Sean started at the sound of her voice. “Oh, hey, Emerson.”
“You have us all worried in there,” Emerson said, leaning against the building next to him. “Everything okay?”
“Eh, not really.” Sean’s eyes lingered on a pair of trees in the back of the restaurant’s garden that leaned together until they were touching, creating a red-and-gold-leafed canopy. The Kissing Trees, they’d been coined. In the summer, people held wedding ceremonies under them. “I guess I’m just having one of those days, you know?”
“Oh, yes,” she said honestly. “Lately I just call them ‘every day.’ ”
Sean let out a short chuckle. He was wearing a checkered polo that could use a wash and a pair of beat-up jeans and untied sneakers. Normally, Emerson would have immediately mentally edited an outfit like that, but right now she was too distracted by the expression on his face. He looked deeply, truly sad. “Sounds familiar,” he said.
Emerson watched him for another minute. It was strange how much time you could spend with someone and never really get to know them. She’d partied with Sean countless times, eaten lunch after lunch with him, watched him fall for Tricia after Hunter broke her heart—but when it came down to it, she hardly knew him. Sure, she knew what beer he drank (Yuengling) and that he ate turkey on rye for lunch, and, thanks to Tricia, that he wore tighty-whities instead of boxers, but she had no idea about the stuff that mattered: what she would find if she peeled away the shiny top coat they all wore like a varnish.
“You must really miss Tricia.” It was the only thing she could think of to say.
“Sometimes it feels like it’s strangling me, how much I miss her. And then sometimes…” Sean cleared his throat. “The whole thing just feels really weird, you know?”
“Weird?” Emerson stiffened. “How so?”
“All of it. That she’s gone. That things can already be so normal again.” He motioned toward the restaurant, where, inside, Jessie and Marta had their heads bent together in laughter. “That we never got to say good-bye.”
“I know, I think about that a lot, how different it would be if we could have just had one last chance to talk.” She paused. This was her opportunity. “Before the Justice accident, did Tricia seem… different to you at all? Like maybe she had something going on? Something she didn’t want to talk about?”
Sean’s head snapped up. For the first time, he looked right at her, his eyes wide and shiny. “So she told you,” he said flatly. “Who was it? Hunter? Or someone new?”
Emerson wrinkled her brow. “What about Hunter?”
“The other guy,” Sean said impatiently. “Who was it? You can tell me, Em. No need to keep it a secret anymore, right?”
Emerson straightened up, her heart beating fast. “You think Tricia was seeing another guy before she died?”
For a long second Sean just stared at her. “So you didn’t know?”
Emerson shook her head mutely.
“Well, now you do.” Sean let out a sharp laugh. “I’m not positive that she was, but when she broke up with me the night of the accident, she just kept saying, ‘I don’t deserve you,’ which everyone knows really means, ‘I’m cheating on you.’ ”
“Wait, Tricia broke up with you that night?” Emerson knew she was starting to sound like a parrot but she couldn’t help it. Her head was spinning with this new information.
“Yup. Last conversation we ever had,” Sean replied. “Nice, huh?”
“And you really think she was cheating on you?” Emerson asked.
Sean nodded. “Even before that night, she’d been acting shady for a little while. She was always preoccupied, constantly checking her phone and making excuses to leave dates early. She went from being so into me, to practically forgetting I existed. And then at dinner a few nights before the accident, I heard her talking on the phone to someone when I came in from parking the car. Something about meeting up later. When she saw me, she hung up so fast you would have thought her phone was a bomb. She claimed it was her mom, but I didn’t buy it for a second. So when she went to the bathroom, I looked at her phone.” He shot Emerson a sheepish look. “I know it’s not cool, but I was getting desperate.”
“I get it.” Emerson squeezed his arm, struggling to keep her voice neutral. “So was it her mom?”
Sean shrugged. “I couldn’t tell. It was a blocked number.”
Emerson’s heart felt as if it were about to zoom right out of her chest. The messages she, Sydney, and Tenley had been getting all came from a blocked number.
“And you really have no idea who it could be?” she pressed.
