Pretty Little Liars #12: Burned

by Sara Shepard

  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.

  Spencer sat down on the bed. “Maybe it doesn’t matter that the cops figured out Tabitha was killed. There’s still no way they can trace the murder back to us.”

  “Unless A talks,” Emily warned. “And who knows what A is capable of—A might not stop at blaming Tabitha’s murder on us. A could frame us for killing Gayle, too. We were there.”

  “Has anyone heard from A?” Aria asked. “It’s weird that A’s been quiet since Gayle’s funeral.” The funeral had been almost a week ago.

  “I haven’t,” Spencer said.

  “Me neither,” Emily piped up.

  “A’s probably planning the next big attack.” Hanna sounded worried.

  “We need to stop it before it happens,” Spencer said.

  Hanna snorted. “How are we going to do that?”

  Spencer walked over to her bed and nervously fingered t
he gold latch on the steamer trunk. She didn’t even have the beginning of an answer. Whoever New A was, New A was crazy. How could she anticipate a lunatic’s next move?

  “A killed Gayle,” Spencer said after a moment. “If we figure out who A is, we can go to the cops.”

  “Yeah, and then A will turn around and tell the cops about us,” Hanna pointed out.

  “Maybe the cops wouldn’t believe a murderer,” Spencer said.

  “Yeah, but A has pictures to prove it,” Aria hissed.

  “Not of us specifically,” Spencer said. “And anyway, if we figure out who A is, maybe we could find them and delete them.”

  Aria sniffed. “That all sounds great if we were, like, James Bond. Right now we don’t know who A is.”

  “You know, it’s good we’re going on this trip,” Hanna said after a moment. “It’ll give us time to think.”

  Aria scoffed. “You really think A is going to leave us alone?”

  Hanna breathed in. “Are you saying A might come?”

  “I hope not,” Aria said, “but I’m not holding my breath.”

  “Me neither,” Spencer said. She’d considered the possibility of A being on board, too. The idea of being trapped in the middle of the ocean with a psycho was chilling.

  “How do you guys feel about going back to the Caribbean?” Emily asked nervously. “I feel like it will remind me of … everything.”

  Aria moaned.

  “At least we aren’t going to Jamaica,” Hanna said. The cruise ship was stopping in St. Martin, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda.

  Spencer shut her eyes and thought about how excited she’d been to go to Jamaica last spring break. They had all planned to put Real Ali, the evil A notes they’d received from her, and their near-death in the Poconos behind them. She’d packed bikinis, T-shirts, and the same Neutrogena sunscreen she’d plopped in the steamer trunk, hope rising in her chest. It’s all over, she’d kept thinking. My life is going to be great now.

  She glanced at the clock on her bedside table. “Guys, it’s ten. We’d better go.” They were supposed to be at the boat docks in Newark, New Jersey, a little after noon.

  “Shit,” Hanna said.

  “See ya there,” Aria answered.

  Everyone hung up. Spencer dropped her phone in her canvas beach bag, then hefted it onto her shoulder and righted the steamer trunk on its wheelie-board. When she was almost to the door, something out the window caught her attention once more.

  She walked over to the window again and stared out at the DiLaurentises’ yard. At first, she wasn’t sure what was different. The tennis courts, which the new family had built over the half-dug hole where the workers had found Courtney DiLaurentis’s body, were empty. The wooden blinds at Ali’s old window were still shut. The multilevel deck at the back, where the girls used to hold court, gossiping and boy-rating, was swept clean of leaves. But then she saw it: There was a child-sized life preserver in the middle of Ali’s yard. It was red-and-white striped, like a candy cane, and had large, curly, piratelike script across the bottom that read DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES.

  Acid rose in Spencer’s throat. Even though there was no one around, it still felt like the preserver was a message expressly from A. Better hang on to this for dear life, A seemed to be saying, because I might just make you walk the plank.

  2

  EMILY’S LITTLE MERMAID

  The road leading up to the Newark shipyards was a nondescript two-lane highway with generic-looking office complexes, gas stations, and seedy bars. But when Emily Fields and her father took a sharp left and pulled onto the waterfront, the sky opened up, the scent of salt hung heavy in the air, and the enormous Celebrity cruise ship rose before her like a giant, many-tiered wedding cake.

  “Whoa,” Emily breathed. The ship stretched several city blocks, and there were more circular portholes on each level than she could count. Emily had read in the Eco Cruise brochure that the vessel contained a theater, a casino, a gym with nineteen treadmills, a yoga studio, a hair salon and spa, thirteen restaurants, eleven lounges, a rock-climbing wall, and a wave pool.

  Mr. Fields pulled into an available parking space near a big tent with a banner that read PASSENGERS, CHECK IN HERE! There was a line of thirty or so kids with suitcases and duffels. After he cut the engine, he sat staring straight ahead. Seagulls circled the sky. Two girls squealed excitedly when they saw each other.

  Emily cleared her throat awkwardly. “Thanks for the ride.”

