The Lying Game Complete Collection - Sara Shepard Page 0,360

forgive you.”

They started down the mall together, my best friends and my sister. “Thank you,” I whispered to Charlotte. “Thanks for forgiving me.”

Everything changes. Sooner or later, we all grow up.

17

RESEARCHING AND REMINISCING

During free period on Wednesday, Emma slipped into the school library. The library was a bland, beige room lined with metal shelves and hung with posters of celebrities holding books. The librarian’s name was Ms. Rigby, a youngish woman who wore cat-eye glasses and vintage cardigans. She had a perpetually aggravated air, as if she simply could not believe teenagers would turn down a chance to use actual research materials on a daily basis, but if she caught sight of a student perusing the stacks voluntarily, she immediately softened. Emma had been in the library a few times since her arrival in Tucson, first to check out materials for an English paper and again to get some books for pleasure reading. The librarian had treated her with skepticism at first—she seemed to know Sutton by her bad-girl reputation rather than by actual library attendance. But over the past few weeks she’d seemed to accept that Sutton Mercer had taken a bookish turn.

Emma had decided to follow Ethan’s suggestion and do some digging into her mother’s illness. It might not help her solve Sutton’s murder, but at least it’d give her some insight into what Becky was going through.

“Hi, Sutton,” Ms. Rigby said, smiling up at her from the reference desk.

“Hey, Ms. Rigby.” She looked around to make sure no one could overhear her, though the library was mostly empty. “I’m doing some research for a presentation.”

“What’s the topic?”

“Uh, mental illness.”

Ms. Rigby leaned back in her chair thoughtfully. “That’s a pretty big subject to tackle all at once. Anything specific you’re interested in?”

“Well, I’m interested in … violent cases.” Her pulse quickened mildly just saying the words out loud.

The librarian nodded. “The violent ones are always the most interesting, aren’t they?” she said. “I have to admit, Abnormal Psychology was one of my favorite subjects in college. Follow me.”

The librarian led her to an aisle in the middle of the nonfiction stacks. There were four and a half shelves full of titles like An Idiot’s Guide to Personality Disorders and Case Studies in Mental Illness. A lot of the books looked outdated and moldy.

Ms. Rigby surveyed the shelves for a moment, then found what she was looking for. “The Devil’s Playground,” she said cheerfully. “It’s about criminal insanity. It’s a good read, and it should give you a good place to start your research if you’re interested in that sort of thing.”

Emma liked Ms. Rigby, but it was a little chilling to hear her talk about violent insanity as if it was a source of entertainment. “Um, great.”

“The school board obviously doesn’t let us keep anything too disturbing in the library, so you might also check the university. They’ll have tons of stuff.”

The librarian returned to her desk, and Emma looked back at the shelves. She grabbed a few more books and went to a table hidden behind the science fiction section, a little out of sight of the front desk.

She started to leaf through the first book. It contained lots of pictures, from woodcuts of the Salem witch trials to before-and-after pictures of lobotomies in the 1960s. She flipped to the index and ran her finger down the list of entries, unsure what she was even really looking for. Then she remembered something the nurse had said in the hospital: It looks like a total psychotic break.

She found the entry for psychotic break and flipped to the page indicated. Psychosis is marked by a complete removal of the patient from reality, it said. Delusions, hallucinations, disordered thinking or behavior, and poor impulse control are all indicators of a psychotic break. Then the book went on to describe a bunch of serial killers with names like the Night Slasher and the Dallas Axe Killer who had received instructions from the voices in their heads to kill and kill again. They murdered people they loved. Parents. Sisters. Children. All because a voice told them to.

Emma’s stomach turned. Becky had been taken to the hospital because she’d pulled a knife on someone. Had a voice commanded her to do that? What might she have done if the security guards hadn’t intervened?

“Good reading?”

Thayer stood over her, his dark hair falling shaggily into his hazel eyes. Emma slapped the book shut and placed it at her side, face down. A book on criminal