Unbelievable (23 page)

“I can’t talk right now,” Emily whispered, a lump growing in her throat. “I have to take care of something first.”

“I’ll be here,” the cop said, stepping aside so Emily could pass. “Take your time. I have a few other people to find anyway.”

Emily could just make out Maya’s shape running into the country club’s main building. She sprinted after her, through two glass French doors and down a long hallway. She looked through the last door at the end of the hall, which led to the indoor pool. The window had fogged up with condensation, and Emily could just make out Maya’s tiny body walking to the pool’s edge, looking at her reflection.

She pushed her way in and walked around a small tiled wall separating the entryway from the pool. The pool’s water was flat and dead, and the air was thick and humid. Even though Maya had surely heard Emily come in, she didn’t turn around. If things had been different, Emily might jokingly have pushed her in the water, then jumped in too. She cleared her throat. “Maya, the Trista thing isn’t what it looks like.”

“No?” Maya peeked over her shoulder. “It looked pretty obvious to me.”

“It’s just…she’s fun,” Emily admitted. “She doesn’t put any pressure on me.”

“And I do?” Maya shrieked, whirling around. Tears streamed down her face.

Emily swallowed hard, gathering her strength. “Maya…have you been sending me…text messages? Notes? Have you been…spying on me?”

Maya’s brow crinkled. “Why would I spy on you?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Emily started. “But if you are…the police know.”

Maya slowly shook her head. “You’re not making any sense.”

“I won’t tell if it’s you,” Emily pleaded. “I just want to know
why
.”

Maya shrugged, then let out a little whimper of frustration. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” A tear streaked down her face. She shook her head, disgusted. “I love you,” she spat. “And I thought you loved me.” She turned around, yanked the pool’s glass door open, then slammed it shut.

The pool’s overhead lights dimmed, turning the reflections coming off the pool from whitish-gold to orangish-yellow. Beads of humid sweat gathered on the top of the diving board. All of a sudden, the realization hit Emily, like the shock of diving into ice-cold water on an already cold day. Of course Maya wasn’t A. A had set all this up for Maya to look suspicious, so things would be ruined between the two of them forever.

Her cell phone buzzed. Emily grabbed for it, her hands shaking.

Emmykins:

There’s a girl waiting for you in the hot tub. Enjoy!—A

Emily let her phone drop to her side, her heart pounding. The hot tub was separated from the rest of the room by a partition, and it had its own door that led back out to the hall. Emily crept slowly to the hot tub. It bubbled like a cauldron, and mist rose off the water’s surface. Suddenly, she noticed a flash of red in the bubbly water and jumped back in terror. Looking again, she realized it was only a doll floating facedown, its long red hair fanned out around it.

She reached in and pulled the doll out. It was an Ariel doll from
The Little Mermaid
. The doll had scaly green and purple fins, but instead of a clamshell bikini, Ariel wore a sleek racing suit that said
ROSEWOOD DAY SHARKS
across the boobs. There were
X
’s over her eyes, as if she’d drowned, and there was something written in thick marker across her forehead.

Tell and die.—A

Emily’s hands started to shake, and she dropped the doll on the slick, tiled floor. As she stepped away from the hot tub’s edge, a door slammed.

Emily shot up, her eyes wide. “Who’s there?” she whispered.

Silence.

She stepped out from the hot tub partition and looked around. There was no one in the pool area. She couldn’t see around the tiled wall that hid the front door, but she saw a distinct shadow on the far wall. Someone was here with her.

Emily heard a giggle and jumped. Then a hand flew out from behind the tiled wall. A blond ponytail appeared, then another pair of hands, larger and masculine, with a silver Rolex dangling from one wrist.

Noel Kahn emerged first, darting from behind the wall to one of the nearby chaises. “Come on,” he whispered. Then the blonde scampered to him. It was Trista. They lay down on the chaise together and resumed kissing.

