Her breath caught as she recognized the area on the map: Sutton had fallen from a precipice very close to the spot where the girls had held their fake séance just a few weeks earlier.
She thought back to the faint voice she’d heard in her head that night, so familiar in her ear. It had told her to run. It had sounded like it was coming from far, far away. But maybe it had been closer than
she’d thought.
It had come from me.
Finally there was the coroner’s report. The medical examiner had enumerated Sutton’s injuries, and the list was long. On one page he’d sketched the locations of the wounds and fractures on a schematic
outline of her body.
Victim has more than a dozen separate bruises and thirteen lacerations over her limbs and torso. Victim’s tibia and three ribs are fractured, and left shoulder is dislocated. Victim also suffered depressed
skull fracture directly over right eye, causing subdural hematoma and massive hemorrhage.
Emma bit hard on the inside of her mouth, her blood salty and metallic on her tongue. Her sister had died in a lot of pain, and a side note mentioned that it looked like wild animals of some kind had
“disturbed” the body. Emma didn’t want to think about that. She turned the page.
These injuries are all consistent with an accidental fall.
The words froze her in her seat. Accidental fall?
I froze, too. They thought it was an accident? How was that possible? I reached frantically through my memory to conjure up the last image I had of that night in the canyon. Once again I felt Garrett’s hand
on my shoulder, his voice in my ear. I willed myself to turn around, to face him and find out what he had done to me—but the memory went dark. All I could pull up was that sickly sense of vertigo I’d had
when Quinlan had first announced that I’d fallen. Garrett must have pushed me over the side—but there had to be a clue, some indication that he’d done it on purpose. What happened to me—what had happened
to Emma and Nisha since—had been no accident.
Emma’s head spun wildly. It was just like Nisha’s death, covered up and made to look accidental.
Then, at the bottom of the report, two lines in bold type caught her eye.
CAUSE OF DEATH: CEREBRAL CONTUSION CAUSED BY BLUNT FORCE TRAUMA
MANNER OF DEATH: UNDETERMINED
She blinked. Undetermined. So maybe they weren’t so sure it had been an “accidental” fall, after all.
She kept shuffling through the folder. A stack of grainy surveillance camera stills were stapled together with printed-out e-mails from the Sabino Canyon visitor center, addressed to Quinlan. We’re eager to
help in any way we can, the sender had written. The camera takes one picture on the hour every hour. We installed it three years ago after a spate of vandalism in the parking lot—it’s not set up to monitor
activity on the trails. Emma quickly ran her index finger through the dates attached to the pictures until she found the ones taken on the night of the thirty-first. Her eyes searched for any familiar car,
any familiar person. Any clue she hadn’t caught before.
From the photos it seemed that there’d hardly been anyone in the canyon that night, and she didn’t recognize any of the cars. Sutton’s Volvo was nowhere to be seen. Maybe the murderer had already stolen it
by the time the picture was taken, or maybe she and Thayer had parked somewhere secluded.
Picture by picture, hour by hour, the parking lot emptied. At one point two new cars appeared—cars she knew. Mr. Mercer’s SUV and Becky’s rusted-out brown Buick. That must have been when Sutton had run
into her father, and then, not long after that, into Becky. An hour later the cars were gone. Maybe the murderer had walked from somewhere, or had been dropped off by a taxi, just as Emma had been the
following day.
She turned the page, and I felt an electric shock pulse through my being. There at midnight, under the sallow yellow light of a street lamp, sat a familiar silver Audi. I could just barely make out the
sticker on the bumper. It read WHAT’S LIFE WITHOUT GOALS? The letter O in GOALS was replaced by a soccer ball.
I knew that car. I knew the dark, kidney-shaped stain on the passenger seat where I’d spilled a cup of coffee. I knew the cheesy shearling throw in the backseat, where I’d curled my legs up under me and
quirked a finger, beckoning its driver to come close for a kiss. I knew the dent he’d left in the rear driver’s side door one night when I’d told him he’d had too much to drink, when I refused to give him
his keys. I could see his soccer-muscled leg flying toward that door even now, crumpling the fiberglass with his heel.
It was Garrett’s car. And now that wasn’t all I could see. I felt the memory coming before it took me. It welled up like an undertow, and dragged me down, down, down—back to the last few moments of my
life.
18
WHAT GOES UP . . .