by Sara Shepard
Emily gasped. Spencer looked confused. Hanna snatched the ring from Aria’s palm and held it to the light above Spencer’s bed. “Maybe it fell off Ian’s finger when he escaped?”
“What should we do with it?” Emily asked. “Turn it in to the cops?”
“Definitely not,” Spencer said. “It seems a little convenient that we see Ian’s body in the woods, make the cops search the place, they find nothing, and then voila! We find a ring just like that. It makes us look suspicious. You probably shouldn’t have picked it up at all. It’s evidence.”
Aria crossed her arms over her Fair Isle sweater. “How was I supposed to know that? So what should I do? Put it back where I found it?”
“No,” Spencer instructed. “The cops will be mobbing those woods again because of the fire. They might notice you putting it back and ask questions. Just hold on to it for now, I guess.”
Emily shifted impatiently in the little chair. “You saw Ali after you found the ring. Right, Aria?”
“I’m not sure,” Aria admitted. She tried to think about those frantic minutes in the woods. They were growing blurrier and blurrier. “I never actually touched her. . . .”
Emily stood up. “What is wrong with you guys? Why do you suddenly not believe what we saw?”
“Em,” Spencer said gently. “You’re getting really emotional.”
“I am not!” Emily cried. Her cheeks flushed bright pink, making her freckles stand out.
They were interrupted by a loud, squawking alarm in an adjacent room. Nurses yelled. There were frantic footsteps. A sick feeling welled in Aria’s stomach. She wondered if it was the alarm warning that someone was dying.
A few moments later, the wing fell silent again. Spencer cleared her throat. “The most important thing is figuring out who set that fire. That’s what the cops need to concentrate on right now. Someone tried to kill us last night.”
“Not just someone,” Hanna whispered. “Them.”
Spencer looked at Aria. “We got in touch with Ian in the barn. He told us everything. He’s sure Jason and Wilden did it. Everything we talked about last night is true, and they’re definitely out to keep us quiet.”
Aria’s chest heaved, remembering something else. “When I was in the woods, I saw someone set the fire.”
Spencer sat up even more, her eyes saucers. “What?”
“Did you see their face?” Hanna exclaimed.
“I don’t know.” Aria shut her eyes, calling back the horrible memory. Moments after she’d found Ian’s ring, she’d seen someone skulking through the woods only a few paces ahead of her, his hood pulled tight and his face in the shadows. Instantly, she felt in her bones that it was someone she knew. When she realized what he was doing, her limbs froze. She felt powerless to stop him. In seconds, the flames were speeding along the forest floor, making a hungry beeline for her feet.
She felt her friends’ stares, waiting for her answer. “Whoever it was had a hood on,” Aria admitted. “But I’m pretty sure it was . . .”
Then she trailed off at the sound of a loud, long creak. Slowly, the door to Spencer’s hospital room swung open. A figure emerged in the doorway, his body backlit in the bright hall. When Aria saw his face, her heart jumped to her throat. Don’t pass out, she told herself, instantly feeling woozy. It was one of the people A had warned them about. The person Aria was almost certain she’d seen in the woods. One of Ali’s killers.
Officer Darren Wilden.
“Hello, girls.” Wilden strutted through the door. His green eyes were bright, and his handsome, angular face was chapped from the cold. His Rosewood police uniform fit him snugly, showing off how in shape he was.
Then he paused at the edge of Spencer’s bed, finally noticing the girls’ unwelcoming expressions. “What?”
They exchanged terrified glances. Finally, Spencer cleared her throat. “We know what you did.”
Wilden leaned against the bed frame, careful not to bump into Spencer’s IV fluids. “Excuse me?”
“I just called for the nurse,” Spencer said in a louder, more projected voice, the one she often used when she was on stage for the Rosewood Day drama club. “She’ll call security before you can hurt us. We know you set that fire. And we know why.”
Deep creases etched Wilden’s forehead. A vein bulged in his neck. Aria’s heart beat so loudly it drowned out all the other sounds in the room. No one moved. The longer Wilden glared at them, the tenser Aria felt.
Finally, Wilden shifted his weight. “The fire in the woods?” He let out a dubious sniff. “Are you serious?”
