Heartless pll-7

by Sara Shepard

  “The saga of Alison DiLaurentis’s murder has finally ended,” the reporter announced gravely. “A man has just been arrested for Alison’s murder on the basis of overwhelming evidence.”

  A blurry black-and-white photo of the greasy blond man flashed on the screen. He was lurking in a convenience store parking lot, drinking a can of beer. His name was Billy Ford. Like Emily suspected, he’d been part of the crew that had dug the hole for the DiLaurentises’ gazebo almost four years ago. Investigators now thought he’d stalked her.

  Spencer shut her eyes, gripped with guilt. Thank God the workers aren’t here, Ali had said when they passed the half-dug hole on the night of their seventh-grade sleepover. They keep harassing me. At the time, Spencer had thought Ali was bragging: Ha ha, even older guys think I’m hot. Meanwhile . . .

  “After another body was found earlier this evening,” the reporter was saying, “police received a tip that the deaths might be connected. Their investigation led them to Mr. Ford, and they found photos of Ms. DiLaurentis on a laptop in his truck. Also on the laptop were pictures of the foursome now known as the Pretty Little Liars—Spencer Hastings, Aria Montgomery, Hanna Marin, and Emily Fields.”

  Spencer bit down hard on her fist.

  “Also found in the car were records of correspondence in the form of text messages, photo messages, and IMs under the handle USCMidfielderRoxx,” the reporter continued.

  Spencer pressed her forehead against the cool window glass, watching the trees blur past. USCMidfielderRoxx was Ian’s IM.

  The shadowy memory from the night Ali was murdered flooded her mind. After Spencer and Ali had gotten in a fight outside the barn, Ali ran off into the thicket. There had been a signature giggle, rustling sounds, and then Spencer had seen two distinct shapes. Ali . . . and someone else.

  I saw two blonds in the woods, Ian had told Spencer when he’d accosted her on her porch, pleading that he was innocent. Spencer stared at the photo of the man on her cell phone’s tiny screen. Billy had blond hair. And he was New A, sending each of them texts that blamed Jason, Wilden, and even Spencer’s mom. But how did he know so much about all of them? Who was he? Why did he care?

  Her cell screen flashed white. New text message. Spencer grappled with the keyboard and pressed read. It was from Andrew Campbell, Spencer’s boyfriend. I heard about jail. . . and that you were released. Are you okay? Are you home? Do you know what’s happening on your street?

  Spencer sat back in the seat, the streetlights whizzing past outside the window. What did he mean, on her street?

  Another text popped in her inbox. This one was from Aria. What’s going on? Your road is blocked off. There are police cars everywhere.

  A horrible idea began to form. The radio had said there was another murder.

  The police car made a wide left turn onto her street. At least ten vehicles were jackknifed across the road, blue lights flashing. Neighbors stood on their yards, their faces slack. Police officers moved in and out of the shadows. They were right in front of Spencer’s house.

  Melissa.

  “Oh my God,” Spencer cried. She pulled at the door and leapt out of the car.

  “Hey!” her driver growled. “You’re not allowed out until we’re in your driveway!”

  But Spencer didn’t listen. She sprinted toward the flashing lights, her limbs aching. Her house was ahead. She passed through the front gate and up the long drive. All sound disappeared. Shapes blurred in front of her. She could taste bile at the back of her throat. Then she saw a figure on the front porch, her body in silhouette. She shaded her hand over her forehead, squinting in the bright porch light. Her knees buckled. A relieved wail gurgled from her throat. She sank to the grass.

  Melissa ran toward her and engulfed her in a hug. “Oh, Spence, it’s so awful.”

  Spencer trembled. The sirens rang in her ears. A couple of neighborhood dogs howled along, disoriented and scared.

  “It’s so terrible,” Melissa sobbed on Spencer’s shoulder. “That poor girl.”

  Spencer stepped back. The air was frigid and sharp. The smell of the fire was still pungent and suffocating. “What girl?”

  Melissa’s jaw twitched. She grabbed Spencer’s hand. “Oh, Spence. You don’t know?”

