didn’t answer. I guess you had more important things to do.”

She sniffed and took a choked breath. “The world doesn’t revolve around you, you know. I always jump when you tell me to jump, but it would be nice if you reciprocated sometimes. I called Charlotte next, and she stayed with me all night. So
yeah
, of course we’ve been tight lately. Satisfied?”

Steeling her jaw, Madeline swept past Emma as though she were a faceless student clogging up the library aisles.

“Mads!” Emma protested. But Madeline didn’t stop. She stormed through the doors and out into the hall.

Everyone in the library turned and stared at Emma. She ducked back into an aisle and leaned against a stack of books. Madeline was hiding something big, but it wasn’t what Emma thought. There was no faking the reaction Madeline just had. Whatever she’d dealt with the night Sutton went missing was her own issue, something completely divorced from what had happened to Sutton. Madeline was busy that night.
Innocent.
And now, because they were together, Charlotte likely was, too.

Relief washed over me, hard and fast. I wanted to cheer aloud. My two best friends were actually my best friends—not my murderers.

A series of shrill
beep
s sounded as the librarian scanned books for a scrawny red head. Emma turned to leave, but her knee caught the corner of a copy of
The Riverside Shakespeare
and knocked it to the floor. The book splayed open, its paper-thin pages full of highlights and notes from kids who didn’t seem to care that it was a library book. A line from
Hamlet
caught Emma’s eye, sending a chill up her spine.

It made me shiver, too. Charlotte and Mads were in the clear, but my killer was still out there—smiling, watching, lurking, waiting.

Chapter 13
Never Underestimate the Power of Snooping

“She’ll be good, Mom,” Laurel begged. “I
promise
. Please let her go?”

It was Friday evening, and Emma and Laurel stood in the foyer of the Mercer house. Mrs. Mercer peered at the girls from the doorway of her office. Drake panted beside her, his long tongue looking like a thick slab of ham. Emma edged away from him slightly.

“It’s just a stupid tennis dinner.” Laurel went on in a sweet voice. “It’s going to be totally boring—
Nisha’s
throwing it. And anyway, didn’t Coach Maggie tell you she was practically going to put an ankle monitor on Sutton once she gets there? You have nothing to worry about.”

“Please?” Emma gave Mrs. Mercer puppy-dog eyes that matched Laurel’s. A week ago she wouldn’t have believed she’d
want
to go to something at Nisha’s house. But the truth was, being grounded kind of . . . sucked. It wasn’t that she was simply stuck in the house; Mrs. Mercer had taken away Emma’s Internet privileges, disconnected the cable box from Sutton’s room, and confiscated Sutton’s iPhone. After becoming accustomed to Sutton’s shiny, high-tech gear, the outdated, banged-up BlackBerry Emma had brought from Vegas wasn’t exactly cutting it. She had spent the evenings scouring Sutton’s room once more, searching for anything relevant to her murder, but there was nothing. The only thing left to do was homework. Sutton was probably rolling over in her grave.

If
I was somewhere as boring as a grave. Which I highly doubted.

Emma wasn’t supposed to be allowed out for Nisha’s tennis team dinner, but Coach Maggie had apparently called Mrs. Mercer at work this afternoon and urged her to let Sutton attend. It would be good for team morale, Maggie had said, assuring Mrs. Mercer she would be there and would keep an eye on Sutton. But now Mrs. Mercer was hesitating.

“You’ll watch her like a hawk, Laurel?” Mrs. Mercer asked.

“Yeh-
hes
,” Laurel groaned, fidgeting with the strap of her flowered camisole.

“And you two will come straight home after the dinner is over?”

“Absolutely,” the two girls said in unison.

Mrs. Mercer put a finger to her lips. “Well, it
is
Nisha.” She uttered Nisha’s name in the same reverent way she might talk about the Dalai Lama. Mrs. Mercer was convinced Nisha was a model girl with straight As and iron-tight morals who could do no wrong.

“Okay, fine.” With a sigh, Mrs. Mercer lowered her shoulders and shooed them out the door.

Emma climbed into Laurel’s car, and Laurel swung into the driver’s seat and whooped. “How does freedom taste?”

“Amazing!” Emma cried.

Laurel drove one-handed through the neighborhood, using her other hand to run a paddle brush through her long blond hair. Despite her messy room, Sutton’s sister was permanently polished: constantly reapplying lip gloss, checking her teeth in mirrors to make sure nothing was caught between them, and dragging out the ironing board from the hall closet and smoothing her skirts and shirts. Emma liked that Laurel took care of her own clothes instead of asking Mrs. Mercer or a dry cleaner to do it. She was resourceful, like Emma was. She could take care of herself.

But that didn’t mean Emma trusted her.

Emma shifted in the passenger seat and mentally assumed her sleuth mode. “So apparently, Madeline has a secret,” she began, turning to Laurel and catching sight of the canine day care, Doggie Dude Ranch, that zoomed past her window. A turquoise and crystal shop was next, followed by a big outdoor pottery shop.

