The Lying Game #5: Cross My Heart, Hope to Die Read online

  EPIGRAPH

  Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.

  —ARTHUR MILLER

  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Prologue: A Familiar Face

  1 Drive-By Mom

  2 The Good, the Bad, and the Sexy

  3 The Face That Launched a Thousand Fists

  4 Karma’s a Bitch, and So Am I

  5 Daddy-Daughter Dine-and-Dash

  6 The Fourth Floor

  7 Strangers in the Night

  8 Who Are You?

  9 White Lies and Alibis

  10 Tea for Two

  11 A Picnic Under the Stars

  12 Monsters in the Attic

  13 Never Underestimate the Power of a Little Retail Therapy

  14 The School of Bitchcraft

  15 Hopes and Schemes

  16 Every Day Should Be Senior Skip Day

  17 Researching and Reminiscing

  18 Mom, Interrupted

  19 Mommie Dearest

  20 The Escape

  21 Calm in the Storm

  22 In Hot Water

  23 Help from an Unexpected Source

  24 Meet Me at the Plaza

  25 File M for Murder

  26 You Better Get This Party Started

  27 A Voice in the Dark

  28 Scenic Overlook Ahead

  29 Arts and Crafts Time

  30 Things That Go Bump in the Night

  31 Origin Story

  32 Hello, and Good-Bye

  33 The Most Important Meal of the Day

  34 Kiss the Girl

  35 Call Me Maybe

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Works

  Credits

  Copyright

  Back Ads

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  A FAMILIAR FACE

  I watched the two teenagers sitting together outside the Coffee Cat Café on a sunny Saturday morning. They leaned toward each other, their voices low and almost intimate, their bodies close but not touching. Most people probably thought they were a couple—a really attractive couple. The boy had high cheekbones and a lean, athletic build. His blue-and-green striped polo shirt brought out the green flecks in his hazel eyes. He was movie-star hot. But maybe I was just biased: Thayer Vega was my boyfriend, after all.

  Or at least he was before I died.

  The girl next to him looked exactly like I did, back when I had a body. Her bright blue eyes were lined with my velvety chocolate liner, and her light brown hair spilled down her back in thick waves just like mine used to. She was wearing a gray cashmere sweater and dark-wash skinny jeans from my closet. She answered to my name, and when a tear streaked down her cheek, my boyfriend leaned over to hug her. Instantly, I felt the ghost of my heart constrict.

  I should have been used to this by now: living a bodiless existence as a dead girl, floating around like a plastic bag behind my long-lost twin, Emma, watching her inhabit my life, sleep in my bedroom, and talk to the boyfriend I’d never get to kiss again. The night Emma and I were supposed to meet for the first time, I never showed up—because I’d been murdered. My killer threatened Emma into taking my place, or else. She’d been living my life for months now, trying to solve the mystery of my death. But knowing all of that didn’t make it any easier to watch moments like the one I was seeing now.

  When Thayer had first returned to Tucson from rehab a few weeks ago, Emma had thought he might be my killer. But even though he was with me that night in Sabino Canyon, her investigation proved—to my great relief—that he definitely hadn’t killed me. She had cleared my adoptive parents, too, even though they had been hiding a huge secret from me—that they were actually my grandparents. Our birth mother, Becky, was their troubled daughter. She had us when she was a teenager, leaving me with her parents and taking Emma with her when she left town, only to abandon her in foster care five years later.

  I watched Thayer and Emma talk until a car backfired loudly. Emma’s head snapped up, her gaze locking on a brown Buick idling in the parking lot in front of the café. The woman at the wheel had a wrecked look to her, her hair a wild black tangle, her cheeks sunken and pale. And yet I could sense that she’d once been pretty.

  When I looked back at Emma, her hands were trembling. Her coffee cup tumbled to the patio tile, and the lid flew off, spilling lukewarm coffee all over her black flats. But she didn’t even flinch.

  “Oh my God,” Emma whispered.

