Secrets and Lies(51)

Emerson should be there. She should be laughing with her friends and turning down Ben Wiley’s five thousandth request to dance. She closed her eyes, trying not to scream. The darer had taken everything from her. Caitlin, Holden, her privacy, and now any semblance of normal. A steely resolve settled over her as she opened her eyes. Tenley was right. As soon as they took care of her leg, they had to find Delancey. They had to get answers once and for all.

Most of the lights were on in Tenley’s house when they pulled into the driveway, making the whole place glimmer in the night. Sydney let out a low whistle. “I always forget you live in fairy-tale land,” she said.

Emerson stared out at the mansion, with its turrets and columns, its windows that seemed to stack up to the sky. “That’s my life,” Tenley replied. “A real fairy tale.”

The lawn was a blanket of leaves. They crunched under Emerson’s heels as she crossed it. A breeze blew in from the ocean, and she pulled her coat tighter around her.

“In and out,” Tenley declared. The ocean clapped behind them, punctuating her words. It made Emerson think of Caitlin, how she used to sleep with her window open so she could fall asleep to the sound, her own personal lullaby. The memory made her feel even worse, and she picked up her pace, hurrying toward Tenley’s front porch.

They were nearly there when Tenley grabbed Emerson’s hand, her fingers cold against her skin. “Hold on.” Tenley reached for Sydney on the other side, making them all stop short. “Do you see that?” She nodded to the woods behind her house. Tiny pinpricks of light shone through the trees, casting patterns across the grass.

“Lights?” Emerson shifted from foot to foot, trying to stay warm. “So?”

“We don’t have lights back there,” Tenley said. Her nails dug into Emerson’s hand. “Lanson is obsessed with keeping the woods all pristine. He didn’t even have lights on the lawn until my mom and I moved in and she put her foot down.”

“Maybe your mom put her foot down about the woods, too,” Sydney offered.

“If she did, it happened today, because there were no lights out there last night.” Tenley paused. She was watching the trees sway in the breeze, momentarily eclipsing the lights. “Maybe someone’s back there with a flashlight or something. What if it’s Delancey? Maybe she came to hide from the darer, and wait for us!”

Emerson tensed. She’d heard that voice from Tenley before. A plan almost always followed.

“We’re going back there.” It was a statement, not a question. Tenley started forward, pulling them with her.

“Ow.” Emerson wriggled her hand out of Tenley’s grip. “You are freakishly strong for someone so tiny,” she grumbled.

Tenley laughed, but it was so choked it sounded more like a cough. “You try swinging on uneven bars for ten years.”

The ground crunched and rustled beneath them as they neared the woods. “I don’t know about this.…” Sydney murmured. “We should really take care of your leg, Tenley.”

Tenley ignored her. She paused at the edge of the yard and reached into her purse. Out came her small pink bottle of pepper spray. Wielding it in front of her, she limped into the woods.

Emerson looked at Sydney. Sydney looked at Emerson. “I guess we’re going with her,” Sydney said.

Emerson dug her own pepper spray out of her purse. With a sigh, Sydney did the same. Holding tightly to their pink bottles, they followed Tenley into the woods.

The world seemed to still inside the thicket. Trees draped over them like a tent, making the house and road feel miles away. “This way,” Tenley whispered. She pushed aside some brush and stepped over a fallen log, following the thin stream of light.

“I bet your mom is just having lights installed,” Emerson insisted. A bush snagged at her ankle as she struggled to keep up with Tenley.

“I vote we turn back and get a bandage,” Sydney chimed in. She sounded impatient as she kicked several sticks out of the way.

“I’m on Sydney’s side,” Emerson said. She raised her voice as Tenley powered ahead, ducking under a low-hanging branch. “We need to concentrate on—”

An earth-shattering scream drowned out the rest of her sentence.

For a split second Emerson and Sydney just stared at each other. Then they surged forward at the same time, racing after Tenley. A branch slapped against Emerson’s back but she barely felt it. She emerged into a small clearing. In the middle of it stood an old, worn gazebo. It had clearly been unused for a long time, but someone had strung white Christmas lights along its beams and rafters. With the lights twinkling prettily and the gold-hued trees sweeping overhead, it might almost look like a Christmas card. If it weren’t for what was inside.

