Emma stared at the church’s facade, and then strode across the dry street to look around it. Nothing. The desert stretched out beyond, empty except for a few scattered cacti. If someone had been spying, he’d slipped away.
Ethan put an arm around her shoulder and squinted into the sunset. But it no longer seemed beautiful to Emma. Somewhere out there, a killer was watching her every move. Somewhere her sister’s body lay undiscovered, unmourned.
She turned to Ethan. “I’m pretty wiped out. We’d better get home and rest up for the big flag football game tomorrow.” She reached for his hand. “You’re still coming, right?”
“I wouldn’t miss it,” Ethan promised. The sand crunched beneath their feet as they walked past the busy part of the town, where tourists were buying handkerchiefs and Stetsons.
Sutton’s Volvo was at the far end of the parking lot, but Emma spied the note folded under her windshield wiper immediately. Her heart seized in her chest. She ran for the note and snatched it off the glass. The muscles in Ethan’s face were taut as she unfolded the note.
“Oh my God.” Emma gasped, looking around the empty desert. The message was in the same familiar handwriting that had greeted her on her first morning in Tucson, the same scrawl that had announced her sister was dead, and she had to play along or she’d be next.
You should thank me. Before you came here you had nothing. Now you have everything you want. Just don’t slip up. Sutton thought she could have everything she wanted, too.
For once, Emma and I were thinking the exact same thing: Those footsteps by the church had been real. My killer was still watching Emma’s every move.
3
THE FACE THAT LAUNCHED A THOUSAND FISTS
“These shirts are so lame,” Laurel whined, pulling at the collar of her blue cotton tee. “Why couldn’t they have gotten American Apparel instead of Hanes Beefy-Ts?”
It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon, and Emma, Sutton’s friends, and the Mercer family were gathered in Saguaro National Park for the annual Hollier High Parent-Student Football Fun Fest—that was what the banner arching over their heads called it, anyway. An artificially green swath of grass splayed out before them, and a bunch of families flipped burgers on the public barbecues and loaded plates with potato salad and watermelon slices. Little kids tumbled across the freshly chalked lines of the football field, playing freeze tag. Mr. Mercer tossed a U-of-A-branded football in the air, seeming pumped for the flag football game that was about to begin.
Emma laughed, tucking her own red shirt into Sutton’s mesh Adidas shorts. “It’s a fund-raiser. I’m sure the shirts were donated.”
Charlotte Chamberlain rolled her eyes. “My mom does plenty of fund-raisers. Everyone knows if you want to get big money, you have to spend big money. Last year she held a raffle for a vintage Chanel coat and got three times what it was worth.”
“What was the charity?” asked Madeline Vega, another one of Sutton’s friends, who was tall and lithe next to Charlotte’s short and curvy frame.
Charlotte shrugged, pulling her reddish curls into a ponytail. “Does it matter?”
There was shuffling and giggling behind them, and the girls turned. The Twitter Twins, Gabriella and Lilianna Fiorello, twirled over. They’d come dressed in short cheerleader outfits—Lili in black and red, with giant safety pins pierced through the skirt, and Gabby in sky blue and white, her blond hair in a high ponytail. Both of them carried sparkly pompoms and made a lot of noise when they shook them.
“Oh my God, what are you guys wearing?” Madeline snickered.
“It’s ironic, duh,” Gabby trilled, lifting a pompom high in the air.
Emma smiled at all of them. These were Sutton’s friends, but she’d begun to think of them as her friends, too. Aside from Alex, her best friend from Henderson, she’d never been close to any girls, let alone a whole group of them. It was a nice feeling, even if she couldn’t talk to them about her actual problems.
I wasn’t sure I had talked to my friends about my serious problems either. We loved each other with a fierce loyalty, but we weren’t the best at saying it. I think we were all so focused on maintaining our fabulous images that we forgot they weren’t always real.
Emma pulled her hair into a knot and did some deep knee bends to stretch. Her legs still ached from chasing Becky’s car, but she’d gotten a lot stronger while pretending to be Sutton—she’d had tennis practice almost every day.
“Oh my God, Sutton, are you actually playing this year?” Madeline asked, incredulous.