by Sara Shepard
Aria took a sip of coffee. “Noel said he heard a guy’s voice when he was attacked. But that’s it.”
“I wish we could take down Ali and her helper once and for all.” Spencer plopped into a chair.
“Maybe we could go back to The Preserve,” Hanna suggested. “Ask them if there were any guy patients whose names started with N.”
Emily looked unsure. “It seems so risky.”
Hanna furrowed her brow. “You want to give up?”
“Maybe we should,” Spencer said. Just last week, in an attempt to catch Ali and her helper, they’d gone rogue, putting away their phones, which A had hacked dozens of times, and buying burner cells. Then they’d met in a panic room in Spencer’s stepfather’s model home for Who-Is-A brainstorming meetings. They’d created a list of people who might have been helping Ali. They’d drawn lines through each name as they ruled people out. Finally, only Noel remained . . . and they’d thought they were one step ahead of A, until A’s text yesterday included a picture of the suspect list. Spencer had no idea how Ali found the thing, as she’d had it hidden under her bed. Noel as A? Not it! the note had said.
“What about the cops?” Hanna reshaped her auburn ponytail. “Should I hand over Ali’s note from the burn clinic?”
Spencer thought it over. If they showed the cops the note, Ali and Helper A might come after them. If they didn’t, the cops might accuse them of obstructing justice. “What if you handed it over but told them nothing about A?” she suggested. “It’s signed in Kyla’s name, not Ali’s. The cops don’t have to know she’s one and the same. To be honest, we don’t even know for sure.”
“That could work,” Hanna murmured.
“What do we do about our burner phones?” Aria asked. “A hacked them, too. Do we keep them?”
“We might as well use our old phones,” Emily suggested. “No matter what we do, she finds us. Let’s just not make calls or send texts unless we absolutely have to.”
“If we change our passwords on our e-mail daily, that could be okay to use,” Spencer said. “But we shouldn’t discuss anything about Ali or Helper A over e-mail or text.”
“What if we get another A note?” Hanna whispered. “Can we still talk about it?”
Spencer glanced around the room, almost afraid A was listening. “Yeah,” she whispered. “Maybe we could use a code word if we want to meet and talk about Ali. How about . . .” Her gaze clapped on the handsome, silver-haired figure on the TV screen. “Anderson Cooper.”
“Done,” Aria said.
Hanna leaned in closer. “What do you think A’s next move is going to be?”
Spencer’s stomach flipped over. How many times had they wondered that? “It could be anything. A’s still watching us. We just need to keep our eyes and ears open.”
Everyone nodded, looking even more terrified than before. But there was nothing else to say, so Spencer grabbed her purse, fished out her keys, and started for the elevators, eager to head home and take a long, hot shower.
She passed the cafeteria and staggered out into the bright morning. The street swarmed with people, including a bunch of ragtag protesters holding signs on the corner. ROSEWOOD, some of the signs read. SERIAL KILLER was written on another in big red letters. “Keep our children safe!” the protesters bellowed. One of them wore a Rosewood Day sweatshirt.
Spencer watched them for a while, feeling ambivalent. It was strange to have people care so passionately about something she was so directly and intimately caught up in.
Then she noticed a news van parked across the street, with a female reporter sitting in the passenger seat. Spencer ducked her head and strode quickly to her car, afraid that in seconds, the reporter would recognize her.
“Spencer?”
She gritted her teeth and whirled around—but it was Chase, a new sort-of friend. He was standing under the hospital awning wearing a black nylon coat and a gray baseball cap.
Spencer reluctantly crossed to Chase and pulled him into a more secluded nook near a service entrance. “What are you doing here?” she whispered.
Chase tugged at his mangled ear, a wound from a stalker in boarding school. “Weren’t we supposed to meet today? I looked all over for you. Your mom finally told me where you were.”
“Did she tell you why I was here?”
Chase shook his head.
“Okay,” Spencer said, and told him everything. She knew she could trust Chase. He ran an unsolved-crime blog, and they’d met up when she was trying to track down Ali. There had been some identity confusion at first—Chase was trying to pass his brother Curtis off as himself because he was self-conscious about his ear, and for a while Spencer had even worried he was A. But he’d eventually come clean.
