Ruthless Read online

Page 2

 

  But as the screen flashed, she felt an eerie premonition. What if Spencer was in trouble? The last time she’d seen Spencer, she’d seemed so scared and desperate. Maybe she needed Emily’s help. Maybe they could help each other.

  Emily’s fingers inched toward the phone, but then Carolyn rolled over in bed and groaned. “You’re not going to get that, are you? Some of us have class in the morning. ”

  Emily pressed IGNORE and flopped back down to the mattress, biting back tears. She knew it was a burden for Carolyn to let her stay here—the futon took up nearly all the floor space, Emily constantly interrupted her sister’s studying schedule, and she was asking Carolyn to keep a huge secret from their parents. But did she have to be so mean about it?

  Spencer hung up without leaving Emily a message. There was one person left to call. Spencer pressed Hanna’s name in her contacts list.

  Hanna was zipping her suitcase closed when the phone rang. “Mike?” she answered without looking at the screen. All day, her boyfriend had been calling her with random trivia about Iceland—Did you know there’s a museum about sex there? I am so taking you.

  “Hanna,” Spencer blurted on the other end. “I need you. ”

  Hanna sat back. “Are you okay?” She’d barely heard from Spencer all summer, not since she began an intensive summer program at Penn. The last time she’d seen her was at Noel Kahn’s party, when Spencer’s friend Kelsey came along, too. What a weird night that had been.

  Spencer burst into tears. Her words came out in choppy bursts, and Hanna only caught bits of sentences: “The police . . . pills . . . I tried to get rid of them . . . I am so dead unless you . . . ”

  Hanna rose and paced around the room. “Slow down. Let me get this straight. So . . . you’re in trouble? Because of the drugs?”

  “Yes, and I need you to do something for me. ” Spencer clutched the phone with both hands.

  “How can I help?” Hanna whispered. She thought about the times she’d been dragged to the police station—for stealing a bracelet from Tiffany, and later for wrecking her then-boyfriend Sean’s car. Surely Spencer wasn’t asking Hanna to cozy up to the cop that arrested her, as Hanna’s mother had done.

  “Do you still have those pills I gave you at Noel’s party?” Spencer said.

  “Uh, yeah. ” Hanna shifted uncomfortably.

  “I need you to get them and drive them to Penn’s campus. Go to the Friedman dorm. There’s a door around the back that’s always propped open—you can get in that way. Go to the fourth floor, room four-thirteen. There’s a keypad combination to get into the room—five-nine-two-oh. When you get in, put the pills under the pillow. Or in the drawer. Somewhere kind of hidden but also kind of obvious. ”

  “Wait, whose room is this?”

  Spencer curled her toes. She was hoping Hanna wouldn’t ask that. “It’s . . . Kelsey’s,” she admitted. “Please don’t judge me right now, Hanna. I don’t think I can take it. She’s going to ruin me, okay? I need you to put those pills in Kelsey’s room and then call the cops and say that she’s a known dealer at Penn. You also need to say she has a sketchy past—she’s trouble. That will make the cops search her room. ”

  “Is Kelsey really a dealer?” Hanna asked.

  “Well, no. I don’t think so. ”

  “So basically you’re asking me to frame Kelsey for something you both did?”

  Spencer shut her eyes. “I guarantee you Kelsey’s in the interrogation room right now, blaming me. I have to try to save myself. ”

  “But I’m going to Iceland in two days!” Hanna protested. “I’d rather not go through customs with a warrant out for my arrest. ”

  “You won’t get caught,” Spencer reassured her. “I promise. And . . . think about Jamaica. Think about how we all would have been screwed if we hadn’t stuck together. ”

  Hanna’s stomach swirled. She’d tried her hardest to erase the Jamaica incident from her mind, avoiding her friends for the rest of the school year so as not to relive or rehash the awful events. The same thing had happened to the four of them after their best friend, Alison DiLaurentis—really Courtney, Ali’s secret twin sister—disappeared on the last day of seventh grade. Sometimes, a tragedy brought friends together. Other times, it tore them apart.

  But Spencer needed her now, just like Hanna had needed her friends in Jamaica. They had saved her life. She stood up and slipped on a pair of Havaiana flip-flops. “Okay,” she whispered. “I’ll do it. ”

  “Thank you,” Spencer said. When she hung up, relief settled over her like a cool, misty rain.

  The door burst open, and the phone almost slid from Spencer’s hand. The same wiry cop strode into the room. When he noticed Spencer’s phone, his cheeks reddened. “What are you doing with that?”

  Spencer dropped it to the table. “No one asked me to hand it in. ”

  The cop grabbed the phone and slipped it into his pocket. Then he gripped Spencer’s hand and roughly pulled her to her feet. “Come on. ”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  The cop nudged Spencer into the hall. The odor of rancid takeout burned her nostrils. “We’re going to have a discussion. ”

  “I told you, I don’t know anything,” Spencer protested. “What did Kelsey say?”

  The cop smirked. “Let’s see if your stories match. ”

  Spencer stiffened. She pictured her new friend in the interrogation room, preserving her own future and wrecking Spencer’s. Then she thought of Hanna getting into her car and setting the GPS to Penn’s campus. The idea of blaming Kelsey made her stomach churn, but what other choice did she have?

