“And, you guys, Jamaica.” Aria pointed to the bottom of the page. “This part where she says she took off with a guy her first day there. Could that be true?”
Hanna glanced out into the hall again. Kelsey was still sitting in the nurse’s office, fiddling with the string on her pajama pants. “If it is, she wouldn’t have seen us interacting with Tabitha. She certainly wouldn’t have seen . . . what happened.”
“Maybe she was telling the truth when she said she didn’t know who Tabitha was,” Emily whispered.
Spencer shook her head, her dangling earrings trembling. “It’s not possible. What about that photo she sent me of Tabitha on the beach . . . dead?”
A light went on in Hanna’s mind. “Let me see your phone.”
Spencer gave her a strange look, but then turned it over. Hanna opened up Spencer’s saved texts and scrolled through her history. A’s message was still there: You hurt both of us. Now I’m going to hurt you. But Spencer also had at least twenty unopened messages from Friday after the play. Many of them were from her family or friends or that guy who played Macbeth, but one was from an unknown number with a 484 area code.
Hanna opened it up. Emily told me what you did, bitch, it said. We need to talk. Kelsey.
“Jesus,” Hanna whispered, showing it to Spencer. “What if this was the text she was talking about in the letter? The text she was referring to on Friday night?”
The blood drained from Spencer’s face. “B-but I didn’t see this on Friday. All I saw was that one from A, and then Kelsey came up, and I put two and two together, and . . .”
She let the phone fall to the table. Her gaze searched the room, seemingly trying to hold on to something stable and solid. “Kelsey must have sent both texts.”
“But what if she didn’t?” Hanna whispered. “What if this second one was from someone else?”
Everyone stared at one another, wide-eyed. Then Hanna turned around and peeked into the nurse’s office across the hall. They needed to solve this. They needed to ask Kelsey what the hell was going on.
But the office was empty. The nurse was gone . . . and Kelsey was, too.
Chapter 38
SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES
“Visiting hours are over,” a nurse in crisp medical scrubs said, poking her head into the visitation room. “If you want to schedule another appointment for tomorrow, you’re welcome to come between noon and two P.M.”
Emily bit the inside of her cheek. They had school tomorrow. “Is there any way we could call Kelsey?” she asked. “We have a quick question for her. It’s important.”
The woman fingered the badge that hung from her jacket. “I’m sorry, but phone calls are verboten for the patients. We want them concentrating on the work they do inside here, not dealing with anything from the outside world. But like I said, if you’d like to visit again . . .” She opened the door that led to the hall that eventually emptied into the lobby.
There was nothing to do but comply. Emily followed Spencer, Hanna, and Aria through the hall, her mind swarming. Kelsey’s letter to Spencer was puzzling, and her letter to Emily was downright heartbreaking. Had Kelsey really not seen what they’d done to Tabitha . . . or was that just another one of her A mind games? If she didn’t know, what did Kelsey mean at the quarry when she’d said Emily was a terrible person? Maybe it simply was because Emily had kept the secret of what Spencer had done to her. Kelsey had trusted Emily, after all.
“So what do we do?” Emily whispered. “Visit her on another day?”
“I guess so,” Spencer said. “If she’ll see us.”
The girls walked slowly through the corridor, which was lit with harsh overhead fluorescent lights and lined with tightly shut doors. “Look,” Aria hissed, stopping at a small alcove that held a water fountain. On the inside wall were dozens of scrawled names in different-colored pens. PETRA. ULYSSES. JENNIFER. JUSTIN.
“That was my roommate,” Hanna whispered, pointing to the large IRIS in pink marker. “The one I thought was A.”
Then Emily spied something in the corner, a signature so hauntingly familiar she felt her knees go wobbly. COURTNEY, it said, in silvery bubble letters. It was the same handwriting that was on the sixth-grade mural where everyone had to stamp their handprints and write a few adjectives about themselves. It was very similar handwriting, too, to the real Courtney, the girl Emily had always known as Ali. Emily pictured Her Ali writing her name at the top of a vocab quiz, the e in DiLaurentis just as loopy as this e in Courtney, the letters slanted slightly forward in the same way. Courtney had wanted to be just like Ali down to the last detail—and she had been.
The other girls followed Emily’s gaze. “So she really was here,” Spencer said quietly.