Burned (2 page)

An ambulance wailed in the distance. The girls stared at one another in horror, then started shuffling faster. Aria yanked the driver’s-side door open. The key was still in the ignition, and the left-turn signal was blinking. Hanna, Spencer, and Emily moved the airbag aside and set the girl down in the buttery leather seat behind the wheel. Her body listed to the right. Her eyes were still sealed shut, and the expression on her face was placid.

Emily let out a whimper. “Maybe we should stay here.”

“
No!
” Hanna screamed. “What if we
did
hurt her? We look even guiltier now!”

The sirens grew louder. “Hurry!” Hanna grabbed her purse from the backseat and slammed the driver’s-side door hard. Spencer shut the passenger door. They scrambled up the hill and dove into Aria’s car just as the ambulance appeared on the ridge. Emily got in the car last.

“Go!” Hanna screamed.

Aria jammed her key in the Subaru’s ignition, and the car sputtered to life. She did a quick three-point turn and sped away.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” Emily sobbed.

“Keep driving,” Spencer growled, peering out the back window at the whirling lights on top of the ambulance. Two EMTs jumped out of the ambulance and carefully maneuvered down the hill. “We can’t let them see us.”

Hanna swiveled around and stared out the window. All kinds of emotions knifed through her. Relief, definitely—at least Madison would get help. But the regret was like a vise around her throat. Had moving Madison made her worse? What had just
happened
?

A low sob burst from her lips. She put her head in her hands and felt the tears come.

Emily started crying, too. So did Aria.

“Stop it, guys,” Spencer snapped, though tears were running down her cheeks as well. “The EMTs will take care of her. She’s probably fine.”

“But what if she’s
not
fine?” Aria cried. “What if we
paralyzed
her?”

“I was just trying to do the right thing by driving her home!” Hanna moaned.

“We know.” Emily hugged her tight. “We know.”

As the Subaru wound around the hairpin turns, there was something else everyone wanted to say but didn’t dare:
At least no one will know about this
. The accident had happened on a desolate stretch of road. They’d gotten away from the accident before anyone had seen.

They were safe.

The girls waited for the accident to hit the news:
CAR CAREENS OFF EMBANKMENT ON REEDS LANE
, they imagined the headlines would read. The story might recount the girl’s high blood-alcohol level and how badly the car had been smashed up. But what else would the reporters say? What if Madison
was
paralyzed? What if she remembered she hadn’t been driving, or even remembered the girls moving her?

All the next day, each of them sat by the TV, checked their phones for breaking news, and kept the radio on low, on alert. But no news came.

A day passed, and then another. Still nothing. It was like the crash had never happened. On the third morning, Hanna got in her car and drove slowly down Reeds Lane, wondering if she’d imagined the whole thing. But no, there was the bent guardrail. There were the skid marks in the mud and a few shards of glass on the forest floor.

“Maybe her family was really embarrassed about what happened and made a deal with the cops to keep it quiet,” Spencer suggested when Hanna called her to express her uneasiness at the lack of news. “Remember Nadine Rupert, Melissa’s friend? One night, when they were seniors, Nadine got drunk and wrapped her car around a tree. She was fine, but her family begged the cops to keep the DUI a secret, and they did. Nadine was out of school for a month getting rehab, but she told everyone she was at a spa retreat instead. Later, though, she got drunk again and told Melissa the truth.”

“I just wish I knew if she’s hurt,” Hanna said in a small voice.

“I know.” Spencer sounded worried. “Let’s call the hospital.”

They did, on three-way, but since Hanna didn’t know Madison’s last name, the nurses couldn’t give them any information. Hanna hung up the phone, staring into space. Then she went on the website for Penn State—which was the school Madison said she attended—and did a search for her, hoping she’d find her last name that way. But there were quite a few Madisons in the sophomore class, way too many to go through one by one.

Would she feel better if she came forward and confessed? But even if she explained that another car had come out of nowhere, knocking her off the road, no one would believe her—they’d assume she’d been as wasted as Madison. The cops wouldn’t congratulate her for being honest, either—they’d haul her off to jail. They’d also realize that she’d needed help moving Madison and had had to recruit her friends. They’d be in trouble, too.

