Seven Minutes in Heaven

by Sara Shepard

Page 31

 

  “Don’t say that, Sutton,” he murmurs. I stare up at him, and his eyes are filled with earnest tenderness. “I’ve been in love with you for years. ”

  “In love with me?” I can’t help it. I laugh. It sounds shrill and cruel even to me, and I instantly feel bad. “You don’t even know me,” I say, lowering my voice.

  “Yes, I do. I know everything about you,” he says. His voice is strangely calm and commanding, as if there’s no room for argument. As if he could convince me to love him by reasoning with me. “I know you’ve been trying to sleep with Garrett Austin all summer. I know you’ve been sneaking around with Thayer Vega. Neither one of them deserves you, but you don’t seem to get that. I know you’re adopted and that you’ve always felt like your family couldn’t possibly love you as much as they love Laurel. I know you’re afraid Nisha’s going to beat you out for the state title this fall, because you’ve barely practiced all summer. I know you need your friends to be afraid of you so they don’t get too close to you—and so you won’t have to feel hurt if they ever abandon you. ”

  My mouth falls open. Somewhere at the back of my mind, an alarm goes off. This has to be some kind of joke. Some kind of prank. But he’s not done.

  “And I know something you don’t know. ” A smile sneaks up the corners of his mouth, like he’s been waiting a long time to tell me this. “I know where your twin sister is. Emma. I’ve been watching her for weeks. I found her for you, Sutton. ”

  For a heartbeat, I feel like I’m paralyzed. Then the anger comes, a quick, savage spike. I didn’t even know about Emma until a few hours ago. How the hell did he?

  “Have you been out here spying on me?” My voice rings with a hard edge. I push away from him, taking a step back. “That’s not cool, Ethan. ”

  A shadow flits across his face. “Aren’t you listening? I found Emma. For you. Do you know how hard that was? I even went to Las Vegas to make sure I had the right girl. It was uncanny—you’re totally identical. ”

  “That’s not the point!” My muscles tense. Something about this is all wrong. “Ethan, I don’t know how you knew about Emma, but . . . ”

  “I told you. ” His voice is calm but insistent, like he’s reasoning with a child. “I found her for you. Because I love you. ”

  I feel sicker every time he says it. How long has he been following me? Listening to my conversations? He knows things about me I haven’t even told my best friends. Things I haven’t even told Thayer. And he’s been planning to give me my sister, as a present—like she was some kind of thing. But maybe that’s how he thinks about me, too. As a thing, to be fought over and won.

  “Jesus, Ethan. ” I shake my head, disgust curling my lip. “I don’t think you know what love is. ”

  Then I’m turning away from him, determined to start back down the mountain, but his hand darts out to clamp around my wrist. He pulls me back toward him, leaning in to kiss me again. His mouth is almost sickeningly sweet. Panic shoots through me, and before I can think about it, I bite down on his lip—hard. He throws me to the ground, his hand flying to his mouth in pain.

  “Are you insane?” I shriek. Then I see his eyes, with their long, dark lashes. Empty and implacable. And I realize: He is.

  I scramble away from him, stumbling to my feet just as he lunges, and break into a sprint down the trail, trying to put distance between us. Cacti and brambles claw at my ankles. Behind me, I can sense Ethan more than hear him—his feet make almost no sound on the hard-packed earth, but I can feel him in my wake, his hands just inches from me. I think back to the headlights in the darkness, bearing down on me and Thayer—my car. I’m suddenly certain that it was Ethan behind the wheel.

  But I’m faster than he is. I make a mental note to thank Coach Maggie for every sprinting drill she’s ever made me do as I leap lightly over a small boulder. I’m going to get away from him—I’m going to head back to the visitor center, and the instant I have service I’m going to call 911 and have his creeper ass dragged off to jail. I’m going to go home to my family, to Thayer, and I’m going to put this whole god-awful night behind me forever.

  My sneaker catches on something and curls under my foot, and my feet dance dangerously under me as I try to keep my balance. To my left the ravine opens hungrily. Before I can move he grabs me around the waist, pulling me off my feet. His breath is hot against my ear. “I don’t understand why you’re fighting this,” he growls, his arms so tight I can’t breathe. “You’re supposed to love me! We’re supposed to be together. ”

  He spins me around to face him, his teeth bared in frustration. Below us, I can hear the wind howling through the chasm. Pebbles slide away from my feet, sounding like raindrops as they fall. I scream, my voice tearing through the night. A burst of anger shoots through me, burning hotter than my fear. He’s a liar, a manipulator—and he’s been stalking me.

  “I’ll never love you,” I hiss, spitting in his face.

  He gives a howl of anger, and twists my wrists so hard spasms of pain shoot up my arm. I writhe in his grip, and for a moment we’re motionless, grappling silently for control.

  Then my feet are sliding out from under me, my body slipping out of his grasp, and I am falling. The last thing I see is his pale, shocked face, his hand still outstretched toward me. Then the darkness swallows me, and the world is nothing but wind and stone.

