Spencer took off after him as silently as she could, smacking stray branches out of the way. It was almost too dark to see where she was going. By the time she reached the top of the hill to see where he’d gone, the woods were empty.
She stood still and silent, listening for footsteps, but there were none. The only sound was the wind whistling through the branches. Spencer wheeled around, wondering if she’d gotten turned around in the woods, but all she saw were trees and stumps and bushes. Nothing else. He had just . . . disappeared.
Disappointed, she tramped back to the shack, thorns hitting her the whole way. The sky was completely dark, the only lights dim flickers from the road far below. Spencer fumbled in the darkness until she found the window Dominick had been standing at, then reached into her pocket for her phone and shone it on the sill. It was filthy with cobwebs and dirt. Something made of glass had broken on the sill, too; when she picked it up, a bubble of blood appeared on her thumb.
She shone the phone light along the jamb, but she still didn’t see anything. She aimed the beam into the room, but it was empty, too. Maybe she would never know what Dominick had been doing there.
But the bigger deal was that he’d been doing something at all.
24
SET ’EM FREE, THEN KILL ’EM OFF
The following morning, Emily sat in her Volvo in the Rosewood Day parking lot before chemistry class, on a conference call with Spencer and the others. Mostly, Spencer was doing all the talking.
“There was someone at the pool house,” Spencer said hurriedly after describing her heckler. “I ran up to catch him.”
“But how could you follow him through the woods?” Hanna shrieked. “You could have gotten really hurt, Spence! You should have called the police!”
Emily murmured in agreement, but she felt guilty—Spencer was getting the lecture she also deserved. Her friends didn’t know about her freak-out the other day at the pool house, and hopefully, they never would. They could, technically: They could rewind the footage themselves and see everything she’d done. Even thinking about it made Emily feel prickly and embarrassed. All those things she’d trashed. All those awful things she’d said.
“Look, I know it was crazy, but I wasn’t thinking straight,” Spencer said. “And anyway, I’m fine. But the guy got away.” She sighed dramatically. “Which sucks, because I’m almost positive it was Dominick. I don’t know who else it could have been.”
“So who is he?” Aria asked.
Spencer briefly described the guy who’d heckled her online and at her panel in New York. “It’s part of the reason why I ran up there—I thought it was him, but the camera image wasn’t clear, and he ran off too quickly for me to get a better look. I even rewound the surveillance tape, but I still couldn’t see his face.”
“So how can we find this Dominick guy?” Hanna asked, her voice high and thin. “Do you know where he lives?”
“All I have is the screen name he used to torment me on my blog. He says he’s from Philly, but who knows if that’s true?”
“What do you think he was looking for?” Aria asked.
“Well, when I watched the surveillance tape again, he seemed to be just standing there,” Spencer said. “So I don’t know. Maybe he was waiting for Ali. Why else would he be there unless she’d been there?”
“So where does this leave us?” Aria asked. “If the Ali Cats are real, and Ali trusts a few of them, does that mean that they’re all after us?”
Emily shut her eyes. For the past few days, after her foolish trashing of the pool house, she’d lived in fear that Ali and Robin Cook would break into her house while she was sleeping and stand over her, laughing, before they smothered her to death. She’d barely slept a wink. “How can we fight something when we don’t even know what the something is?” she said weakly.
“Let’s not panic,” Spencer said firmly. “Maybe I can find Dominick and ask him questions. Or maybe we could report him to the police, saying he was trespassing on the Maxwells’ property.”
“And what if the cops ask us how we knew Dominick was there?” Hanna reminded her. “We’ll have to tell them about our cameras. And then we’ll be in trouble for trespassing, too.”
Everyone was silent for a while. Then Aria sighed heavily. “We’re all meeting at the Rosewood Rallies charity thing tonight?”
Spencer groaned. “I don’t want to.”
“I don’t, either,” Emily said.
“Please come, Em,” Aria said quickly—so quickly, in fact, that it annoyed Emily a little. She’d noticed how tweaky and twitchy her friends had been around her lately. They were probably worried about her—she knew she’d been acting a little unhinged. But on some level, she wished they’d just leave her alone.