  The cop pushed open a second door, and pointed for Spencer to sit down in an office chair. “You have a lot of explaining to do, Miss Hastings. ”

  That’s what you think, Spencer thought, rolling back her shoulders. Her decision was a good one. She had to look out for herself. And with Hanna on her way, she’d get away with this scot-free.

  It was only later, after Hanna had planted the drugs, after her call came into the central switchboard, and after Spencer overheard two cops talking about going to the Friedman dorm to search room 413, that Spencer found out the truth: Kelsey hadn’t said a single word to implicate either herself or Spencer for the crimes they’d been accused of. Spencer wished she could undo everything, but it was too late—admitting she’d lied would get her into worse trouble. It was better to keep quiet. There was no way to trace what the cops had found back to her.

  Shortly after that, the cops let Spencer go with a warning. As she was leaving the holding room, two officers marched Kelsey through the hall, their meaty hands gripping her arm like she was in big, big trouble. Kelsey glanced at Spencer fearfully as she passed. What’s going on? her eyes said. What do they have on me? Spencer had shrugged like she had absolutely no clue, then walked into the night, her future intact.

  Her life went on. She took her APs and aced every single one. She returned to Rosewood Day at the top of her class. She got into Princeton early decision. As the weeks and months flew by, the nightmarish evening faded and she rested easy, knowing her secret was safe. Only Hanna knew the truth. No one else—not her parents, not the Princeton admissions board, not Kelsey—would ever find out.

  Until the following winter. When someone discovered everything.

  Chapter 1

  EVERY KILLER DESERVES A NIGHT OUT

  On a Wednesday evening in early March, Emily Fields lay on the carpet in the bedroom she used to share with her sister Carolyn. Swimming medals and a big poster of Michael Phelps hung on the walls. Her sister’s bed was littered with Emily’s warm-up jacket, tons of oversized T-shirts, and a pair of boyfriend jeans. Carolyn had left for Stanford in August, and Emily relished having a space all her own. Especially since she was spending almost all her time in her room these days.

  Emily rolled over and stared at her laptop. A Facebook page blinked on the screen. Tabitha Clark, RIP.

&nb
sp; She stared at Tabitha’s profile picture. There were the pink lips that had smiled so seductively at Emily in Jamaica. There were the green eyes that had narrowed at all of them on the hotel’s crow’s-nest deck. Now Tabitha was nothing but bones, her flesh and innards eaten away by fishes and pounded clean by the tides.

  We did that.

  Emily slammed down the lid of her computer, feeling the urge to throw up. A year ago, on spring break in Jamaica, she and her friends had sworn that they’d come face-to-face with the real Alison DiLaurentis, back from the dead and ready to kill them once and for all, just like she’d meant to do at her family’s house in the Poconos. After a series of bizarre encounters in which this new, enigmatic stranger had uttered secrets that only Ali had known, Aria had pushed her over the edge of the crow’s nest. The girl had fallen several stories to the sandy beach, and her body had disappeared almost instantly, presumably carried out to sea by the tide. When the four of them saw the newscast on TV two weeks ago that this very same girl’s remains had washed up on the shores of the resort, they thought the whole world would discover what they already knew: that Real Ali had survived the fire in the Poconos. But then, the bomb dropped: The girl Aria pushed wasn’t Real Ali at all—her name was Tabitha Clark, just as she’d told them. They’d killed an innocent person.

  As the newscast ended, Emily and her friends received a chilling note from an anonymous person known only as A, in the tradition of the two stalkers who’d tormented them before. This new A knew what they had done and was going to make them pay. Emily had been holding her breath ever since, waiting for A’s next move.

  The realization cascaded over Emily daily, startling her anew and making her feel horribly ashamed. Tabitha was dead because of her. A family was ruined because of her. It was all she could do to keep from calling the police and telling them what they had done. But that would ruin Aria, Hanna, and Spencer’s lives, too.

  Her phone bleated, and she reached for it on her pillow. ARIA MONTGOMERY, said the screen. “Hey,” Emily said when she picked up.

  “Hey,” Aria said on the other end. “You okay?”

  Emily shrugged. “You know. ”

  “Yeah,” Aria agreed softly.

  They fell into a long silence. In the two weeks since a new A had emerged and Tabitha’s body had been found, Emily and Aria had begun calling each other every evening, just to check in. Mostly, they didn’t even talk. Sometimes, they watched TV together—shows like Hoarders or Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Last week, they’d both caught a rerun of Pretty Little Killer, the TV movie depicting Real Ali’s return and killing spree. Neither Emily nor her friends had seen the movie the night it originally aired—they’d been too shell-shocked from the revelation about Tabitha to change the channel from CNN. But Emily and Aria had watched the rerun quietly, gasping at the actresses who played their roles and squirming at the overdramatized moments where their doppelgangers found Ian Thomas’s body or ran from the fire in Spencer’s woods. When the movie hit its climax in the Poconos and the house exploded with Ali inside it, Emily shivered. The producers gave the show a definitive ending. They killed the villain and gave the girls their happily-ever-after. But they didn’t know that Emily and her friends were once again being haunted by A.