Two Truths and a Lie (17 page)

Emma moved to Sutton’s dresser and yanked each drawer open one by one, tossing the contents onto the floor. There had to be something she was missing. She rifled through T-shirts and shorts and stuck her hands into tennis socks. She skimmed every page of three worn notebooks filled with history notes and algebra equations, and sorted through tubes of lip gloss, half a dozen chandelier earrings, and a small pot of moisturizer whose label promised to revitalize tired skin.

After she’d searched the drawers of Sutton’s desk as well, she slumped against the wall, scanning old photos to make sure there wasn’t something she had missed the first dozen times. But what would that be? A figure lurking in the background at a tennis match? Someone holding a sign saying
I KILLED YOUR SISTER
at her birthday party? Someone holding a knife to her back at prom?

Emma’s spine straightened and her head snapped up. Prom Queen Barbie. She didn’t fit with everything else Sutton had stashed under the bed and inside the drawers. Emma yanked the doll from where she’d dropped her in a tangle of light blue blankets and flipped her upside down. The folds of fabric fell away, exposing a tiny pouch sewn into the innermost layer of the ball gown.
Bingo.

Nice work. Even I wouldn’t have thought to check the doll—and presumably
I
was the one who’d put that pouch there.

Emma plunged her index finger inside the pouch and touched cold metal. It was a tiny, tarnished silver key. She held it up to the light. It looked like the kind of key that could open a journal or a jewelry box.

A knock sounded and Sutton’s door swung open. Laurel stood in the doorway in a cloud of tuberose perfume, her hands on her hips. There was a sour look on her face. “Mom wants you downstairs for breakfast.” Then she glanced around at the clutter strewn across the floor. “What in the world are you doing in here?”

Emma looked around at the mess. “Um, nothing. Just looking for an earring.” She held up a silver star stud she’d just found under the bed. “Found it.”

“What’s that?” Laurel pointed accusingly at the key in Emma’s palm.

Emma stared at it, too, cursing herself. If only she’d thought to hide it before Laurel saw it. “Oh, just some old thing,” she said vaguely, dropping the key on Sutton’s bedside table like she didn’t have a care in the world. Only when Laurel turned away did she scoop it back up again and shove it into the pocket of Sutton’s jeans. If the key had been important enough to hide, maybe it led to some huge secret. And Emma wasn’t going to rest until she found out what it was.

Which meant, no doubt, that I wouldn’t rest either.

15

Thursday afternoon, Emma sat in Fashion Design, Sutton’s last class of the day. Headless mannequins covered in draped muslin bordered the room. A makeshift runway shot through the center. Students sat at worktables, fabric, scissors, buttons, zippers, and thread strewn around them. Hollier’s one and only fashion design teacher, Mr. Salinas, paced the room, wearing slim-cut trousers and a pale blue scarf tied around his neck. He looked like Tim Gunn’s younger brother.

“Today’s presentation will push the boundaries of form versus function,” he announced in a pinched voice. He tapped a long, skinny finger on the glossy cover of French
Vogue,
which he had more than once called his “Bible.” “It’s the question on the tip of every editor’s tongue,” he mused. “How does fashion translate from the runway to real life?”

Emma glanced at her mannequin. Her creation wasn’t exactly translating, per se. Plaid flannel crossed the midsection, pinned awkwardly at the waist where Emma had attempted to make the outfit A-line. A black chiffon top hung crookedly with ruffles that sagged at the collar. The worst part was the pin: Emma had tried to make a flower-shaped brooch out of the excess plaid fabric. Add that to the red pen marks that dotted the mannequin’s bare arms, and the whole thing looked like a drunken schoolgirl-gone-goth with a bad case of the chicken pox. Although Emma loved fashion—she scoured thrift stores and made a lot of on-the-cheap outfits look expensive—sewing clothes wasn’t really her thing. She suspected Sutton took this class for the same reason she took a lot of the electives in her schedule—because they were fairly easy As and didn’t require much reading.

“What does the artist within have to say?” Mr. Salinas blathered on. “This is what we must ask ourselves.”

Emma ducked down, hoping Mr. Salinas didn’t call on her—she hadn’t exactly been trying to
say
anything. She had bigger things to worry about than
pushing the boundaries of form versus function
, like figuring out if Thayer had killed her sister before he got out of jail and came after her again.

“
Ma
deline?” Mr. Salinas called out, dramatically emphasizing the first syllable of her name. “Tell us what you’ve created here with your avant-garde ballerina.”

Madeline stood and smoothed down her black leather miniskirt. She was the best in the class and she knew it. “Well, Edgar,” she started. She was also the only student who called Mr. Salinas by his first name. “The look I’ve created is called the Dark Dance. It’s sort of ballet-meets-street. It’s the dancer after hours. Where does she go? What does she do?” She gestured toward her mannequin, which wore a blazer over a black dress and tights. “It’s the dark, deviant part of all of us that lies under the façade of perfection.”

Mr. Salinas clapped his hands together. “Brilliant! Absolutely divine. Everyone,
this
is the kind of work I expect you
all
to be doing.”

Madeline sat back down, looking satisfied with herself. Emma tapped her knee. “Your dress looks amazing. I’m super-impressed.”

