Killer (11 page)

“It fits,” Spencer croaked. “Ian pretended to be dead, and he called us to the woods because he knew we’d go to the police and tell them we saw him.”

Aria sank down onto one of the swings. “But why wouldn’t Ian just run? Why would he put on a show for us?”

“When the cops found out he was missing, they started searching for him immediately,” Spencer explained. “But then when we saw his body, they turned their attention to the woods instead. We distracted them for a few days, long enough so Ian could really escape. We probably did exactly what he wanted us to.” She gazed up at the clouds, a helpless expression on her face.

Hanna sank onto her left hip. “What do you think A has to do with this? A lured us into the woods so we’d see Ian. A is obviously working with him.”

“This text makes it pretty obvious that Ian and A were in cahoots,” Spencer said, shoving her phone at them. Emily read the first two lines again.
When I said he had to go, I didn’t mean he had to die. Still, there’s something really sketchy in this case…and it’s up to you to figure out what it is.
She bit her lip hard, then gazed at the dragon-shaped slide behind them. Years ago, whenever something or someone at school scared her, she would hide inside the dragon’s head at the top until she felt better. She felt an overwhelming urge to do that now.

“It seems like A helped Ian bust out,” Spencer went on. “They worked together—when Ian met me on my back porch last week, A threatened that if I told the cops, I’d get hurt. If I would’ve told them, they would’ve rearrested Ian…and he couldn’t have escaped.”

“A was worried about
any
of us saying anything,” Emily piped up. “All of my notes said that if I didn’t tell A’s secret, A wouldn’t tell mine.”

Hanna looked at Emily, a curious smile on her lips. “This A knows some secrets about you?”

Emily shrugged. For a while, A was taunting Emily about how she’d kept her sexuality from Isaac. “Not anymore,” she said.

“What if Ian
is
A?” Aria suggested. “It still makes a lot of sense.”

Emily shook her head. “The texts weren’t from Ian. The cops checked his phone.”

“Just because the A notes weren’t coming from Ian’s phone doesn’t mean they weren’t coming from Ian,” Hanna reminded her. “He could have had someone else send them. Or he could have gotten a disposable cell or a phone in another name.”

Emily put her finger to her lips. She hadn’t thought of that.

“And all those tricks he pulled the night we allegedly saw his body are pretty easy if you know how to use a computer,” Hanna went on. “Ian probably figured out how to delay sending a text so that we’d get it the moment we saw what looked like his dead body. Remember how Mona sent herself an e-mail from A to throw us off? It’s probably not that hard.”

Spencer pointed at the piece of computer paper. It was a printout of the IM exchange between her and Ian. “Look at this,” she said, pointing to the lines that said,
They hated me. They found out that I knew. That was why I had to run.
“Ian signed off before I could ask who ‘they’ were. But what if this is much bigger than Ian planning an escape? What if Ian really did find out something huge about Ali’s murder? What if he thought that if he went on trial, explaining what he knew, he’d be killed? Faking his own death wouldn’t just get the cops off his back, it’d get whoever wanted to hurt him off his back too.”

Aria stopped swinging. “Do you think whoever was after Ian might come after us if we figure out too much?”

“That’s what it sounds like,” Spencer said. “But there’s something else.” She pointed to a few lines of text at the bottom of the computer printout. It was the IP address of where the Instant Messages were from. “It says Ian IM’ed us from somewhere in Rosewood.”

“Rosewood?”
Aria shrieked. “You mean he’s still…
here
?”

Hanna’s face paled. “Why would Ian stay here? Why wouldn’t he skip town?”

“Maybe he’s not done searching for the truth,” Spencer suggested.

“Or maybe he’s not done with
us…
for turning him in,” Aria said.

Emily heard a
whoop
behind her and jumped. A crow was slowly circling the playground. When she turned back to her friends, their eyes were wide, and their jaws were tense.

“Aria’s right,” Hanna said, picking back up on the conversation. “If Ian’s alive, we don’t know what he’s up to. He still might be after us. And he still might be guilty.”

“I don’t know,” Spencer protested.

Emily faced Spencer, confused. “But
you
told the cops it was him! What about that memory you had of seeing Ian with Ali on the night she died?”

Spencer shoved her hands in her coat pockets. “I’m not sure if I really remember that…or if it was just what I wanted to believe.”

