Sara Shepard - Seven Minutes in Heaven

Emma stood motionless, her lip trembling. She didn’t struggle. She didn’t have the heart to. Mrs. Mercer was right. None of this belonged to her. Not the clothes, not the house—and not the family. She had nothing of her own.

“Now get the hell off my property,” Mrs. Mercer spat.

I’d never heard my mother curse before, not even when she was at her most frustrated. The sound of it now filled me with fear. She was acting like a different person. It was like the old Mom, the one I’d loved so much, who had taken me for ice cream the day I got my first period and who’d watched old romantic comedies with me on rainy, lazy Sundays, was gone. All that was left was this bitter, angry shell of a woman. Suddenly I realized that this was what my death would mean to my family—that this wasn’t some adolescent fantasy where I’d get to hear everyone say nice things about me at my funeral and then ride a cloud to heaven. My mother had just realized that she’d lost me, and it was destroying her. This was my murderer’s—Garrett’s—legacy.

Mrs. Mercer started to close the door in Emma’s face, but before she shut it all the way she paused. “Tell me one thing.” Her voice was lower now, very soft.

“Anything,” Emma whispered.

Her grandmother’s eyes flitted over Emma’s face, searching for something. Emma wasn’t sure what.

“Did you do it? What they say you did?”

Emma took a deep, shuddering breath. “No.”

Mrs. Mercer stared at her silently, her blue eyes, so much like Emma’s own, suddenly soft. Emma wanted to say more, but she couldn’t figure out where to start. She wanted to tell Mrs. Mercer how badly she had wanted to meet Sutton. How sorry she was, how scared she’d been, how desperately she’d wanted to tell the truth all this time. More than anything, she wanted to tell her how the last few months had felt like someone else’s dream—that she had never had family like this, and that it’d meant more to her than anything. But before she could speak, Mrs. Mercer’s expression hardened once more, and she gave a strangled cry.

“I just don’t know how I can believe you.” She gave Emma a long, searching look, her eyes wounded. Then she slammed the door. The lock clicked shut.

Slowly, Emma turned to face the street. Corcoran resolutely watched the reporters. They were in a frenzy, microphones bristling from the crowd, her name the only word she could make out in their screams. Step by step, she walked back down the slate path. She felt like she was moving through deep water, her body slow and heavy.

A microphone appeared under Emma’s chin. She looked up to see the local reporter who had been covering both Nisha’s and Sutton’s deaths, now in a cobalt blue suit. Her hair was even bigger in person than it looked on TV. “Tricia Melendez from Channel Five. Can you tell me whether the rumors are true? Are you the girl who was presumed dead?”

Corcoran forced a way through the crowd, looking menacingly at the reporters on either side of him. They parted when they saw his uniform. He put a hand on Emma’s back and pushed her gently toward the car.

Once they were safely inside, he looked at her. “Where can I take you?”

She hesitated. Ethan’s face bloomed in her mind, but involving him was the last thing she wanted. She’d already gotten Alex in trouble. She didn’t want anyone else to suffer because of her.

But she didn’t have anywhere else to go. She gave Corcoran Ethan’s address.

I looked out the rear window. My home receded into the distance, smaller and smaller until finally we turned a corner . . . and it was gone. A sick, empty feeling opened inside of me. My mother didn’t know that in banishing Emma, she was banishing me, too. It had been hard enough, not being able to touch my family or talk to them. Now I couldn’t even watch them.

It was like I was losing them all over again.

Emma gripped the sides of the squad car’s passenger seat as the officer sped around a corner. She craned her neck to look behind them at the reporters trailing in their wake, news vans and cheap rental cars harrying the cop’s bumper like a pack of hungry wolves. She glanced at Corcoran. His lips were pursed in a tight, stoic line.

“Is there any way to keep them from following us?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper.

Corcoran didn’t answer. His eyes flickered up to the rearview mirror. Then, without warning, he jerked the steering wheel into a hairpin turn, down an alley that ran behind a Starbucks and a Mediterranean deli. Emma watched three vans streak past. His hands steady on the wheel, he then floored the gas, and with an angry squeal of tires the squad car shot through the intersection just as the light turned red.

I thought suddenly of the times that Mads and Thayer and I had played Grand Theft Auto on our old PlayStation, back before I ever even thought Thayer was cute. This was even better. But Emma didn’t seem so happy. Her pulse throbbed wildly in her ears, and she was clutching the door handle, her eyes wide. “That was some driving,” she mumbled.

The hint of a smile flitted across Corcoran’s lips, but he didn’t say a word.

They drove the rest of the way to Ethan’s in a circuitous route, making a wide loop to get back to the Catalina Foothills where he lived. Emma watched Corcoran out of the corner of her eye as he drove. She wasn’t sure what to make of him, but he’d certainly gone out of his way to protect her from the reporters, which was more than Quinlan would have done.

Corcoran pulled up outside of Ethan’s house and put the car in park. She sat for a moment, staring up at the faded bungalow, the porch light casting a feeble glow over the steps and the swing.

“I’ll wait until you’re inside,” Corcoran said.

“Thanks,” she said softly. She let herself out of the car and started up to the house.

Before she’d made it halfway up the walk, the door burst open. Ethan ran down the steps to meet her, a worried frown on his face. His hair looked ink-black in the darkness, but his face was pale. “What’s going on?”

“The cops know.” She stumbled, suddenly feeling faint. Ethan grabbed her in his arms and steadied her. “Quinlan figured out that I’m not Sutton, using my dental records. He has my friend Alex from Henderson—he knows I’ve been texting her as Emma all this time.”

Ethan gave a sharp intake of breath. “And they think you did it?”

She nodded, rubbing her eyes with a fist. His arms were strong around her, her cheek pressed flat to his chest. His T-shirt had a Mexican sugar skull screen-printed across the front, and she found herself staring into its hollow eyes. It made her think of the crime scene pictures all over again, of her sister’s body ravaged by time and elements. She squeezed her eyes shut against the thought, breathing in Ethan’s warm vanilla smell.

“Who’s that?”

She looked up to see that Corcoran’s car was still there. She felt a little rush of gratitude. It was too dark to see the man’s face behind the windshield, but she knew he was waiting to make sure she was all right.

“They kept Sutton’s car to search for evidence, so he tried to take me home. But . . . the Mercers . . .” Her lip trembled. “They’re furious, Ethan. They think I killed Sutton.”

His chest rose and fell beneath her as he sighed. “Come on,” he said, leading her up the stairs and through the front door.