  I fall. Or rather, I tumble. My body careens off every outcropping of stone and every protruding branch. I flail around, grasping for any kind of handhold. For a minute my fingers close around a clump of exposed roots. Then the roots tear free from the earth, and gravity has me again.

  When I land, my lungs claw inside my chest for what seems like ages before I can take a breath. The world is brilliant with agony, shimmering and surreal. When my eyes focus again, I can see a shard of bone protruding from my left leg.

  From somewhere nearby I can hear something scrambling around. I try to pull myself up on my elbows, but everything goes white with the effort. Sweat and blood drip down into my face. And he’s here now, standing over me. Ethan.

  “Please help me,” I croak. “My leg’s broken. I can’t walk. ”

  Ethan kneels down next to me. For a minute his face is cloaked in shadows. He fumbles around next to me—I can’t see what he’s doing. Every time I try to move my head the world spins. But then a cool white light illuminates the angles of his face. He’s pulled my iPhone out from my purse—I can make out the polka dots on its Kate Spade cover.

  “There’s no service down here,” I say. Pain ripples out from my leg in sickening waves. “Please. You have to walk back to the parking lot and call 911. ”

  He looks down at me, his face strangely blank in the electronic glow of the phone. It’s almost like he doesn’t recognize me. For some reason this scares me more than anything that happened at the top of the cliff. I start to cry, my body heaving in choked, painful sobs.

  “I can’t believe you made me do this,” he says, his voice hollow with disappointment. “After everything I did for you. I didn’t want this. I thought you were different, Sutton. ”

  Then he’s kneeling down over me, fumbling at my shirt collar. His fingers close around the locket at my throat, and he pulls so sharply the chain breaks.

  “Give it back!” I scream, my breath ragged. “Give it back, you asshole!” But he’s already moved away from me, into the shadows. The gentle twinkle of the stars has become pulsing and rhythmic. They throb in time with my heartbeat, flaring and then fading, flaring and fading.

  Then he’s back, looming over me. He’s nothing but a dark shape blocking out the stars behind him. There’s a jagged, pointed rock in his hands. He holds it high overhead.

  “If I can’t have you, no one can,” he says.

  I close my eyes, but I can still hear it whistling through the air as he brings it down over my head.

  Before I can even scream out, the world explodes in light—the grand finale of
a summer fireworks display—and then, just as quickly, my world goes suddenly, finally dark.

  30

  THE ENVELOPE, PLEASE

  Emma stared down at the records in her hand. Written in black ink across the top form was the patient’s name.

  Ethan Landry.

  For a moment she thought about stuffing the paperwork back in the envelope, back into the Tampax box under the sink. She’d had the chance to look at this once before, when she’d broken into the hospital about a month earlier. But she had chosen not to invade Ethan’s privacy—and she still didn’t want to.

  Ethan had been honest with her about the whole thing. When she’d asked him about the files, he told her the story: how his dad had been beating his mom, and Ethan had intervened, hitting his father over the head with a beer bottle—only to have his mother call the police on him. She’d reported him as “violent” and had him admitted to the psychiatric ward. Emma’s heart ached when she thought about it. In a way, Ethan had been abandoned by his family, just like she had.

  But her eyes moved across Nisha’s note again. Sutton, I’m so sorry. She’d been so certain that the evidence Nisha found was some kind of proof that Garrett killed Sutton. But it seemed obvious from her note that Nisha had no idea Sutton had died. What had she called and texted so frantically about, then? Why had Garrett come to kill her if she didn’t have evidence against him? Emma’s fingers clutched the folder sharply. She didn’t understand any of this.

  But I did.

  “Get out of there!” I screamed, terror churning inside me. The whole world was upside down. My sister was alone in a house with my murderer—and she trusted him. She loved him. She didn’t suspect a thing.

  Emma bit her lip. Whatever Nisha had seen in Ethan’s file had clearly freaked her out, even if it had nothing to do with Sutton’s murder. She glanced back into the bedroom. On the other end of the house she could hear movement, drawers opening and closing as Ethan searched Dr. Banerjee’s study. As quietly as she could, she shut and locked the bathroom door, and started to read.

  REASON FOR TREATMENT: Patient was referred to our facility for court-ordered psychiatric services upon his family’s relocation to Tucson. This was a condition of Ethan’s acquittal in the San Diego Family Court System.

  Emma’s blood ran cold. She glanced at the date at the top of the records. They were almost eight years old—Ethan would have been ten. A child. What could he have possibly done at ten that required an acquittal?

  In April, Ethan (age ten at the time) was seen playing with a neighborhood girl (age eight) in a culvert near their home in San Diego. A city worker who’d been assigned to clear a nearby drainage ditch testified that he witnessed Ethan strangling the girl, but by the time he was able to intervene, the girl had died.

  When interviewed by police, Ethan claimed he had only been playing and that he had not intended to kill the girl. Due to his young age he was tried in family court, where he was acquitted of manslaughter. It was felt that Ethan displayed remorse for what he claimed was an accident, and that he hadn’t properly understood his own strength when roughhousing with the victim.