Crushed (6 page)

Bloop.

Aria looked down and frowned. There, on her new phone’s screen, was an alert for a text message. Only she hadn’t given anyone the number yet.

Her heart began to pound. Nervously, she opened the text. It was a picture of the
Splendor of the Seas
cruise ship on fire. A message accompanied it.

5
Let the Questioning Begin

On Wednesday afternoon, Spencer stood in front of the full-length mirror in her bedroom, inspecting her reflection. Agent Fuji was coming to interview all of them in a few minutes, and Spencer couldn’t remember the last time she’d agonized over her outfit so much.

Was a pin-striped blazer too corporate? She frowned and pulled it off and tried on a pink blouse, but that just made her look like a big square of bubble gum. She needed casual but serious. Girl next door—no,
smart
girl next door. Someone who would never, ever break the law.

Her gaze drifted to the shimmering pearl-gray Zac Posen gown that hung in plastic in her closet. The tag was still on, but she didn’t have the heart to return it. Two days later, Reefer’s rejection still stung. Spencer had sent him a few plaintive texts, begging for another conversation. Maybe she’d misinterpreted what he’d meant when he said they shouldn’t be tied down. Maybe he’d had a change of heart. But Reefer hadn’t written back, and she’d begun to feel foolish and desperate. What she needed, she decided, was a prom date to take her mind off things. But who? All the eligible boys had been claimed months ago. Spencer considered calling her old boyfriend, Andrew Campbell, who had graduated early and was now at Cornell, but they hadn’t spoken since last spring.

The doorbell rang, and she shed the blouse, changed again, and padded downstairs in a blue oxford shirt and skinny khakis. Aria, Emily, and Hanna stood on the porch, bouncing and quivering like a trio of shaken-up soda bottles. They rushed inside.

“We’ve got to do something,” Hanna said.

“I think A’s reading my e-mails,” Emily wailed at the same time.

“I got a note on an
unlisted
phone
,” Aria blurted out.

“Hold up.” Spencer stopped at the border of the hall and the living room. “Start over.”

Each girl explained that they’d all gotten A notes in the past forty-eight hours. All of them had to do with telling the cops on them, like Spencer’s had, and several mentioned Agent Fuji by name. Aria’s was especially disconcerting—A had cracked her unlisted number in a matter of hours.

“Does A have an in with Verizon or something?” she moaned. “And I think A is trying to frame us for hurting Graham. As if
I
set off that explosion.”

“A could try to do that with Gayle, too,” Emily said. “We were in her driveway when she was shot. I’m sure A has something up his or her sleeve about all of that.”

“Don’t forget A’s threat to kill us,” Hanna added.

“This is getting ridiculous. It’s like A’s everywhere.” Spencer thought about how A had texted her almost the minute Reefer left. But how had A known? Spencer had been inside her house. It was like A had bugged the place or something.

She blinked. Was it possible? She peered into the corners of the room, the spaces under the couches, at the high windowsills. A rearing horse in the garish Civil War painting Mr. Pennythistle had hung in the hall leered at her.

Suddenly, she hit on an idea. “Come on,” she commanded the others over her shoulder, heading toward the backyard.

Everyone followed her out the sliding door. It was wet and gray outside, and the air smelled like freshly cut grass and the swampy creek in the woods at the back of the property. A big blue tarp covered the family’s swimming pool. An eerie haze hung over the trees where the Hastingses’ refurbished barn had once stood—before Ali burned it down. To the left was the DiLaurentises’ old house, though the only reminder that they’d lived there was the big boulder in the middle of the backyard that they never dug up—the new family had removed all other traces of them by now, including their old deck, and there was no longer an Ali shrine on the front curb.

Spencer marched to the shed Mr. Pennythistle had installed a few weeks ago, unlocked the door, and looked around. An orange leaf blower leaned against the left wall. She grabbed it, dragged it to the middle of the yard, and pulled the starter chain. Her three friends stared at her like she was crazy, but there was a method to her madness. Everyone’s hair flew about until Spencer pointed the nozzle at the ground. The air filled with the noxious scent of gasoline. The best and most important part was the deafening noise the thing made. No one, not even A, would be able to hear the girls over it.

