Sara Shepard - Seven Minutes in Heaven

Ethan’s jaw tensed. With another glance up toward the canyon, he took her hand and led her onto the dimly lit porch. Two small brown moths flung themselves at the bare bulb that hung over the house numbers. Ethan’s telescope sat near the railing, angled toward the sky. Next door, Nisha’s house was dark and silent. Emma ran her fingers through her hair nervously. The whole street felt haunted to her now.

Ethan’s laptop sat open, a cursor blinking placidly on an open document. Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment sat splayed out, spine up, on the seat next to it. “Oh, sorry. Were you doing homework?” she asked, another pang of guilt cutting through her. She wondered how much of Ethan’s schoolwork she’d interrupted since she’d arrived in Tucson.

He sat down on the porch swing, picking up the computer and setting it on his lap. “It’s not due until the end of the month. I was just trying to get a head start.” As he spoke, he exited the document and pulled up Facebook. Emma loved the way his hands flew over the keyboard, doing everything with the shortcuts he’d programmed, never using the mousepad. Even though his computer was old and dented, Ethan had painstakingly built the machine inside.

“What are you doing?” she asked, sitting next to him on the swing. She’d stopped crying, but now the salt of her tears was drying on her face and making her skin feel stiff. Rubbing at her cheeks, she cuddled against Ethan’s shoulder as he pulled up Garrett’s profile.

“I want to know what Garrett was up to the night of Sutton’s murder,” he said. He handed her the can of root beer, and she took a small sip. The bubbles churned in her fluttering stomach.

“Good thing his profile is public,” Emma said, craning her neck to see. “We’re definitely not friends anymore.” The screen filled with hundreds of pictures of Garrett—scoring at soccer, shirtless and oiled up on a beach somewhere, lifting a glass to the camera at a fancy restaurant. In a few he stood by his sister, an arm wrapped protectively around her.

The most recent update read: RIP Nisha B. You’ll be missed, baby girl. Before that, though, most of his status updates were pretty banal, things like Anybody see The Voice tonight? CeeLo brought his parrot!!! or Only five more months before I never have to do a trig proof again. Sometimes he linked to soccer news or Saturday Night Live clips. It looked like he posted several times a day.

“Go to the night of the thirty-first,” Emma said, her hand on Ethan’s shoulder. He scrolled backward through the months, slowing when he hit September. Emma winced when she saw the phrase Garrett went from being “in a relationship” to “single,” updated on her birthday.

“Nothing interesting,” said Ethan. She leaned in and peered at the monitor. Then her eyes fell on Garrett’s last post before Sutton’s murder, late in the afternoon of the thirtieth.

Do you ever get tired of all the lies people tell?

Emma and Ethan exchanged glances. “That could be about Sutton and Thayer,” Emma said quietly. Ethan nodded. Then they saw a status update from September first, and shivered. It was updated at 2:38 A.M.

Eventually, people always get what’s coming to them.

I stared at the screen, my mind churning, willing the words to spark my memory to life, to take me back to that night so I could finally see how he had done it. But I couldn’t remember past that point when he grabbed my shoulder and said my name. Sutton . He’d said it like it was the dirtiest, most insulting word he’d ever heard.

“Garrett would probably have known about the snuff video,” Emma said softly, rereading the September first update. “It wouldn’t have been hard for him to steal it from Laurel’s computer sometime when he was at the house.”

Somewhere far away an ambulance siren wailed. The dogs up and down the street howled in response. Emma gazed out at the canyon, looming like a dark shadow, like a secret.

“I don’t get it,” Ethan said. “Stealing it and hoping you’d see it . . . that seems so complicated. Why wouldn’t he just Facebook you from Sutton’s account?”

“I didn’t use Facebook much when I was Emma. It’s not like I had a lot of friends. My profile was hidden.” She sighed. “And Garrett needed me to come out to Tucson and take over Sutton’s life, fast . If he did any research on me, he’d have known about Travis. What better way than to label that video Sutton in AZ and slip it to my slimy foster brother? Obviously I’d look for a girl who looked just like me. Then once I did, he replied to me as Sutton.”

Ethan stared at her. “Emma, that makes it sound premeditated. Like he planned all along to use you to cover up the murder. Which means he already knew you were out there, somehow.”

The thought sent an icy thrill down her spine. How would Garrett have known about Emma, when not even the Mercers knew she existed? But it would all fit in with knowing about Travis.

Emma glanced over at Nisha’s house, which was completely dark. She wondered if Dr. Banerjee had gone to stay with friends or family. Maybe he was at the hospital, burying his grief in his work like he’d done when his wife died. She could just make out the short organza curtains in Nisha’s bedroom, motionless now.

“How are we going to prove that he did it, though?” she asked, laying her head back against the siding of the house. Ethan stared at the computer screen thoughtfully.

“If we had access to Garrett’s texts or e-mail, we’d be able to see if he sent the link,” he said. “Even if he deleted the messages. That stuff stays on record forever. You just have to know how to pull it up.”

“I’ll keep an eye on him,” she said. “Maybe I can figure out a way to get my hands on his phone.”

“Be careful.” Ethan looked worried. “He’s dangerous, Emma. Especially now. He’s probably getting desperate.”

“Well, so am I,” Emma said, sounding tougher than she felt.

And so was I. I’d never felt so helpless, so hopeless. I finally knew who had killed me—and I couldn’t tell a soul.

“The girl’s body was found just a half-mile off Upper Sabino Canyon Road, at the bottom of this scenic overlook.” The newscaster, the same woman who had covered Nisha’s death just a few days earlier, was now wearing a poofy yellow North Face vest. Emma guessed that must be her “outdoorsy” look. She stood in front of a picnic area with green-painted benches and an awning, wisps of hair flying free from her ponytail in the breeze.

Mrs. Mercer passed a basket of steaming rolls to Emma, her eyes never leaving the fifteen-inch television they’d propped at the end of the island. The Mercers almost never ate dinner in front of the TV, but there seemed an unspoken consensus to do so tonight.

Emma and Laurel had both been surprised when the Mercers said they would be missing school that day—until they looked out at the front lawn and saw the crowd of news vans gathered outside. The Mercers had refused to open the door, but any time they saw someone in front of a window the reporters started shouting questions. “Sutton! Sutton, did you know Emma? What do you think happened to her, Sutton?” So Laurel and Emma had spent most of the day in the kitchen, baking cookies and flipping through magazines. “You are looking for answers in the wrong places,” Emma’s horoscope had said, and she rolled her eyes. Tell me something I don’t know.