Snap.
Whir.
When Ali was almost to one, Spencer jumped up and ran right to the back window. “It’s too dark in here,” Spencer proclaimed. She whipped back the curtains, letting in the night. “I want it lighter. Maybe everyone does.”
Alison looked at the others. Their eyes were sealed closed. Her lips curled up in a smirk. “Close them,” she insisted.
Spencer rolled her eyes. “God, take a pill.”
Ali glanced out the now-open window. Fear flickered across her face. Did she see? Did she know who was there? Did she know what was coming?
But then Ali turned back to Spencer. Her fingers were curled into fists. “You think I should take a pill?”
Snap. Another photo fell from the camera. The image slowly materialized from nothingness.
Spencer and Ali stared at each other for a long time. The other girls remained on the carpet. Hanna and Emily swayed back and forth, tangled in a dream, but Aria’s eyes were half open. Her gaze was on Spencer and Ali, watching the fight unfold but feeling powerless to stop it.
“Leave,” Spencer demanded, pointing to the door.
“Fine.” Ali strode onto the porch, slamming the door hard behind her.
Ali stood for a moment, heaving deep breaths. The leaves on the trees swished and whispered. The yellow lantern-style light over the front door illuminated the left half of Ali’s body. There was an angry and determined scowl on her face. She didn’t glance fearfully around the side of the house. She didn’t sense the dangerous presence that lurked so close. Maybe it was because Ali was preoccupied, keeping a dangerous secret of her own. She had someone to meet right now. And someone else to avoid.
After a moment, Ali started down the path. Seconds later, the barn door slammed again. Spencer followed, catching up with her on the other side of the trees. Their whispers grew more and more fevered and furious. You try to steal everything away from me. But you can’t have this. You read about it in my diary, didn’t you? You think kissing Ian was so special, but he told me that you didn’t even know how.
There was the slick, wet sound of shoes slipping on grass. A shriek. A dangerous crack. A horrified gasp. And then silence.
Aria stepped out on the porch and looked around. “Ali?” she cried, her bottom lip trembling.
No answer. The tips of Aria’s fingers shook; maybe she sensed, deep down, that she wasn’t alone.
“Spencer?” Aria called again. She reached out and touched the wind chimes, desperate for sound. They knocked together melodically.
Aria returned to the barn as Hanna and Emily came to. “I had the weirdest dream,” Emily murmured, rubbing her eyes. “Ali fell down this really deep well, and there were these giant plants.”
“That was my dream, too!” Hanna cried. They stared at each other in confusion.
Spencer stomped back onto the porch, dazed and disoriented.
“Where’s Ali?” the other girls asked.
“I don’t know,” Spencer said in a faraway voice. She looked around. “I thought…I don’t know.”
By this time, the Polaroids had been scooped up off the ground and stowed safely in a pocket. But then the camera went off again by accident, the flash lighting up the red wood siding. Another photo emerged.
Snap. Whir.
The girls stared at the window, frozen and terrified as deer. Was someone there? Ali? Or maybe it was Melissa or Ian. They’d just been here, after all.
They remained very still. Two seconds passed. Five. Ten. There was only silence. It was just the wind, they decided. Or maybe a tree branch scraping against the glass, as painful as someone scraping her fingernails against a plate.
“I think I want to go home,” Emily told her friends.
The girls filed out of the barn together—annoyed, embarrassed, shaken. Ali had ditched them. The friendship was over. They started across Spencer’s yard, unaware of the terrible things that were to come. The face at the window had disappeared, too, off to follow Ali down the path. Everything had been set in motion. What was about to happen had already begun.
Within hours, Ali would be dead.
1
A BROKEN HOME
Spencer Hastings rubbed her sleep-crusted eyes and put a Kashi waffle in the toaster. Her family’s kitchen smelled of freshly brewed coffee, pastries, and lemon-scented household cleaner. The two labradoodles, Rufus and Beatrice, circled her legs, their tails wagging.
The tiny LCD TV in the corner was tuned to the news. A female reporter in a blue Burberry barn jacket was standing with the Rosewood chief of police and a gray-haired man in a black suit. The caption said The Rosewood Murders.
“My client has been wrongfully accused,” the man in the suit proclaimed. He was William “Billy” Ford’s publicly appointed lawyer and it was the first time he’d spoken to the press since Billy’s arrest. “He’s absolutely innocent. He was framed.”
“Right,” Spencer spat. Her hand shook unsteadily as she poured coffee into a blue Rosewood Day Prep mug. There was no doubt in Spencer’s mind that Billy had killed her best friend, Alison DiLaurentis, nearly four years ago. And now he’d murdered Jenna Cavanaugh, a blind girl in Spencer’s grade, and probably Ian Thomas—Melissa’s ex-boyfriend, Ali’s secret crush, and her first accused killer. Cops found a bloody T-shirt that belonged to Ian in Billy’s car and they were now searching for his body, though they hadn’t come up with any leads.
Outside, a garbage truck grumbled around the cul-de-sac where Spencer lived. A split second later, the same exact sound growled through the speakers of the TV. Spencer walked to the living room and parted the curtains at the front window. Sure enough, a news van was parked at the curb. A cameraman swiveled from one person to the other, and another guy holding a giant microphone braced against the blustery wind. Spencer could see the reporter’s mouth moving through the window and hear her voice through the TV speaker.