“None. Unless it’s Hunter. All I know is that the articles have it wrong. I don’t think Tricia took fireworks onto the Justice to celebrate the end of Fall Festival. I think she took them to celebrate the end of us.”
Emerson looked down, guilt and relief cascading through her all at once. Tricia had been cheating on Sean. Or at the very least, meeting up with someone behind his back—someone with a blocked phone number. It screamed one thing loud and clear: accomplice. Sean wasn’t the person they were after at all. Tricia’s mystery boy was.
Emerson bit down on her lip. She wished she could tell Sean how crazy Tricia had been—how lucky he was to have escaped her clutches unscathed. But she couldn’t. So instead she gave him a quick hug. “She was right, you know. She didn’t deserve you. Not if she was cheating,” she added quickly.
“Thanks, Em.” Sean pulled back, clearing his throat. “I guess we should get in there, right?” He glanced through the window at the waitress carrying a huge platter of pizzas over to their table.
“We’re having pizza tapas,” Emerson informed him. The heady scent of garlic and tomato rushed at her as she followed him inside.
Emerson tried to concentrate on her friends’ conversation as they took their seats at the table. But her thoughts kept zooming back to Tricia. They’d been right. Tricia hadn’t been working alone. They’d just been wrong about Sean. There had been someone else all along.
Her eyes flickered over to Nate and Tyler. Could Tricia have been cheating on Sean with one of them? Or Hunter? Could she have plotted and planned while curled up in the arms of one of their friends? The whole thing made Emerson want to bang her head against the table. Once again, they had more questions than answers.
Emerson was midway through a slice of sausage pizza when her phone buzzed in her bag. She reached for it, halfheartedly listening to the cheerleading story Jessie was telling. When she saw the screen, Jessie’s voice seemed to fall away—replaced instantly by the sharp, insistent buzzing of fear.
Blocked.
No. Her skin went clammy as she jabbed open the message.
It’s not just monsters that lurk under the bed! Your fireman friend has something that belongs to you. Get it back ASAP, or your affair becomes front-page news.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Thursday, 7:15 AM
Tenley moved quietly down the stairs, careful to avoid the creaky step near the bottom. She was hoping to make it out of the house without her morning dose of motherly love. It was bad enough facing a barrage of questions about school before 8 AM; it would only be worse when she wasn’t actually going to school.
Last night, as the hours passed and sleep continued to evade her, she’d lain in bed obsessing over the phone call she’d had with Emerson. Sean couldn’t be the darer. Before her death, Tricia had been messing with him almost as much as she’d been messing with them: cheating on him, or at the very least meeting up with someone behind his back. Someone with a blocked number. That was the person who knew the most about Tricia. That was the person they wanted.
Guinness was still an option. Sydney kept swearing it was impossible, but she’d agreed to look into it. They knew their best bet was to get into Tricia’s bedroom to search for clues, but right now there was no way to. The Suttons had left town after Tricia’s funeral, and they still hadn’t returned. Their house was locked up tight; Emerson had checked.
That left only one other lead: the toy train Caitlin had seen in her kidnapper’s basement. The darer clearly didn’t want Tenley to know who Caitlin’s kidnapper was. Which of course meant she had to know. If she could just find the kidnapper, it would lead her straight to their darer. She could feel it in her bones.
Around two in the morning Tenley had made a decision. She’d promised Sydney she’d leave Joey Bakersfield out of this, but how could she? He was the only connection she could find to that train. She had no choice; she had to go to Danford Academy to talk to him. Even if it meant skipping school to do it.
Now she padded as quietly as she could down the slate-tiled hallway, clutching the box of bright pink pepper spray bottles against her chest. They’d arrived last night and she planned to distribute them as soon as she got back from Danford today. She squeezed the box a little tighter. Just knowing she had some kind of protection made her feel a little safer.
As she passed by the dining room, she could hear her mom’s voice floating out, lecturing Lanson on the latest TV special she’d seen about the Lost Girls. “In the past ten years, there have been more teenage deaths in Echo Bay than in any other town on the North Shore!” she was saying. Tenley could just picture her: painted lips pursed, double Ds spilling out as she leaned over the table. “It’s an epidemic!”