Читать книгу Never Have I Ever: A Lying Game Novel - Сара Шепард - Страница 7

Ethan Landry opened the chain-link gate to the public tennis court and let himself in. Emma watched him stroll toward her, his shoulders slumped and his hands in his pockets. Even though it was after ten, there was enough moonlight overhead to see his perfectly distressed jeans, scuffed Converse, and messy dark hair that curled sweetly over the collar of a navy flannel shirt. An untied shoelace dragged across the court behind him.

“Mind if I leave the lights off?” Ethan gestured to the coin-operated meter that turned on giant floodlights for night play.

Emma nodded, feeling her insides leap. Being in the dark with Ethan didn’t sound so shabby.

“So what’s this train prank?” he asked, referring to the text Emma had sent hours earlier when she asked him to join her at the courts. It had become a meeting place for them, somewhere that felt uniquely theirs.

Emma handed the silver charm to Ethan. “Someone left it for Sutton at the country club. There was a note attached.” A chill ran down her spine as she relayed what the note had said.

A motorcycle rumbled in the distance. Ethan turned the charm over in his hands. “I don’t know anything about a train, Emma.”

Emma’s heart tugged when Ethan called her by her real name. It was such a relief. But it also felt dangerous. The killer had told her to tell no one. And she’d broken the rule.

“But it sounds like whoever gave it to you was part of the prank,” Ethan went on, “or a victim of it.”

Emma nodded.

They were silent for a moment, listening to the sounds of a lone basketball bouncing on the far court. Then Emma reached in her pocket. “I have something to show you.” She passed her iPhone to him, her stomach flipping over as their fingers accidentally brushed. Ethan was cute—really cute.

I had to admit Ethan was cute, too—in that disheveled, brooding, mystery-boy way. It was fun to watch my sister’s crush develop. It made me feel closer to her, like it was something we would’ve obsessed over together if I were still alive.

Emma cleared her throat as Ethan scrolled through the page she’d loaded. “It’s a list of everyone in Sutton’s life,” she explained, the words tumbling quickly out of her mouth. “I’ve gone through everything—Sutton’s Facebook, her phone, her emails. And now I’m almost positive I’ve got the date of her death narrowed down to August thirty-first.”

Ethan turned toward her. “How can you be sure?”

Emma took a quick breath. “Check this out.” She tapped the Facebook icon. “I wrote to Sutton at ten-thirty the night of the thirty-first.” She moved the screen over so Ethan could read her note: This will sound crazy, but I think we’re related. You’re not by any chance adopted, are you? “And then Sutton responded at twelve-fifty-six, here.” Emma scrolled down the message page and showed what Sutton had written back: OMG. I can’t believe this. Yes, I was totally adopted …

An unreadable expression flickered across Ethan’s face. “Then how can you think she died on the thirty-first if she was writing you messages on Facebook?”

“I was the only person Sutton wrote or talked to that night.” Emma scrolled through Sutton’s call log from the thirty-first. The last answered call was from Lilianna Fiorello, one of Sutton’s friends, at 4:32 P.M. Then at 8:39, MISSED CALL, LAUREL. Three more missed calls at 10:32, 10:45, and 10:59 from Madeline. Emma flipped ahead to the next day’s log. The missed calls began again the following morning: 9:01, Madeline; 9:20, Garrett; 10:36, Laurel.

“Maybe she was busy and didn’t pick up her phone,” Ethan suggested. He took back the phone and clicked to Sutton’s Facebook page, scrolling through her Wall posts.

Emma grasped Sutton’s locket. “I’ve looked through Sutton’s entire call log back to December. Practically every call she gets, she answers. And if she doesn’t answer it, she calls whoever it was back later.”

“Then what about this post she wrote on the thirty-first?” Ethan asked, pointing to the screen. “Couldn’t this mean she was avoiding everyone?” The last post Sutton had ever written was a few hours before Emma’s note: Ever think about running away? Sometimes I do.

Emma shook her head vehemently. “Nothing fazed my sister. Not even being strangled.” Just saying the words my sister connected her to Sutton in a deep, powerful way. At first, Emma had wondered if Sutton really had run away—maybe sticking her long-lost twin sister in her place had been part of an elaborate prank. But once someone nearly strangled Emma in Charlotte’s house, she became convinced Sutton’s death was for real.

“Ethan, think about it,” she went on. “Sutton writes this random post about wanting to run away … and then someone kills her? It’s too much of a coincidence. What if Sutton didn’t write this—what if the killer did? That way, if someone noticed Sutton was missing, they’d read her Facebook and assume she ran away, not died. It was a way for the killer to cover her ass.”

Ethan rolled a forgotten tennis ball on the ground with the sole of his foot. A gash along the seam marred the bright yellow fabric. “It still doesn’t explain the note Sutton wrote you a few hours later telling you to come to Tucson. Who wrote that?” The tremble in his voice betrayed his nerves.