Laurel’s eyebrows shot up, but she didn’t take her eyes off the road. “Oh yeah? What?”

“She won’t tell me. It has something to do with the night before Nisha’s back-to-school party.”

Laurel’s face clouded. “You mean the night before you
ditched
me?”

Emma bit down hard on the inside of her cheek.
Oops.
Sutton was supposed to pick up Laurel for that party . . . but since she was dead, it didn’t happen. “Yeah. Well, anyway, Mads called Charlotte that night and told her what it was. I guess it was kind of a big deal.”

“Why weren’t you with them?”

The AC in the car suddenly felt ice-cold.
You tell me
, Emma wanted to say. “I guess that means you weren’t with them either?”

Laurel’s mouth formed a straight line. The Jetta veered over the line on the highway, and the driver next to them blew his horn, making both girls jump. “Uh,
no
,” she answered tightly after she’d steered the car back into its rightful lane. “I wasn’t.”

“So where were you?” Emma tried to sound like she was making casual conversation, even though her heart was rocketing inside her chest.

Laurel’s fingers clutched the steering wheel. She paused for a long moment, her eyes fixed on the horizon. “Sutton, are we seriously going to have this conversation right now?” she said finally in a steely voice
.
Emma stared at her, waiting, but she didn’t offer anything more.

Laurel pulled the car up to a familiar low-slung ranch house with a big front yard full of desert succulents. It looked exactly the same as it had the last time Emma had come here, her very first day in Tucson, before she knew her twin was dead. Back before all of this craziness started. Several cars were parked in the driveway and at the curb, many of them pasted with bumper stickers that said
TENNIS IS THE GOOD LIFE
or
LOVE
with a yellow tennis ball as the
O
. All the lights were on in the house, and a giggle exploded from somewhere inside.

“Come on.” Laurel hit the key fob to lock the Jetta and started up the driveway, but Emma hung back for a moment. She stared across the street at Ethan’s house. The front porch was dark. The telescope Ethan had peered through the first night Emma had met him had disappeared. She wondered what Ethan was doing tonight. Had he thought about their near kiss in the pool the other night? They’d seen each other in the halls, but they hadn’t really spoken since.

Nisha’s front door flung open, and the tennis team greeted them with hugs and squeals. Emma poked her head into the room and nudged Laurel. “Where’s Maggie?”

Laurel started to laugh. “Maggie’s not actually
here
.”

Charlotte emerged through the crowd wearing an off-the-shoulder striped top and wide-leg jeans. She linked her elbow through Emma’s. “I see my little plan worked!” The freckles on her nose scrunched together as she grinned.

Emma frowned.
Little plan?

Charlotte extended her thumb and pinkie to make the shape of a phone. “ ‘Hello, Mrs. Mercer?’” she said in an adult voice. “ ‘This is Coach Maggie. I’d really, really like Sutton to attend the tennis team dinner tonight. It’s such a show of solidarity! Oh, I understand she’s grounded, but I’ll watch her carefully, I promise. You can count on me!’”

Not even I saw that one coming. My friends were
good
. With a rush of relief, I tried to wrap my arms around Charlotte, thrilled once more that she wasn’t my killer. But, as usual, my fingers just passed through her skin.

Charlotte put her arm around Emma’s shoulders and squeezed. “No need to thank me. Now all we have to do is figure out how to spring you for Homecoming.”

She pulled Emma into the dining room, where platters of roast chicken and panini sandwiches lay on a checkered tablecloth next to big bowls of pasta salad, crispy, foil-wrapped garlic bread, and a tier of chocolate-iced cupcakes for dessert. Red plastic cups sat next to bottles of Gatorade, Smartwater, and Diet Coke. Everyone else on the team had already dug in, scooping food onto their plates with long-handled plastic spoons.

As Emma stepped toward the table, an icy hand circled her wrist. “Glad you could make it, Sutton,” Nisha said with a saccharine smile.

Emma flinched, jittery at the sight of Nisha. Something about the girl was
too
glossy, starting with the way she was styled to anal-retentive perfection: her cream-colored silk blouse perfectly tucked into a pair of dark-wash trouser jeans. The gold bangle bracelets on her wrist looked as though they’d been spit-polished. Her hair was a smooth, glassy sheet that hung down her back, and her makeup looked as though it had been professionally applied.

“I’m glad you’re
enjoying
it,” Nisha went on. “It was kind of hard work to put all this food together. Especially because I had to do it alone.”

“
Liar!
” I wanted to call out. In the kitchen, past all the girls, I spotted a bunch of AJ’s market grocery bags on the kitchen island. No doubt Nisha had bought all this stuff ready-made and just arranged it artfully on plates.

