Wanted (2 page)

Aria stepped out on the porch and looked around. “Ali?” she cried, her bottom lip trembling.

No answer. The tips of Aria’s fingers shook; maybe she sensed, deep down, that she wasn’t alone.

“Spencer?” Aria called again. She reached out and touched the wind chimes, desperate for sound. They knocked together melodically.

Aria returned to the barn as Hanna and Emily came to. “I had the weirdest dream,” Emily murmured, rubbing her eyes. “Ali fell down this really deep well, and there were these giant plants.”

“That was my dream, too!” Hanna cried. They stared at each other in confusion.

Spencer stomped back onto the porch, dazed and disoriented.

“Where’s Ali?” the other girls asked.

“I don’t know,” Spencer said in a faraway voice. She looked around. “I thought…I don’t know.”

By this time, the Polaroids had been scooped up off the ground and stowed safely in a pocket. But then the camera went off again by accident, the flash lighting up the red wood siding. Another photo emerged.

Snap. Whir.

The girls stared at the window, frozen and terrified as deer. Was someone there? Ali? Or maybe it was Melissa or Ian. They’d just been here, after all.

They remained very still. Two seconds passed. Five. Ten. There was only silence. It was just the wind, they decided. Or maybe a tree branch scraping against the glass, as painful as someone scraping her fingernails against a plate.

“I think I want to go home,” Emily told her friends.

The girls filed out of the barn together—annoyed, embarrassed, shaken. Ali had ditched them. The friendship was over. They started across Spencer’s yard, unaware of the terrible things that were to come. The face at the window had disappeared, too, off to follow Ali down the path. Everything had been set in motion. What was about to happen had already begun.

Within hours, Ali would be dead.

1

A BROKEN HOME

Spencer Hastings rubbed her sleep-crusted eyes and put a Kashi waffle in the toaster. Her family’s kitchen smelled of freshly brewed coffee, pastries, and lemon-scented household cleaner. The two labradoodles, Rufus and Beatrice, circled her legs, their tails wagging.

The tiny LCD TV in the corner was tuned to the news. A female reporter in a blue Burberry barn jacket was standing with the Rosewood chief of police and a gray-haired man in a black suit. The caption said
The Rosewood Murders.

“My client has been wrongfully accused,” the man in the suit proclaimed. He was William “Billy” Ford’s publicly appointed lawyer and it was the first time he’d spoken to the press since Billy’s arrest. “He’s absolutely innocent. He was framed.”

“Right,” Spencer spat. Her hand shook unsteadily as she poured coffee into a blue Rosewood Day Prep mug. There was no doubt in Spencer’s mind that Billy had killed her best friend, Alison DiLaurentis, nearly four years ago. And now he’d murdered Jenna Cavanaugh, a blind girl in Spencer’s grade, and probably Ian Thomas—Melissa’s ex-boyfriend, Ali’s secret crush,
and
her first accused killer. Cops found a bloody T-shirt that belonged to Ian in Billy’s car and they were now searching for his body, though they hadn’t come up with any leads.

Outside, a garbage truck grumbled around the cul-de-sac where Spencer lived. A split second later, the same exact sound growled through the speakers of the TV. Spencer walked to the living room and parted the curtains at the front window. Sure enough, a news van was parked at the curb. A cameraman swiveled from one person to the other, and another guy holding a giant microphone braced against the blustery wind. Spencer could see the reporter’s mouth moving through the window and hear her voice through the TV speaker.

Across the street, the Cavanaughs’ backyard was wrapped in yellow police tape. A cop car had been parked in their driveway ever since Jenna’s murder. Jenna’s guide dog, a burly German shepherd, peered out the bay window in the living room. He’d remained there day and night for the past two weeks, as if patiently waiting for Jenna to return.

The police had found Jenna’s limp, lifeless body in a ditch behind her house. According to reports, Jenna’s parents arrived home on Saturday evening to an empty house. Mr. and Mrs. Cavanaugh heard frantic and persistent barks from the back of their property. Jenna’s guide dog was tied to a tree…but Jenna was gone. When they released the dog, he sprinted straight to the hole plumbers had dug a few days ago to repair a burst water pipe. But there was more inside that hole than the newly fitted pipe. It was as if the murderer
wanted
Jenna to be found.

