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AN EMPTY ROOM
Spencer, Hanna, and Emily shot to their feet as soon as Aria returned to the waiting room. Aria avoided their gazes and trudged straight to the drinks station, her shoulders hunched.
“What did Noel say?” Spencer asked breathlessly, following her. “Did he see who hurt him?”
“No,” Aria mumbled, grabbing a cup from the stack.
“Are you sure?” Hanna asked. “How well did he know Ali, anyway? Were they friends—or more?”
Aria busied herself at the coffee machine. Her eyes were red, and she kept making little hiccupping sighs like she’d been crying. Spencer hated pushing her for answers, but they needed to know.
Reluctantly, Aria relayed what Noel had told her, including how he’d visited Ali at The Preserve. When she got to the part about Noel not meeting anyone else there except for Tabitha and Iris, Spencer grumbled. “He didn’t see one single guy? Ali never talked about someone she liked?”
Aria shrugged. “I think Ali wanted Noel to think she liked him. ”
Emily groaned. “That makes sense. It was her way of keeping him on her side. ”
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, wi
th 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.