When Spencer finally finished telling him about Noel and the storage shed, Chase narrowed his green eyes. “So . . . Noel isn’t Ali’s boyfriend?”
Spencer sighed. “Nope. We’re back to square one.”
“Well then, we’d better get going,” Chase said, linking his arm around Spencer’s elbow.
Spencer planted her feet. “Where?”
Chase blinked. “We’re going to stake out that town house on the surveillance video.”
When Chase visited her yesterday, he’d shown her a grainy surveillance video of the outside of a town house in Rosewood. A girl who looked a lot like Ali was visible in a few frames. They’d made plans to investigate it today, but after everything that had happened with Noel, Spencer had forgotten.
A city bus whooshed by, spewing out exhaust. “Someone’s boyfriend ended up in a storage shed because of us,” Spencer said nervously. “Ali knows we’re on to her. I can’t let anyone else get hurt.”
“But what if this is where she lives?” Chase asked. “If we could find proof that she’s still alive, we could turn it in to the cops and put an end to this, once and for all. And then no one else would get hurt.”
Spencer twisted her mouth. A shadow flickered across the window of a car parked across the street, for a moment looking like a person.
Chase did have a point. What if they found something at the apartment? What if they could end this whole nightmare today?
She looked up at Chase and nodded ever so slightly. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
Twenty minutes later, as low clouds rolled across the sky, Spencer and Chase steered into a housing complex in West Rosewood, the low-rent part of town. Of course, low-rent was relative: A big FOR SALE sign in the development entrance boasted hardwood floors and marble countertops in every unit. A brand-new community swimming pool glistened in the distance. And the local grocery store was Fresh Fields, where you couldn’t buy a quart of milk for less than five bucks.
“There it is,” Chase said, pointing at a block of town houses. Each unit looked the same, with a fake, old-timey gaslight in the front yard, a faux dormer window set into the roof, and gingerbreadlike scallop details around the windows. In the surveillance photos, Ali had been walking into the unit on the corner.
Spencer pulled the car into park and stared at the house, shivering in the suddenly cold air. The house had a red-painted door and dried leaves all over the front porch. There were no blinds on the windows—she’d have thought Ali would insist on absolute privacy. Could this really be Ali’s secret lair?
Then she peered at the units next to it. The grass in all the front yards hadn’t been cut in a while, and newspapers were piled up on a front porch. There wasn’t a single light on in any of the windows, and no dogs barked from inside. Before Spencer and Chase had left Philly, they’d checked the county courthouse records for information on the housing complex and found that most of the units hadn’t yet sold. The house Ali was entering in the photo had been on the market since its construction last year. A couple in their seventies named Joseph and Harriet Maxwell had bought the unit next door two Novembers ago, right when Ian Thomas was arraigned for Courtney DiLaurentis’s murder; but the plant on their front stoop was withered, and there were a bunch of flyers
wedged inside the storm door.
“This seems like the perfect place for Ali to hide out,” Spencer murmured. “It’s so deserted. No one would ever see her coming and going.”
“Exactly.” Chase started to get out of the car, then paused and turned back to her. “Spencer. Are you sure you’re ready for this?”
Spencer’s stomach swirled. Was she? She looked around the parking lot. Though it was empty, it still felt like she was being watched. She stared at a thick line of shrubs on the other side of the lot, then peered worriedly at a locked-up realtor’s office across the street. Could someone be hiding inside?
“Yes,” she said, getting out of the car and slamming the door firmly behind her. She needed to do this.
The sky was ominously gray, and the air felt thick and electrified. Something made a scraping sound behind her, and the hair on her arms stood on end. “Did you hear that?”
Chase stopped short and listened. “No . . .”
Then something fluttered in the woods that bordered the lot. Spencer stared hard at a splotch between the trees. “H-hello?” she stammered. Nothing.
Chase’s swallow was audible in the eerie silence. “It was probably a rabbit. Or a deer.”
