As soon as that happened, Emily and the others drove up to Ashland to see if Ali was at the pool house, dismantling the cameras. But all they found was blood on the floor. They’d gone inside to look around, then heard a slam and run upstairs. The smell of bleach had wafted through the air, and someone—surely Ali, though they hadn’t seen for certain—stomped around in the kitchen, messily cleaning it up. When they came back downstairs, the house was empty. Then they’d called 911. Little did they know the police would blame them.
But that’s just what happened: The cops came, swabbed for evidence, and deemed that the blood type matched Ali’s. They’d also found a tooth that matched Ali’s dental records. Then they accused the girls of trying to clean up the crime scene—their prints were all over the place, after all, and they’d been in the house. The surveillance cameras had recorded the girls sneaking in the door moments before.
You’re totally mine.
There was Ali’s voice again. Emily blinked hard. She looked around at her friends, wondering if they heard their own versions of Ali’s taunts in their heads.
“And the dress?” Aria asked, referring to the dress they’d found in the pool house’s upstairs loft. It had also been covered in blood.
The lawyer checked his notes. “Forensics says it only has A-positive blood on it—Ali’s blood type. I wouldn’t bring it up. It doesn’t really help your case.”
Emily sat up straighter. “Couldn’t Ali have cut herself, spread her blood around the pool house, and then cleaned it up? She could have pulled and planted that tooth, too. She was in The Preserve for years. She’s crazy.”
Not as crazy as you! the Ali in Emily’s head tittered. Emily made a face, wanting Ali’s voice out. Then she noticed Hanna looking at her curiously.
The lawyer sighed. “If we had evidence of Alison in that pool house—alive—at the same time you were there, we might be able to make that case. But all we have is a video of you girls sneaking in through the front door. Ali isn’t there.”
“Ali probably snuck in through a window,” Spencer piped up. “In the back, maybe. There were no cameras there.”
The lawyer stared at his palms. “There’s no evidence supporting that. I had the police dust for prints on the windowsills around the property, and they found nothing.”
“She could have used gloves,” Hanna tried.
Rubens clicked his pen. “This is all circumstantial evidence, and we have to consider that it’s coming from you four girls and that you are somewhat notorious, er, characters.” He cleared his throat. “I mean, your nickname is the Pretty Little Liars. You’ve been caught in lies before—very public lies. You were on trial for killing a girl in Jamaica, and you confessed to at least pushing her off a balcony. And everyone knows what Alison did to you and how much motive you’d have to get rid of her. And like I said, there was Emily’s episode . . .”
Everyone turned to look at Emily. She stared down at the table. Okay, so she’d lost it in the hunt for Ali. But that was because Ali had almost drowned Emily in the Rosewood Day Prep pool . . . and then one of her Ali Cats had killed Jordan Richards, the love of Emily’s life. She hadn’t meant to go to the pool house and freak out. She hadn’t meant to trash the place and vow loudly that she was going kill Ali, which the surveillance camera had recorded. It had just . . . happened.
“And then there’s that journal.”
Rubens reached for a large binder on his right. Inside was a photocopy of the journal Ali had purportedly written and stashed in the woods, in an easy enough hiding place for the cops to find. Emily hadn’t wanted to read it, but she’d heard plenty about it. Ali had painted herself as the innocent victim and Spencer, Aria, Emily, and Hanna as her vengeful captors. Entries talked of the girls verbally and physically abusing her. As Rubens opened the binder, Emily caught sight of the words tied me up. Then she saw the phrase they don’t understand.
Poor, poor me, Ali sang in Emily’s head. Emily must have groaned, because Spencer looked up at her, eyes wide. Emily’s cheeks blazed. She had to be careful. Her friends already thought she was troubled—and that was when she wasn’t hearing voices.
Aria glanced at the binder, too. “Surely that won’t count as evidence, will it?”
“Especially because of what Nick said this morning.” Emily fumbled for her phone and showed the lawyer an article she’d found before the meeting. She pointed to the headline. Maxwell Says Journal Is All Lies, it read. His Love and Loyalty Only Go So Far. “If Nick says Ali lied about the stuff about him in the journal, it throws the validity of the rest of the thing into question, right?” she asked hopefully.
Rubens shrugged. “We’re talking about a confessed murderer’s word here. Sometimes judges take journals very seriously. And when someone writes, I’m scared, or I think they’re going to kill me, and then she winds up dead . . .”
“But she’s not dead,” Emily blurted. “The police found one tooth and blood. That’s it. Won’t it be hard for them to convict us of murder without a body?”
The lawyer shut the binder with a slap. “That’s true. And you have that going for you.” A strange look came over his face. “So let’s hope detectives don’t find the rest of her.”