Cross My Heart, Hope to Die (6 page)

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

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
grand
daughter.
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.