Burned

34 THE FUN HASN’T EVEN BEGUN

The doorbell at Byron’s house pealed around 8 A.M. the following morning, and Aria shot up from the couch. The house was empty—Byron was at work, and Meredith had taken baby Lola to a doctor’s appointment.

She peered through the window in the door. Hanna, Spencer, and Emily were standing on the porch, grave looks on their faces.

“Thanks for coming,” Aria said in a small voice when she pulled the door open.

No one answered. She led them to the den. All three of her friends lined up on the couch facing the TV. They sat with perfect posture, their eyes glazed and red-rimmed, like they were at a funeral. Which, of course, they sort of were.

“Are you sure we should do this?” Spencer blurted.

Everyone exchanged a glance. “I don’t want to,” Hanna whispered.

“Me neither,” Emily said. Her throat bobbed as she swallowed.

Aria perched on the wing chair, feeling just as conflicted. Every moment of this morning had felt like the end of an era. It was the last time she’d ever wake up in her bed. The last time she’d ever brush her teeth in her bathroom. The last time she’d ever kiss Lola without a prison guard standing over her. Would Meredith even bring Lola to visit her in prison? A’s taunting text haunted her, too: Will Aria’s boyfriend visit her in jail?

Hanna picked at her nails. Emily stared at a coffee cup she was holding, but couldn’t seem to bring herself to drink it. And Spencer kept picking up a magazine, staring at the cover, and then putting it right back down again.

“Maybe we’ll get a really kind judge,” Emily said. “Maybe someone who understands how scared we were about Real Ali coming back to hurt us.”

Spencer scoffed. “No judge will buy that. They’ll say everyone knew Real Ali was dead.”

Emily wriggled in her seat, either looking like she was about to burst or pee her pants. “Actually, not if we tell the court I left the door open for her the day of the fire.”

Everyone’s heads shot up. “Excuse me?” Spencer sputtered.

Emily buried her face in her hands. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t just leave her on the floor like that. I don’t know if she got out, but I did leave the door open.”

“But I saw the door,” Hanna said. “You shut it.”

“No, I didn’t.”

Aria stared at the ceiling, trying to recall those hot, horrible, frantic moments before the house blew up. She swore she’d looked back and saw that the door was closed tight—or was that just a fabrication in her mind after the fact?

“God, Emily,” Spencer whispered, her eyes wide.

Hanna ran her hands down the length of her face. “Is this why you’re so convinced Real Ali is the one stalking us now?”

“I guess so.” Emily fiddled with the coaster on the coffee table. “But I’ve been thinking about it, and, you guys, maybe it’s a good thing. If I bring up how the door was left open and how afraid we were that she’d escaped, maybe the judge will understand our paranoia in Jamaica.”

“Or maybe he’ll think we’re crazy,” Hanna snapped.

Aria shook her head. “You should have told us about this before now.”

“I know.” Emily looked tortured. “And I’m sorry. But would it really have changed anything? We probably would have been even more convinced Tabitha was Ali in Jamaica.”

“Or we would have gone to the police instead of handling it ourselves,” Aria said.

“This might never have happened,” Spencer added.

Emily slumped down. “I’m sorry.”

“Do you realize what this means?” Aria pushed her fingers through her hair. “Real Ali could be out there! She could be A!”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Emily urged. “Ali makes the most sense. She and Tabitha had been such good friends that Tabitha carried her picture in a locket. Maybe she was with Tabitha in Jamaica, and maybe the plan had been to push us off the roof, not the other way around. Maybe that was why she was waiting on the sand, taking those pictures. But then, when things went wrong, she’d decided to torture us instead.”

“But what about Graham?” Spencer asked. “He makes a lot of sense, too. And we’re certain he’s alive.”

Aria swallowed hard. “I thought it didn’t matter since we were confessing, but I overheard Jeremy and this cop talking yesterday, and Graham’s in the hospital.”

Hanna squinted. “Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe from the blast. It was unclear.”

“Who cares if Graham’s in the hospital?” Spencer threw up her hands. “He’ll get out eventually. And then he’ll tell about everything we did.”

