Emma hesitantly padded to the window and peered out. The streetlight made a soft golden circle on the prickly pear cactus beside the sidewalk. Laurel’s Jetta was parked directly below. Sure enough, someone stood in the driveway beneath the basketball court. She half expected it to be Becky, but then the figure stepped into the light, arm aimed to pitch another rock at the window.

It was Ethan.

She inhaled sharply and moved away from the window. She pulled on a heather-gray bra under Sutton’s see-through camisole and kicked her bare legs into a pair of striped pajama pants. Then she reappeared at the glass, waved, and hefted open the window. Mrs. Mercer hadn’t locked it yet, and it gave easily. The night air was stiflingly hot without the faintest trace of wind.

“Have you heard of using your phone instead of a rock?” she called softly.

Ethan squinted up at her. “Can you come out?”

Emma listened for sounds in the hallway—a toilet flushing, Drake’s jingling tags, anything. The Mercers would kill her for sneaking out the very day she’d been caught stealing. But there was only silence. She lifted the window higher and shimmied out.

A thick tree branch extended toward the roof; Emma grabbed it easily and swung to the ground. No wonder Sutton used this as an escape route. She dropped to the gravel and headed toward Ethan, a smile on her face.

But Ethan wasn’t smiling back. “What on earth got into you? Have you lost your mind?”

“Shhh.” Emma glanced around. The neighborhood was eerily still, all lights off, cars silent in driveways. “It was the only way I could get into the police station.”

“Why did you want to do that?”

Emma sat down on the big boulder in front of the Mercers’ house. “I had to see Sutton’s police file.”

As Emma told Ethan about the police report and the incident at the train tracks, his eyes bulged wider and wider. “Sutton put everyone’s lives at risk,” Emma finished. “And something happened to Gabby that night. She went to the hospital.”

“Whoa.” Ethan sank down on the boulder next to her. “And no one told on Sutton?”

“According to the report, no.” Their legs were just barely touching; Emma could feel the tough fabric of his jeans through her thin pajama pants.

Ethan turned his phone over in his hands. “Why do you think they kept quiet?”

“I don’t know. The train prank was serious. They all could have died,” she said, watching a shadow pass across the window of a neighboring house. “Maybe they wanted to give Sutton a taste of her own medicine?”

“Through a prank . . . or something else?”

A chill coursed through Emma’s veins. “You said yourself that Sutton’s friends looked like they wanted to kill her the night of the snuff film, right?”