“I saw you buying propane at Home Depot,” Hanna said shakily, her shoulders rigid. “You were putting three jugs into the car, easily enough to burn those woods. And why weren’t you on the scene after the fire? Every other Rosewood cop was.”
“I saw your car speeding away from Spencer’s house,” Emily piped up, curling her knees into her chest. “Like you were fleeing the scene of the crime.”
Aria sneaked a peek at Emily, uncertain. She hadn’t noticed a cop car leaving Spencer’s house last night.
Wilden leaned against the little metal sink in the corner. “Girls. Why would I set fire to those woods?”
“You were covering up what you did to Ali,” Spencer said. “You and Jason.”
Emily turned to Spencer. “He didn’t do anything to Ali. Ali’s alive.”
Wilden jerked and glanced at Emily for a moment. Then he appraised the other girls, a look of betrayal on his face. “You really believe I tried to hurt you?” he asked them. The girls nodded almost imperceptibly. Wilden shook his head. “But I’m trying to help you!” When there was still no response, he sighed. “Jesus. Fine. I was with my uncle last night when the fire broke out. I lived with him in high school, and he’s really sick.” He shoved his hands into his jacket pockets and whipped out a piece of paper. “Here.”
Aria and the others leaned over. It was a receipt from CVS. “I was picking up a prescription for my uncle at nine fifty-seven, and I heard the fire started around ten,” Wilden said. “I’m probably even on the drugstore’s security camera. How could I be in two places at once?”
The room suddenly smelled pungently of Wilden’s musky cologne, making Aria woozy. Was it possible Wilden wasn’t the guy she’d seen in the woods lighting the fire?
“And as for the propane,” Wilden went on, touching the large bouquet of flowers that sat on Spencer’s nightstand, “Jason DiLaurentis asked me to buy it for his lake house in the Poconos. He’s been busy, and we’re old friends, so I said I’d do it for him.”
Aria glanced at the others, taken aback by Wilden’s nonchalance. Last night, finding out that Jason and Wilden were friends had seemed like a huge breakthrough, a secret busted open. Now, in the light of day, with his open admission, it didn’t seem to matter very much at all.
“And as for what Jason and I did to Alison . . .” Wilden trailed off, stopping by a little tray on wheels that held a small pitcher of water and two foam cups. He looked dumbstruck. “It’s crazy to think I’d hurt her. And Jason’s her brother! You really think he’s capable of that?”
Aria opened her mouth to protest. Last night, Emily had found a sign-in ledger from when the Radley was a mental hospital with Jason DiLaurentis’s name all through it. New A had also teased Aria that Jason was hiding something—possibly about issues with Ali—and tipped off Emily that Jenna and Jason were fighting in Jenna’s window. Aria hadn’t wanted to believe that Jason was guilty—she’d gone on a few dates with him the week before, fulfilling a longtime crush—but Jason had flown off the handle when Aria had gone to his apartment in Yarmouth on Friday.
Wilden was shaking his head with utter disbelief. He seemed so blindsided by all this, which made Aria wonder if anything A had led them to believe was even remotely true. She gazed questioningly at her friends. Their faces were laced with doubt, too.
Wilden shut Spencer’s door, then turned around and glared at them. “Let me guess,” he
said in a low voice. “Did your New A plant these ideas in your heads?”
“A is real,” Emily insisted. Time and again, Wilden had insisted that New A was nothing more than a copycat. “A took pictures of you, too,” she went on. She rifled through her pocket, pulled out her phone, and scrolled to the picture message of Wilden going to confession. Aria caught sight of A’s accompanying note: What’s he so guilty about? “See?” Emily dangled it under his nose.
Wilden stared at the screen. His expression didn’t change. “I didn’t know it was a crime to go to church.”
Scowling, Emily stuffed her phone back into her swim bag. A long pause followed. Wilden pinched the flap of skin at the bridge of his long, sloped nose. It seemed like all the air in the room had seeped out the windows. “Look. I need to tell you what I really came in here for.” His irises were so dark they looked black. “You girls have to stop saying you saw Alison.”