“There was something else weird, too,” Aria said. “The cop said they identified two figures on the surveillance tape from the boiler room—one was definitely Graham. They couldn’t identify the second person, but they thought it was a guy.”

Spencer cocked her head. “Do you remember anyone else being down there?”

Aria shook her head. Emily tapped the table. “Maybe they just caught you at a weird angle or something. Or maybe it was a worker just randomly down there the same time you were.”

“Maybe,” Aria said slowly. Then she shut her eyes. She was so sick of talking about this, going back and forth as to who might be A, letting A torment their lives. She was done.

“We’re telling the cops about Tabitha right now,” she decided.

“Okay,” Emily whispered, widening her eyes at Aria’s authoritative tone. Spencer just nodded. Hanna swallowed hard, but then nudged her head toward Aria’s cell phone.

“Good.” Aria felt electrically charged and a little crazy. She grabbed her phone and looked up the number for Michael Paulson, the man at the FBI in charge of the murder trial. It was a Washington, DC, area code. She punched the numbers on her phone unnecessarily hard.

She pressed the last digit and listened as the line rang. After a moment, someone at the front desk answered. “Can I speak to Michael Paulson, please?” she asked, placing the call on speaker.

“May I ask who’s calling?” the woman said in a bored voice.

Aria glanced at her friends, then turned back to the phone. “Someone who has information on the Tabitha Clark murder case.”

There was a loaded pause. “Mr. Paulson’s at a press conference right now,” she said after a moment. “But if it’s important, I’ll be able to reach him. Can he call you back shortly?”

Aria said that was fine and hung up. She set the phone down on the coffee table, her heart hammering. What was she going to say when the detective called her? How was she going to blurt it out? As soon as she did this, their lives would change. Was she seriously ready for that?

Hanna grabbed for the remote and turned on the TV. “I need some noise,” she said. “I can’t stand this.” A commercial for ice cream cakes popped on the screen. Everyone stared at it absently. Aria wondered if they were all thinking the same thing—they’d probably never have something as frivolous and celebratory as ice cream cake again.

The commercial for ice cream cake ended, and one for Ford trucks came on. Then one for a local pizza parlor, then life insurance. After that, the local news appeared. The weatherman blathered about how it was going to be cloudy today, but there was a high-pressure system moving in tomorrow. “Break out your shorts and T-shirts!” he announced. “It’s going to be unseasonably warm!”

“God, does he have to be so cheerful?” Spencer snarled at the screen.

Emily looked desperately at the phone. “Why doesn’t he call back? Doesn’t he know it’s important?”

Hanna cradled a pillow. “There’s something I didn’t mention about my conversation with Naomi yesterday. Apparently, Real Ali called her when she was back in Rosewood as Courtney and told her everything.”

Now it was her everyone stared at. “What do you mean, everything?” Aria asked.

“The truth, I guess. Everything that was in that letter she slid under the door at the Poconos. Naomi didn’t believe her, though. She thought she was crazy.”

Spencer blinked hard. “Why would Ali give away such a big secret?”

Hanna shrugged. “She thought Naomi would take her side. She told me Ali tried to recruit her, just like Mona tried to recruit you, Spencer. Ali said, ‘We’re going to get those bitches, Naomi.’”

“‘We’?” Aria blurted.

“That’s what she said,” Hanna looked at Aria in puzzlement. “What’s weird about that?”

Aria pushed her hair behind her ear. “I don’t know. It just sounded weird for a second, like Ali had a team of people out to get us. But maybe not.”

Suddenly, Spencer, who had been looking at her phone, lifted her head. “You know how you said Graham was in the hospital, Aria? Actually, I think he’s in a coma.”

She turned her phone outward. THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE CRUISE CLAIMS A VICTIM, said the headline of an online story. Aria scanned the text. Graham Pratt was hospitalized from injuries following the explosion on board the Splendor of the Seas Eco Cruise ship. The medical staff in Bermuda says he is in a coma but resting comfortably.

“Whoa,” Aria whispered, her heart pounding hard. A coma? Had he been knocked out from the blast? But why hadn’t she seen him lying like an X on the boiler-room floor, unconscious?