Emily was so stunned, she burst out laughing. Trista and Noel glanced at her. Trista’s mouth fell open, but then she shrugged, as if to say,
Hey, you weren’t around.
Emily suddenly thought of Abby’s warning—
Trista Taylor tries to hump anything that moves, girl or guy.
She had a feeling Trista wouldn’t be camping out on Emily’s bedroom floor tonight after all.

Noel’s lips spread into an easy smile. Then they went back to what they were doing, as if Emily didn’t exist at all. Emily looked back at the drowned Ariel splayed out on the ground and shivered. Of course if she told anyone about A, A would make sure that Emily
really
didn’t exist.

29

NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM

Aria dashed from her dented Subaru to the Hollis art building. A storm was building on the horizon, and the rain had already begun to fall. She had finished telling the cops about A only a little while ago, and although she’d tried to call her old friends on Wilden’s phone, none of them had picked up—probably because they didn’t recognize his number. She was now going into the Hollis art building to see if she had left her Treo here; without it, she had no concrete proof of what A was doing to her. Mike had offered to go into the building with her, but Aria had told him she’d see him later, at Hanna’s party.

As Aria pushed the call button for the elevator, she pulled her Rosewood Day blazer around her—she hadn’t had time to change yet. Mike’s insistence that she tell Wilden about A had been a wake-up call, but had she done the right thing? Wilden had wanted to know the details of every last text, IM, e-mail, and note that A had sent. He had asked over and over again, “Is there anyone the four of you hurt? Is there anyone who might want to harm you?”

Aria had paused and shaken her head, not wanting to answer. Who
hadn’t
they hurt, back in the day, with Ali at the helm? There was one clear front-runner, though…Jenna.

She thought of A’s notes:
I know EVERYTHING. I’m closer than you think.
She thought of Jenna fiddling with her cell phone, saying,
I’m so psyched I can send texts!
But was Jenna truly capable of something like this? She was blind—A obviously wasn’t.

The elevator doors slid open, and Aria got in. As it pulled her to the third floor, she thought about the memory Hanna had mentioned when she first woke up from her coma—the one about the afternoon before Ali went missing. Ali had been acting so strangely that day, first reading some notebook she wouldn’t show the others, then appearing downstairs moments later, seeming so disoriented. Aria had lingered on Ali’s porch by herself for a few minutes after the others left, knitting the last few rows of one of the cuff bracelets she planned to give to each of them as a first-full-day-of-summer present. As she went around the house to retrieve her bike, she saw Ali standing in the middle of her front yard, transfixed. Ali’s eyes flickered from the DiLaurentises’ curtained dining room window to the Cavanaughs’ house across the street.

“Ali?” Aria had whispered. “Are you okay?”

Ali didn’t move. “Sometimes,” she said in an entranced voice, “I just wish she was out of my life forever.”

“What?” Aria whispered. “Who?”

Ali seemed stunned, as if Aria had snuck up on her. There was a flash of something in the DiLaurentises’ window—or perhaps it was just a reflection. And when Aria looked at the Cavanaughs’ yard, she saw someone lurking behind the large shrub by Toby’s old tree house. It reminded Aria of the figure she swore she’d seen standing in the Cavanaughs’ yard the night they blinded Jenna.

The elevator let out a
ding,
and Aria jumped. Who had Ali been talking about when she said,
I just wish she was out of my life forever
? At the time, she’d thought Ali meant Spencer—they were constantly fighting. Now she wasn’t sure at all. There were just so many things she hadn’t known about Ali.

The hallway leading to the Mindless Art studio was dark, save for a brief moment when a zigzag of lightning came dangerously close to the window. When Aria reached the open door of her classroom, she flipped on the light and blinked in the sudden brightness. Her class’s cubbies were along the back wall, and amazingly, Aria’s Treo was in an empty cubby, seemingly untouched. She ran to it and cradled it in her arms, letting out a sigh of relief.