Spencer nodded shakily. She tiptoed up the corner unit’s front walk and peered through the window, but it was too dark to tell what—or who—was inside. She inspected the front door. There were no scuffs, no footprints, and no welcome mat. Then, sliding on the gloves Chase gave her—they didn’t want to leave prints—she touched the metal doorknob tentatively, as if it were wired to set off a bomb. Her skin tingled. She glanced over her shoulder again toward the realtor’s office. Thunder rumbled. The wind gusted. A few raindrops landed on Spencer’s head.
“Excuse me?”
Spencer yelped and spun around. A man walking a dog approached them down the sidewalk. He seemed older, a bit stooped. The collie’s tongue lolled out of its mouth. Spencer couldn’t tell if the dog was on a leash or not.
The man gazed from Spencer to Chase. “What are you doing?” he asked sharply.
Spencer’s mind went blank. “Uh, we thought our friend lived here.”
“No one lives there,” the man said, squinting at the house. “That place has been vacant since they built it.”
It didn’t seem like he was lying. It also didn’t seem like he had any idea who they were—he was just an old guy out for a walk with his dog. “Have you ever seen anyone coming and going out of this place?” she dared to ask. “Anyone at all?”
“Nope, not even a light on,” the man said. “But it’s private property. You should move along.” He gave them another long look, and for a moment, Spencer wondered if she’d trusted him too quickly. But then he whistled at his dog, and the dog stood. As they passed, the dog stiffened and turned its head toward the realtor’s office across the street. Spencer sucked in her stomach. Did the dog sense a presence? But then it loped off and lifted its leg on a clump of dandelions. The man and dog disappeared, all footsteps and jingling tags.
Spencer waited until the man was a safe distance away before turning to look at Chase. “This was definitely the unit in the photo.”
“Do you think Ali knew we found it?” Chase whispered, his eyes wide. And then, suddenly, a terrified look crossed his face. “Do you think it was possible that Ali planted that video? Maybe she was never here in the first place. Or maybe she sent us here to hurt us.”
Spencer couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to her. She darted off the porch, certain something horrible was about to happen. It didn’t, but for a split second, she swore she could hear someone snickering. She squinted hard at the trees, then peered worriedly at the realtor’s office, desperate to make out Ali’s shape at the window. What if she was close? What if she realized what they’d discovered—and she was furious?
Spencer took Chase’s hand. “Let’s get out of here,” she said hurriedly, darting back to the car. She hoped, suddenly, that they hadn’t made a horrible mistake.
3
HANNA LOSES IT
An hour later, Hanna Marin and her boyfriend, Mike Montgomery, sat in Hanna’s Prius, in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the way from the hospital back to Rosewood. Mike fiddled with the radio, first choosing a rap station, then flipping to sports. He let out a sigh and stared out the window, looking just as exhausted as Hanna felt. He’d hung around for a long time at the hospital last night, partly for Noel and partly for Hanna. Hanna wasn’t even sure when he’d left, but she was pretty certain it had been after midnight, and he’d showed up again shortly after Noel had woken up this morning.
Hanna’s phone, which was connected to the car’s Bluetooth system, bleated loudly. She pressed the ANSWER button on the center console without looking at the caller ID. “Hanna?” a familiar voice rang out. “It’s Kelly Crosby from the burn clinic.”
“Oh.” Hanna’s finger hovered over the HANG UP button on the steering wheel. She could feel Mike staring at her. “Uh, hi.”
“I was just calling to let you know that there’s no need for you to come in next week,” Kelly went on. “The clinic is closed until further notice because of the . . . murder.”
The murder. Hanna swallowed hard.
“I also wanted to let you know that Graham Pratt’s funeral will be tomorrow,” Kelly went on. “You were such good friends, I thought you might be interested.”
“Um, great,” Hanna said loudly to Kelly. “Gotta go!”
She hung up and stared straight through the windshield as though nothing were amiss. The only sound was the clunka-clunka-clunk of the uneven pavement on the off-ramp. Finally, Mike cleared his throat. “I thought you said Graham was the Unabomber, Hanna.”
Hanna gripped the steering wheel hard. Mike had been suspicious about her volunteering stint at the burn clinic, first certain she wanted to reconcile with her ex, Sean Ackard. That was ridiculous, but she couldn’t exactly tell him the whole truth, either—that would mean explaining about A. She’d finally admitted that Aria and Graham had been in the boiler room of the ship when the bomb went off, and she was spying on Graham to see what he knew. But there were a lot of holes in her story, and Mike knew it.
