Chapters (43)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Epigraph
- Prologue - Life After Death
- Chapter 1 - Charmed Life
- Chapter 2 - CSI, Tucson
- Chapter 3 - Spinning Her Wheels
- Chapter 4 - Paper Trail
- Chapter 5 - Extreme Times Call for Extreme Measures
- Chapter 6 - A Criminal History
- Chapter 7 - The Ultimate Prank
- Chapter 8 - Truth or Consequences
- Chapter 9 - Daddy’s Little Girl
- Chapter 10 - Fish Out of Water
- Chapter 11 - Nothing Like a Threat at 2 A.M.
- Chapter 12 - A Secret of a Different Kind
- Chapter 13 - Double the Trouble
- Chapter 14 - An Opening... and a Closing
- Chapter 15 - An A for Effort
- Chapter 16 - X Marks the Spot
- Chapter 17 - Tremors and Treachery and Threats, Oh My!
- Chapter 18 - The Writing on the Wall
- Chapter 19 - Creepy Vampires to the Left, Stalkers to the Right
- Chapter 20 - Service with a Snicker
- Chapter 21 - Tweet, Untweet
- Chapter 22 - The Awful Truth
- Chapter 23 - The Viking’s Revenge
- Chapter 24 - Almost, But Not Quite
- Chapter 25 - One Down, One to Go
- Chapter 26 - A Shove in the Dark
- Chapter 27 - Walled In
- Chapter 28 - The Darkest Place in the World
- Chapter 29 - The Aftermath
- Chapter 30 - Clever Little Bitches
- Chapter 31 - The Moment We’ve Been Waiting For
- Chapter 32 - A Moment in Time
- Epilogue - A Moment in Time
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Books by Sara Shepard
- Credits
- Copyright
- About the Publisher
Emma sliced her hand through the bowl and let out a fake sigh of disappointment when it collapsed. “So much for that.”
As soon as Mrs. Gilliam disappeared into the kiln, Emma eyed Madeline and lifted her foot from the treadle. Madeline and the others still made the most sense to be Sutton’s killers. But she had no proof.
Wiping her hands on a towel, she pulled out Sutton’s iPhone and scrolled through the calendar feature. “Uh, guys?” she said. “Does anyone know when I had my last highlights appointment? I forgot to put it in my calendar and I want to make a note for when I need to go in next. Was it . . . August thirty-first?”
“What day was that?” Charlotte asked. She looked exhausted, like she hadn’t slept at all the night before. She mashed her hands way too hard into the clay, turning the bowl she was making into a soupy pancake.
Emma tapped on the phone again. “Uh . . . the day before Nisha’s party.” The day before Mads kidnapped me at Sabino Canyon, thinking I was Sutton. Or maybe knowing I wasn’t Sutton. “Two days before school started.”
Charlotte glanced at Madeline. “Wasn’t that the day we—”
“No,” Madeline snapped, shooting Charlotte an icy glare. Then she turned to Emma. “Neither of us know where you were that day, Sutton. Someone else will have to cure your amnesia.”
Fluorescent light gleamed over Madeline’s porcelain skin. Her eyes narrowed at Emma, as though challenging her to drop the subject. Charlotte glanced from Emma to Madeline, looking suddenly alert. Even Laurel’s back was stiff in front of them.
Emma waited, knowing she’d hit on something and hoping someone would tell her what it was. But when the tense silence persisted, she gave up. Take two, she thought, reaching into her pocket and wrapping her fingers around the silver train charm. “Whatever. So I was thinking it’s time for a new Lying Game prank.”
“Cool,” Charlotte murmured, her eyes focused back on the spinning lump of clay in front of her. “Any ideas?”
Across the room, a girl washed her hands at the sink, and a loud crash sounded from the kiln. “The prank where we stole my mom’s car was awesome.” She remembered seeing a video of the girls doing just that on Laurel’s computer. “Maybe we should do something like that again.”
Madeline nodded, thinking. “Maybe.”
“Except . . . with a twist,” Emma went on, saying the words she’d rehearsed the night before in Sutton’s bedroom. “Like, we could leave someone’s car in the middle of a car wash. Or drive it into a swimming pool. Or abandon it on the train tracks.”
At the word tracks, Charlotte, Laurel, and Madeline tensed. A hot, sharp pain streaked through Emma’s gut. Bull’s-eye.
“Very funny.” Charlotte slapped her clay down with a thwap.
“No repeats allowed, remember?” Laurel hissed over her shoulder.