Stunning

31 THE TRUTH COMES OUT

Emily stared at Gayle’s inert features, her pale skin, and the blood seeping out of her head. A shrill noise rang in her ears, and it took her a few seconds to realize it was the sound of her own screams. She spun around and bent over, dry-heaving on the grass.

The sound of sirens roared closer, and a car purred up the drive. It was Spencer. She slammed the door and took a few steps toward them, a confused look on her face. Then she saw Gayle’s figure on the ground and stopped short. Her face registered a series of emotions—surprise, horror, fear—in a split second. “Oh my God,” she screamed. “Is that . . . ?”

“Gayle,” Emily croaked, her voice quavering.

Spencer looked like she was going to be sick. “What happened?”

“We’re not sure.” Tears ran down Aria’s face. “We came out into the courtyard because we heard a baby crying, there was all this fog, we heard footsteps, and then something that sounded like a gunshot, and then . . .”

Police cars blazed up the street, and the girls froze. The vehicles sped up the driveway and screeched to a stop behind Spencer’s car. Hanna’s mouth dropped open. Spencer instinctively raised her hands in surrender. Emily took a big step away from Gayle’s body.

The doors to the police cars opened, and four cops jumped out. Two of them rushed to the fallen body, requesting for backup, while the other two stalked over to Emily and her friends. “What the hell is going on here?”

Emily stared up at the cop who’d spoken. He had spiky blond hair, acne scars, and wore a shiny gold Lieutenant’s badge that said LOWRY. “We didn’t do this!”

“We can explain!” Aria shouted at the same time.

Lowry twisted around and stared into the darkness beyond the police cars. “Where’s the person who called this in?”

“I’m here,” a voice responded.

Another figure emerged through the fog. Emily presumed it would be a neighbor, but then she noticed the guy’s black tuxedo, shiny shoes, and shoulder-length brown hair. Her stomach dropped to her feet. It was Isaac.

“W-what are you doing here?” Emily sputtered.

Isaac stared at her. “I followed you—I was worried about you. Then I heard the gunshot, so I called the cops.”

Emily’s head whirled. “You had no right to follow me! This is private!”

“If you would have told me what was going on I wouldn’t have!” Isaac’s voice cracked. “I was afraid you were in trouble!” His gaze fell to Gayle’s body, and his mouth wobbled.

Lowry snatched his walkie-talkie from his belt and checked in on the backup and ambulance. Then he looked at the girls. “Do you know who this woman is?”

“Her name is Gayle Riggs,” Aria said in a small voice.

Lowry stared, chewing his gum hard. “Were you trying to rob her?”

“Of course not!” Emily cried. “We were just . . . here! Someone else did this!” She looked at Isaac. “Tell him I wouldn’t do something like this.”

Isaac rolled his jaw. “Well, I didn’t actually see what happened—the fog was too thick. But Emily wouldn’t do something like this, Officers. She’s not a killer.”

The guy who was holding Spencer snorted. “People can surprise you.”

Lowry chomped on his gum and stared at Emily. “You want to explain what you are doing here?”

Emily glanced guiltily at Isaac. The whirling lights on top of the cop car cast blue and red lights across his face. He was still looking at her with loving concern. “It’s personal.”

Lowry looked annoyed. “If you can’t explain why you’re here, we’ll have to bring you into the station as suspects.”

Her friends gasped beside her. Emily’s stomach clenched. Could she seriously allow them to be accused of a crime they didn’t commit just to keep her secret?

She cleared her throat. “I’m here because I thought my baby was in danger. I thought she’d been kidnapped. We didn’t know Gayle Riggs lived here—we just got a tip that the baby was at this address.”

Isaac’s eyes bugged. “What baby?”

Lowering her eyes, Emily took the deepest breath ever. “I had a baby girl this summer.” She said the words very fast.

Isaac looked stunned. “You did?”

She nodded. “She’s yours, Isaac.”

For a moment, everything in the world went still. Isaac scrunched up his face. “Uh . . . what?”

