“Oh, I’m sorry, Mrs. Smith.” There was a rustle of paperwork. “It looks like your account is clear through the end of the month. Will you be paying in cash again?”
Emma ended the call, lowering the phone back to her bag. Then she looked at Ethan, his eyes round and questioning.
“Get your coat,” she said. “We’re going to Rosa Linda.”
If I still had fists, I would have punched them toward the sky in excitement.
Finally, we were going to find out what was behind door number two.
27
MEMENTO MORI
Rosa Linda Storage was located on a desolate stretch of road on the outskirts of Tucson, between a run-down motel called the Flamingo and a boarded-up liquor store. A neon sign stood out front, several of the letters burnt out so that it said only OS LIN STOR. A chain-link fence wound around the property, the barbed wire dotted with incongruous red bows for the holidays.
Emma traced her sister’s initials on the key fob as Ethan pulled into the parking lot. She knew that they wouldn’t find old furniture or soccer equipment in that storage unit. Whatever it was, it had something to do with Sutton.
I knew it, too. I could feel the truth just out of my reach, like a dream that fades from memory upon waking.
Ethan parked, and they stepped out into the packed-earth courtyard. Rows of storage units, shuttered and silent, branched off into the darkness in four directions. No one else was there at that hour.
“Are you ready for this?” Ethan asked, his voice low.
“I don’t know,” Emma admitted. She took a deep breath, the dry desert air filling her lungs and calming her. “Come on,” she said, giving Ethan’s hand a squeeze. “Let’s get this over with.”
They started down the aisle of buildings hand in hand. The floodlights that lit each unit made their shadows flicker grotesquely across the ground, misshapen and eerie. Their footsteps echoed in the stillness. Farther into the desert, a coyote gave a shrill yip.
The unit numbers were painted on the doors in bright orange, starting with 100. Emma counted out loud as they walked through the aisles. “One hundred fifty,” she whispered. “Two hundred . . . three hundred . . . three fifty—it should be down here, Ethan.” She jerked her head around a corner.
Unit 356 looked like all the others, the numbers stenciled across the folding leaves in the garage-type door. Emma had leaned down to fumble at the padlock when Ethan grabbed her elbow.
“Wait,” he said, handing her a pair of knit pink gloves, which no doubt belonged to his mother, from one of the pockets in his cargo pants. From another he extracted a pair of black climbing gloves and pulled them over his own fingers.
“Good call,” Emma said, tugging on her gloves and grasping the padlock once more. The key was a perfect fit. With an almost inaudible click, the latch sprang free. Emma gripped the door’s handle—and pulled sharply up.
The inside was completely dark. She groped along the wall to find the switch, and a single fluorescent bulb hanging in the center of the unit flickered to life. The unit was large enough to hold an apartment’s worth of furniture or a few hundred boxes—but it was almost completely empty.
Almost.
In the center of the cavernous space, a single manila envelope lay on the floor just under the light. Next to it was a stuffed octopus missing one of its black button eyes. Emma knew that octopus. She’d hugged those blue knit legs countless times as a little girl, whenever she needed comfort. It was her Socktopus, one of the only things she’d brought with her from Vegas.
She slowly walked forward, picking up the stuffed animal and staring down at it. Socktopus had been in the duffel that was stolen from the bench in Sabino Canyon, her first night in Tucson. Whoever took it had acted quickly—it had only been unattended for a few minutes before she’d returned looking for it.
Ethan hung back, glancing at the open door every now and then as if afraid someone would spring out at them. “What is that?” he asked, frowning.
“My mom got it for me,” she said. Her voice sounded far away, even to her. “When I was little.”
For a moment the dingy storage unit faded, and she could feel Becky tying two of the octopus’s arms around Emma’s neck in the store so it hung down on her back like a cape. So he can protect you, Becky had explained, a rare smile lighting up her pretty face.
Emma blinked away her tears, and the dusty unit came back into focus. She tucked Socktopus under her arm, leaning down to pick up the envelope. For a moment she fumbled at the brad that held it closed, her fingers wooden and clumsy through the gloves. Then a pile of papers and photos slid out in one large stack. On top was a disc in a clear jewel case, labeled SUTTON IN AZ in red Sharpie.
“The video,” Ethan whispered.
She nodded, but she was already rifling through the pages behind the disc. There was a printout of the very first message Emma had sent Sutton. This will sound crazy, but I think we’re related. We look exactly the same, and we have the same birthday. Behind that was a page with Sutton’s e-mail and Facebook passwords. And behind that were photos—a thick stack of glossy black-and-white photos.
Emma had gotten so used to seeing Sutton’s face everywhere that for a moment, she thought the pictures were of her twin. But that wasn’t right—in the very top picture, the girl stood behind a ticket window. Emma’s heart skipped a beat. It was the New York–New York roller coaster in Vegas, where she’d worked the summer before coming to Tucson. In the picture she was busy counting change for a customer, completely unaware that someone had a lens trained on her.