  Mr. Fields turned abruptly and looked at her hard. His eyes were iron-cold, and two curved lines accentuated his mouth like parentheses.

  “Dad …” Emily’s stomach started to hurt. “Can we talk about this?”

  Mr. Fields set his jaw and faced front. Then he turned up the radio. They’d been listening to a New York news station for the second half of the drive; now a reporter was droning on about someone nicknamed the Preppy Thief who’d escaped from a New Jersey holding cell that morning. “Ms. Katherine DeLong might be armed and dangerous,” the reporter was saying. “And now, on to weather …”

  Emily twisted the volume down again. “Dad?”

  But her father didn’t pay any attention. Emily’s jaw wobbled. Last week, she’d broken down and told her parents that she’d secretly had a baby girl over the summer and had given her up for adoption shortly after she was born. She’d omitted a few of the more sordid details, like accepting money from Gayle Riggs, a wealthy woman who’d wanted the baby, and then changing her mind and returning the payment, which A had intercepted. But she’d told them a lot. How she’d hid in her sister Carolyn’s dorm room in Philadelphia during the third trimester. How she had seen an ob-gyn in the city and had a scheduled C-section at Jefferson Hospital.

  Emily’s mom hadn’t blinked through the whole story. After Emily had finished, Mrs. Fields took a long sip of her tea and thanked Emily for being honest. She even asked Emily if she was okay.

  The clouds had parted in Emily’s mind. Her mom was being normal—cool, even! “I’m holding up,” she’d answered. “The baby is with a really great family—I saw them the other day. They named her Violet. She’s seven months now.”

  Then a muscle in Mrs. Fields’s cheek twitched. “Seven months?”

  “Yep,” Emily said. “She smiles. And waves. They’re wonderful parents.”

  And then, like a light switch abruptly flipped on, reality hit Emily’s mom at full force. She blindly groped for her husband’s hand as though she were on a sinking ice floe. After letting out a squeak, she leapt up and ran to the bathroom.

  Mr. Fields sat, stunned, for a moment. Then he turned to Emily. “Did you say your sister knew about this, too?”

  “Yes, but please don’t be mad at her,” Emily said in a small voice.

  Since that day, Emily’s mom had barely come out of her bedroom. Mr. Fields handled the chores, making dinner, signing Emily’s permission slips, and doing the laundry. Every time Emily tried to broach the subject with him, her dad shut her down. And forget about talking to her mom: Whenever Emily even got near her parents’ bedroom, her father appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, like a rabid, protective guard dog, shooing her away.

  Emily had no idea what to do. She would have preferred her parents send her to reform school or to live with her über-religious relatives in Iowa, like they’d done when they were mad at her in the past. Maybe she shouldn’t have told her parents about the baby, but she didn’t want them to find out from someone else—like New A. The Rosewood PD knew, too, as well as Isaac, the baby’s father, and Mr. Clark, Gayle’s husband.

  Amazingly, the news about the baby hadn’t made its way around Rosewood Day, but it didn’t matter—Emily still felt like a pariah. Add in the fact that she’d witnessed a murder two weeks prior and that the police were now investigating Tabitha’s death, and most days she could barely hold it together. She was also more certain than ever that A was Real Ali—that she’d survived the fire in the Poconos and was out to get them once and for all. Real Al
i had framed Kelsey Pierce, driving Emily to almost kill her at Floating Man Quarry. Then she’d thrown suspicion on Gayle, shooting her when she got in the way. Emily shivered. What would she do next?

  A loud horn on the boat roused her from her thoughts. “Well, I guess I should go,” Emily said softly, glancing at her dad again. “Thanks for, um, still letting me go on this.”

  Mr. Fields took a sip from his water bottle. “Thank the teacher who nominated you for the scholarship. And Father Fleming. I still don’t think you should go.”

  Emily fiddled with the University of North Carolina ball cap in her lap. Her parents didn’t have money to send their kids on frivolous class trips, but she’d won a scholarship through her botany class. After her parents had found out about the baby, Mr. Fields had gone to Father Fleming, their priest, to ask if they should still let her attend. Father Fleming had said they should—it would give them time to process what had happened and figure out their feelings.

  There was nothing left for Emily to do but open the door, grab her bags, and start toward the check-in tent. She hadn’t walked but three steps when her dad gunned the engine and took off down the road, not even staying to see the boat off as most parents were. She blinked back tears, trying hard not to cry.

  As she joined the line, a twentysomething guy wearing a pair of red, star-shaped sunglasses bounded up to her. “I’m on to you!” he said, wagging a finger.

  Tabitha’s face flashed in Emily’s mind. “W-what?” she croaked.

  “You’re totally a secret Cirque du Soleil fan!” The guy stuck out his hand. “The name’s Jeremy. I’m your cruise director this week. How would you like to be a guest in tonight’s kickoff Cirque du Soleil performance in the theater? The show’s theme is Mother Earth, in honor of this being an Eco Cruise and all.”