Everyone exchanged a startled glance. Spencer looked a bit vindicated, raising a perfectly arched eyebrow as if to say, I told you so. Predictably, Emily was the first to speak. “You want us to lie?”
“You didn’t see her.” Wilden’s voice was gruff. “If you keep saying you did, it’s going to bring a lot of unwanted attention on you. You think the backlash was bad when you said you saw Ian’s body? This will be ten times worse.”
Aria shifted her weight, fiddling with the cuff of her hooded sweater. Wilden was speaking to them like he was a South Philly cop and they were meth dealers. But what had they done that was so wrong?
“This isn’t fair,” Emily protested. “She needs our help.”
Wilden raised his hands to the white popcorn ceiling in defeat. His sleeves were rolled to his elbows, revealing a tattoo of an eight-pointed star. Emily was glancing at the star too. From her narrowed eyes and wrinkled nose, Aria guessed she wasn’t a fan.
“I’m going to tell you something that’s supposed to be top secret,” Wilden said, lowering his voice. “The DNA results for the body the workers found in the hole are at the station. It’s a perfect match for Alison, girls. She’s dead. So do what I say, okay? I really am looking out for your best interest.”
At that, he flipped open his phone, strode out of the room, and slammed the door hard. The foam cups on the food tray wobbled precariously. Aria turned back to her friends. Spencer’s lips were pressed together fretfully. Hanna chewed anxiously on a thumbnail. Emily blinked her round, green eyes, stunned into speechlessness.
“So now what?” Aria whispered.
Emily whimpered, Spencer fiddled with her IV, and Hanna looked like she was going to keel over. All their perfectly crafted theories had gone up in smoke—literally. Maybe Wilden hadn’t set the fire—but Aria had seen someone out there in the woods. Which unfortunately meant only one thing.
Whoever had lit that match was still out there. Whoever had tried to kill them was still on the loose, maybe waiting for a chance to try it again.
Chapter 3 If Only Someone had Scammed Spencer Years Ago . . .
As the dim, midwinter Sunday sun disappeared over the horizon, Spencer stood in her family’s backyard, surveying the fire’s destruction. Her mother stood next to her; her eye makeup was smudged, her foundation blotchy, and her hair limp—she hadn’t gotten her daily blowout from Uri, her hairdresser, this morning. Spencer’s dad was there too, for once without his Bluetooth headset fastened to his ear. His mouth wobbled slightly, as if he was trying to hold in a sob.
Everything around them was ruined. The towering, old-growth trees were blackened and battered, and a stinky gray haze hung over the treetops. The family’s windmill was now not much more than a carcass, the blades charred, the latticework splintered and crumbled. The Hastingses’ lawn was crisscrossed with tire treads from the emergency vehicles that had rushed to the fire. Cigarette butts, empty Starbucks cups, and even a drained can of beer were strewn across the grass, remnants of the rubberneckers who had swarmed the scene and lingered long after Spencer and the others had been taken to the ER.
But the worst, most heartbreaking result of the fire was what it had done to the family’s barn apartment, which had been standing since 1756. Half the structure was still intact, though the wood siding, once cherry red, was now a charred, toxic gray. Most of the roof was missing, all of the leaded glass in the windows had blown out, and the front door was a pile of ash. Spencer could see straight through the empty shell into the barn’s great room. There was a huge puddle of water on the Brazilian cherrywood floor, left over from the gallons of water the firemen had pumped into the barn. The four-poster bed, plush leather couch, and mahogany coffee table were ruined. So was the desk where Spencer, Emily, and Hanna had gathered just the night before, IMing Ian about who really killed Ali.
Only, it looked like Jason and Wilden weren’t Ali’s murderers. Which meant Spencer was back to knowing absolutely nothing.
She turned away from the barn, her eyes tearing up from the gas fumes. Closer to the house was the spot where she and her friends had collapsed on the lawn after running from the flames. Like the rest of the yard, it was littered with trash and soot, and the grass was scrubby and dead. There was nothing special about it at all, no magical indication that Ali had been there. Then again, Ali hadn’t been there—they’d hallucinated her. It had been nothing more than a side effect of inhaling too much smoke. Workers had found her decomposed body in the DiLaurentises’ old backyard months ago.