She shrugged. “I had to tell people at the burn clinic that Graham and I were friends. That was the only way they’d let me get close to him.”
“And what’s this about a murder?”
Hanna stared fixedly at a Delaware license plate on the car in front of her. “No clue.”
“Bullshit.”
“I don’t know!” Hanna protested.
But she did. Yesterday, a girl’s body had been found in the woods behind the clinic, and her hospital bracelet read KYLA KENNEDY. The girl had been dead for days, except Hanna had spoken to Kyla—or someone impersonating her—the previous night. Kyla’s bed had been outside Graham’s room. There was only one girl who didn’t want Graham to wake up and say who’d really set off the bomb.
Ali.
Hanna simply hadn’t recognized her under those bandages.
Hanna turned up her mom’s driveway and parked. She was out of the car and almost to the side door when she realized Mike wasn’t with her. He was still standing in the driveway, a strange expression on his face.
“I’m so sick of this,” he said in a quiet voice.
Hanna wilted. “Sick of what?”
“I know you’re lying.”
Hanna cut her gaze to the left. “Mike . . . stop.”
“First, you play detective, ditching prom—where you were queen—to go to the burn clinic and talk to the potential bomber instead of letting the cops deal with it.” Mike listed the items on his fingers. “Then, after you tell me that dude is dead, you disappear with Spencer and the others without telling me. When I find you next, you’re covered in mud.”
Hanna touched her toe to a decorative stone to the right of the welcome mat. The mud on her dress was from when she and her friends had gone to save Aria from Noel at the cemetery.
“And then,�
�� Mike said, his voice rising, “you tell me you just happen to be there when the cops find Noel’s body in that shed. I heard you tell a cop this morning that you’d received a threatening note saying to go there.”
Hanna’s throat felt sandpapery. She’d fudged the story about finding Noel, too—and she still didn’t know what to do about handing over Kyla’s note to the cops.
“You’re not just acting crazy with me, either,” Mike said. “I talked to Naomi about you. You guys were BFFs on the cruise, and suddenly you’re not anymore.”
Rage spiraled through Hanna. “You talked to Naomi about me?” She and Naomi Zeigler had been enemies for years, and to make matters worse, Hanna realized Naomi was related to Madison, a girl she’d hurt last summer.
“I was grasping at straws.” Mike slapped his arms to his sides. “Naomi said you did some weird shit on that cruise. You looked through her e-mails on her computer. There were times when you ran away from her like you were afraid of her.” He set his jaw. “Something tells me that that has to do with all of this other crazy stuff that’s been going on, too. It’s all connected.” He looked at her hard. “It’s A, isn’t it? Ali. She’s back.”
Hanna froze. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Mike stepped closer. “It’s the only thing that fits. Just tell me. Don’t you trust me?”
Hanna’s jaw wobbled. “Maybe I haven’t told you for a good reason!” she blurted. “It’s because I don’t want you to get hurt, you idiot! I don’t want you to end up like Noel!”
They were face-to-face, Mike’s breath minty on her cheeks. He grabbed her hands. “I want to help. I love you. I don’t care what the risks are.”
She shut her eyes, feeling worn down. There was no way out of this. Mike knew he was right, and the look on her face surely confirmed it. The only thing to do to keep him from knowing more was to break up with him. Not only did Hanna hate the thought of that, it probably wouldn’t keep Mike safe, anyway. He already knew too much.
She took a deep, wobbly breath, and suddenly, the whole story spilled out. She told Mike how the new A notes had started coming, how they’d become more and more sinister, and how, on the cruise, the notes had focused on how Hanna had fled the scene of a car crash, leaving Madison Zeigler, Naomi’s cousin, for dead. “For a little while, I was afraid that Naomi was A,” she said. “That’s why I was looking through her computer. I thought I might find something to prove it. But Naomi told me that the crash wasn’t even my fault, in the end—someone ran me off the road. I remember someone doing it, but I didn’t see their face. That’s who she and Madison were trying to catch.”