  Then she gestured toward the sidewalk. The police weren’t surrounding their house but the Cavanaughs’ across the street. Yellow police tape covered the Cavanaughs’ entire backyard. Mrs. Cavanaugh stood in the driveway, screaming in agony. A German shepherd in a blue vest stood next to her, sniffing the ground. A small shrine had already begun at the curb, rife with pictures and candles and flowers. When Spencer saw the name written in pale green chalk on the pavement, she lurched back.

  “No.” Spencer looked at Melissa imploringly, hoping this was a dream. “No!”

  And then she understood. A few days ago, she’d gazed out her bedroom window and seen a greasy-haired man dressed in a plumber’s jumpsuit lope up the Cavanaughs’ driveway. He’d given a beautiful girl a predatory look, revealing a gleaming gold front tooth. But the girl hadn’t seen his look. She hadn’t known to be afraid. She couldn’t see anything . . . ever.

  Spencer turned to Melissa in horror. “Jenna?”

  Melissa nodded, tears spilling down her cheeks. “They found her in a trench in her backyard, where plumbers were replacing one of the burst pipes,” she said. “He killed her just like he killed Ali.”

  What Happens Next . . .

  Poor poor Jenna Cavanaugh. I’d feel bad, but what’s done is done. Finito. Over. Stick a fork in her, she’s dead. Does that make me sound heartless? Oh well!

  Of course, the Pretty Little Liars are going to take this one hard. Aria will wish she’d asked Jenna about Ali’s pesky sibling problems. Emily will cry because, well, Emily always cries. Hanna will wear a little black dress that makes her look skinny to the funeral. And Spencer . . . well, she’ll just be glad her sister is alive.

  So where do we go from here? A body has been found. DNA has been collected. An arrest has been made, a mug shot taken. But is it my mug shot? Am I the big, bad Billy Ford . . . or someone else entirely? Well, you’ll just have to stay tuned because I’m keeping that my last little secret.

  For now, anyway.

  Kisses,

  —A

  Acknowledgments

  Heartless was another tricky book to get right, but I had lots of help. My brilliant editors at Alloy: Lanie Davis, Sara Shandler, Josh Bank, and Les Morgenstein, pulled through as usual—whatever would I do without any of them? And Farrin Jacobs and Kari Sutherland at Harper had amazing edits and suggestions that turned a decent second draft into a stellar third one. Seriously, Team PLL is the best editorial team I could ever ask for.

  Thanks also to Andy McNicol and Anais Borja at William Morris for being such dedicated PLL cheerleaders. Love to my husband, Joel, a source of so much happiness, and to my parents, Shep and Mindy, for the fantastic book party they threw me in June—complete with specialty drinks and late-night dancing (well, more like shuffling). Many thanks to Libby Mosier and daughters Alison and Cat for putting together an awesome Pretty Little Liars party in St. Davids, PA—with tough trivia and a nail-biter of a scavenger hunt. Kisses to all of my readers, too, for all your letters, Twitters, Facebook posts, YouTube adaptations of crucial PLL scenes, and various other ways of saying how much you love the series. You guys are the best.

  And finally, this book is dedicated to my grandmother, Gloria Shepard, who has been a voracious reader of Pretty Little Liars from the start, and my late uncle, the always-cheerful, always-inspirational Tommy Shepard, the biggest fan of all things Michael Jackson and Star Wars I’ve ever met. Many hugs.

  Excerpt from The Lying Game

  Prologue

  I woke up in a dingy claw-foot bathtub in an unfamiliar pink-tiled bathroom. A stack of Maxims sat next to the toilet, green toothpaste globbed in the sink, and white drips streaked the mirror. The window showed a dark sky and a full moon. What day of the week wa
s it? Where was I? A frat house at the U of A? Someone’s apartment? I could barely remember that my name was Sutton Mercer, or that I lived in the foothills of Tucson, Arizona. Had someone slipped me something?

  “Emma?” a guy’s voice called from another room. “You home?”

  “I’m busy!” called a voice close by.

  A tall, thin girl opened the bathroom door, her tangled dark hair hanging in her face. “Hey!” I leapt to my feet. “Someone’s in here already!” My body felt tingly, as if it had fallen asleep. When I looked down, it seemed like I was flickering on and off, like I was under a strobe light. Freaky. Someone definitely slipped me something.

  The girl didn’t seem to hear me. She stumbled forward, her face covered in shadows.

