Cross My Heart, Hope To Die

Emma helped Mr. Mercer into a chair at a large round table in the corner. “I’m so sorry again about your knee,” she mumbled.

He shrugged. “It’s not your fault.”

“It kind of is. If it wasn’t for me …” Emma trailed off, still annoyed at Thayer and Ethan.

But Mr. Mercer waved her protestations away. “Let’s not talk about it anymore, okay?”

A waitress handed them leather-bound menus, and Emma’s mouth started watering just reading her choices: portobello ragout in truffle oil, butter-poached lobster, rosemary-rubbed pork tenderloin, pecan-crusted snapper. Eating in nice restaurants instead of Jack in the Box was definitely on the list of Things That Do Not Suck About Being Sutton Mercer.

But then Emma thought of the killer’s most recent note—YOU SHOULD THANK ME—and suddenly didn’t feel as hungry. The cost of her new life made it hard to enjoy the perks.

When the waitress returned, they put in their orders: fettuccine alfredo for Emma, a filet mignon, rare, for Mr. Mercer. Then Mr. Mercer reached into his coat and pulled out a folded manila envelope. He looked down at it in his hands for a moment. “I found these for you,” he said, setting it on the table between them.

Emma opened it to find a thick pile of photographs. On the top was a glossy picture of Becky around age twelve or thirteen. She was sitting on a horse and grinning broadly, braces glinting on her teeth. The next was of Becky in a Girl Scout uniform, pointing proudly at a merit badge on her sash. Becky in a cat costume for Halloween. Becky on a beach building an elaborate sand castle. There were a few of an older Becky, sixteen or seventeen years old. She’d lost all her baby fat and had a pale, waifish beauty. She no longer smiled for the camera. Emma paused at a picture of her mother in an oversized plaid flannel shirt, standing on a canyon trail in California. The expression on her face was hard to read. Sad, maybe, or just distant.

A wave of sorrow washed over Emma, too. What had happened to that smiling girl on horseback? How had she become the haggard woman she’d seen in the Buick?

It was hard for me to look at them, too. All my life, I’d wondered who my birth mother was. Admittedly, I’d pictured someone amazing: an international reporter called away to cover a dangerous war zone that was no place for a child, or a fashion model working the runways in Paris. But Becky was so ordinary, plain. Damaged.

“There are more in the attic, if you’d like to see them,” Mr. Mercer offered.

“I would,” Emma said, flipping through the photographs again. She paused on a picture of a junior-high-age Becky scowling playfully from a tent, perhaps on a camping trip. “She’s really pretty.”

The Becky she’d known had been beautiful, with her big blue eyes and milky white skin. But there was a brittleness to her, an unease that kept most people at a distance, as though some tangible sadness clung to her. Emma remembered being at a playground once when a man in a basketball jersey had tried to flirt with her mother. Becky had stared silently at him from within the depths of her long, loose hair until he’d moved nervously away.

Mr. Mercer nodded as the waitress set down their appetizers. “She is. She looks a lot like her mother. So do you, for that matter.”

Emma could see it: All three generations of Mercer women had the same eyes, the same cheekbones. In one of the pictures, Becky sat side by side with her mother at the end of a dock. Mrs. Mercer’s smile looked forced, while Becky just stared blankly at the camera. She looked as if she might be around Emma’s age.

“When was the last time Mom saw Becky?” she asked, picking up her fork to spear a piece of lettuce from her salad.

Mr. Mercer dipped a bite of calamari into marinara sauce, frowning. “Not long after she left you with us, Sutton.” He sighed. “Becky had a way of hitting her mom just where it would hurt her the most.”

Emma swallowed a crouton. “Shouldn’t we tell her that Becky’s been in town? It’s been a long time. Maybe things have changed.”

Mr. Mercer shook his head. “I know it’s difficult, but we have to keep this a secret. Things haven’t been easy for any of us, but your mom has taken it especially hard. Promise me you won’t tell her.”

“I promise,” Emma said softly. She hesitated, biting her lip, then forged ahead. “I think I saw Becky the other day. She drove past me, but I know it was her.”

To her astonishment, he nodded. “I guess I’m not surprised by that.”

“You’re not? You mean she’s hung around here before, spying?”

The waitress swooped in at that very moment to ask if everything was okay. “Fine,” Mr. Mercer said, giving her a clipped smile. When she vanished, he turned back to Emma. “She’s come back into town a few times.”

“She clearly saw me.” Emma felt the hurt on the surface of her skin, like a physical wound. “Why did she drive off? Why did she pretend I didn’t exist?”

Mr. Mercer sighed heavily. “Becky’s life has never been easy.”

“Sure it has.” Emma suddenly felt angry. She grabbed the pile of pictures and started to flip through them. “Horseback riding. Dance lessons. Presents at Christmas. Ski vacation, beach vacation, Disneyland vacation. She had …” Emma swallowed hard. She’d almost said more than I ever did. “She had everything anyone could want. Don’t make excuses for her.”