Madeline nodded curtly, but Emma could tell by the way her features softened that Madeline was touched. Emma’s—or, rather,
Sutton’s
—opinion really mattered to her.

While Mr. Salinas called on a few more students—their responses clearly boring him compared to Madeline’s—Emma’s thoughts wandered. She’d practically memorized her sister’s notes to Thayer, and phrases like
Someday we can be together when the time is right
and
We’ll sort out all our problems
flitted through her mind. Even though Sutton had written almost thirty pages to Thayer, she hadn’t been particularly specific. Why couldn’t they be together? Why wasn’t the time right? What were the problems that needed sorting out?

I tried my hardest to think about what I might have meant. But nothing came.

Then Emma thought about the key tucked safely into her pocket. She’d tried it in every possible place today—a jewelry box in Sutton’s closet, a toolbox in the Mercers’ garage, and a little door to a room on the second floor of the house that she’d never been in before. She’d even run to the nearby post office at lunch in case the key was to a PO Box there, but the proprietor said Emma’s key was much too small for any mailbox. Maybe it, too, was a dead end.

Emma resisted the urge to rest her head on the desk and fall asleep. This was getting exhausting. Sure, she wanted to be an investigative journalist when she grew up, and uncover corporate scandal and horrific crimes, but it was different when her life was on the line.

“Earth to Sutton!” Polished fingernails snapped in front of Emma’s face. Charlotte’s green eyes bored into her.

“Are you okay?” Charlotte asked, looking concerned. “You went kind of comatose for a second.”

“I’m fine,” Emma murmured. “Just sort of … bored.”

Charlotte raised an eyebrow. “If you remember,
you
were the one who convinced both of us to take Fashion Design.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “I keep saying this, but you’ve seemed so weird lately. You know you can talk to me, right?”

Emma ran her fingers along the fabric of her dress, considering. If only she could tell Charlotte about Thayer. But it would be a mistake—if she let on that Sutton and Thayer had been romantically linked, Charlotte would immediately accuse her of cheating on Garrett. Garrett was always a touchy subject with Charlotte—he’d broken up with Charlotte to be with Sutton, and Emma suspected she’d never gotten over it.

I was almost positive that was true.

But then Emma got an idea. She reached into her pocket and unearthed the small silver key. “I found this in my room this morning and can’t for the life of me remember what it unlocks. Do you know?”

Charlotte plucked the key from Emma’s palm and turned it over in her hands. It glinted in the harsh overhead light. Emma noticed Madeline peering at her out of the corner of her eye, but then she quickly turned and faced front.

“It looks like it unlocks a padlock, maybe,” Charlotte said.

“A locker?” Emma guessed eagerly. Maybe Charlotte had seen Sutton open a secret locker Emma didn’t know about.

“Maybe a filing cabinet.” Charlotte handed it back to her. “What does a key have to do with your bizarre attitude lately? Does it unlock your sanity?”

“I don’t have a bizarre attitude,” Emma said defensively, slipping the key back in her pocket. “You’re imagining things.”

“Are you
sure
?” Charlotte tried.

Emma pursed her lips. “I’m positive.”

Charlotte stared at her for a beat, then picked up her drawing pencil. “Fine.” She furiously doodled swirls and stars across her fashion sketchbook. “Be secretive. I don’t care.”

The bell rang, and Charlotte jumped up. “Char!” Emma called after her, sensing that Charlotte was more irritated than she let on. But Charlotte didn’t turn. She sidled up to Madeline and disappeared into the hall. Emma remained at her desk, feeling drained. When she trudged into the hall, she endured yet more stares from random students whose names she didn’t yet know.

“Did you hear that a soccer scout from Stanford came here asking about Thayer?” a girl in a denim jacket whispered to her dark-haired friend, who was wearing an eighties-style off-the-shoulder striped shirt.

“Totally,” her friend murmured back. “But because Thayer’s in jail, there’s no shot of him getting in there.”

“Oh, please.” The girl in the denim jacket waved a hand. “His lawyer is getting him out. He’ll be free by next week.”

Please, no
, Emma thought.

“But even so, what about that limp?” Eighties Stripes asked. “I heard it was really, really bad. How do you think he got it, anyway?”

The answer, to them, was obvious. The two girls whipped around and looked at Emma as she passed, their eyes blazing.

It felt like everyone was whispering about her, even the teachers. Frau Fenstermacher, her German professor, nudged Madame Ives, one of the French teachers. Two cafeteria workers stopped their conversation and stared. Freshman, seniors,
everyone
looked at her as if they knew all of her business.
Would you just leave me alone?
Emma wanted to scream. It was ironic: When she school-hopped as a foster kid, she’d been a nobody, a ghost in the hallways. She’d longed to be someone everyone knew. But notoriety came with a price.

Didn’t I know it.

As Emma rounded the corner into a windowed hallway and looked out onto a courtyard dotted with cacti and potted ferns, she caught a glimpse of Ethan’s dark hair a few inches above the other students. Her heart pounded against her chest as she maneuvered her way through the swarming crowd.

“Hey,” she said, taking his elbow.

A smile lit up Ethan’s face. “Hey, yourself.” Then he noticed Emma’s gloomy expression. “Are you okay? What happened?”