Emily’s stomach burned. What was true…and what wasn’t? She stared across the playground. A group of students were marching down the sidewalk into the sixth-grade wing. More students passed in front of the long line of classroom windows, walking to the coat closet. Emily had forgotten that sixth graders didn’t have proper lockers; they had to put their stuff in cubbies in that tiny coatroom. The coatroom used to get so stinky by midmorning, smelling like everyone’s bagged lunches.

“When Ian talked to me on my back porch, he told me that we had it wrong—he didn’t kill Ali,” Spencer went on. “He wouldn’t have hurt a hair on Ali’s head. He and Ali always flirted, but
she
was the one who escalated it to the next level. Ian thought for a while that she was doing it to make someone angry. At first I thought she meant me—because I kind of liked him. But Ian didn’t seem to buy that theory. And the night she died, he saw two blondes in the woods—one was Ali, one was someone else. At the time, I thought he meant me. But he said maybe it was someone else.”

Emily sighed, frustrated. “We’re going by
Ian’s
word again.”

“Yeah, Spence.” Hanna wrinkled her nose. “Ian killed Ali. Then he tricked us. We should go to Wilden with the IMs. Let him deal with it.”

Spencer snorted. “Wilden? He’s done a good job convincing all of Rosewood that we’re crazy. Even if by some miracle he does believe us, no one else on the police force would.”

“What about Ian’s parents?” Emily suggested. “They got a note from him too. They’d believe us.”

Spencer pointed to another line on the IM exchange. “Yeah, but what would that do? His parents would have yet more proof that Ian’s alive, but they might tell the cops that his IMs came from a computer in Rosewood. And then the cops would track him down and rearrest him.”

“Which would be a
good
thing,” Emily reminded her.

Spencer gave her a helpless look. “What if this is a test? Suppose we do tell the cops or his parents…and something happens to one of us? Or what if something happens to Melissa? Ian thought he was IMing her, after all.” Spencer rubbed her gloved hands together. “Melissa and I don’t get along, but I don’t want to put her in danger.”

Aria stepped off the swing, grabbed Spencer’s phone, and looked at A’s text. “This note says now it’s up to us to figure it out…or
we’ll
be next.”

“Meaning?” Emily stuck her boot into a patch of snow.

“We have to prove who Ali’s real killer is,” Aria answered matter-of-factly. “Or else.”

“Do you think the killer is the person—or people—in Ian’s IMs?” Spencer asked. “The people who hated him? The ones who found out he knew?”

“Who hated Ian?” Emily scratched her head. “Everyone at Rosewood adored him.”

Hanna snorted. “Guys, this is retarded. I don’t really feel like playing Veronica Mars.” She unzipped her bag, pulled out an iPhone from the inside pocket, and turned it on. “The best way to stay away from A is to do what I did: get a new phone and an unlisted number. Voilà, A can’t find us.” She started jabbing at the phone’s screen.

Emily exchanged a wary look with the others. “A has gotten in touch with us in other ways, Hanna.”

Hanna pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes, still texting. “This A hasn’t.”

“It doesn’t mean that this A
won’t
,” Spencer said firmly.

Hanna clamped her lips together, looking annoyed. “Well, if
Ian
is A, I guess we won’t have to worry. Because Ian has no way of getting my new phone number.”

Emily gazed at Hanna, not quite sure how Hanna could be so certain…especially if Ian really
was
still here in Rosewood.

“So do we search, or not?” Aria said after a moment.

The girls stared at each other. Emily had no idea how they could even attempt to search for Ali’s real killer. They weren’t cops. They didn’t have forensic experience. But she understood why they couldn’t turn to the cops—after the Dead Ian Scandal, the cops would just laugh at them and tell them to stop wasting their time.

She stared across the courtyard. More sixth graders paraded toward the classrooms. A few gathered around a sign hanging outside the door, talking giddily. “I’m going to find a piece,” said a brunette girl with sparkly clips in her hair. “Yeah,
right,
” said her friend, a petite Asian girl with a high ponytail. “You’ll never figure out those clues.”

Emily squinted at the sign’s block letters.
TIME CAPSULE IS HERE! HAVE YOU STARTED SEARCHING YET?

“Remember how excited everyone was for Time Capsule the first year we were able to play?” Hanna murmured, watching the girls too.

Aria pointed to the bike racks near the sixth-grade entrance. “That was where Ali announced that she knew where one of the pieces was.”