Then, she noticed the masks her class had completed, one drying in each cubby. The alcove with Aria’s name written in Scotch tape on the bottom was empty, but Jenna’s wasn’t. Someone else must have helped Jenna make her mask, because there it was, faceup and perfectly formed, the blank, hollowed-out eyes staring at the cubby’s ceiling. Aria lifted it slowly. Jenna had painted her mask to look like an enchanted forest. Vines swirled around the nose, a flower bloomed above her left eye, and there was a gorgeous butterfly on her right cheek. The detailed brushwork was impeccable—perhaps
too
impeccable. It didn’t seem possible for someone who couldn’t see.

A crack of thunder sounded like it was splitting open the earth. Aria yelped, dropping the mask to the table. When she looked to the window, she saw the silhouette of something swinging from the window’s top crank. It looked like a tiny…person.

Aria stepped closer. It was a plush doll of the Wicked Queen from
Snow White
. She wore a long black robe and a gold crown on her head, and her frowning face was ghostly pale. She hung from a rope around her neck, and someone had drawn big, black
X
’s over her eyes. There was a note pinned to the doll’s long gown.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the naughtiest of them all? You told. So you’re next.—A

Tree branches scraped violently against the window. More lightning set fire to the sky. As another crack of thunder sounded, the studio’s lights died. Aria shrieked.

The streetlights just outside the window had gone off, too, and somewhere, far away, Aria heard a fire alarm screaming.
Stay calm,
Aria told herself. She grabbed her Treo and dialed the number for the police dispatch. Just as someone picked up, a knife-shaped bolt of lightning flickered outside the window. Aria’s phone slipped from her fingers and clattered to the floor. She reached for it, then tried to dial again. But her phone no longer had service.

Lightning lit up the room again, illuminating the shapes of the desks, the cabinets, the swinging Wicked Queen from the window, and, finally, the door. Aria widened her eyes, a scream frozen in her throat.
There was someone there.

“H-hello?” she cried out.

With another zing of lightning, the stranger was gone. Aria bit into her knuckles, her teeth chattering. “Hello?” she called. Lightning flashed again. A girl was standing just inches from her face. Aria felt dizzy with fear. It was…

“Hello,” the girl said.

It was Jenna.

30

THREE LITTLE WORDS CAN CHANGE EVERYTHING

Spencer sat at the roulette table, moving her shiny plastic casino chips from one palm to the other. As she placed a few chips on numbers 4, 5, 6, and 7, she felt the push of the crowd now gathered thickly behind her. It seemed like all of Rosewood was here tonight—everyone from Rosewood Day, plus the people from rival private schools who were staples at Noel Kahn’s parties. There was even a cop here, wandering the perimeter. Spencer wondered why.

When the wheel stopped, the ball landed on the number 6. This was the third time in a row she’d won. “Nice job,” someone said in her ear. Spencer looked around, but she couldn’t locate who’d spoken to her. It sounded like her sister’s voice. Only, why would Melissa be here? No other college kids had come, and before Spencer’s Golden Orchid interview, Melissa had said Hanna’s party sounded ridiculous.

She did it, you know.
Spencer couldn’t get A’s text out of her head.

She scanned the tent. Someone with chin-length blond hair was slinking toward the stage, but when Spencer stood up, the person seemed to have evaporated into the crowd. She rubbed her eyes. Maybe she was going crazy.

Suddenly, Mona Vanderwaal grabbed her arm. “Hey, sweetie. You have a sec? I have a surprise.”

She led Spencer through the crowd to a more secluded spot, snapped her fingers, and a waiter magically appeared, handing each of them a tall, fluted glass filled with bubbly liquid. “It’s real champagne,” Mona said. “I wanted to propose a toast to thank you, Spencer. For planning this fantastic party with me…and also for being there for me. About…you know. The notes.”

“Of course,” Spencer said faintly.

They clinked glasses and sipped. “This party is really awesome,” Mona went on. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”