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To Lanie
Cherish those who seek the truth
but beware of those who find it.
—VOLTAIRE
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Dead Like Me
1
Don’t Feed the Earthlings
2
To Grandmother’s House We Go
3
Volleying with the Enemy
4
The Ungiving Tree
5
The Devious Four
6
Evidence Locker
7
Can You Hear Me Now?
8
A Brush with Danger
9
That’s One Way to Win
10
Smoking Gun
11
Too Hot to Handle
12
Track Meet
13
Grandmothers Know Best
14
Racketeering
15
The Birthday Surprise
16
Another One Bites the Dust
17
Hit and Run
18
Watch Your Back
19
One Big Unhappy Family
20
Where It All Began
21
Wandering Minds
22
Play Along
23
The Rattlesnake in the Room
24
Mano a Mano
25
Midnight Snack
26
Call the Doctor
27
This Means War
28
Breaking and Entering
29
Motel Hell
30
Diner Dash
31
A Fateful Goodbye
32
Grandfather Clause
33
She’s Back
34
Mama Drama
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Sara Shepard
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
DEAD LIKE ME
I’d always thought the afterlife would be like an eternal stay at a resort on St. Barts—hot French waiters bringing me fruity drinks until the end of time, the azure Caribbean sky in a permanent sunset, a cool ocean breeze tickling my forever tanned skin. It would be my reward for living a full, fabulous, long life.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Instead I died days before my eighteenth birthday and what was supposed to be an amazing senior year. And rather than sipping a mojito on a white-sand beach, I woke up in Las Vegas, tethered to a twin sister I never knew I had. I watched as Emma Paxton was forced into my life and had to begin impersonating me. I watched as she sat at my place at the table with my family and giggled with my friends, pretending she’d known them forever. I watched her read my journal, sleep in my bed, and try to figure out who killed me.
And I seemed to be stuck here until further notice. Everywhere Emma went, I went, too. Everything she knew, I knew as well—the problem was, I didn’t know much beyond that. My life before I died was a question mark. Certain things have come back to me—like how I wasn’t exactly the nicest girl at Hollier High, how I took for granted all the things I’d been given in life, and how I’d made plenty of enemies by playing vicious pranks on people who didn’t deserve it. But everything else was a blank, including how I died, and who murdered me.
One thing I did know was that my killer was now watching Emma’s every move right along with me, making sure that she plays along. I was a breath away when Emma found a note saying I was dead and warning her that if she didn’t pretend to be me, she’d be dead, too. I felt the stars explode behind Emma’s eyes when she was nearly strangled during a sleepover at my best friend Charlotte’s house. I had a front-row seat when a light fixture in the school’s auditorium careened toward her head. They were all warnings. My killer had been so close. And yet, neither of us had seen who it was.
It was up to my twin to catch my killer, and there was nothing I could do to help. It wasn’t like I could communicate with her. Emma had cleared my best friends, Charlotte Chamberlain, Madeline Vega, and Gabby and Lili Fiorello, as murder suspects—they each had alibis for the night of my death. But the alibi she’d been counting on to clear my adoptive little sister, Laurel, suddenly wasn’t so airtight.
Now I watched as my family sat on chaise lounges at the local country club, shading their eyes from the brutal Tucson sun. Emma settled into a seat next to Laurel and buried her nose in a magazine, but I could tell she was studying my sister as closely as I was.
Laurel pored over a leather-bound beverage menu through the shade of thick black Gucci sunglasses, then casually rubbed a dollop of tanning oil on her shoulders as though she didn’t have a care in the world. Fury streaked through me. I’ll never feel the sun on my skin again and it might be because of her. She had a motive, after all. We shared a secret crush—and I was the one who got Thayer in the end.
My mother pulled her BlackBerry from her straw Kate Spade beach tote. “You won’t believe the way the RSVPs are pouring in for Saturday, Ted,” she murmured, staring at the screen. “It looks like you’ll be turning fifty-five with a bang.”
“Mm-hmm,” my dad said absently. It was unclear whether he really heard her. He was too busy looking across the pool at a tall, muscular boy running a hand through his dark hair.
Speak of the devil. Thayer Vega himself.