Hanging from the beams, strung up by their own marionette strings, were the Purity Club’s life-size puppets. They’d been slashed open down the middle, leaving their insides gaping and exposed. Across two of their faces, names had been scrawled in red marker. DELANCEY. TRICIA.

Hanging in the center of them, looking like a doll herself with her long curls and porcelain skin, was Delancey Crane.

“No.” Emerson tripped away from the horrifying sight. Her eyes rebelled, clamping shut, but it didn’t matter. The image had been stamped behind her eyelids: Delancey, a rope snug around her neck, her feet dangling over a stool, her head twisted into an unnatural position. And her eyes: wide open, as if something had shocked her in her very last breath.

Distantly, Emerson could hear Sydney crying, Tenley gagging. Someone kept whimpering: oh my god oh my god oh my god. It took Emerson a second to realize it was her. “You guys…” It was Sydney’s voice. “Look at this.”

Emerson wrenched open her eyes. The world seemed to cycle around her, ground-sky-ground-sky. She clutched a twinkling beam to steady herself. Sydney was standing in front of one of the purity puppets, the one marked Delancey. Pinned to it was a small note. Silently, Sydney pulled it down. Her face went ghostly white as she read it. She passed it to Tenley, who made a small moan before handing it to Emerson. Emerson’s stomach heaved as her eyes landed on the typewriter font.


It’s easy to find the puppets--and even easier to silence them. Utter a word to the cops and you’ll be the next to hang.



Tenley staggered backward. “Delancey was just a pawn.”

“And so was Tricia,” Sydney whispered. Tears were streaming down her face. “Someone else was controlling them all along.”

Emerson looked frantically from puppet to puppet. Her gaze landed on Delancey’s hanging form. She buckled over, unable to breathe. The game wasn’t over. Delancey had been right: It never would be. People would keep dying, one after another, until finally it was her turn. She would never be free. She would never escape.

She forced herself to look up. The same naked terror was inscribed on her friends’ faces. “Then the question is,” she choked out, “who’s the one holding the strings?”





CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE


Sunday, 9:30 AM


“Breakfast is ready.” Sahara bustled into the dining room, carrying a tray stacked high with blueberry pancakes. Tenley pounced on it the instant it hit the table. The promise of food was the only thing keeping her from crawling back into bed and never coming out again.

Last night was already a black web in her mind. The ambulance coming for Delancey. The EMTs pronouncing her dead. The cops sweeping in, wrapping the gazebo in yellow tape. And through it all, the sharp, stinging undercurrent of fear. The darer had done this.

By the time it was all over, it was midnight. Emerson and Sydney had decided to sleep at Tenley’s house rather than go home alone. Which, of course, meant they’d stayed up for hours more, obsessing over who the master darer could be.

On the other side of the table, Sydney pulled something out of her pocket. It was the darer’s note, crumpled and worn from being passed among them so many times. She slapped it down on the table, typewriter font up. “I say we shred this,” she declared.

Emerson pushed her food around on her plate. “We could still bring it to the cops,” she said halfheartedly.

“We could also dig our own graves,” Tenley offered. She shoveled a bite of pancake into her mouth and chewed furiously. She wondered if they were all thinking what she was: that she already had.

When the pair of cops had shown up last night, chock-full of suicide theories, Tenley had snapped. Delancey hadn’t killed herself. She’d been murdered. She’d been taunted, tortured, tied in strings, and made to dance. And when her performance grew old, she’d been strung up and left to hang. And the cops were blaming her.

Fury had roared inside of Tenley, impossible to control. “It wasn’t suicide!” she yelled. “She was killed! Someone did this to her. We have the text messages on her phone to prove it!”

Immediately she shrank back, regretting it. Utter a word to the cops and you’ll be the next to hang. She’d gone against the darer’s wishes, and now the words were out in the world, impossible to erase. Emerson recoiled and Sydney’s face turned green and they all stood immobilized, time hanging in suspension as they waited for the cops to react.