The news anchor materialized on the screen with a story about a traffic accident near the Conshohocken Curve, breaking her concentration. Aria grabbed the remote, wanting to put on something else, when the camera turned to a familiar face. Tabitha’s blue eyes gleamed. Her smile was sparkly and flirtatious, as though she was keeping a secret. NEW DEVELOPMENTS, read a caption under her photo.

The remote fell from Aria’s fingers to the floor. Hanna grabbed her arm and squeezed.

“We just received new information about Tabitha Clark, the teenager who was murdered in Jamaica last year,” the blond reporter said. “The medical examiner has finished the autopsy, and he has some surprising results. For more, here’s Jennifer Rubenstein.”

Emily’s face went pale. “Oh my God.”

“Here we go,” Spencer whispered. “They’re going to say Tabitha was pushed.”

The picture cut to Michael Paulson, the very man they were waiting for, standing in front of a sea of microphones. A man in a white lab coat stood next to him. Flashbulbs popped.

“After a lengthy examination of Miss Clark’s remains,” Paulson said, stepping forward, “my team and I have concluded that she was killed by severe trauma to the head. There were multiple blows to her skull, and it appears that she was beaten with a blunt object.”

Hanna, who had been covering her eyes with her hands, peeked out. “Wait. What?”

Aria cocked her ear toward the TV, certain she’d heard that wrong, too.

“Whoever killed her did so at close range,” Paulson went on. “Those are all the findings I can release for now.”

The reporters hurled questions, but suddenly one of Paulson’s aides tapped his shoulder and pushed a phone toward him. Paulson turned from the camera, mouthed a few terse words to the aide, but then took the phone and put it to his ear.

Aria’s phone bleated, and everyone jumped. She looked down at the Caller ID. It was the DC number she had just called. Paulson was still on the TV screen, waiting for her to answer.

Aria widened her eyes at the phone, then at her friends, and then at the television again. TABITHA CLARK KILLED BY HEAD TRAUMA AT CLOSE RANGE, read the caption at the bottom. Slowly, she inched over to the phone and pressed IGNORE. The phone stopped buzzing as the call was sent to voicemail; he didn’t leave a message.

Then she muted the TV and turned to the others. Her palms felt prickly. Her head felt like it had detached from the rest of her body.

“I don’t understand,” she said shakily. “Why didn’t the autopsy say her back was broken from the impact of the fall? I mean, blunt-force trauma to the head at close range …”

“… isn’t something we did,” Hanna finished for her. “The fall didn’t kill her.”

Aria blinked hard. The gears in her brain turned very slowly. “So … does that mean … someone else killed her?”

On the muted TV, reporters hurled questions at Mr. Clark. Aria attempted a smile. Hanna reached over and squeezed her hand. Spencer and Emily hugged, both of them bursting into tears. A strange mix of feelings flooded over Aria: relief, elation, but also paralyzing fear. Someone else had done this. They were innocent. The words were beautiful music in her ears.

And yet her hands were shaking badly and her heart was thudding hard. They’d been about to confess to a crime they didn’t commit. Ruin their lives. Destroy their relationships. They’d done it to get A off their backs, but maybe this was exactly what A wanted them to do all along. Because, perhaps, A was Tabitha’s real killer. Not them.

“Guys, Graham doesn’t make sense as A anymore,” she said slowly. “He had no reason to frame us before Jamaica. Whoever is doing this to us is someone we’ve known for a long, long time.”

Everyone exchanged a horrified glance, definitely thinking the same thing at the same time. “Real Ali,” Spencer whispered.

“It’s got to be,” Hanna gulped.

Suddenly, Aria’s cell phone bleated. At first, she thought it was the detective calling back, but then she saw the words on the screen. One new text message. Her stomach swirled. Any remaining notion that Graham was guilty was gone. People in comas didn’t send texts.

Hanna’s phone rang next. Spencer’s chimed. Emily’s let out a low-pitched buzz. Everyone looked at one another, the blood draining from their faces. Then Aria grabbed her phone and pressed READ.

You got me, bitches—I did it. And guess what? You’re next.

—A