The Lying Game Complete Collection - Sara Shepard Page 0,347

usually followed. That’s what you get for dating a brooder, sis, I thought. Lots of epic fighting, lots of hot apology make-outs.

I was glad Emma and Ethan were making up. But the question still lingered at the back of my mind: How was Emma going to find out whether Becky was innocent?

And if Ethan couldn’t help her prove it, who could?

12

MONSTERS IN THE ATTIC

After a grueling tennis practice the next day, Emma stood in the upstairs hallway, staring at the hatch to the attic. During their father-daughter—or rather, grandfather-granddaughter—dinner, Mr. Mercer had mentioned that some of Becky’s old things were still up there. Maybe something upstairs would help her piece together Becky’s relationship with her family and illuminate her motives. It was a thin lead, but it was all she had to go on.

She checked her watch. She had the house to herself—Mr. Mercer was at the hospital, Mrs. Mercer was out running errands, and Laurel was still at school for a physics project—but she wasn’t sure for how long, so she had to move fast. She tugged the cord down from the ceiling. Drake, who was keeping her company in the hall, scampered backward as dust billowed down around her. For a big lug, he was quite the coward.

Emma gripped the sides of the ladder and climbed up into the darkness. The musty smell of old paper and mothballs pervaded the attic, which was cluttered with evidence of abandoned hobbies and family history. A pair of downhill skis was propped against a yellowed dress form. Translucent boxes of red and green Christmas ornaments were neatly piled on the floor. A porcelain doll with a cracked cheek sat staring blankly from a child-sized rocking chair. At one end of the attic a few beams of sunlight fought through a small, dirty window that looked out over the backyard.

The attic gave me that same frustrating feeling of déjà vu that I got from all the objects and places of my former life. Some of the objects—a child-sized vanity with a padded pink stool, a North Face frame backpack, a pile of old board games laced with cobwebs—drew me toward them like magnets. I knew they’d meant something to me, but I couldn’t remember what.

Emma stood still for a moment, wondering where the Mercers would have stored Becky’s things. It wasn’t as if there would be a big box in the corner labeled OUR ESTRANGED SECRET DAUGHTER’S STUFF. But she knew that Mr. Mercer had been up here recently for the pictures, so she looked around the attic for areas that seemed recently disturbed. Her gaze fell on an ornately carved Chinese chest. A bunch of graying shoe boxes were sitting next to it, as if they’d been recently shifted off the top. The patterns on its rosewood lid were clean and dust free. She braced herself and opened it.

The inside of the chest smelled like tobacco and old newspapers. A stuffed rabbit with one ear was nestled in the leg of a purple Dr. Martens combat boot. Under that she found a silver-plated hand mirror wrapped in a scarf, a bunch of shattered CD jewel cases, a dog-eared copy of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, and a crumpled pack of cigarettes. It looked as if someone had swept up all the contents of Becky’s room and shoved them in the chest. Then, tucked near the bottom, under a pile of faded magazines, she found a composition book covered in doodles. Her heart lurched. She knew a journal when she saw it—she’d certainly kept enough herself. She just never knew her mother had.

Girl Finds Mother’s Old Journal, Contents Change Everything, she hoped, looking at the book’s cover. Then she flipped the journal open.

The handwriting was painfully familiar, the same untidy scrawl Emma remembered from childhood birthday cards and from the note Becky had left for her at the diner just a few weeks earlier.

At first, the journal’s entries were neat and tidy, dated even down to the time of day:

Today I woke up at five and could not sleep any more so I climbed out the window and went to Denny’s. Mom and Dad panicked and thought I had run away when I did not come down to the table and when they saw my shoes were missing. Can’t a person enjoy her Grand Slam breakfast in peace around here?

A few days later:

I got $200 for the cheesy diamond studs Mom got me for “sweet sixteen” last year. Part of me thinks I should