Seconds later, Becky’s body relaxed. Her eyes unfocused and her head lolled to face the wall.
“Thank you, Dr. Banerjee,” Mr. Mercer said wearily.
Emma looked up at the doctor in surprise—it was Nisha’s father, a short man with a round face, thick glasses, and a sad expression. His wife had passed away not long ago. Every time Emma had seen him, he’d looked so lost.
Dr. Banerjee ushered Mr. Mercer and Emma out of the room. “Let’s go into the hall so she can rest.”
“You’re just going to leave the restraints on her?” Emma blurted out.
Dr. Banerjee looked at her steadily. His red-rimmed eyes were magnified behind his lenses. “They’re for her own protection, Sutton. I promise, we will do our best to make her comfortable. But right now she is a danger to herself and to others.”
They followed him into the hallway. A low bench ran against the wall under the Monet print, and he gestured for them both to sit. Mr. Mercer sank onto the bench gratefully, but Emma shook her head. Dr. Banerjee turned to face them.
“This is the worst I’ve seen her in a long time,” he said, exhaling heavily. He opened a large file that had been clamped beneath his arm and rifled through it. Becky’s records, Emma realized. She glanced at Mr. Mercer questioningly.
“Dr. Banerjee has treated Becky several times over the years, when she’s been in town,” he explained.
She nodded slowly. “How did she end up in here today?” she asked Dr. Banerjee.
“She was arrested,” Nisha’s father explained.
Mr. Mercer rubbed his face, as if trying to scrub the information away. Finally, he looked up at Dr. Banerjee again. “Did she hurt anyone?”
The other man sat down across from him and took what Emma recognized as a police report from the file. “No, thankfully. She pulled a knife on a man at the mall downtown. She was confused, agitated. Several shopkeepers reported that she’d been in their stores earlier in the day asking bizarre questions. But mall security managed to get the knife from her without anyone being hurt.”
I remembered the eerie look on my mother’s face in the canyon the night we met. If she could wave a knife at someone, maybe she could do worse. Maybe she had done worse.
“When was the last time you saw her?” asked Dr. Banerjee.
Mr. Mercer shook his head. “About two months ago. She checked out of her hotel, so I assumed she’d left town, like she usually does. But then she called me from a motel just last week, so I’m not sure where she’s been.”
Dr. Banerjee wiped his glasses on the sleeve of his coat. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but she seems to have been living out of her car—the police found it in the parking lot. She’s off her medication again. I’m not sure for how long, but you know how bad she gets.”
Mr. Mercer and Dr. Banerjee continued to talk in low voices about Becky’s prognosis and a potential treatment plan, and Mr. Mercer asked whether he should talk to an attorney in case anyone at the mall pressed charges. But Emma was only half listening. She glanced back to the room that held her mother, drugged and silent. Then her eyes fell on the folder on Dr. Banerjee’s lap, bristling with medical records and arrest reports.
Emma imagined her two worlds, side by side like the twin images in a stereoscope. Was Becky her sad, beautiful mother, loving but tragic? Or was she a knife-wielding maniac, a woman so wild she deserved to be strapped to a bed? Her hands closed into fists. She wasn’t the adoring little-girl Emma anymore, and she couldn’t afford to be a bitter teenage Emma coming to terms with her mother’s sudden reappearance. She was a different person altogether. She was the Emma who’d been channeling Sutton. She was a tough and practical Emma who had to fight to survive, who had to ask difficult questions and learn truths she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. She was the Emma who was going to solve a murder, and to do that, she knew she had to find out what was in that file.
I wanted to see whatever was in that folder as badly as she did. Now she just had to figure out a way to get it.
9
WHITE LIES AND ALIBIS
It was just after midnight when Mr. Mercer pulled the car into the driveway and killed the motor. The lights were on in the kitchen—Mrs. Mercer had obviously waited up for them—but he made no move to get out of the car. He and Emma sat in silence, neither one looking directly at the other. With the AC off, the air quickly became heavy around them.
Mr. Mercer took Emma’s hand in his and squeezed. “That really wasn’t how I wanted you to meet your mother,” he said.
“Yeah,” she muttered, looking out the passenger window. She could just make out the hole Mr. Mercer had dug in the lawn before his accident. He’d been planning to plant something there, but in the dark it looked like a fresh grave.
“I’m so sorry,” Mr. Mercer went on. “It must have been hard to see her like that.”
Emma didn’t say anything. Her body felt bruised and weak. She’d always imagined she might look for her mother someday, track her down with a private investigator or maybe by herself, with her own research skills. Sometimes in her fantasies, she told Becky off for abandoning her. Sometimes she ran to her, threw her arms around her neck, and all was forgiven. But never in all her daydreams had she pictured it like this.
After a long pause, Mr. Mercer spoke again. “I’m going to visit her tomorrow. Hopefully they’ll have stabilized her a little and she’ll be more coherent. Do you want to come with me?”
Emma bit her lip. She had questions she wanted to ask Becky, but nothing she could ask in front of her grandfather. And what if Becky kept calling her Emma? Someone might start trying to figure out whom Becky was referring to. In her deluded state, Becky might say anything—even that Sutton had a twin named Emma. And then what?