  And just like that, I knew: It was Becky, our birth mother. I recognized her from Emma’s memories, although she looked even more ragged than the last time my sister saw her, thirteen years ago. And yet she seemed familiar to me, too. I wondered if we’d ever met. So far, I had only been able to remember my life in disjointed flashes, usually preceded by a disconcerting tingling sensation. I felt tingly right then, but when I closed my eyes, I saw nothing. I had found out about Becky the night that I died. My father had met Becky in secret that same night—what if I had, too? I concentrated on the tingling feeling, willing myself to remember more of that night. But my mind was a blank and I was left with a feeling of dread and doom.

  Just last night, my father had told Emma that Becky was troubled, possibly even dangerous. As I watched the car take off in a cloud of exhaust, I couldn’t help but wonder: Was she disturbed enough to kill her own daughter?

  1

  DRIVE-BY MOM

  Emma Paxton stared hard at the woman in the Buick. At first, all she saw was a haggard woman with a lined face, sunken cheeks, and cracked, thin lips. But then she realized that beneath her dull, spotted skin the woman had a familiar heart-shaped face. And if Emma squinted, she could picture the woman’s brittle, frizzy hair a shiny, raven black again. And her eyes—those eyes. An electric jolt ran through her. Our eyes are our best features, Emmy, her mother always used to say, as they stood in front of the mirror in whatever run-down apartment they happened to be living in that month. They’re like two sapphires, worth more than any amount of money.

  She gasped. It was …

  “Oh my God,” she whispered.

  “What did you say, Sutton?” Thayer Vega asked.

  But Emma barely heard him. She hadn’t seen her birth mother in thirteen years, ever since Becky abandoned her at a friend’s house when she was five.

  The woman looked up and her eyes—two blue sapphires—locked on Emma’s. Her nostrils flared like a spooked horse’s, then there was a gunshot-like bang and the car peeled away in a thick cloud of exhaust.

  “No!” Emma cried out, leaping up. She clambered over the wrought-iron railing that surrounded the café’s patio, scraping her shin in the process. Pain rocketed through her leg, but she didn’t stop.

  “Sutton! What’s going on?” Thayer asked, hurrying after her.

  She raced toward the Buick as it accelerated out of the parking lot and turned left into the Mercers’ subdivision. Emma followed it across the street, barely noticing the traffic whizzing past her. Horns honked at her in anger, and someone even stuck his head out the window to yell, “What the hell are you doing?” Behind her, Emma heard Thayer’s labored breathing and uneven footsteps as he did his best to keep up with her despite his injured leg.

  The Buick turned down the Mercers’ street and picked up speed. Emma forced herself forward at a faster clip, her lungs heaving in her chest. But the car pulled farther and farther away from her. Her eyes blurred with tears. She was about to lose Becky again.

  Maybe that’s a good thing, I thought, still shaken by my almost-memory—or, at least, my hunch. Whatever was going on, I had a feeling Becky didn’t
come to town for a happy family reunion.

  Suddenly, the brakes squealed and the Buick screeched to a stop so quickly that the smell of burnt rubber permeated the air. A bunch of kids playing kickball in the street screamed, and a boy stood inches in front of the car, frozen in fear, a bright red ball in his arms.

  “Hey!” Emma called out, sprinting for the car. She cut across the Donaldsons’ lawn, hurdling their Kokopelli lawn ornament and narrowly dodging a staghorn cactus. “Hey!” she yelled again, plowing into the back of the car, bracing herself against the trunk to stop. She slapped her hand on the rear window. The exhaust steamed out hot against her knees.

  “Wait!” she yelled. Her eyes met Becky’s in the rearview mirror. Her mother stared back at her. Her lips parted.

  For a split second, it felt as if time stood still as Emma and her mother looked at each other in the mirror, cut off from the rest of the world. The boy ran off toward the sidewalk, clutching his kickball. Birds splashed in the Stotlers’ rock fountain. The grumble of a lawn mower vibrated through the air. Was Becky hesitating because she thought Emma was Sutton? Or was she thinking of Emma, remembering all the good moments they’d shared? Sitting in bed, reading chapters from Harry Potter. Playing dress-up with the clothes Becky brought home from the dollar bin at the thrift store. Making a tent out of blankets during a thunderstorm. For five years, it had been just the two of them, mother and daughter against the world.

