She gritted her teeth and whirled around—but it was Chase, a new sort-of friend. He was standing under the hospital awning wearing a black nylon coat and a gray baseball cap.
Spencer reluctantly crossed to Chase and pulled him into a more secluded nook near a service entrance. “What are you doing here?” she whispered.
Chase tugged at his mangled ear, a wound from a stalker in boarding school. “Weren’t we supposed to meet today? I looked all over for you. Your mom finally told me where you were.”
“Did she tell you why I was here?”
Chase shook his head.
“Okay,” Spencer said, and told him everything. She knew she could trust Chase. He ran an unsolved-crime blog, and they’d met up when she was trying to track down Ali. There had been some identity confusion at first—Chase was trying to pass his brother Curtis off as himself because he was self-conscious about his ear, and for a while Spencer had even worried he was A. But he’d eventually come clean.
When Spencer finally finished telling him about Noel and the storage shed, Chase narrowed his green eyes. “So . . . Noel isn’t Ali’s boyfriend?”
Spencer sighed. “Nope. We’re back to square one.”
“Well then, we’d better get going,” Chase said, linking his arm around Spencer’s elbow.
Spencer planted her feet. “Where?”
Chase blinked. “We’re going to stake out that town house on the surveillance video.”
When Chase visited her yesterday, he’d shown her a grainy surveillance video of the outside of a town house in Rosewood. A girl who looked a lot like Ali was visible in a few frames. They’d made plans to investigate it today, but after everything that had happened with Noel, Spencer had forgotten.
A city bus whooshed by, spewing out exhaust. “Someone’s boyfriend ended up in a storage shed because of us,” Spencer said nervously. “Ali knows we’re on to her. I can’t let anyone else get hurt.”
“But what if this is where she lives?” Chase asked. “If we could find proof that she’s still alive, we could turn it in to the cops and put an end to this, once and for all. And then no one else would get hurt.”
Spencer twisted her mouth. A shadow flickered across the window of a car parked across the street, for a moment looking like a person.
Chase did have a point. What if they found something at the apartment? What if they could end this whole nightmare today?
She looked up at Chase and nodded ever so slightly. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
Twenty minutes later, as low clouds rolled across the sky, Spencer and Chase steered into a housing complex in West Rosewood, the low-rent part of town. Of course, low-rent was relative: A big FOR SALE sign in the development entrance boasted hardwood floors and marble countertops in every unit. A brand-new community swimming pool glistened in the distance. And the local grocery store was Fresh Fields, where you couldn’t buy a quart of milk for less than five bucks.
“There it is,” Chase said, pointing at a block of town houses. Each unit looked the same, with a fake, old-timey gaslight in the front yard, a faux dormer window set into the roof, and gingerbreadlike scallop details around the windows. In the surveillance photos, Ali had been walking into the unit on the corner.
Spencer pulled the car into park and stared at the house, shivering in the suddenly cold air. The house had a red-painted door and dried leaves all over the front porch. There were no blinds on the windows—she’d have thought Ali would insist on absolute privacy. Could this really be Ali’s secret lair?
Then she peered at the units next to it. The grass in all the front yards hadn’t been cut in a while, and newspapers were piled up on a front porch. There wasn’t a single light on in any of the windows, and no dogs barked from inside. Before Spencer and Chase had left Philly, they’d checked the county courthouse records for information on the housing complex and found that most of the units hadn’t yet sold. The house Ali was entering in the photo had been on the market since its construction last year. A couple in their seventies named Joseph and Harriet Maxwell had bought the unit next door two Novembers ago, right when Ian Thomas was arraigned for Courtney DiLaurentis’s murder; but the plant on their front stoop was withered, and there were a bunch of flyers wedged inside the storm door.
“This seems like the perfect place for Ali to hide out,” Spencer murmured. “It’s so deserted. No one would ever see her coming and going.”
“Exactly.” Chase started to get out of the car, then paused and turned back to her. “Spencer. Are you sure you’re ready for this?”
Spencer’s stomach swirled. Was she? She looked around the parking lot. Though it was empty, it still felt like she was being watched. She stared at a thick line of shrubs on the other side of the lot, then peered worriedly at a locked-up realtor’s office across the street. Could someone be hiding inside?