Spencer gestured for the girls to move in closer. “This has got to stop,” she said angrily. “If A knows where we are at all times, then A must be bugging us somehow. A’s trying to pin all these crimes we didn’t commit on us, and if we don’t act soon, A might just succeed.”

“What do we do?” Hanna yelled over the leaf blower.

“I say we go rogue,” Spencer declared. “We get rid of our current phones and phone numbers. If we need cell phones for absolute emergencies, we can get a burner cell, but we can’t tell one another
anything
critical on calls or voicemails. We should use a code phrase.”

“What about
not it
?” Emily piped up.

“That’s perfect,” Spencer said. “And we can’t give the number out to anyone else except for our parents.”

Aria shifted her weight. “What about boyfriends?”

Spencer shook her head. “It’s too risky.”

Aria frowned. “Noel won’t tell anyone.”

“He might leave his phone out somewhere that A might see, though. And you’ll have to explain to him
why
you got a burner phone.”

“How am I going to explain why I’m not using a phone at all?” Aria asked, hands on her hips.

Spencer stared at her, exasperated. “I don’t know! Say you’re doing it for a school project about living for a week without technology.”

“What about e-mail?” Hanna asked.

“We can still use school e-mail for schoolwork—maybe we could carry our old phones around but only use WiFi. I’m pretty sure WiFi usage on phones can’t be tracked in the same way as usage on a data plan. And we shouldn’t use the Internet on our home computers—for all we know A has hacked into our systems. We need to use computers that won’t be linked to us and definitely don’t have any spyware installed.”

Emily glanced at the spot where the barn had stood. “All that sounds well and good for A not knowing where we are
now.
But A could
still
frame us.”

“That’s the second part of my plan,” Spencer shouted over the leaf blower. “As soon as possible, we need to go somewhere really secret and safe and sit down and figure out who A could be. There are probably all kinds of clues that we aren’t even thinking about. And now that we know what happened the night of the fire, A could be Real Ali.”

The leaf blower sputtered. The trees at the back of the property swayed, and for a moment, Spencer swore she saw a figure in the woods.

“That sounds like a good idea to me,” Hanna said. “Where should we go?”

Everyone paused to think. Then Spencer’s gaze drifted to a light on inside Mr. Pennythistle’s office in the house. “The other day, Mr. Pennythistle told me that his model home at Crestview Estates has a panic room. Aren’t those places, like, soundproof?”

“I think so,” Hanna said. “And sometimes they have video surveillance, so you can see if someone is on your property.”

“Perfect,” Emily said. “A will never hear us in somewhere like that.”

Aria squinted. “Crestview Estates isn’t far from here, right? In Hopewell?”

“Yeah,” Spencer said. Hopewell was a town about fifteen minutes from Rosewood. “And I bet I could steal the key to the house.” Mr. Pennythistle kept copies of all of his properties’ keys in his home office. It would just be a matter of finding the right one.

Emily’s eyes gleamed. “Should we drive together?”

Spencer shook her head vehemently. “We need to all go separately to confuse A. It would be even better if we could go by different modes of transport—like bus or SEPTA or car.”

Aria ground her toe into the grass. “Well, the public transport goes to Hopewell.”

“And if some of us drive, we can take different routes,” Emily said. “A won’t know which one of us to follow. And if it seems like someone is following us, we could speed up or pull off or do a quick turnaround, maybe catching A in the act. Then we might see who A is.”

“Great,” Spencer said. She looked hard at the others. “How about tomorrow night?”

Everyone nodded. Then Spencer caught sight of a black sedan rolling up the long driveway. Her stomach turned over.
Showtime.

The car cruised to a stop at the front of the house. A tall, thin woman with long, wavy, black hair and sharp features started toward the front door. When she noticed Spencer and the others in the backyard, she stopped and waved.

“Miss Hastings?” She looked questioningly at the leaf blower. “Doing some yard work?”

Spencer turned off the leaf blower and dropped it to the ground. She tramped through the wet grass toward the house. “Something like that.”

