Aria cleared her throat. “Maybe it’s not a coincidence at all.”
Everyone looked at her. Aria turned to Emily. “Let me get this straight, Em. You just saw the woman you promised a baby to, the woman you screwed over in the end. Right?”
“I had to screw her over,” Emily interrupted, a tormented look on her face. “I had to do what was right for the baby!”
“I know, I know.” Aria waved her hands impatiently. “Just go with me, okay? You were worried sick about Gayle tracking you down, though. And you said Gayle was crazy. Isn’t that why you didn’t want to give the baby to her?”
Emily wrinkled her nose. “I don’t see what you’re getting at.”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Aria exclaimed. “You saw Gayle inside. And then, seconds later, you got a note from A about the baby. Gayle is A! Maybe she figured out what you did—what we all did! And now she wants to get revenge on all of us for helping you take her baby away!”
Emily squinted. “That makes no sense. How could Gayle know about Spencer’s drug problem? How could she know about what happened in Jamaica?”
“Maybe she has a connection to Penn and Jamaica,” Aria said. “She’s really rich. Maybe she hired a PI. You never know.”
“But what does she want from us?” Hanna asked.
Everyone thought for a moment. “Maybe she wants to know where the baby is,” Aria suggested.
“Or maybe Gayle just wants to hurt you like you hurt her,” Spencer said with a shiver. “Remember those messages she left on your voicemail, Em? She sounded crazy.” She shut her eyes and recalled the woman’s grating voice coming through the tiny cell phone speaker. I’m going to find you, the last voicemail had said. I’m going to hunt you and that baby down, and then you’ll be sorry.
Inside, Tom Marin’s voice boomed through the microphone. Hanna cast a glance at the door. “What did you mean when you said Gayle being my dad’s biggest donor might not be a coincidence, Aria?”
“Think about it.” Aria fiddled with one of her feather earrings. “If Gayle is A, maybe she got involved with your dad’s campaign to get closer to you. Maybe it’s part of her master plan.”
Hanna squeezed her eyes shut. “My dad said that her funds are crucial to the campaign, though. If she withheld them for any reason, he might not have the money to air his commercials throughout the state.”
“Maybe that’s part of A’s master plan, too,” Spencer said somberly.
“Guys, do you hear yourselves?” Emily looked annoyed. “There’s no way Gayle is A. Yeah, it’s awful that I ran into her. And yeah, I don’t know what I’m going to do now that she’s seen me. But we have to think about A getting to Gayle, not A being Gayle.”
“I think we need more facts,” Spencer said. “Maybe there’s a way we could prove if Gayle is or isn’t A. If she’s your dad’s biggest donor, Hanna, maybe you could snoop around a little?”
“Me?” Hanna pressed her hand to her chest. “Why do I have to do it?”
They were suddenly interrupted by a loud creak. The back door opened, and Kate stuck her head out. “There you are,” she said, sounding more relieved than annoyed. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Dad wants us on the stage with him.”
“Got it.” Hanna moved toward the door. She glanced over her shoulder at the others, indicating that they should follow. Aria and Spencer fell in line, but Emily stayed where she was. I’m not going back inside, her stubborn expression said. Not with Gayle there.
Spencer gave Emily an apologetic wave before ducking back into the banquet hall. The room was even more crowded than before—every seat was filled. Mr. Marin stood on the stage, answering questions and flashing his politician’s smile. Spencer caught Hanna’s arm before she joined her father. “Which one is Gayle, anyway?”
Hanna pointed to a woman in a red skirt suit in the front row. “Her.”
Spencer gazed at the woman, assessing her blond hair, thin face, and the enormous diamonds on her fingers. All of a sudden, something clicked. The cake tasting. Gayle had been a few tables over, wearing a Chanel suit. Spencer had felt the woman’s gaze on her back, but had shaken off Gayle’s weird, smug expression, telling herself she was just being paranoid.
But maybe she wasn’t. Maybe Gayle had been watching her. Because maybe, just maybe, Gayle was A.
10
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Wednesday afternoon, Aria and Noel stood at a counter in the basement of the Rosewood Culinary College, where they were taking Introduction to Cooking. Shiny pots and pans surrounded them. Ground-up spices waited in small, clear prep bowls, and a half-chopped leek lay limply on their cutting board. The room smelled of boiling chicken broth, gas from the burners, and the pungent cinnamon Trident that Marge, the lady behind them, chewed nonstop.
All eyes were on Madame Richeau, their instructor. Even though she’d only been a cook on a Carnival cruise ship for all of six months in the eighties, she acted as though she were a celebrity chef on the Food Network, wearing a tall toque and speaking with a dubious French accent.
“The key to good risotto is constant stirring,” Madame Richeau said, inserting a wooden spoon into a pot and rotating it slowly around. She pronounced the like zee. “Never stop stirring until the rice is creamy. It’s a hard technique to master! Now, stir, stir, stir!”
Noel nudged Aria. “You aren’t stirring fast enough.”
Aria snapped to attention and looked down at her pot, which was full of Arborio rice and bubbling broth. “Oops,” she said distractedly, giving the concoction a few good mixes.