An anonymous tip led the police to Billy Ford. The cops also charged him with killing Alison DiLaurentis. It made sense—Billy had been a part of the construction crew installing a gazebo for the DiLaurentises the same weekend Ali disappeared. Ali had complained about the lascivious looks the workers gave her. At the time, Spencer had thought Ali was bragging. Now she knew what actually happened. The toaster popped and Spencer padded back to the kitchen. The news had cut back to the studio, where a brunette anchor wearing big hoop earrings sat at a long desk. “Police recovered a series of incriminating images on Mr. Ford’s laptop that helped lead to his arrest,” the anchor said in a grave voice. “These photos show how closely Mr. Ford was stalking Ms. DiLaurentis, Ms. Cavanaugh, and four other girls known as the Pretty Little Liars.”

A montage of old photos of Jenna and Ali appeared, many of the shots looking like they’d been stealthily snapped from a hiding spot behind a tree or inside a car. Then came images of Spencer, Aria, Emily, and Hanna. Some of the pictures were from seventh grade, when Ali was still alive, but others were more recent—there was one of the four girls in dark dresses and heels at Ian’s trial, waiting for Ian to show up. There was another shot of them gathered by the Rosewood Day swings clad in wool coats, hats, and mittens, probably discussing New A. Spencer winced.

“There are also messages on Mr. Ford’s computer that match the threatening notes sent to Alison’s former best friends,” the reporter went on. An image of Darren Wilden coming out of a confessional and a bunch of familiar e-mails and IM conversations whizzed past. Each note was signed with a crisp, singular letter
A.
Spencer and her friends hadn’t gotten a single message since Billy had been arrested.

Spencer took a gulp of coffee, barely noticing the hot liquid sliding down her throat. It was so bizarre that Billy Ford—a man she didn’t know at all—was behind everything that had happened. Spencer had no idea
why
he’d done those things.

“Mr. Ford has a long history of violence,” the reporter went on. Spencer peered over her coffee mug. A YouTube video showed a fuzzy image of Billy and a guy in a Phillies cap fighting in a Wawa parking lot. Even after the guy fell to the ground, Billy kept on kicking him. Spencer put her hand to her mouth, picturing Billy doing the same thing to Ali.

“And these images, found in Mr. Ford’s car, have never been seen before.”

A blurry Polaroid photo materialized. Spencer leaned forward, her eyes widening. It was a shot of the inside of a barn—her
family’s
barn, which had been ruined in the fire Billy set several weeks ago, presumably to destroy evidence tying him to Ali’s and Ian’s murders. In the picture, four girls sat on the round rug in the center of the room, their heads bowed. A fifth girl stood above them, her arms in the air. The next photo was of the same scene, except the standing girl had moved a few inches to the left. In the following shot, one of the girls who had been sitting had stood up and moved toward the window. Spencer recognized the girl’s dirty blond hair and rolled-up field hockey skirt. She gasped. She was looking at her younger self. These photos were from the night Ali went missing. Billy had been standing outside the barn, watching them.

And they’d never known.

Someone let out a small, dry cough behind her. Spencer whirled around. Mrs. Hastings sat at the kitchen table, staring blankly into a mug of Earl Grey tea. She was wearing a pair of gray Lululemon yoga pants with a tiny hole in the knee, dirty white socks, and an oversize Ralph Lauren polo. Her hair was stringy, and there were toast crumbs on her left cheek. Normally, Spencer’s mom didn’t even let the family dogs see her unless she looked absolutely pristine.

“Mom?” Spencer said tentatively, wondering if her mother had seen the Polaroids, too. Mrs. Hastings turned her head slowly, as though she were moving underwater. “Hi, Spence,” she said tonelessly. Then she turned back to her tea, staring miserably at the bag steeping at the bottom of the cup.

Spencer bit off the tip of her French-manicured pinkie. On top of everything else, her mom was acting like a zombie…and it was all her fault. If only she hadn’t blurted out the horrible secret Billy-as-A had told her about her family: that her dad had had an affair with Ali’s mother, and that Ali was Spencer’s half sister. If only Billy hadn’t convinced Spencer that her mom knew about the affair and killed Ali to punish her husband. Spencer had confronted her mother, only to discover that her mother hadn’t known—or done—anything. After that, Mrs. Hastings kicked Spencer’s dad out of the house, and then more or less gave up on life entirely.

