Sara Shepard - Seven Minutes in Heaven

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.

Emma felt like something was clamped down around her lungs, cold and metallic and painful. This wasn’t what Ethan had told her. For a moment she thought it had to be a mistake, or a joke. Maybe Nisha had been trying to get into the Lying Game and had mocked these up to mess with her. But somewhere at the back of her mind Emma knew the records were real. The papers shook in her fingers. She turned the page quickly, her breath short and hard.

Over the course of our sessions, Ethan confided in me that he had considered the deceased to be his “best friend,” but that she’d been playing with another child from the neighborhood just before her death. Again and again, he told me that “you weren’t supposed to have more than one best friend.” Ultimately, Ethan confessed to me that he’d killed Elizabeth Pascal on purpose, then lied to the authorities. Due to the double-jeopardy clause I am unable to make this observation to the court, as Ethan has already been acquitted.

Her mind reeling, Emma shook her head as if someone were reading the notes out loud to her. The shrink had to be wrong. She must have misunderstood what Ethan told him. The little girl’s death had been an accident, a mistake, and Ethan had been carrying this guilt for his entire life. No wonder he hadn’t wanted to tell Emma the truth. He must have been tormented by the memory. She kept reading, faster this time, looking for the words that would reflect her Ethan, the caring, thoughtful boy she had fallen in love with.

Ethan is incredibly gifted at playing to an audience. I have caught him in dozens of lies in the past six months, all engineered to manipulate my opinion of him. In our first sessions he seemed confused and saddened by what he had done; once he’d made sure I could not do anything to indict him, however, he couldn’t seem to resist telling me the details of what must now be called a murder. He has a need to show off and reveal the depths of his own cleverness, which in this case has led to his confession for a crime he can no longer be charged with. I am of the opinion that Ethan has antisocial personality disorder with obsessive tendencies, possibly bordering on psychopathy. It is likely that he will display violent behavior again.

She whipped through the pages of the report, looking for a note that said obviously this had been a huge mistake, that Ethan Landry couldn’t have hurt a fly. She tried to find the word CURED rubber-stamped across a page in green ink. But the transcripts attached to the report didn’t seem to challenge the doctor’s opinion. “If she wasn’t going to be my friend, she didn’t matter anymore. She deserved what she got,” Ethan said in one session. In another, he boasted: “The police officers in San Diego are stupid. They were really easy to trick. You’re actually pretty stupid too, Dr. White, but that’s okay. I like talking to you anyway.”

The taste of bile filled Emma’s mouth. Even as her brain spun, making frantic excuses and explanations—this wasn’t her Ethan, the shrink was wrong, the reports were fake — in some dark corner of her mind, thoughts were cascading into one another like falling dominoes.

Only Ethan had known she wasn’t Sutton. None of Sutton’s friends or family had figured it out. But Ethan, a boy Sutton barely knew, had confronted Emma that very first week in Tucson. You’re not who you say you are , he’d told her. You’re not Sutton. You’re someone else. She remembered, with a cold, sick dread, that she’d immediately accused him of killing her sister—how else could he have known that Sutton was gone? He’d recoiled as though she’d slapped him, his face gray. Sutton’s dead? he’d repeated, clearly shocked. And Emma—trusting, naive Emma—hadn’t questioned him again. She’d simply broken down and told him the whole story, desperate for an ally.

Another domino fell. Ethan lived across the street from the canyon. Ethan had a telescope that was always angled in that direction. Ethan had been positioned perfectly to watch Sutton on her last night alive—and to watch Emma arrive and leave her duffel bag on a park bench.

Time froze as Emma quickly rewound through the last four months, replaying every moment, every conversation with Ethan. How he’d fed her information and encouraged her to pursue different suspects. How he’d tried to keep her away from Thayer, and then Garrett. How desperate he’d been to keep her from Nisha’s house when she’d wanted to look for the evidence. How Ethan had arrived late to dinner at the Mercers’ the night Nisha had died—how he hadn’t been in school that day. And she knew he was an expert hacker.

Her heart froze over in her chest, hard and metallic, heavy with certainty. Ethan had killed Nisha. Ethan had killed her sister.

And now she was alone with him in a dark house.

Footsteps echoed in the kitchen, and she froze.

“Here, kitty, kitty,” came Ethan’s voice. It sounded strangely distorted, like it belonged to a stranger. Emma listened furtively, and then fumbled in her purse for the burner cell.

Her hands were shaking so hard she had to try a few times before she managed to dial the right number. When the line began to ring, she crammed her fist in her mouth to keep from letting out a sob.

“Hello?” Laurel’s voice cut through the dense silence. Emma flinched, covering the speaker with one hand. Down the hall she heard something clatter onto the tile. “Hello? Who is this?”

“It’s me,” she hissed. She cupped her hand around her mouth, her knuckles white around the phone. “Emma.”

“Emma?” Laurel’s voice shot up an octave. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”

“Laurel,” Emma gasped, swallowing a frantic sob. “It’s Ethan. He did it, there are these files at Nisha’s house, and it sounds like he’s killed before.”

“Emma, wait, slow down,” Laurel instructed.

But Emma couldn’t stop, the words tumbling from her mouth. “I don’t know what to do. I’m alone in Nisha’s house with him . . .”