“So,” Nisha’s voice oozed with faux sweetness. “What’s it like for Sutton Mercer not to have a boyfriend? It must be the first time since, oh, I don’t know, kindergarten!”

Emma straightened. “I’m actually really enjoying myself,” she said, reaching forward to pop a cracker into her mouth. “It feels good to be free.”

The corners of Nisha’s mouth curled up into a sickly pink grin. “I heard you wouldn’t have sex with him,” she added, loudly enough to turn the heads of two sophomores lining up for pasta-salad seconds.

Emma’s hand froze over the crackers. “Where did you hear that?”

A tiny giggle escaped from Nisha’s mouth. The answer was obvious. Other than her friends, Garrett was the only person who knew what happened in Sutton’s bedroom.

Ew.
I suddenly was glad that Emma broke up with him.

“I had no idea you were such a prude!” Nisha trilled, exposing her pearly teeth. Then, without allowing Emma to get another word in, she whipped around and sashayed into the den.

Emma stabbed at a piece of chicken on the platter, hating Nisha more with every second. Had Sutton hated her this much, too? But it was more than that. There was something about Nisha that unnerved her. The strange looks she gave Emma, the whispers. It was like she was toying with Emma. Like she
knew
something—something big.

Emma peered out of the dining room. A large, state-of-the-art kitchen was to her right; on the other side of the foyer was a long, dark hallway, which most likely led to Nisha’s bedroom. Did she dare?

“Be careful,” I warned, even though Emma couldn’t hear me. There was no way Nisha would take kindly to snooping.

Emma stared at the chicken leg she’d selected from the platter, the thin, yellowish flesh suddenly turning her stomach. Discarding her plate, she mumbled something about the bathroom to no one in particular and tiptoed down the hall.

Tiny night-lights illuminated the baseboards. The air smelled like Febreze and Indian spices. Emma pressed open the first door with the very tips of her fingers and stared into a walk-in closet full of towels and sheets. She moved to the next door. It was a hall bathroom, adorned with a paisley shower curtain and a mosaic-tiled mirror. The next door, which led to the master bedroom, stood ajar. The king-sized bed hadn’t been made, and men’s dress shirts, black socks, and shiny black shoes were strewn messily all over the carpet.
I guess someone’s cleaning lady didn’t come this week
, Emma thought, surprised at how accustomed to an immaculate home she’d become after just a few weeks. A twinge of guilt pinched her when she remembered that Mrs. Banerjee had died this summer.

Emma pushed inside the final door to the right. A light glowed from a meticulous desk. A Compaq laptop sat closed, and a white iPod waited in a charging dock next to it. The rest of the surface was empty and sterile, like a hotel room. Nisha had smoothed the bedspread of all creases, organized eight fluffy pillows just so, and lined up her stuffed animals—one of which was a large tennis racket with two googly eyes—along the headboard. She’d alphabetized all the books on her shelf—which seemed mostly of the stuffy, Victorian, Brontë-sisters variety. Even the slats of the venetian blinds tilted precisely at the same angle.

A peal of laughter sounded from the den, and Emma froze. She peeked through the gap between the door and the wall and counted to three. No one appeared at the end of the hall.

She tiptoed farther into the room to take a closer look at the collage of photos housed under a glass pane near Nisha’s bed. Most of the photos showed Nisha in action: hitting a backhand shot, a drop shot, serving, raising her hands above her head when she’d won a match. In the center of the collage, Nisha stood in the first-place spot on a podium, a shiny gold medal around her neck. Sutton stood in the third-place spot, scowling. There was a tan-colored brace on her knee.

Tacked along the border were several group shots of the tennis team: the girls holding a team tournament cup, Sutton standing as far away from Nisha as she could. Charlotte had darker hair in the photo, and Laurel’s hair was cut in a sleek blonde bob. Another photo showed the girls standing at an airport gate. Sutton posed off to the side, jutting her leg up on one of the benches and giving the camera a sexy pout. Emma noticed blinking slot machines in the background. Was that Vegas? Had she and Sutton been in the same city at the same time? For a fleeting moment, she pictured the two of them running into each other at the New York-New York casino where she had worked. Would Sutton have noticed her? Would they have smiled at each other?

A final team shot was pinned in the corner of the bulletin board, overlapping other photos as if it had been hastily stuck there. The tennis team gathered around Nisha’s dining table. Sutton and Charlotte were missing, but Laurel smiled broadly, her hair as long as it was today.
BACK TO SCHOOL TEAM SLEEPOVER
was scrawled at the bottom of the photo. Emma’s finger traced over the date written in Nisha’s calligraphic handwriting:
8/31
. She had to stare at it for a few long beats before she believed it was real.

“What are you
doing
?”

Emma flinched. Nisha stood in the doorway, her arms crossed over her chest. She stalked over and pushed Emma’s shoulder. “I didn’t say you could come in here!”

“Wait!” Emma pointed at the photo. “When was this taken?”