Stop thinking about it
, Hanna decided resolutely.
Her family wanted to make it go away, and you should do the same
. So she went to the mall. She tanned poolside at the country club. She avoided her stepsister, Kate, and was a bridesmaid in her father’s wedding to Isabel, wearing a hideous green dress. Eventually, she stopped thinking about Madison and the accident every second of the day. The crash hadn’t been her fault, after all, and Madison was probably fine. It wasn’t like she
knew
Madison, anyway. She’d probably never see her again.

Little did Hanna know that Madison was connected to someone they all knew very well—someone who hated them, in fact. And if that someone knew what they all had done, terrible things might happen. Acts of retribution. Revenge. Torture. That very person might take it upon himself—or herself—to become the very thing all four girls feared most.

A new—and far more frightening—A.

On a blustery Monday morning in late March, Spencer Hastings stared into the vintage Louis Vuitton trunk on her queen-sized bed. It was packed full of things for her upcoming journey on the Rosewood Day Prep Eco Cruise to the Caribbean, a combination of class trip and environmental-science seminar. Using the trunk was a long-standing good-luck tradition: It had once belonged to Regina Hastings, Spencer’s great-great-grandmother. Regina had bought a first-class reservation on the
Titanic
but decided to stay in Southampton for a few extra weeks and take the next steamer out.

As Spencer tossed a third bottle of sunscreen onto the top of the pile, her phone let out a
bloop
. A text bubble appeared on the screen from Reefer Fredericks.
Hey buddy
, it said.
What are you up to?

Spencer found Reefer’s number in her contacts list and dialed it. “I’m packing for the trip,” she said when he answered on the first ring. “You?”

“Just putting some last-minute things together,” Reefer answered. “But I’m bummed. I can’t find my Speedo.”

“Oh, please,” Spencer teased, curling a tendril of honey-blond hair around her finger. “You don’t own a Speedo.”

“You got me.” Reefer chuckled. “But I really
can’t
find my trunks.”

Spencer’s heart did a flip as she thought about Reefer in swim trunks—she could tell through his T-shirt that he was toned. His school was going on the cruise, too, along with several other private schools in the tristate area.

She’d met Reefer at a Princeton Early Admission dinner a few weeks earlier, and although she hadn’t been into his hippy, pothead vibe at first, he ended up being the best thing she got out of her disastrous pre-frosh weekend on campus.

Since she’d returned to Rosewood, they’d been texting and calling each other … a
lot
. During a
Dr. Who
marathon on BBC America, they’d called one another during the commercial breaks to discuss the doctor’s bizarre alien adversaries. Spencer introduced Reefer to Mumford & Sons, and Reefer schooled her on the Grateful Dead, Phish, and other jam bands, and before she knew it, she had developed a massive crush on him. He was fun, clever, and more than that, nothing seemed to shake him. He was the human equivalent of a hot-stone massage—just the type of guy Spencer needed right now.

She hoped that something would happen between them on the trip. The top deck of the cruise ship seemed like the perfect setting for a first kiss, the tropical sunset like a huge bonfire all around them. Or maybe their kiss would happen on a dive—they were both taking a scuba class together. Maybe they’d be swimming around a crop of neon-pink coral, and suddenly their hands would touch under the water, and they’d swim to the surface, pull off their masks, and then …

Reefer coughed on the other end, and Spencer blushed as if she’d voiced the thoughts aloud. In actuality, she wasn’t sure what Reefer thought about her—he’d been flirty at Princeton, but for all she knew, he was like that with all girls.

Suddenly, a banner on her TV caught her eye.
DEATH IN JAMAICA: MURDERED GIRL INVESTIGATION BEGINS
. A familiar blond girl’s picture flashed on screen.
TABITHA CLARK
, a caption read.

“Uh, Reefer?” Spencer said abruptly. “I have to go.”

