Emily’s stomach swooped. “Do you think it was his blood in the house?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Spencer stared down the street. Emily’s next-door neighbors, an older couple named the Gauls, were hard at work setting up sprinklers on their front lawn. When they saw the girls, they waved. Everyone waved back, though not nearly as enthusiastically.
“But we haven’t heard anything about the pool house investigation,” Aria continued. “I even tried calling the local police station, but when someone asked my name, I hung up.” Then she looked at the plastic bag in her hands. “I don’t know what to do with this.” She opened it a little; Emily could see the crumpled dress they’d pulled out of the house the night before. “Drop it off anonymously at the police station? Burn it?”
“Do you think we should go up there?” Emily asked. “What if they have Ali under arrest? What if she’s caught and they haven’t even told us?” That would be just like Fuji, she thought bitterly.
Spencer shook her head. “The place is probably crawling with cops—us being there would complicate things. We’ll know soon enough. But I feel really positive, you know? I feel like this could be it. And now we can go on with our lives for real.”
Emily bit her lip. Tears rushed to her eyes. She had been about to bury her life. She couldn’t imagine blithely moving forward.
A siren wailed down the street, and everyone looked up. Seconds later, a police car appeared from around the corner and began to roll toward them. It was followed by a second police car, then a third. Emily took a quivering step back, momentarily frozen in the lights. Then she realized who was in the front seat of the first car.
Fuji.
The cop cars rolled up to the curb in front of Emily’s house and came to a stop. Agent Fuji, dressed in a crisp black suit and sunglasses, stepped out of the vehicle and strode toward them. The agent’s face was stern and hard as she approached the girls. She came to a stop and looked around at all of them. A few beats passed. Behind her, Emily heard her front door open. She knew without looking that her mom was standing there, staring.
“We need to speak to you,” Fuji said in a gruff voice.
“Of course,” Spencer said quickly. “Whatever we can do to help.”
“This is about the pool house, right?” Hanna asked excitedly. “What did you find?”
Fuji winced. She reached into her pocket and whipped out a ziplock bag marked EVIDENCE and shoved it in the girls’ faces. “We found this.”
The bag shook before Emily’s eyes. Slowly, her vision adjusted. Something pearly and white and tipped in blood was caught in the bag’s corner. Emily frowned, then backed up. A tooth.
“Whose is that?” Aria cried.
Fuji removed her sunglasses and stared at them hard. There was no kindness in her eyes, which surprised Emily. Fuji should be grateful, shouldn’t she? “I think you know whose it is, girls. What I want to know is: Where’s the rest of the body?”
Everyone flinched. Emily’s heart began to pound. “The rest of what body?” Hanna asked.
“Isn’t Greg’s body by the creek bed?” Spencer piped up.
Fuji pressed her hand to her brow. “We know what you’ve been doing in Ashland, girls. We have witnesses attesting to you skulking around up there. Testimonies about the questions you’ve been asking neighbors and people at the mini-mart. And then we found your surveillance equipment. Saw your shoddy cleanup job for ourselves. Found your prints all over the house.”
Fuji’s words made sense to Emily individually, but not as a whole. She couldn’t even comprehend what the agent was saying. “Wait,” she blurted. “Our cleanup job? What do you mean?”
“You obviously did something last night, and then tried to clean it up. Badly, I might add.” Fuji scowled. “Throwing bleach haphazardly on the floor doesn’t eradicate blood, ladies.”
Bleach? Emily’s heart stopped.
“We didn’t clean that up!” Spencer cried, getting it, too. “Someone else did! We were there, in the house, on the second floor. We heard everything, but we were too afraid to look and see who it was.”
“It’s true,” Emily said. “It was our surveillance equipment—we were spying, but it was in hopes of catching Ali. But we didn’t do anything in that house. We didn’t hurt anyone; we didn’t clean anything. We just happened to be there.”
“Are you sure about that, Emily?” Fuji’s gaze was unblinking. “So then you didn’t go up there yourself and trash the place a few days before, and then make a threat that you were going to kill someone if she ever returned?”
Emily could feel her friends staring at her. Her cheeks started to burn.
“What’s she talking about?” Spencer demanded.
“When did you say that?” Aria hissed.
“Emily, what’s going on?” Emily’s mother said behind her.
“The surveillance cameras store the last seven days of data,” Fuji said, a whisper of a smile on her face. “Three of them we found were smashed, but the fourth—the one that showed the inside of the house—was still intact, though no longer recording. We watched that video of you, Emily. Watched you tear things off the wall, smash anything in sight. Your prints were all over the cameras, too. We knew they were yours before you told us.”
“I . . .” Emily trailed off. She had no idea what to say. She had trashed the house. That awful day, after Jordan died, when she’d gone up there—she’d said all kinds of things. But . . .