The woman extended her hand. “I’m Jasmine Fuji.” She looked at the others with wide gray eyes. “Let me guess. Hanna, Aria, and Emily,” she said, pointing at each girl in turn. Then again, it wasn’t hard—the four of them had been plastered all over
People
magazine last year after Real Ali allegedly died. Even a made-for-TV movie called
Pretty Little Killer
had been filmed, documenting Real Ali’s torment and near killing of the girls.

When no one said anything, she cleared her throat. “How about we go inside and talk?”

Spencer led the way through the kitchen, nervously trying not to trip over anything. Then they lined up on the living room couch, squeezed together tightly. Aria flicked a tassel on a pillow. Emily crossed and uncrossed her legs. Everyone’s hair was a windswept rat’s nest from the leaf blower.

Fuji sat across from them on a striped ottoman, pulled out a yellow notepad, and flipped to a clean page. Her nails were impeccably groomed and painted pink. “Well. Okay. Thanks for meeting me, for one thing. This is just a formality, but I appreciate your cooperation.”

“Of course,” Spencer said in her most mature, professional tone. She wished she had something to do with her hands.

“Your names were on a list of guests who were staying at The Cliffs resort in Jamaica the same time Tabitha Clark was murdered,” Fuji said, looking at a separate sheet of paper. “March twenty-third to March thirtieth. Can you confirm that?”

“Yes.” Spencer’s voice cracked, and she started again. “Yes. We were there. We were on vacation for spring break with a lot of our classmates.”

Fuji gave them a tight smile. “Must be nice.”

Spencer twitched. That sounded kind of bitter.
Must be nice for you spoiled rich girls
, maybe.
You think you can get away with anything, huh?
But then Fuji pointed to a watercolor of a pastoral farm scene above the piano. “My grandmother has one a lot like that, except a little bigger.”

“Oh, neat. I’ve always loved that painting,” Spencer said quickly.
Calm down
, she scolded herself.

“So.” Fuji took out a pair of glasses from her purse and perched them on her nose, then studied her notes again. “Did you meet Miss Clark while you were staying there?”

Spencer exchanged a look with the others. They’d briefly talked through what they’d say on the phone last night, but her mind suddenly was blank. “Sort of,” she said after a moment. “I had a passing conversation with her, nothing big.”

Fuji removed her glasses and put one of the stems in her mouth. “Can you tell me what it was about?”

Spencer’s insides fizzed. “She thought we looked familiar. Like long-lost sisters.”

Fuji cocked her head. Her teardrop earrings fluttered. “
That’s
a strange thing to say.”

Spencer shrugged. “She’d had a lot to drink.”

Fuji wrote something down and turned to the other girls. “Do you remember Tabitha as well?”

Emily nodded. “We danced near each other.” She swallowed hard.

Fuji turned to Hanna and Aria, and both of them said they’d met Tabitha in passing but didn’t have a long conversation. Fuji didn’t ask them to elaborate, so Emily didn’t mention Tabitha’s eerily similar Jenna Thing bracelet, Aria didn’t talk about how Tabitha had hinted that she knew her dad was a cheater, and Hanna didn’t tell her that Tabitha had known Hanna used to be a loser.

Everyone answered articulately. If Spencer were a bystander to the conversation, the girls would have seemed truthful enough. Distraught and quiet, maybe, but that was okay: A girl they’d met had been murdered a few feet from where they’d been sleeping.

Fuji capped her pen. “It seems like a lot of people are telling me the same thing—Tabitha must have gotten around that night, chatted everyone up. Everyone remembers her, but no one can connect her to anyone in particular.” She put down her notebook and met their gazes. “I heard you girls were on the cruise ship that exploded, too.”

“That’s right,” Spencer croaked.

“
And
I heard you were on Gayle Riggs’s property when she was murdered.” She stared unblinkingly at the four girls.

Hanna nodded faintly. Emily coughed. “We’ve been in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Spencer said.

“Sounds like you guys have had a rough couple of years.” A sad smile spread across Fuji’s face. “Conspiracy-theory crackpots would probably have a field day with you girls, huh? They might say you’re cursed.”

Each girl laughed, though their chuckles were mirthless and forced. When Fuji gave them a strange, knowing glance, the moment felt spiky and electric. What if A had already told Fuji everything? What if she was just toying with them, waiting for them to slip up?