Heartless pll-7

by Sara Shepard

  “Greetings,” he boomed. “My name is Equinox.”

  Aria stifled a laugh. Equinox? Come on. But next to her, Noel tipped his chair forward in rapt attention.

  Equinox spread his palms toward the ceiling. “To conjure up the spirits you’re looking for, I need everyone to close their eyes and concentrate as one.” He began to om.

  A few people—including Noel—joined in. The cold metal of the chair penetrated Aria’s wool skirt. She cracked one eye open and peeked around. Everyone was leaning forward expectantly and a few people had joined hands. Suddenly Equinox teetered backward, as if an invisible force had just shoved him. A shiver ran through Aria’s body and the air felt heavy around her. Taking a leap of faith, she omed too.

  There was a long silence. The heating ducts rattled. There were soft patterns from the floor above. Incense wafted in from the front room, sweet and pungent. Something soft and featherlike brushed very faintly across Aria’s cheek, and she jumped. When she opened her eyes, there was nothing there.

  “Goooood,” Equinox said. “Okay, we can open our eyes now. I’m feeling someone with us. Someone very close to one of you. Has anyone lost a friend?”

  Aria stiffened. Ali couldn’t be here, just like that . . . could she?

  Horrifyingly, the medium walked right to Aria and crouched down. His goatee ended in a sharp point, and he smelled faintly of pot. His eyes were wide and unblinking. “It’s you,” he said in a low voice, his lips close to her ear.

  “Um,” Aria whispered, the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end.

  “You’ve lost a special friend, haven’t you?” he asked hauntingly.

  The room was still. Aria’s heart started to pound. “Is she . . . here?” She looked around the room, expecting to see the girl she’d rescued from the fire, dressed in a sweatshirt, her face tinged with soot.

  “She’s close,” the medium assured her. He tented his fingers and clenched his jaw, as if deep in concentration. A few more seconds ticked by. The room seemed to darken. The only lights were the glow-in-the-dark digits on Noel’s IWC Aquatimer diving watch. Aria’s pulse swished in her ears. Her fingers began to tremble, almost like they were picking up a vibration. Ali’s vibration.

  “She’s telling me she knew everything about you,” Equinox said, almost teasingly.

  Aria prickled with fear—and hope. That certainly sounded like Ali. “We were best friends.”

  “But you hated that she knew everything about you,” Equinox corrected. “She knew this, too.”

  Aria gasped. Now her legs trembled in sync with her fingers. Noel shifted in his seat. “She . . . did?”

  “She knew a lot of things,” Equinox whispered. “She knew you wanted her gone. It made her very sad. Many things made her very sad.”

  Aria fluttered her hand to her mouth. All the other audience members were staring at her. She could see the whites of their wide eyes. “I didn’t want her gone,” she squeaked.

  Equinox tilted his head to the ceiling, as if it gave him a better view of Ali. “She forgives you, though. She knows she wasn’t fair to you either.”

  “Really?” Aria stammered. She pressed her palms against her knees to settle them. It was true, of course. Sometimes Ali wasn’t fair to her. Lots of times, actually.

  Equinox nodded. “She knows it wasn’t nice to steal your boyfriend. Especially since you two had been a couple for such a long time.”

  Aria cocked her head, wondering if she’d heard him wrong. A chair squeaked and an audience member coughed. “My . . . boyfriend?” she repeated. A gnawing feeling roiled in her stomach. She hadn’t had a boyfriend in seventh grade.

  Which meant this quack wasn’t talking to Ali at all.

  Aria leapt up, almost banging her head on a low-hanging lantern. She fumbled her way through the haze of incense smoke and dry ice vapor toward the exit. “Hey!” Equinox called.

  “Aria, wait!” Noel said, but she ignored them.

  A cardboard cutout of a warlock pointed the way to the store’s bathroom. Aria ran for it, slammed the door, and collapsed against the sink, not caring that she’d knocked a cake of hand-milled dragon’s blood soap to the floor. Idiot, she told herself. Of course Ali wasn’t here. Of course seances were scams. This guy had probably approached her about Ali because he’d recognized Aria from the news. What had she been thinking?

  Aria stared at her reflection in the round, streaky mirror above the sink. Her skin was milk-pale. But even though Equinox was a quack, he’d pointed out something awful—and something that was kind of true. Aria had wanted Ali gone.