  But then Becky broke her gaze. The engine snarled once more, and the Buick shot off in a billowing cloud of dust. Emma choked back a sob. She turned away—and stopped in her tracks. A police car had driven silently up behind her.

  The driver rolled down the window, and Emma sucked in a breath. It was Officer Quinlan.

  “Miss Mercer,” Quinlan said acidly, his eyes hidden behind aviator sunglasses. “What’s going on here?”

  Emma turned as the Buick sputtered around the corner. For a fleeting second, she hoped that Becky had taken off because the cops had pulled up, not because she wanted to get away from her daughter. “Was that a friend of yours?” Quinlan asked, looking at the car, too.

  “Um, no. I thought I recognized her, but I … didn’t,” Emma finished lamely, wishing it had been any other cop patrolling the street. Quinlan knew enough about her as it was—at least he thought he did. He had a file five inches thick on her twin, mostly about dangerous pranks she’d played with her clique called the Lying Game. Like the time Sutton had called the police to tell them she’d seen a lion prowling around the golf course, or the time she’d claimed to hear a baby crying in a Dumpster, or the time her car had “stalled” on the train tracks, only to miraculously spring back to life just in time to escape an oncoming train.

  My friends had been particularly pissed at me for that one. They’d put together a revenge prank that was so dark, I hated to think about it even now. A video of it, which showed a faceless assailant strangling me, had been leaked on the Internet. And it was that video that had led Emma to me.

  Quinlan squinted suspiciously. “Well, if you do know her, make sure she drives a little more carefully. She might hurt someone.” He looked pointedly at the swarm of kids watching with interest from the sidewalk.

  Irritation seized Emma. She crossed her arms over her chest. “Don’t you have anything better to do?” she asked brazenly. Pushing the envelope was Sutton’s M.O., and it felt liberating to channel her sister’s attitude sometimes.

  Thayer finally caught up to her, panting. “Afternoon, officer,” he said carefully.

  “Mr. Vega.” Quinlan looked weary at the sight of Thayer—he didn’t trust him much more than he trusted Sutton. Thayer placed a hand protectively on Emma’s arm.

  I twitched. I knew Thayer was trying to be supportive, but I felt jealous all the same. I wasn’t the kind of girl who shared, even with my own sister. Especially not my boyfriend.

  Finally, Quinlan shook his head slowly. “I’ll see you both around,” he said, and drove away.

  Thayer ran his hands through his hair. “Déjà vu. At least no one ran me down this time.”

  Emma laughed weakly. The night of her sister’s murder, Sutton and Thayer had been together at Sabino Canyon. He’d snuck home from his rehab center in Seattle to visit Sutton, but what had started as a romantic moonlit walk had quickly gone sour. First, they’d seen Mr. Mercer talking to a woman who they’d assumed was his mistress. Then someone had stolen Sutton’s car and rammed it right into them, shattering Thayer’s leg. Sutton’s sister, Laurel, had picked Thayer up and taken him to the hospital, leaving Sutton behind in the canyon. She had then met with Mr. Mercer, her adoptive father, who’d told her the truth about the woman he was with: Her name was Becky and she was Mr. Mercer’s daughter—and Sutton’s biological mother.

  But as for what happened next, Emma wasn’t sure. All she knew was that Sutton hadn’t survived it. Emma had been piecing together that night in the canyon ever since she arrived in Tucson. Every clue brought her a little closer to the truth, and yet she still felt so far from solving the puzzle. She had figured out that Sutton, furious at Mr. Mercer’s betrayal, had run back into the Canyon—but where did she go next? How did she die?

  Emma looked down to see a ribbon of blood trickling into her sandal from the scrape on her leg.

  “Here,” Thayer said, following her gaze. He took a blue bandana from his pocket and knelt by her feet, carefully dabbing at the wound. “Don’t worry, it’s clean. I keep it on hand just so I can offer it to hot girls in distress,” he added with a grin.