The familiar
click-click-click
of heels on the mahogany hall floors rang through the air. Spencer’s sister, Melissa, blustered into the room, surrounded by a cloud of Miss Dior. She wore a pale blue Kate Spade sweater dress and gray kitten heels, and her dark blond hair was pulled back in a gray headband. There was a silver clipboard under her arm and a Montblanc pen behind her right ear.

“Hey, Mom!” Melissa called brightly, giving her a kiss on the forehead. Then she appraised Spencer, setting her mouth in a straight line. “Hey, Spence,” she said coolly.

Spencer slumped into the nearest chair. The benevolent, I’m-glad-you’re-alive feelings she and her sister had shared the night Jenna was murdered had lasted exactly twenty-four hours. Now, things were back to status quo, with Melissa blaming Spencer for their family’s ruin, snubbing Spencer every chance she got, and taking on all the home responsibilities like the prissy brownnoser she’d always been.

Melissa lifted the clipboard. “I’m going to Fresh Fields for groceries. Want anything special?” She spoke to Mrs. Hastings in an overly loud voice, as if she were ninety years old and deaf.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Mrs. Hastings said morosely. She stared into her open palms as if they contained great wisdom. “It doesn’t really matter, does it? We eat the food, and then it’s gone, and then we’re hungry again.” At that, she stood up, sighed loudly, and shuffled up the stairs to her bedroom.

Melissa’s lip twitched. The clipboard knocked against her hip. She glanced over at Spencer, her eyes narrowing.
Look what you’ve done,
her expression screamed.

Spencer stared out the long line of windows that faced the backyard. Sheets of pale blue ice glistened on the back walkway. Pointed icicles hung from the singed trees. The family’s old barn was a heap of black wood and ash, ruined from the fire. The windmill was still in pieces, the word
LIAR
scrawled on the base.

Tears rushed to Spencer’s eyes. Whenever she looked at her backyard, she had to resist the urge to run upstairs, curl up under her bed, and shut the door. Things had been great between Spencer and her parents before she exposed the affair—for once. But Spencer now felt the same way she did when she first tasted homemade cappuccino ice cream from the Creamery in Hollis—after just one lick, she had to eat the whole cone. After a taste of what a decent, loving family was like, she couldn’t go back to dysfunction and neglect.

The television continued to blare, a picture of Ali filling the screen. Melissa paused to listen for a moment as the reporter walked through the timeline of the murder.

Spencer bit down on her lip. She and Melissa hadn’t discussed the fact that Ali was their half sister. Now that Spencer knew that she and Ali were related, it changed everything. For a long time, Spencer had kind of hated Ali—she’d controlled her every move, stockpiled her every secret. But none of that mattered now. Spencer just wished she could go back in time to save Ali from Billy that horrible night.

The station cut to a studio shot of pundits sitting around a high, bistro-style table, discussing Billy’s fate. “You can’t trust anyone anymore,” exclaimed an olive-skinned woman in a cherry-red power suit. “No child is safe.”

“Now, wait a second.” A black man with a goatee waved his hands to stop them. “Maybe we should give Mr. Ford a chance. A man is innocent until proven guilty, right?”

Melissa scooped up her black patent leather Gucci hobo bag from the island. “I don’t know why they’re wasting their time discussing this,” she spat acidly. “He deserves to rot in hell.”

Spencer gave her sister an uneasy look. That was another strange development in the Hastings household—Melissa had become unequivocally, almost fanatically confident that Billy was the murderer. Every time the news brought up an inconsistency in the case, Melissa grew enraged.

“He’ll go to jail,” Spencer said reassuringly. “Everyone knows he did it.”

“Good.” Melissa turned away, plucked the Mercedes car keys out of the ceramic bowl by the phone, buttoned the checkered Marc Jacobs jacket she’d bought at Saks the week before—apparently she wasn’t too distraught over their broken home to shop—and slammed the door.

As the pundits continued to squabble, Spencer walked to the front window and watched as her sister backed out of the driveway. There was a disquieting smile on Melissa’s lips that sent a shiver up Spencer’s backbone.

For some reason, Melissa almost looked…
relieved
.

2

THE SECRETS NOW BURIED

Aria Montgomery and her boyfriend, Noel Kahn, huddled close as they walked from the Rosewood Day student parking lot to the lobby entrance. A rush of warm air greeted them as they swept inside the school, but when Aria noticed the display near the auditorium, her blood froze. On a long table across the room was a large photo of Jenna Cavanaugh.