  Ali had been with Aria when Aria saw her dad making out with Meredith in the Hollis parking lot in seventh grade. In the weeks after, she just wouldn’t let it drop. She cornered Aria between classes to ask her if there had been any updates. She invited herself over to Aria’s house for dinner, giving Byron damning looks and Ella sympathetic ones. Whenever the five best friends were together, Ali dropped hints that she would tell Aria’s secret any minute unless Aria did exactly what Ali wanted. Aria had reached a boiling point and, in the weeks before Ali’s death, had started to avoid her as much as possible.

  It made her very sad, the medium said. Could Ali have known how much Aria wanted her gone? A memory had popped into Aria’s mind, suddenly: The day after Ali went missing, Mrs. DiLaurentis had invited Aria and her friends over and grilled them about where Ali might have gone. At one point, Mrs. DiLaurentis leaned forward on her elbows and asked, “Did Ali ever seem . . . sad?” The girls immediately protested—Ali was beautiful and smart and irresistible. Everyone adored her. Sad wasn’t in Ali’s emotional vocabulary.

  Aria had always thought of herself as the victim and Ali the predator, but what if Ali had been going through stuff of her own? What if Ali needed someone to talk to—and Aria just pushed her away?

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, starting to weep. Clumps of mascara skidded down her cheeks. “Ali, I’m so sorry. I never wanted you to die.”

  There was a sharp sfft sound, like steam escaping from a radiator. Then the bulb over the mirror flicked off, bathing the room in darkness. Aria froze, her heart in her throat. Then, her nose twitched. There was a sudden fragrance in the air, chokingly pungent. Vanilla soap.

  Aria grabbed the sides of the sink to steady herself. Then, without warning, the light snapped back on with a sizzle. Aria’s frightened eyes stared back at her in the mirror. But her face wasn’t the only one reflected there.

  In the space behind her own ice blue eyes was a girl with a heart-shaped face, two wide, blue eyes, and a dazzling smile. Aria gasped and whirled around. Tacked to a corkboard on the back of the bathroom door, layered on top of other posters for upcoming poetry slams, futons for sale, and available rooms for rent, was a color photo of Ali.

  Aria leaned closer, Ali’s eyes drawing her in. Her breath caught in her throat. It was the Missing Persons flyer from when Ali vanished, the same picture that was splashed across milk cartons and local public service announcement commercials. MISSING, 72-point font said. ALISON DILAURENTIS. BLUE EYES, BLOND HAIR, 5'0'', 90 POUNDS. LAST SEEN JUNE 20. Aria hadn’t seen it in years. She searched frantically along every inch of the poster, even turning it over, for a clue as to why it was here—and who had put it up. But there was nothing.

  Chapter 10 The Simplest Life

  Later that same day, Emily stood in front of a black-and-white clapboard farmhouse in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Instead of a car in the driveway, there was a black buggy with giant wheels and a red triangular SLOW-MOVING VEHICLE sign on the back. She fingered the cuffs of the gray cotton dress A had given her and adjusted the white cloth cap on her head. Next to her was a hand-painted wooden sign that said ZOOK FARM.

  Emily bit her lip. This is crazy. A few hours earlier, she’d told her parents she was going on the youth group trip to Boston. Then she’d boarded a Greyhound for Lancaster, changing into the dress, cap, and boots in the tiny, chemical-scented bathroom at the back of the bus. Sh
e sent her old friends short texts to let them know she’d be in Boston until Friday—if she told them the truth, they’d think she was nuts. And just in case her parents became suspicious, she’d turned off her cell phone so they couldn’t activate its GPS child-tracking function and discover she was in Lancaster pretending to be Amish.

  Emily had been idly curious about Amish people her whole life, but she knew nothing about what it was like to really be Amish. From what she understood, the Amish just wanted to be left alone. They didn’t like tourists to take their pictures, they didn’t take kindly to non-Amish trespassing on their land, and the few Amish people Emily had seen up close looked humorless and stern. So why was A sending her to an Amish community? Did Lucy Zook know Ali? Had Ali run away from Rosewood and secretly become Amish? That seemed impossible, but hope fluttered at the edge of Emily’s thoughts. Was it possible that Lucy . . . was Ali?