A feathery chill darted along Emma’s spine. “I think the killer wrote both notes,” she whispered. “Once the killer realized I existed, she wanted me here so I could slip into Sutton’s life. No body, no crime.”

Ethan’s eyes darted across the court, like he still didn’t believe Emma, but I was almost positive my sister was right. I woke up in Emma’s life the night of August 31, just hours before Emma discovered the snuff film of me. I doubted I’d straddled both Alive Sutton and Ghost Sutton worlds at the same time.

Emma gazed at the dark silhouettes of trees in the distance. “So what was Sutton doing that night? Where was she, who was she with?”

“Have you found any hints in her room?” Ethan asked. “Any emails, notes in her calendar …?”

Emma shook her head. “I’ve scoured her journal. But it’s so cryptic and random, like she assumed it was going to fall into enemy hands one day. There’s nothing anywhere about what she did the night she died.”

“What about receipts in pockets?” Ethan tried. “Crumpled-up notes in her trash can?”

“Nope.” Emma’s eyes dropped to the space between her feet. Suddenly, she felt exhausted.

Ethan sighed. “Okay. How about her friends? Do you know where they were that night?”

“I asked Madeline,” Emma said. “She told me she didn’t remember.”

“That’s convenient.” Ethan scuffed the tip of his sneaker over the court. “I could see Madeline doing it, though. The beautiful, unhinged ballerina. Like Black Swan for real.”

Emma gave a short laugh. “That’s a little bit of an exaggeration, don’t you think?” She’d hung out several times with Madeline over the past week. They’d even had a heart-to-heart about Thayer and a few laughs in a spa hot tub. In those moments, Madeline had reminded Emma of her tough-but-caring friend Alexandra Stokes, who lived in Henderson, Nevada.

Emma looked at Ethan. “Maybe Madeline was telling the truth. I mean, do you remember what you were doing on the thirty-first?”

“Actually, I do. It was the first day of the meteor shower.”

“The Perseids.” Emma nodded. The first time she’d met Ethan, he’d been stargazing.

A shy smile crept onto Ethan’s face like he was remembering the moment, too. “Yep, I was probably on my front porch. The shower goes on for, like, a week.”

“And you were camping out there because stars are more interesting than people, huh?” Emma teased.

Pink colored Ethan’s cheeks and he looked away. “Some people.”

“Should I ask Madeline again?” Emma pressed. “Do you think she’s hiding something?”

Ethan shook his head slowly. “You never know with those girls. Not that I was privy to their inner-circle secrets, but something has always seemed off about Madeline and Charlotte. Before you came to town, when Sutton was still alive, it constantly seemed like they were vying for her attention and her position at the same time.” He stared off into the distance. “Like they loved her and hated her.”

Gripping Sutton’s phone, Emma touched the Twitter icon and called up each of Sutton’s friends’ pages, finding nothing remarkable on the thirty-first. But when she flipped to the tweets on September 1, something on Madeline’s page caught her eye. She’d written a shout-out to @Chamberlainbabe, Charlotte’s Twitter handle. Thanks for being there for me last night, Char. True friends stick together, no matter what.

“True friends,” Ethan said sarcastically. “Aw.”

“More like Huh?” Something wasn’t right. “Madeline and Charlotte aren’t touchy-feely. At all.” To Emma, they seemed more like uneasy comrades in the same popular-girl army. Then Ethan pointed to last night. “Madeline’s talking about the thirty-first.”

I shivered. Maybe they’d been with me that night. Maybe they’d finished off their pseudo–best friend together. And maybe, if Emma wasn’t careful, she’d be next.

Emma ran her hands down her face, then glanced at Ethan again. Guilt welled up in her chest. Whoever killed her sister was monitoring Emma’s every move. How long before the murderer realized Ethan knew the truth about her and tried to silence him, too?

“You don’t have to help me, you know,” she whispered. “It’s not safe.”

Ethan turned to face her, his eyes intense. “You shouldn’t have to do this alone.”

“Are you sure?”

When he nodded, Emma was suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude. “Well, thank you. I was drowning by myself.”

Ethan looked surprised. “You don’t seem like the kind of girl who drowns in anything.”

Emma wanted to reach out and touch the spot where moonlight splashed his cheek. He shifted an inch closer until their knees bumped and his face angled toward hers, like he was about to kiss her. Emma felt the heat of his body as he moved closer, very aware of his full bottom lip.

Her mind swirled, remembering the night before, when he’d told her he’d begun to fall for the girl who’d taken over Sutton’s life. That he’d begun to fall for her. A different kind of girl would know how to seal the deal. Emma kept a list in her journal called Ways to Flirt, but she’d never actually put any of the techniques into action.

Snap.

Emma shot up, cocking her head to the right. Across the court, just behind a tree, came the faint blue glow of a cell phone, like someone was standing there, watching them.

“Do you see that?”

“What?” Ethan whispered.

Emma craned her neck. But there was only darkness, leaving her with the unsettling feeling that someone had seen—and heard—everything.