THE GAME’S AFOOT

Emma’s lungs seized as if she’d had the wind knocked out of her, the breath frozen painfully in her chest. “My . . . my sister?”

Across the table, Mrs. Mercer stifled a sob, and Laurel put a comforting arm around her shoulders. Emma turned to look at Mr. Mercer, noticing for the first time the mud on the elbows of his lab coat, the twig snagged in his shoelaces.

“I’m sorry, Sutton,” he murmured. “Yes. It was Emma. I identified the body.”

The body. Someone had finally found my body. After so long, it almost didn’t feel real.

Emma’s breath kept catching in her throat so that she felt just a step away from hyperventilating. The world slid in and out of focus around her. Of course, she’d known all along that Sutton was dead . . . but somehow, hearing this made it feel more real.

“That is,” Mr. Mercer went on, his eyes haunted, “there wasn’t much to identify. Her body wasn’t . . . wasn’t in good shape. But they found her driver’s license in her bag.” His voice cracked. “The picture. God, Sutton, I just—it looked just like you.”

Emma’s gut wrenched violently. Her driver’s license? As in Emma’s driver’s license? Her wallet, along with her duffel bag, had been stolen on her first night in Tucson. If the police had found it with the body, that meant two things: one, that the murderer had been the one to steal her things—which she’d suspected but hadn’t been able to verify.

And two, the killer had gone back to the scene of the crime to plant evidence.

“Garrett had gone back,” I corrected my sister silently. I could still feel that hand on my shoulder, that voice in my ear, as if no time at all had passed since the night in the canyon. Garrett. It seemed so obvious now. He’d been so jealous. So violent. Why had I stayed with him, knowing all that? How could I have been so stupid?

“The police thought she was you, at first. They thought it was some kind of fake ID,” Mrs. Mercer said softly. Her cardigan was buttoned wrong, and her hands kept fluttering nervously to her mouth as if she wanted to stop the words from coming out of it. “But of course, you aren’t missing, and that body had been in the canyon for . . . for a few months, at least. They called us down, and we explained about Becky and that we’d just found out about Emma ourselves.”