She’d managed to keep her voice from climbing higher, from echoing through the entire dining room, but it shook dangerously. She pinched her forearm under the table to hold back her tears. Mr. Mercer’s eyes were sad behind his glasses, and for a moment he seemed older and more tired than Emma had ever seen him.

He reached across the table and took her hand. “Sutton, believe me, I know how you feel. Your mom and I have never stopped talking about this. Wondering if we could have done more for her, wondering if any of her … of her behavior is our fault. But some people just have a hard time in the world, no matter how many advantages they have, no matter how loved they are. Someday you’ll understand that. Not everybody is as strong as you are.”

Emma pulled her hand from his. “You’re talking like she’s damaged. Like she’s some kind of freak.”

Again he hesitated. Then he turned back to his appetizer and gracefully speared another piece of calamari with his fork. “She’s not a freak. You shouldn’t talk about anyone that way—especially not Becky. But, honey, she has a lot of problems. Difficulties socializing or living with other people. It’s one of the reasons she’s moved so often, one of the reasons she keeps to herself. She can be unpredictable when she’s not on her medication.”

Emma’s blood chilled. Becky took medication? For how long? “Unpredictable how?” she asked.

Mr. Mercer shifted in his seat. “Well, sometimes she’d be despondent for days on end. Hiding in her room, crying at the drop of a hat. Sometimes she was destructive. She broke things out of spite. She punched a hole in the wall, just because she was asked to clear the table.”

“Oh,” Emma said quietly. She thought about her mother’s habits, things she’d always thought of as strange or irresponsible more than dangerous. Like how she’d spend a week at a time in the same pair of pajama bottoms. How she’d stolen candy by the pocketful from the corner store, or gleefully lit their unopened utilities bills on fire with a match.

Mr. Mercer cleared his throat uncomfortably. “But despite all that, Becky can also be creative and warm and wonderful. In her own way she loves you—I know she does. That’s why she gave you to us, because she knew we’d take better care of you than she could. She wanted to talk to you that night in the canyon, but she wasn’t ready. Maybe she’s watching you now because she’s trying to build up the courage to finally see you.”

I wasn’t so sure about that. Becky hadn’t looked shy or nervous, exactly, more like caught. Or annoyed, perhaps, that Emma was running after her.

Emma was thinking the same thing. And she couldn’t help thinking about what Ethan had said at the studio, about how Becky might have played a role in Sutton’s disappearance. More memories started flooding back as though released from a dam, all the ones Emma usually tried not to think about. Like the night Becky caught her boyfriend Joe cheating. He was a mild-mannered guy with a goatee who watched Saturday morning cartoons with Emma before Becky crawled out of bed. Becky had intercepted a call on his phone from someone named “Rainbow” and had gone crazy, her eyes rolling madly as she paced the apartment and screamed at Joe. Emma hid under the bed when Becky picked up a folding chair to clobber her boyfriend over the head. Emma could still remember the terrible crunch of impact. She’d curled up, hugging her Socktopus for dear life and praying for everything to be over soon.

She shuddered. She wanted to be able to dismiss Ethan’s suspicions, but maybe she didn’t actually know what her mother was capable of.

The waitress appeared again, this time with their entrées. Just as Emma was twirling a bite of pasta, Mr. Mercer’s phone jangled from his pocket. He glanced at the screen and frowned. “The hospital,” he murmured. “Sorry, honey, I need to grab this.”

Even through the bustle and clatter of the busy dining room, Emma could hear the crisp, calm voice on the other end of the phone. “Dr. Mercer, I’m with the University of Arizona Hospital. We have your daughter. We have Rebecca. There’s been an incident. Can you come in right away?”

Almost before the woman had finished her sentence, Mr. Mercer was scrambling for his crutches. Emma knocked over her chair as she jumped to her feet to help him. A single thought cycled in her mind again and again. Something has happened to Becky.

I flew behind them both as they hurried out of the club, straining my ears to hear what else the nurse had to say and bracing for whatever they’d find in that hospital bed only a few miles away.

6

THE FOURTH FLOOR

Mr. Mercer found a parking spot near the entrance of the University of Arizona Hospital and Medical Center, and they hurried into the lobby of the ER. A blast of air conditioning greeted them. “We’re here for Rebecca Mercer, please,” Mr. Mercer said to the woman at the triage desk.

Emma looked around, wrinkling her nose at the antiseptic hospital smell. Just one week before, she’d come here to investigate her grandfather’s involvement in Sutton’s disappearance, breaking into his office in the orthopedic wing and rifling through his desk—that was how she’d tracked down Becky in the first place.

The ER lobby was full of orange plastic chairs, dilapidated coffee tables, and out-of-date magazines. A young man sat with a bloody towel wrapped around one finger, a woman who must have been his mother speaking rapidly in Spanish at his side. A man with several small children sat under a poster that showed how to sneeze in to your elbow to prevent spreading germs. A TV bolted to the ceiling was tuned to a classic movie channel—Emma recognized Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak from Vertigo, which she’d seen in a class a few years before in Henderson.