“Would you rather chop?” Noel held up the Japanese knife he’d brought from his parents’ kitchen. He was at work cutting a red onion for a side salad. “I don’t want our risotto to be ruined. Madame might give us the guillotine,” he said with a sly smile.
“I’m cool,” Aria said, glancing at his workstation. “Besides, I could never slice that onion as well as you.” Surprisingly, Noel had turned out to be pretty good at the class—especially the chopping part. Aria always got bored halfway through and left her vegetables in big, unwieldy chunks.
She could feel Noel studying her, but she pretended not to notice, instead vigorously stirring the risotto. Thankfully, Noel had missed the town hall meeting last night because he and his lacrosse buddies had a team dinner. And their schedules didn’t intersect in school for the past two days, which meant she hadn’t seen him in the halls. She’d considered not coming to cooking class, too, but then Noel would ask why. And what was she supposed to say—that she’d seen his father squeezing tomatoes in a dress at Fresh Fields?
She shuddered, the image swimming into her mind again. The moment she’d realized Mr. Kahn’s long-lost sister might just be Mr. Kahn himself, she’d shot out of the produce section as fast as she could and hidden behind a rack of French bread. She’d watched the man from afar, praying that she was wrong. Maybe it was another dude in drag. Maybe it was a really ugly woman. But then the person’s cell phone rang. “Hello?” a man’s voice said into the receiver—a man’s voice that sounded exactly like Mr. Kahn’s. Game over.
Aria wasn’t sure who she felt more embarrassed for—Mr. Kahn or herself. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the whole thing was her fault, which was how she’d felt when she discovered Byron kissing Meredith in seventh grade. If she hadn’t walked down that alley, if she hadn’t turned her head at that moment, she wouldn’t have been burdened with her dad’s secret—or the agonizing struggle of whether to tell Ella. Likewise, if she’d only gone to Fresh Fields a few moments later, or lingered at the cheese counter, she wouldn’t know something so damaging about Noel’s dad.
But now that she did know, she was dying to dig deeper. Was this something Mr. Kahn did often? He was a little odd—he’d dressed up as a cavemannish Viking for Klaudia’s welcome-to-the-U.S. party a month ago, and he was always drunkenly belting out opera songs and show tunes at Rosewood Day school board fund-raiser parties. But dressing up as a woman—in public? Didn’t he realize how that would look if someone caught him? And surely Mr. and Mrs. Kahn’s marriage wasn’t as solid as Aria had thought. Were they one of those couples who put up appearances but secretly didn’t love each other at all? That just made her heart break for Noel even more. He idolized his parents’ strong bond.
Aria had promised no more secrets, but this was definitely something Noel didn’t need to know—or want to know. And she could only hope A would never find out.
From the moment she’d woken up yesterday, Aria kept waiting for a taunting A message to arrive about Mr. Kahn. But miraculously, no note had been slipped under her windshield wiper, left in her locker, or beamed to her cell phone. Which meant one of two things: A was waiting for the perfect moment . . . or A didn’t know.
If Gayle was A, maybe Gayle had been too busy stalking Spencer and Emily to make time for Aria, too. It wasn’t like Gayle could be everywhere at once. And if A didn’t know, the best thing Aria could do was pretend she’d never seen Mr. Kahn. She wouldn’t even think about it.
“Everyone, get out your beurre and measure one half cup!” Madame Richeau crowed from the front.
“What’s beurre again?” Noel grumbled. “I hate when she says stuff in French.”
“Butter.” Aria reached into the mini fridge under the counter and pulled out a stick of Land O’Lakes. As she unwrapped it, her mind wandered again. Why was Gayle, a wealthy, successful woman, wasting her time and money stalking four high schoolers? Then again, she was nuts. Aria had only met Gayle once before, and she could tell immediately that there was something wrong with her.
It had been shortly after Emily admitted to Aria that she was pregnant. Aria was meeting Emily in the city. They’d planned to peruse the Italian Market, but then Emily asked if they could stop off to have coffee with Gayle, a strange, wealthy woman she’d met a week before.
“She got in touch with me through Derrick,” Emily explained, referring to her friend from the restaurant. “He works for her on the weekends. He’s asked her for more hours and listed me as a character reference.” She smiled apologetically. “It’ll only take a couple of minutes, I promise. And oh, I should warn you. She’s a little . . . weepy. But she seems nice enough.”
Aria had agreed, and Emily asked her to wear a wig and sunglasses so that Gayle wouldn’t recognize her and make the connection that both of them were the famous Pretty Little Liars. The only wig Aria had was a pink one from a few Halloweens earlier, but she’d worn it anyway.
The café was next to a yoga studio and a store that did tongue piercings. It was the kind of place that had reclaimed-wood farmhouse tables, weathervanes nailed to the walls, and a hand-printed menu on a chalkboard that said breakfast was served all day. Gayle was waiting for them in a booth, a big stack of blueberry pancakes already on the table. As soon as she spied Emily waddling up the aisle, she pushed the plate across the table. “Eat up. Blueberries are good for the baby’s developing brain.”