  With each passing moment, Emily thought of more reasons why—and how—Ali might still be out there. There was the time when Emily and her friends met with Mrs. DiLaurentis the day after Ali vanished, and Mrs. DiLaurentis asked if Ali had run away. Emily had dismissed the notion, but the truth was she and Ali did used to talk about leaving Rosewood forever. They made all kinds of wistful plans—they’d go to the airport and pick the first flight that was leaving. They’d take Amtrak to California and find roommates in L.A. Emily couldn’t imagine why Ali would want to leave Rosewood; she always secretly hoped that it was because Ali wanted Emily all to herself.

  Then the summer between sixth and seventh grade, Ali had dropped off the face of the earth for two weeks. Every time Emily called Ali’s cell phone it went to voice mail. Whenever she rang Ali’s house, the answering machine picked up. And yet, the DiLaurentises were definitely home—Emily biked by their house and saw Mr. DiLaurentis washing his car in the driveway and Ali’s mom pulling weeds in the front yard. She became convinced Ali was angry at her, though she had no idea why. And she couldn’t talk to her other best friends about it. Spencer and Hanna were vacationing with their families, and Aria was at an art camp in philly.

  Then, two weeks later, Ali called out of the blue. “Where were you?” Emily demanded. “I ran away!” Ali chirped. When Emily didn’t answer, she laughed. “I’m kidding. I went to the poconos with my aunt Giada. There’s no cell service up there.”

  Emily glanced at the handwritten sign again. As much as she didn’t trust A’s cryptic instructions about going to Lancaster—after all, A had misled them into believing that Wilden and Jason were Ali’s killers, when Ali was in fact still alive—one tiny sentence fragment kept swirling in her head: What wouldyou do to find her? She’d do anything, of course.

  Taking a deep breath, Emily climbed the steps to the front porch of the farmhouse. A bunch of shirts hung from the laundry line, though it was so cold out that they looked half-frozen. Smoke poured from the chimney, and a big windmill in the back of the property churned. The yeasty smell of freshly baked bread wafted through the frigid air.

  Emily looked over her shoulder, squinting at the far-off rows of dead cornstalks. Was A watching right now? She raised her hand and knocked three times, her nerves jangling. Please let Ali be there, she chanted to herself.

  There was a creak and then a bang. A figure disappeared out the back door, slipping through the cornfield. It looked like a guy about Emily’s age, wearing a puffy down jacket, jeans, and bright red-and-blue sneakers. He ran at top speed without looking back.

  Emily’s heart banged in her chest. Moments later, the front door opened. A teenage girl stood on the other side. She wore a dress like Emily’s, and her brown hair was pulled into a bun. Her lips were very red, as if they’d been recently kissed. She searched Emily’s face wordlessly, her eyes narrowed with disdain. Emily’s stomach swooped with disappointment.

  “Uh, my name is Emily Stoltzfus,” she blurted, reciting the name from A’s note. “I’m from Ohio. Are you Lucy?”

  The girl looked startled. “Yes,” she said slowly. “Are you here for Mary’s wedding this weekend?”

  Emily blinked. A hadn’t told her about a wedding. Was it possible Ali’s new Amish name was Mary? Maybe she was being forced to be a child bride, and A had sent Emily here to save her. But Emily’s return bus ticket was for Friday afternoon, the very same time the church group returned from Boston. She couldn’t possibly stay for what was probably a Saturday wedding without raising her parents’ suspicions. “Um, I came to help with the preparations,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound incredibly foolish.

  Lucy glanced at something behind Emily. “There’s Mary now. Do you want to go say hi?”

  Emily followed her gaze. But Mary was much smaller and dumpier than the girl Emily had seen in the woods just days ago. Her black hair was pulled back in a tight bun, showing off her chubby cheeks. “Um, that’s okay,” Emily said glumly, her heart yo-yoing. She turned back to Lucy, inspecting her face. Lucy’s lips were pressed tightly together, like she was biting back a secret.

  Lucy opened the door wider, letting Emily in. They walked into the parlor. It was a big square room, lit only by a gas-powered lantern in the corner. Handcrafted wooden chairs and tables crowded the walls. A bookshelf in the corner housed a jar full of celery and a large, well-worn copy of the Bible. Lucy walked into the center of the room and gazed at Emily carefully. “Where are you from in Ohio?”

  “Um, near Columbus,” Emily said, blurting out the first Ohio town she could think of.

