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“Of course I did!” Emily whispered.
“But . . . Emily . . . ”
“What?” Emily snapped. She glared at Spencer crazily, as if there was a unicorn horn growing out of her forehead.
“Em, it was just a hallucination. The doctors said so. Ali’s dead. ”
Emily’s eyes boggled. “But we all saw her, didn’t we? Are you saying we all had the exact same hallucination?”
Spencer stared unblinking at Emily. A few tense seconds passed. Outside the room, a beeper went off. A hospital bed with a squeaky wheel rolled down the hall.
Emily let out a whimper. Her cheeks had turned bright pink. She turned to Hanna and Aria. “You guys think Ali was real, right?”
“It could have been Ali, I guess,” Aria said, sinking into a spare wheelchair by the tiny bathroom. “But, Em, the doctor told me it was smoke inhalation. It makes sense. How else could she have just vanished after the fire?”
“Yeah,” Hanna said weakly. “And where would she have been hiding all this time?”
Emily slapped her arms to her sides violently. The IV pole next to her rattled. “Hanna, you said you saw Ali standing over you in your hospital bed the last time you were here. Maybe it really was her!”
Hanna fiddled with the high heel of her suede boot, looking uncomfortable.
“Hanna was in a coma when she saw Ali,” Spencer jumped in. “It was obviously a dream. ”
Undaunted, Emily pointed at Aria. “You pulled someone out of the woods last night. If it wasn’t Ali, then who was it?”
Aria shrugged, running her hands along the spokes on one of the wheelchair’s wheels. Out the big window, the sun was just coming up. There was a line of shiny BMWs, Mercedes, and Audis in the hospital parking lot. It was amazing how normal everything looked after such a crazy night. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “The woods were so dark. And . . . oh shit. ” She dug in the inner pocket of her bag. “I found this last night. ”
She opened her palm and showed them the familiar-looking Rosewood Day class ring with a bright blue stone. The inscription on the inside of the band said IAN THOMAS. When they’d discovered Ian’s supposedly dead body in the woods last week, the ring had been on Ian’s finger. “It was just lying there in the dirt,” she explained. “I don’t know how the cops didn’t find it. ”
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. “Bu
t 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.