Spencer hung up and stared at the TV. A stern-looking gray-haired man appeared next.
MICHAEL PAULSON, FBI
, said a caption under his face. “We’re beginning to put together the pieces of what might have caused Ms. Clark’s death,” he said to a group of reporters. “Apparently, Ms. Clark traveled to Jamaica alone, but we’re trying to re-create a timeline of where she was and who she was with that day.”

After that, the news shifted to a story about a murder in Fishtown. Suddenly, the cheerful, colorful resort-wear folded neatly in the steamer trunk looked perverse and ridiculous. The smiling sun on the sunscreen bottle seemed to be sneering at her. It was ridiculous to be jetting off on a tropical trip like nothing was wrong.
Everything
was wrong. She was a coldhearted killer, and the cops were narrowing in on her fast.

Ever since Spencer and her friends discovered that they’d killed Tabitha Clark—not the real Alison DiLaurentis, as they’d all thought—Spencer hadn’t been able to draw in a full breath. At first the cops had thought Tabitha had accidentally drowned, but now they knew she’d been murdered. And the police weren’t the only ones.

New A knew, too.

Spencer had no idea who New A, the insidious text messager who knew everything about their lives, might be. First, she and the others had thought it was Real Ali—maybe she’d survived the fall off the roof deck and was after them once and for all. But then the authorities identified the washed-up remains as Tabitha’s, and they realized how crazy they’d been to even consider that Ali had survived the fire in the Poconos. Her bones might not have been found, but she’d been inside the house when it exploded. There was no way she could have gotten out, even though Emily still clung to that theory.

Next, the girls had thought A might be Kelsey Pierce, whom Spencer had framed for drug possession the previous summer. Kelsey made sense: Not only had Spencer wronged her, but Kelsey had also been in Jamaica at the same time the girls were.

But that turned out to be a dead end. Next they had thought A was Gayle Riggs, the woman to whom Emily had promised—and then unpromised—her unborn baby, and who happened to be Tabitha’s stepmom. But that theory fell through when Gayle ended up dead in her driveway. Even more chilling? They were pretty sure New A had killed her.

Which was baffling—and terrifying. Did Gayle know something she shouldn’t have? Or had A meant to kill Spencer and the others instead? And A knew
everything
. Not only had A sent pictures of the girls talking to Tabitha during dinner the night they’d killed her, but the girls had also received a picture of Tabitha’s broken body on the sand. It was like A had been poised and ready on the beach, camera in hand, predicting the fall before it happened. There was another weird twist, too: Tabitha had been a patient at the Preserve at Addison-Stevens, a mental hospital, at the same time Real Ali had been there. Had they been friends? Was that why Tabitha acted so much like Ali in Jamaica?

Spencer’s phone bleated again, and she jumped. Aria Montgomery’s name flashed on the screen. “You’re watching the news, aren’t you?” Spencer said when she answered.

“Yeah.” Aria sounded distraught. “Emily and Hanna are on the line, too.”

“You guys, what are we going to
do
?” Hanna Marin said shrilly. “Should we tell the cops we were at the resort, or should we keep quiet? But if we
do
keep quiet, and then someone
else
tells the cops we were there, we’ll look guilty, right?”

“Calm down.” Spencer eyed the news again. Tabitha’s father, who was also Gayle’s husband, was on the screen now. He looked exhausted—as he should. Both his wife and his daughter had been murdered in the span of a year.

“Maybe we should just turn ourselves in,” Aria suggested.

“Are you crazy?” Emily Fields whispered.

“Okay, maybe
I
should turn myself in.” Aria backtracked. “I was the one who pushed her. I’m the guiltiest.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Spencer said quickly, lowering her voice. “We
all
did it, not just you. And no one is turning themselves in, okay?”

A tiny movement outside caught her eye, but when she went to the window, she didn’t see anything suspicious. Her mother’s fiancé, Mr. Pennythistle, had parked his enormous SUV in the driveway. The new woman who’d moved into the Cavanaugh house across the street was kneeling in the flower bed, weeding. And to the left, Spencer could just make out Alison DiLaurentis’s old bedroom window. When Ali had lived there, the pink curtains were always flung open, but the room’s new owner, Maya St. Germain, always kept the wooden blinds twisted closed.