  “Oh.” Lucy scratched her head. This must have been an acceptable answer. “Did Pastor Adam send you to me?”

  Emily swallowed hard. “Yes?” she guessed. She felt like she was an actress in a play, but no one had bothered to give her the script.

  Lucy tsked and glanced over her shoulder toward the back door. “He always thinks things like this will make me feel better,” she muttered acidly.

  “I’m sorry?” Emily was surprised at how annoyed Lucy seemed. She’d thought the Amish were eternally temperate and calm.

  Lucy waved her thin, pale hand. “No, I’m sorry.” She turned and started down a long hall. “You’ll take my sister’s bed,” she said matter-of-factly, leading Emily into a small bedroom. Inside were two twin beds covered by lively colored homemade quilts. “It’s the one on the left.”

  “What’s your sister’s name?” Emily asked, glancing at the bare white walls.

  “Leah.” Lucy punched a pillow.

  “Where is she now?”

  Lucy smacked the pillow harder. Her throat bobbed, and then she turned away toward the corner of the bedroom, as if she’d done something shameful. “I was just going to start the milking. Come on.”

  At that, she marched out of the bedroom. After a moment, Emily followed Lucy, snaking through a rabbit warren of hallways and rooms. She poked her head into each room, aching to see Ali in one of them, sitting in a rocker, her finger to her lips, or crouching behind a bureau, her knees pulled into her chest. Finally they crossed the big, bright kitchen, which smelled overpoweringly like wet wool, and Lucy led her out the back door to an enormous, drafty barn. A long line of cows stood in stalls, their tails swishing. Upon seeing the girls, a few of them let out loud moos.

  Lucy handed Emily a metal bucket. “You start on the left. I’ll do the right.”

  Emily shifted her feet in the scratchy hay. She’d never milked a cow before, not even when she had been shipped to her aunt and uncle’s farm in Iowa the fall before. Lucy had already turned away, tending to her own line of cows. Not knowing what else to do, Emily approached the cow closest to the door, slid the bucket under her udder, and crouched. How hard could it be? But the cow was enormous, with strong legs and a broad, trucklike butt. Did cows kick, like horses? Did cows bite?

  She cracked her knuckles, eyeing the other stalls. If a cow moos in the next ten seconds, everything will be okay, she thought, relying on the superstitious game she’d created for tense situations like this one. She silently counted to ten in her head. There
weren’t any moos, although there was a noise that sounded suspiciously like a fart.

  “Ahem”

  Emily shot up. Lucy was glaring at her.

  “Haven’t you ever milked a cow before?” Lucy demanded.

  “Uh.” Emily grappled for a response. “Well, no. We have really specific jobs where I’m from. Milking isn’t my responsibility.”

  Lucy looked at her as if she’d never heard of such a thing. “You’ll have to do it as long as you’re here. It’s not hard. just pull and squeeze.”

  “Um, okay,” Emily stammered. She turned to the cow. Her teats dangled. She touched one; it felt rubbery and full. When she squeezed, milk squirted into the bucket. It was a strange dusty color, nothing like the milk her mother brought home from Fresh Fields grocery store.

  “That’s good,” Lucy said, standing over her. She had that funny look on her face again. “Why are you speaking English, by the way?”

  The sharp scent of hay tickled Emily’s eyes. Did Amish people not speak English? She’d read various Wikipedia articles about Amish people last night in an attempt to absorb as much information as possible—how had she not stumbled upon that? And why hadn’t A said anything?

  “Did your community not speak Pennsylvania Dutch?” Lucy prompted incredulously.

  Emily adjusted her woolen cap nervously. Her fingers smelled like sour milk. “Um . . . no. We’re pretty progressive.”

  Lucy shook her head in wonderment. “Wow. You’re so lucky. We should switch places. You stay here, and I’ll go there.”

  Emily laughed nervously, relaxing a teensy bit. Maybe Lucy wasn’t so bad. And maybe even Amish country wasn’t so bad either—at least it was quiet and drama-free. But disappointment welled in her chest all the same. Ali didn’t seem to be hiding out in this community, so why had A sent her here? To make her look stupid? To distract her for a while? To send her on a wild-goose chase?

  As if on cue, one of the Holsteins let out a loud, lowing moo and dropped fresh cow pies on the hay-strewn floor. Emily gritted her teeth. Perhaps a wild cow chase was more like it.