Crushed

“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?

But then Fuji pressed her palms flat on the top of her notebook and stood. “Thanks for your time, girls. If you think of anything else, please let me know.”

Spencer jumped up, too. “I’ll walk you out.”

Fuji bid her another good-bye at the door, walked down the path, and climbed into her car. When she backed out of the drive and turned off the cul-de-sac, Spencer whirled around to face her friends, who were sitting stock-still on the couch.

Hanna broke the silence. “I thought she was going to nail us.”

“I know.” Aria collapsed into the back cushions. “I was convinced she knew more than she was saying.”

Beep.

It was Spencer’s phone. All of the girls’ spines went ramrod straight. A bleep soon followed from Emily’s phone. Then Hanna’s buzzed. Aria’s phone made a slide-whistle sound. Their screens all flashed with an alert that a new text message had come in.

Taking a huge breath, Spencer looked at the screen.

I do love some freshly planted lies on a lovely spring afternoon. I wonder if Agent Fuji feels the same . . . —A

Spencer squeezed her eyes shut. Letting out a wail, she hurled the phone across the room, where it crashed against a small side table. The battery flew out and skidded across the floor. Then she eyed the others. “Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow,” Aria growled. Emily and Hanna nodded, too.

It was their only hope. They were going to solve this, once and for all.

6

The Situation Room

On Thursday, after the last bell rang, Hanna scuttled toward the parking lot, her leather tote bumping against her back. When she heard someone call her name, she turned. Chassey Bledsoe stood at the curb, smiling eagerly, every inch of her formerly pockmarked skin eerily blemish-free.

“We’re shooting campaign videos,” Chassey chirped. “Aren’t you coming?”

Hanna glanced toward the lot, then back at Chassey. “Um, I can’t.”

Chassey looked disappointed. “Do you want me to tell them to reschedule?”

Hanna chewed on her lip. All she wanted was to make a video that was a zillion times better than anything Chassey could do. But then she thought of A’s note about campaigning. It was painful to see all the VOTE CHASSEY posters on the wall when she couldn’t put up a single HANNA FOR MAY DAY QUEEN one. What if Chassey won by a landslide? Hanna would be humiliated.

“That’s okay. I have an appointment I can’t miss,” she said. “It’s sort of hard to explain. Good luck, though!”

“But . . . ,” Chassey started, but Hanna just waved, turned, and jogged up the hill to her car. Before she got in, she pulled a black knit cap over her head and shrugged into a black peacoat she’d stashed in the back of the Prius. Time to get into secret-mission mode.

She climbed into the car, gunned out of the lot—well, as fast as a Prius could gun—and pulled onto the highway. She threw the new burner cell she’d picked up at Radio Shack in the console, then glanced at the car’s GPS. The next turn wasn’t for a few miles yet, but what was with that black SUV on her tail? She squinted in the rearview mirror, trying to get a glimpse of the driver. The windows were tinted. Her heart began to bang. Black SUVs were a dime a dozen here in Rosewood—it could be anyone in there.

She took the very next exit. Recalculating, the GPS said. The SUV followed. Hanna slowed at a stop sign and took a left. The SUV did the same. “Oh my God,” Hanna whispered. Was it A?

She spied a Wawa ahead and pulled into the parking lot. The SUV whizzed past. Hanna reached for a pen to scribble down the license plate, but the car was out of view before she could read the last two letters. Shifting into reverse, she peeled out and took the back way to the highway. When she merged into traffic, the black SUV was nowhere in sight. She wished she could call Mike and tell him about how much of a badass she was. But as of now, Mike didn’t even have the number for her burner cell, a hideous flip-phone thing that Hanna couldn’t even buy a bejeweled Tory Burch case for.

Twenty minutes, three more suspicious vehicles, and several more evasive turns later, Hanna pulled up to a secluded street of huge, cookie-cutter mansions. A man-made lake glittered in the distance—even the plump, brilliantly colored mallard ducks looked like models. A few athletic-looking people were out walking their dogs, even though a steady rain had started to fall. Hanna pulled into the long slate driveway of number 11, noticing a light on inside.

She got out of the car and tiptoed toward the door. The heavy scent of pine bombarded her nostrils. For a neighborhood in the middle of the bustling Main Line, it was eerily quiet, the only sounds the chirps, crunches, and flutters of nature.

Before she could ring the bell, a hand grabbed her arm from behind. She started to scream, but a second hand in a black glove clapped over her mouth. “Shh,” Spencer whispered, pulling the hood off her face. “Didn’t I tell you not to go in the front?”

“I forgot,” Hanna said, suddenly irritated. She’d lost four tails! She couldn’t be expected to remember everything.

Spencer led her through a side entrance and into a mudroom that smelled like 409 cleaner and cinnamon candle. Then she guided her down a flight of stairs into a finished basement with a game room, wine cellar, and home theater. To the left was a heavy iron door with a spinning bank vault handle. Spencer wrenched it open. “Go,” she whispered, pushing Hanna inside like she was a hostage.

Hanna squinted in the dim light. The room had thick, solid walls. There was a small denim couch, a few chairs, and a card table in the corner, along with a bookcase that held some magazines and board games. On two walls were video cameras of the house’s massive front and back yards. Hanna watched them for a few minutes. Trees brushed back and forth. A rabbit hopped in front of one of the cameras.

One of the screens showed a cab pulling up to the driveway. Aria, wearing a black hoodie like Spencer’s, slunk out of the car and crept toward the house. Spencer appeared on the screen and led Aria to the same entrance Hanna had come through.

Emily arrived a few minutes later. Then Spencer unfurled a large piece of blank paper and taped it over the closed vault door. “Okay. Let’s get started.”

She pulled a black marker from her purse and wrote A at the top of the piece of paper. “What do we know so far?” she asked.

Hanna jiggled her leg. “Well, A killed Tabitha. So it’s someone who was in Jamaica.”

Jamaica, Spencer wrote. “What else?”

“Do you think A was a friend of Tabitha’s, or an enemy?” Emily asked. “I would say an enemy since A killed her, but maybe that’s what A wants us to think.”

Aria nodded. “A was poised on the beach, so A knew Tabitha was going up to the roof to talk to us. Do you think A told Tabitha to say all those Ali-like things to us, too? Like how you guys seemed like long-lost sisters, Spence? Or how you used to be chubby, Hanna?”

“Maybe. And A could have given that string bracelet to Tabitha, too,” Hanna said. “But why would someone want us to think Tabitha was Ali?”

“To pique our curiosity, so we would definitely go on the roof deck with her when she asked?” Aria said. “And then . . . what? Orchestrate things so that we’d push Tabitha off? How would A know that was going to happen? A’s not a mind reader.”

“It might have just been an accident that Tabitha fell,” Hanna decided. “What if A really asked Tabitha to push me? But then Aria stepped in and pushed her instead. Everything went wrong, until A realized how to make it right. A killed Tabitha when she fell and then blamed it on us.”

Spencer capped the marker. “That could be how it went down, I suppose. But who would do something like that?”

Emily looked at the others. “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

Hanna swallowed hard. “Real Ali?”

Emily shifted her weight on the couch. “It makes sense. First of all, she knew our weaknesses—it would have been easy for her to tell Tabitha what to say. She wanted revenge once and for all. And it makes sense how she knew Tabitha—she met her at The Preserve. But how did she get Tabitha to do all that—even potentially murder for her? What did Tabitha have to gain from it? Do you think she paid her?”