  “Hello?” I cried, climbing out of the tub. She didn’t look over. “Are you deaf?” Nothing. She pumped a bottle of lavender-scented lotion and rubbed it on her arms.

  The door flung open again, and a snub-nosed, unshaven teenage guy burst in. “Oh.” His gaze flew to the girl’s tight-fitting T-shirt, which said new york new york roller coaster on the front. “I didn’t know you were in here, Emma.”

  “That’s maybe why the door was closed?” Emma pushed him out and slammed it shut. She turned back to the mirror. I stood right behind her. “Hey!” I cried again.

  Finally, she looked up. My eyes darted to the mirror to meet her gaze. But when I looked into the glass, I screamed.

  Because Emma looked exactly like me.

  And I wasn’t there.

  Emma turned and walked out of the bathroom, and I followed as if something was yanking me along behind her. Who was this girl? Why did we look the same? Why was I invisible? And why couldn’t I remember, well, anything? The wrong memories snapped into aching, nostalgic focus—the glittering sunset over the Catalinas, the smell of the lemon trees in my backyard in the morning, the feel of cashmere slippers on my toes. But other things, the most important things, had become muffled and fuzzy, as if I’d lived my whole life underwater. I saw vague shapes, but I couldn’t make out what they were. I couldn’t remember what I’d done for any summer vacations, who my first kiss had been with, or what it felt like to feel the sun on my face or dance to my favorite song. What was my favorite song? And even worse, every second that passed, things got fuzzier and fuzzier. Like they were disappearing.

  Like I was disappearing.

  But then I concentrated really hard and I heard a muffled scream. And suddenly it was like I was somewhere else. I felt pain shooting through my body, before a final, sleepy sensation of my muscles surrendering. As my eyes slowly closed, I saw a blurry, shadowy figure standing over me.

  “Oh my God,” I whispered.

  No wonder Emma didn’t see me. No wonder I wasn’t in the mirror. I wasn’t really here.

  I was dead.

  Chapter 1 The Dead Ringer

  Emma Paxton carried her canvas tote and a glass of iced tea out the back door of her new foster family’s home on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Cars swished and grumbled on the nearby expressway, and the air smelled heavily of exhaust and the local water treatment plant. The only decorations in the backyard were dusty free weights, a rusted bug zapper, and kitschy terra-cotta statues.

  It was a far cry from my backyard in Tucson, which was desert-landscaped to perfection and had a wooden swing set I used to pretend was a castle. Like I said, it was weird and random which details I still remembered and which ones had evaporated away. For the last hour, I’d been following Emma trying to make sense of her life and willing myself to remember my own. Not like I had a choice. Everywhere she went, I went. I wasn’t entirely sure how I knew these things about Emma, either—they just appeared in my head as I watched her like a text message popping in an inbox. I knew the details of her life better than I did my own.

  Emma dropped the tote on the faux wrought-iron patio table, plopped down in a plastic lawn chair, and craned her neck upward. The only nice thing about this patio was that it faced away from the casinos, offering a large swath of clear, uninterrupted sky. The moon dangled halfway up the horizon, a bloated alabaster wafer. Emma’s gaze drifted to two bright, familiar stars to the east. At nine years old, Emma had wistfully named the star on the right the Mom Star, the star on the left the Dad Star, and the smaller, brightly twinkling spot just below them the Emma Star. She’d made up all kinds of fairy tales about these stars, pretending that they were her real family and that one day they’d all be reunited on earth like they were in the sky.

  Emma had been in foster care for most of her life. She’d never met her dad, but she remembered her mother, with whom she had lived until she was five years old. Her mom’s name was Becky. She was a slender woman who loved shouting out the answers to Wheel of Fortune, dancing around the living room to Michael Jackson songs, and reading tabloids that ran stories like baby born from pumpkin! and bat boy lives! Becky used to send Emma on scavenger hunts around their apartment complex, the prize always being a tube of used lipstick or a mini Snickers. She bought Emma frilly tutus and lacy dresses from Goodwill for dress-up. She read Emma Harry Potter before bed, making up different voices for every character.

  But Becky was like a scratch-off lottery ticket—Emma never quite knew what she was going to get with her. Sometimes Becky spent the whole day crying on the couch, her face contorted and her cheeks streaked with tears. Other times she would drag Emma to the nearest department store and buy her two of everything. “Why do I need two pairs of the same shoes?” Emma would ask. A faraway look would come over Becky’s face. “In case the first pair gets dirty, Emmy.”