  As the faded piece of cloth turned dark with my twin’s blood, a memory flashed before me. I saw Thayer, his eyebrows furrowed, handing me that same bandana to wipe the tears from my eyes. I couldn’t remember what I’d been crying about, but I remembered hiding my face in the fabric’s soft folds, breathing in the warm sweet scent of Thayer’s body that lingered on it.

  “Who did you say that was?” Thayer asked, tying the bandana snugly around Emma’s ankle to cover the wound.

  Emma scrambled for an explanation, for yet another lie. But then she looked at the boy who’d loved her sister, his hazel eyes soft and concerned, and all that came out was the truth: “My birth mom.”

  Thayer blinked hard. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  “How did you know it was her? I thought you’d never met.”

  “She left me a picture,” Emma said, thinking of the note Becky had left in the Horseshoe Diner.

  For a few horrible days, Emma had thought that Mr. Mercer killed Sutton, in order to keep her from revealing his affair. Knowing that Sutton had seen Mr. Mercer with a woman in the canyon, Emma had searched his office and discovered he was secretly paying a woman named Raven. She’d arranged to meet with Raven at her hotel, but the mysterious woman had sent her on a scavenger hunt that ended with a note at a diner. Raven had left behind a letter and a photo of herself—only, it had been Becky’s face staring back. Raven/Becky had vanished, but Mr. Mercer had explained everything.

  It was actually why Emma had asked Thayer to meet her for coffee. She’d wanted to tell him that Mr. Mercer hadn’t been the one who’d run Thayer down in Sabino Canyon the night I’d died—and that the woman Thayer had seen Mr. Mercer with was actually her biological mother.

  “It was her, Thayer. I know it was,” Emma protested.

  “I believe you,” he said in a low voice.

  Behind them a garage door rattled open, and they stepped aside so that a freshly waxed Lexus could back out past them onto the street. They stood in silence for a moment, saying nothing.

  “Are you going to be okay?” Thayer asked finally.

  Emma felt her jaw tremble. “She looked … sick, didn’t she?”

  “She’d have to be sick not to want to talk to you.” Thayer reached out and squeezed her arm, then pulled away cautiously, as though afraid he’d been too intimate. He nodded awkwardly back in the direction of the café. “I should probably get home. But Sutton—” He hesitated
again. “If you want to talk about any of this, I’m here for you. You know that, right?”

  Emma nodded, still lost in her thoughts. He was three blocks away before she realized that she still had his bandana knotted around her ankle.

  I watched him go. Maybe he and Emma were right. Maybe the reason that Becky was acting strange was that she was ill. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d encountered her face before—while I was alive, before I became Emma’s silent shadow.

  I wondered if it had been the last face I’d ever seen.

  2

  THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE SEXY

  Later that day, Emma parked Sutton’s vintage Volvo outside the Old Tucson Movie Studios. A rickety, old-style western saloon stood in front of her, complete with swinging wooden doors and an overpowering stench of booze. Next to that was a bank building with bullet holes in the wall, a hitching post, and even a house that must have been a brothel, judging by the overly made-up women fanning themselves on the porch. In the fifties and sixties the studio had been a real movie set for westerns, but now it was an amusement park, a Wild West Disneyland full of tourists. Ethan Landry—Emma’s boyfriend and the only person who knew her true identity—had suggested they come here instead of the municipal tennis courts, their usual meeting spot.

  “Howdy, ma’am.” A man in cow-print chaps and spurs nodded his Stetson to her. Emma waved halfheartedly, not really feeling in the Wild West spirit. She wished she could—it would be reassuring to swagger confidently down the street, a gun at her hip, finally in charge of her destiny after feeling helpless for so long.

  The studio sparked something in me, too. I was pretty sure I’d been here on a class trip and had laughed at the fakey-fakeness of it all with Char and Mads. We’d ditched the tour to sneak into the saloon through the outhouse in the back. Even half remembering how much fun I used to have with them filled me with longing.

  After wandering for a few minutes without seeing Ethan, Emma plopped down on one of the benches facing Tucson Mountain Park and pulled out her copy of Jane Eyre, which they were reading for English. She had opened to the middle of the book when suddenly she heard gravel crunching behind her.