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?”