“I’m so sorry,” Spencer whispered as a piece of red roofing dislodged itself from the barn and tumbled to the ground with a thud.
Slowly, Mrs. Hastings reached out and grabbed Spencer’s hand. Mr. Hastings touched her shoulder. Before Spencer knew it, both her parents were wrapping their arms around her, engulfing her in a shaking, blubbering hug. “I don’t know what we would have done if something had happened to you,” Mrs. Hastings cried.
“When we saw the fire, and then when we heard you might be hurt . . .” Mr. Hastings trailed off.
“None of this matters,” Mrs. Hastings went on, her voice thick with sobs. “All of this could’ve burned down. At least we still have you.”
Spencer clung to her parents, her breath catching in her bruised throat.
In the past twenty-four hours, her parents had been beyond wonderful to her. They’d sat by her hospital bed all night, hyper-vigilantly watching Spencer’s chest rise and fall with every ragged breath. They’d bugged the nurses about getting Spencer water as soon as she wanted it, pain pills as soon as she needed them, and warmer blankets when she felt cold. When the doctor discharged her this afternoon, they’d taken her to the Creamery, her favorite ice cream parlor in Old Hollis, and bought her a double scoop of maple chip. It was a big change—for years, they’d treated her like the unwanted kid they begrudgingly let live in their home. And when she’d recently come clean about plagiarizing her award-winning Golden Orchid essay from her perfect sister, Melissa, they’d basically excommunicated her.
Only now there really was a reason for them to hate her, and the minute Spencer told them, their concern, their rare show of love, would vanish. Spencer squeezed them hard, savoring the very last moment they’d probably ever speak to her again. She’d put this off for as long as she possibly could, but she had to tell them sometime.
She stepped back and squared her shoulders. “There’s something you need to know,” she admitted, her voice hoarse from the smoky air.
“Is it about Alison?” Mrs. Hastings’s voice swooped. “Because, Spence—”
Spencer shook her head, cutting her off. “No. Something else.”
She gazed at the blackened branches high in the sky. Then the truth spilled out in rapid succession. How, after Spencer’s grandmother, Nana Hastings, didn’t leave Spencer any money in her will, Melissa suggested Spencer might have been adopted. How Spencer registered with an online adoption site and just days later received a message that her birth mother had been found. How her visit with Olivia Caldwell in New York had been so wonderful th
at Spencer decided she wanted to move to the city permanently. Spencer just kept talking, afraid that if she stopped, she’d burst into tears. She didn’t dare look at her parents, either, for fear their devastated expressions would break her heart.
“She had left behind her real estate agent’s card, so I called and gave him my college savings account number to cover the security deposit and first month’s rent,” Spencer went on, curling her toes inside her gray suede slouch boots. She could barely get the words out.
A squirrel scuttled in the grimy underbrush. Her father groaned. Her mother squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her hand to her forehead. Spencer’s heart sank. Here we go. Commence Operation: You’re Not Our Daughter Anymore. “You can guess what happened next.” She sighed, gazing at a tall birdhouse near the deck. Not a single bird had approached it since they’d been out here. “The broker was obviously working with Olivia, and they cleaned out the account and disappeared.” She swallowed hard.
The backyard was silent and still. Now that the sunlight was almost gone, the barn looked like a ghost town relic, the dark windows like hollow eye sockets in a skull. Spencer sneaked a peek at her parents. Her dad was pale. Her mom sucked in her cheeks, as if she’d swallowed something sour. They exchanged a nervous look, then checked the front yard, perhaps scanning for press vans. Reporters had been pulling up to the house all day, grilling Spencer about whether she’d really seen Ali.
Her dad took a deep breath. “Spencer, the money doesn’t matter.”
Spencer blinked, startled.
“We can trace what happened to it,” Mr. Hastings explained, wringing his hands. “It’s possible we’ll be able to get it back.” He gazed off at the weather vane on top of the roof. “But . . . well, we should have seen it coming too.”
Spencer frowned, wondering if her brain was screwed up from inhaling residual fumes from the fire. “W-what?”