  Becky could be very forgetful, too—like the time she left Emma at a Circle K. One summer night not long after that, Emma slept over with Sasha Morgan, a friend from kindergarten. She woke up in the morning to Mrs. Morgan standing in the doorway, a sick look on her face. Apparently, Becky had left a note under the Morgans’ front door, saying she’d “gone on a little trip.” Some trip that was—it had lasted almost thirteen years and counting.

  The sliding glass door opened, and Emma wheeled around. Travis, her new foster mom’s eighteen-year-old son, strutted out and settled on top of the patio table. “Sorry about bursting in on you in the bathroom,” he said.

  “It’s okay,” Emma muttered bitterly, slowly inching away from Travis’s outstretched legs. She was pretty sure Travis wasn’t sorry. He practically made a sport of trying to see her naked. Today, Travis wore a blue ball cap pulled low over his eyes, a ratty, oversized plaid shirt, and baggy jean shorts with the crotch sagging almost to his knees. There was patchy stubble on his pointy-nosed, thin-lipped, pea-eyed face; he wasn’t man enough to actually grow facial hair. His bloodshot brown eyes narrowed lasciviously. Emma could feel his gaze on her, canvassing her tight-fitting new york new york camisole, bare, tanned arms, and long legs.

  With a grunt, Travis reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a joint, and lit up. As he blew a plume of smoke in her direction, the bug zapper glowed to life. With a crisp snap and a fizzle of blue light, it annihilated yet another mosquito. If only it could do that to Travis, too.

  Back off, pot breath, Emma wanted to say. It’s no wonder no girl will get near you. But she bit her tongue; the comment would have to go into her Comebacks I Should’ve Said file, a list she’d compiled in a black cloth notebook hidden in her top drawer. The Comebacks list, CISS for short, was filled with pithy, snarky remarks Emma had longed to say to foster moms, creepy neighbors, bitchy girls at school, and a whole host of others. For the most part, Emma held her tongue—it was easier to keep quiet, not make trouble, and become whatever type of girl a situation needed her to be. Along the way, Emma had picked up some pretty impressive coping skills: At age ten, she honed her reflexes when Mr. Smythe, a tempestuous foster parent, got into one of his object-throwing moods. When Emma lived in Henderson with Ursula and Steve, the two hippies who grew their own food but were clueless about how to cook it, Emma had begrudgingly taken over kitchen duties, whipping up zucchin
i bread, veggie gratins, and some awesome stir-fries.

  It had been just two months since Emma had moved in with Clarice, a single mom who worked as a bartender for VIP gamblers at The M Resort. Since then, Emma had spent the summer taking pictures, playing marathon games of Minesweeper on the banged-up BlackBerry her friend Alex had given her before she’d left her last foster home in Henderson, and working part-time operating the roller coaster at the New York New York casino. And, oh yeah, avoiding Travis as much as she could.

  All Emma wanted to do was get through her senior year here. It was the end of August, and school started on Wednesday. She had the option of leaving Clarice’s when she turned eighteen in two weeks, but that would mean quitting school, finding an apartment, and getting a full-time job to pay rent. Clarice had told Emma’s social worker that Emma could stay here until she got her diploma. Nine more months, Emma chanted to herself like a mantra. She could hold on until then, couldn’t she?

  Travis took another hit off the joint. “You want some?” he asked in a choked voice, holding the smoke in his lungs.

  “No thanks,” Emma said stiffly.

  Travis finally exhaled. “Sweet little Emma,” he said in a syrupy voice. “But you aren’t always this good, are you?”

  Emma craned her neck up at the sky and paused on the Mom, Dad, and Emma stars again. Farther down the horizon was a star she’d recently named the Boyfriend Star. It seemed to be hovering closer than usual to the Emma Star tonight—maybe it was a sign. Perhaps this would be the year she’d meet her perfect boyfriend, someone she was destined to be with.

  “Shit,” Travis whispered suddenly, noticing something inside the house. He quickly stubbed out the joint and threw it under Emma’s chair just as Clarice appeared on the back deck. Emma scowled at the joint’s smoldering tip—nice of Travis to try to pin it on her—and covered it with her shoe.