The Lying Game Complete Collection - Sara Shepard Page 0,366

fearing she was right. The crushing way Becky had squeezed me, the sad way she’d looked at me, as though saying good-bye for the last time. You weren’t supposed to be here. They told me. She was hearing voices in her head—voices that told her to kill me.

Emma watched through the doorway as two nurses and an orderly surrounded Becky’s bed. “Get her strapped down,” said one of them, a middle-aged woman wearing pink-heart-print scrubs. The silvery tip of a needle flashed in her right hand.

A hulking, crew-cut orderly leaned over Becky, grunting as he fixed the leather straps around her wrists. But Becky was too quick for him. Like a cat, she slid away from under his grip, sinuous and fluid. When he grabbed her shoulders, she let out a shrill, tortured scream. The orderly glanced over his shoulder. “A little help?”

“On it,” the nurse said, dropping the syringe on a tray. She grabbed Becky’s bare feet. Suddenly, there was a horrible crunching sound, and then a scream. The nurse flew back, blood pouring from her nose. It took Emma a second to realize that Becky had kicked her. The orderly’s grip loosened for a split second in surprise, and Becky sprang to her feet. She grabbed the syringe off the nightstand and wielded it like a weapon.

“Stay away from me,” she hissed, her voice hoarse and raspy.

The orderly raised his palms. “It’s going to be okay, Ms. Mercer. No one’s trying to hurt you.”

Becky looked wildly around the room. The nurse was still lying on the ground in a fetal position, clutching her nose. The orderly had taken a few careful steps toward Becky. She held up the needle higher, pointing it at him. “I’ll do it. I swear I will.” The orderly stopped and took a step back.

Emma froze. The hallway was empty and quiet. She was the only one here who might be able to intervene, to take Becky by surprise. She couldn’t allow her sister’s killer to escape.

Taking a deep breath, she lunged forward and made a grab at Becky, wrapping her arms tightly around her mother’s skinny shoulders. Becky shrieked and threw Emma’s arms off her, body checking her with surprising force. Emma fell to the floor. She scrabbled away as Becky appeared in the doorway, the syringe still in her hand. Becky paused for a moment, staring down at Emma with wide eyes.

“Sutton … ,” she whispered, her eyes shifting to just above Emma—to me. Neither Emma nor I knew which of us she was talking to anymore.

Emma’s lips parted. She wanted to move, but her limbs hung heavy and useless. Becky leaned toward her for another moment, then spun on her heel and, with a scream, ran toward the stairwell at the other end of the hallway. A confused babble broke out from the social room. One of the ward’s inhabitants yelled, “Run!”

“Someone call security!” spat the nurse in pink-heart scrubs, staggering to her feet.

She and the orderly rushed past Emma in the hallway. The patients who had been watching TV were shouting, some of them crying and others bellowing curse words. An old man in a nightshirt went running out of his room toward the stairwell in his own bid for freedom. He was pinned by a muscular orderly and wrestled back toward his room. A siren started to whoop through the linoleum halls.

“That night at the canyon.” Emma repeated Becky’s words out loud. Just thinking about Sutton’s last night alive had sent Becky into some kind of fit. Had it been guilt she’d seen on her mother’s face, or something more like … excitement?

She thought about Mr. Rochester’s wife in Jane Eyre, sneaking into Jane’s room and destroying her things, setting the house on fire. Becky was a madwoman, and the Mercers had tried to hide her away just like Mr. Rochester had hidden his wife. Now, it seemed, she was getting revenge on all of them.

I break everything I touch, Becky had said to me at the canyon.

“Girly all alone in the hallway?” asked a creaking voice. Just a few feet away stood the leering man from the social room, the one who had winked at her. His stringy hair fell heavily into his face, and the white T-shirt he wore was blotched with stains. He grinned, revealing yellowed and chipped teeth, and started toward her.

Emma looked around frantically to see if anyone had noticed him, but the orderlies and nurses were in a froth of activity, running down