The Lying Game Complete Collection - Sara Shepard Page 0,487

flaring and fading.

Then he’s back, looming over me. He’s nothing but a dark shape blocking out the stars behind him. There’s a jagged, pointed rock in his hands. He holds it high overhead.

“If I can’t have you, no one can,” he says.

I close my eyes, but I can still hear it whistling through the air as he brings it down over my head.

Before I can even scream out, the world explodes in light—the grand finale of a summer fireworks display—and then, just as quickly, my world goes suddenly, finally dark.

30

THE ENVELOPE, PLEASE

Emma stared down at the records in her hand. Written in black ink across the top form was the patient’s name.

Ethan Landry.

For a moment she thought about stuffing the paperwork back in the envelope, back into the Tampax box under the sink. She’d had the chance to look at this once before, when she’d broken into the hospital about a month earlier. But she had chosen not to invade Ethan’s privacy—and she still didn’t want to.

Ethan had been honest with her about the whole thing. When she’d asked him about the files, he told her the story: how his dad had been beating his mom, and Ethan had intervened, hitting his father over the head with a beer bottle—only to have his mother call the police on him. She’d reported him as “violent” and had him admitted to the psychiatric ward. Emma’s heart ached when she thought about it. In a way, Ethan had been abandoned by his family, just like she had.

But her eyes moved across Nisha’s note again. Sutton, I’m so sorry. She’d been so certain that the evidence Nisha found was some kind of proof that Garrett killed Sutton. But it seemed obvious from her note that Nisha had no idea Sutton had died. What had she called and texted so frantically about, then? Why had Garrett come to kill her if she didn’t have evidence against him? Emma’s fingers clutched the folder sharply. She didn’t understand any of this.

But I did.

“Get out of there!” I screamed, terror churning inside me. The whole world was upside down. My sister was alone in a house with my murderer—and she trusted him. She loved him. She didn’t suspect a thing.

Emma bit her lip. Whatever Nisha had seen in Ethan’s file had clearly freaked her out, even if it had nothing to do with Sutton’s murder. She glanced back into the bedroom. On the other end of the house she could hear movement, drawers opening and closing as Ethan searched Dr. Banerjee’s study. As quietly as she could, she shut and locked the bathroom door, and started to read.

REASON FOR TREATMENT: Patient was referred to our facility for court-ordered psychiatric services upon his family’s relocation to Tucson. This was a condition of Ethan’s acquittal in the San Diego Family Court System.

Emma’s blood ran cold. She glanced at the date at the top of the records. They were almost eight years old—Ethan would have been ten. A child. What could he have possibly done at ten that required an acquittal?

In April, Ethan (age ten at the time) was seen playing with a neighborhood girl (age eight) in a culvert near their home in San Diego. A city worker who’d been assigned to clear a nearby drainage ditch testified that he witnessed Ethan strangling the girl, but by the time he was able to intervene, the girl had died.

When interviewed by police, Ethan claimed he had only been playing and that he had not intended to kill the girl. Due to his young age he was tried in family court, where he was acquitted of manslaughter. It was felt that Ethan displayed remorse for what he claimed was an accident, and that he hadn’t properly understood his own strength when roughhousing with the victim.

Emma felt like something was clamped down around her lungs, cold and metallic and painful. This wasn’t what Ethan had told her. For a moment she thought it had to be a mistake, or a joke. Maybe Nisha had been trying to get into the Lying Game and had mocked these up to mess with her. But somewhere at the back of her mind Emma knew the records were real. The papers shook in her fingers. She turned the page quickly, her breath short and hard.

Over the course of our sessions, Ethan confided in me that he had considered the deceased to be his “best friend,” but that she’d been playing with another child from the neighborhood just