“It’s true.” Emily’s voice trembled. “I found out several months after we broke up. I hid in Philly last summer and looked into giving the baby up for adoption. I met Gayle, and she was interested in adopting the baby, but I decided that I wanted to give the baby to someone else. Afterward, Gayle made threats that sounded like she might try to steal the baby from the new family. So when I got the tip that the baby was here, I dragged my friends along to see if it was true.” Emily figured this was as close to the truth as she could get. “And we really thought she was here—we heard a baby crying. But then it . . . stopped. We didn’t do anything to hurt Gayle, though,” she added. “And don’t punish my friends. It’s because of me that they’re here.”

When she was finished, her throat was raw and she felt like she’d just swum the English Channel. Isaac’s expression morphed from disbelief to confusion to anger all in the matter of a few seconds. “A . . . baby?” he squeaked out, his voice cracking. “A girl?”

“Yes.” Emily felt tears in her eyes.

Isaac ran his hand over the top of his head. “Unbelievable.” He took a step to the right, then a tottering lurch to the left. All of a sudden, he turned around and staggered toward the other two cops, his posture stiff. Emily stepped forward to go after him, but Hanna touched the small of her back.

“Leave him alone,” she whispered.

Seconds later, more police cars, an ambulance, and a fire truck roared up the drive. Cops leapt from the cars and set up a perimeter around the crime scene. A detective in a gray jacket pulled out a camera and took photos of Gayle’s lifeless figure. A man in a coat that said CORONER on the back examined the body, making sure she was indeed dead. Police dogs yapped on their leashes, saliva dripping off their jaws. The sirens blared relentlessly, giving Emily a headache.

The cop next to Aria, a big burly guy with a bald head, turned to Emily. “You really expect us to believe your story?” he asked.

“It’s the truth.” Emily felt defeated. “You can look up my medical records from Jefferson Hospital.”

“Why didn’t you come to the police when Ms. Riggs allegedly made these threats?”

Emily glanced at her friends. Spencer cleared her throat. “She didn’t want her parents to know she was pregnant,” she said. “She thought she could handle things herself.”

“And what about this tip you received, saying the baby was here? Who wrote that?”

Emily’s stomach flipped. The last thing she wanted to do was tell the cops about A. “I guess it was a hoax. Someone messing with us.”

“So why is Ms. Riggs dead?” Lowry snapped.

“I have no idea,” Emily whispered.

“So you don’t know where that came from?” Lowry pointed at something on the ground.

Emily followed his finger. Lying next to Gayle’s elbow was a black gun. It blended in with the dark pavement. She jumped away from it as though it were a rattlesnake. “Oh my God.”

“We heard that go off,” Aria said.

“Did you see who shot it?” Lowry asked.

Everyone exchanged a helpless look. “The fog was too thick,” Emily said. “All we heard were footsteps.”

“I saw someone run in front of my car,” Spencer offered, “but I didn’t see a face.”

Lowry snatched the gun with two gloved fingers, placed it into a plastic bag, and handed it to one of the detectives. The man tapped something into a laptop. Emily shivered next to her friends, trying to convey what she was thinking without speaking. How had this happened? And who killed Gayle? Was it completely unrelated to us or the baby?

Or, Emily thought with a shiver, what if the killer was absolutely related? Was it possible Gayle wasn’t A after all? Was it possible that A had killed Gayle?

But why?

After a few torturous minutes, the detective returned to the girls. “Okay. The weapon was registered to a Gayle Riggs. According to the records, it hadn’t been stolen. Whoever shot it must have taken it from her house.”

The cop holding Aria jutted a thumb into the darkness. “Isaac saw you girls go into the house. Coincidence?”

“Yes,” Aria said weakly. “It was someone else.”

Lowry glanced at Gayle’s body on the ground, which was now covered with a sheet. “We’ll run fingerprints on the gun. The results should take a few hours.” Then he glanced at the girls. “Until then, you four are coming with us.”