“That was so annoying.” Spencer groaned, making a face. “She cheated—Jason told her where it was. She didn’t even have to solve the clues. That’s why I wanted to steal Ali’s piece—I didn’t think she deserved it.”

“Except you didn’t get to steal it,” Hanna singsonged. “Because someone stole it first. And we’ll never find out who.”

Aria coughed loudly. Bottled water spewed out of her mouth. Everyone turned to look at her. “I’m fine,” she assured them, wheezing.

The high school bell rang, and the girls broke apart. Spencer walked off quickly, barely saying good-bye. Hanna lingered, tapping her iPhone. Emily fell in step with Aria. For a while, the only sound was their shoes crunching through the icy crust of snow on the commons. Emily wondered if Aria was thinking about the same thing she was—could Ian be telling the truth? Was someone else behind Ali’s murder?

“So you’ll never believe who I ran into yesterday,” Aria said. “Jason DiLaurentis.”

Emily stopped short. Her heart started to pound. “Where?”

Aria knotted her scarf tighter, seemingly nonchalant. “I cut school. Jason was waiting for the train to Philly.”

A gust of wind kicked up, sneaking down the collar of Emily’s shirt. “I saw Jason the other day too,” she mustered, her voice raspy. “I parallel-parked in back of him, and he accused me of denting his car. He was kind of…
angry
.”

Aria gave her a sidelong glance. “What do you mean?”

Emily fiddled with the ski lift ticket that was affixed to her jacket’s zipper. She suspected that Aria used to like Jason, and she hated bad-mouthing people. Then again, Aria needed to know. “Well, he kind of screamed for a while. And then he lunged at me, like he was going to punch me.”

“Did
you dent his car?”

“Even if I did, it was tiny. Definitely not worth freaking out about.”

Aria shoved her hands in her pockets. “Jason’s probably really sensitive right now. I can’t imagine what this must be like for him.”

“That’s what I thought, too, but…” Emily trailed off, gazing concernedly at Aria. “Just be careful, okay? Remember what Jenna said to you. Ali said she had ‘problems’ with Jason. He could’ve been abusing Ali, just like Toby was abusing Jenna.”

“We don’t know if that’s true,” Aria barked, her eyes darkening. “Ali wanted to find out Jenna’s secret about Toby. She would’ve told Jenna anything to get her to talk. Jason was nothing but sweet to Ali.”

Emily looked away, staring blankly at the flagpole at the end of the school commons. She wasn’t so sure about that. She remembered the shouts coming from inside Ali’s house the day they’d sneaked into Ali’s backyard to steal her Time Capsule flag. Someone kept imitating Ali’s voice. And then there was a shattering sound and a
thud
, as if someone had been pushed. Jason stormed out of the house moments later, his face fiery red.

In fact, now that she thought about it, the very first time Emily had ever seen Ali, Jason had been teasing her. It was a few days before she started third grade, and Emily and her mom were at the grocery store, picking out juice boxes and mini bags of Doritos for school lunches. A pretty blond girl about Emily’s age bounded right past them, skipping up the cereal aisle. There was something intoxicating about her, probably because she was everything plain, introverted Emily wasn’t.

They saw the girl again in the frozen foods section, peering into every case, trying to decide what she wanted. Her mother trailed behind with a cart, and a boy, probably about fourteen, followed, staring at a Game Boy. “
Mom, can we get Eggos?
” the girl cried, opening up a freezer door, her smile big and gap-toothed. The teenage boy rolled his eyes. “Mom, can we get Eggos?” he imitated, his voice sharp and mean.

And just like that, the girl wilted. Her bottom lip wobbled, and she shut the door with a disheartened
thud
. The mother grabbed the boy’s arm. “You know better.” The boy shrugged and slumped down, but Emily thought he deserved being yelled at. He ruined the girl’s fun, simply because he could. A few days later, when third grade began, Emily realized that the girl in the store had been Ali. She was new to Rosewood Day, but she was so pretty and bubbly that everyone instantly wanted to sit next to her on the rug during show-and-tell. It was hard to believe anything would make her sad.

Emily kicked an icy ball of snow down the sidewalk, quietly debating whether she should tell Aria this. But before she could, Aria mumbled a terse good-bye and walked briskly toward the science wing, the tassels at the ends of her earflap hat bouncing.