Inside, the bar was dark and grubby, with a dingy Ping-Pong table in the back. This place was pretty much like Snooker’s, Hollis’s other grimy student bar, but Aria had vowed to never set foot in Snooker’s again. She’d met a sexy boy named Ezra at Snooker’s two weeks ago, but then he wound up being less of a boy and more of an AP English teacher—her AP English teacher. A sent Aria taunting texts about Ezra, and when Ezra accidentally saw what A had written, he assumed that Aria was telling the whole school about them. So ended Aria’s Rosewood faculty romance.

A waitress with enormous boobs and Heidi braids came up to their booth and looked at Mike suspiciously. “Are you twenty-one?”

“Oh, yeah,” Mike said, folding his hands on the table. “I’m actually twenty-five.”

“We’ll have a pitcher of Amstel,” Aria interrupted, kicking Mike under the table.

“And,” Mike added, “I want a shot. Of Jaeger.”

Heidi Braids looked pained, but she came back with the pitcher and the shot. Mike downed the Jaeger and made a puckered, girlish face. He slammed the shot glass on the chipped wooden table and eyed Aria. “I think I’ve cracked why you’ve become so loco.” Mike had announced last week that he thought Aria was acting even freakier than usual, and he’d vowed to figure out why.

“I’m dying to know,” Aria said dryly.

Mike pushed his fingers together in a steeple, a professorly gesture their father often made. “I think you’re secretly dancing at Turbulence.”

Aria laughed so forcefully, beer flew up her nasal passages. Turbulence was a strip club two towns over, next to a one-strip airport.

“A couple of guys said they saw a girl going in there who looked just like you,” Mike said. “You don’t have to keep it a secret from me. I’m cool.”

Aria pulled discreetly at her knitted mohair bra. She’d made one for herself, Ali, and her old friends in sixth grade, and had worn hers to Ali’s memorial as a tribute. Unfortunately, in sixth grade, Aria’s measurements were about a cup size smaller, and the mohair itched like hell. “You mean you don’t think I’m acting strange because a) we’re back in Rosewood and I hate it here, and b) my old best friend is dead?”

Mike shrugged. “I thought you didn’t really like that girl.”

Aria turned away. There had been moments when she really didn’t like Ali, that was true. Especially when Ali didn’t take her very seriously, or when she hounded Aria for details about Byron and Meredith. “That’s not true,” she lied.

Mike poured more beer into his glass. “Isn’t it messed up that she was, like, dumped in the ground? And, like, concrete was poured on top of her?”

Aria winced and shut her eyes. Her brother had zero tact.

“So you think someone killed her?” Mike asked.

Aria shrugged. It was a question that had been haunting her—a question no one else had asked. At Ali’s memorial, no one came out and said Ali had been murdered, only that she’d been found. But what else could it have been but murder? One minute, Ali was at their sleepover. The next, she was gone. Three years later, her body showed up in a hole in her backyard.

Aria wondered if A and Ali’s killer were linked—and if the affair was tangled up in The Jenna Thing. When Jenna’s accident happened, Aria thought she saw someone besides Ali at the base of Toby’s tree house. Later that night, Aria was startled awake by the vision and decided she needed to ask Ali about it. She’d found her and Spencer whispering behind the closed bathroom door, but when Aria asked to come in, Ali told her to go back to sleep. By morning, Toby had confessed.

“I bet the killer’s, like, someone out of left field,” Mike said. “Like…someone you’d never guess in a trillion years.” His eyes lit up. “How about Mrs. Craycroft?”

Mrs. Craycroft was their elderly neighbor to the right. She’d once saved up $5,000 worth of coins in Poland Spring jugs and tried to redeem them for cash at a nearby Coinstar. The local news did a story on her and everything. “Yep, you cracked the case,” Aria deadpanned.

“Well, someone like that.” Mike drummed his knobby fingers on the table. “Now that I know what’s going on with you, I can focus my attention on Ali D.”

“Go for it.” If the cops weren’t adept enough to find Ali in her own backyard, Mike might as well try his hand at it.

“So I’m thinking we need to play some beer-pong,” Mike said, and before Aria could answer, he had already collected some Ping-Pong balls and an empty pint glass. “This is Noel Kahn’s favorite game.”

Aria smirked. Noel Kahn was one of the richest kids at school and the quintessential Rosewood boy, which basically made him Mike’s idol. And, irony of all ironies, he seemed to have a thing for Aria, which she was trying her hardest to squelch.

“Wish me luck,” Mike said, holding the Ping-Pong ball ready. He missed the glass, sending the ball rolling off the table onto the floor.

“Chug it down,” Aria singsonged, and her brother wrapped his hands around his beer and poured the whole thing down his throat.

Mike tried for the second time to get the Ping-Pong ball in Aria’s glass but missed again. “You suck!” Aria teased, the beer beginning to make her feel a little buzzy.

“Like you’re any better,” Mike shot back.

“You wanna bet?”

Mike snorted. “If you don’t make it, you have to get me into Turbulence. Me and Noel. But not while you’re working,” he added hastily.

“If I make it, you have to be my slave for a week. That means during school, too.”

“Deal,” Mike said. “You’re not going to make it, so it doesn’t matter.”

She moved the glass to Mike’s side of the table and took aim. The ball careened off one of the table’s many dents and landed cleanly in the glass, not even bumping its sides on the way in. “Ha!” Aria cried. “You are so going down!”

Mike looked stunned. “That was just a lucky shot.”

“Whatever!” Aria snickered gleefully. “So, I wonder…should I make you crawl on all fours behind me at school? Or wear mom’s faldur?” She giggled. Ella’s faldur was a traditional Icelandic pointed cap that made the wearer look like a deranged elf.

“Screw you.” Mike grabbed the Ping-Pong ball out of his glass. It slipped out of his hands and bounced away from them.

“I’ll get it,” Aria offered. She stood, feeling pleasantly tipsy. The ball had rolled all the way to the front of the bar, and Aria bent down on the floor to get it. A couple swept past her, squeezing into the discreet, partially blocked seats in the corner. Aria noticed that the girl had long dark hair and a pink spiderweb tattoo on her wrist.

That tattoo was familiar. Very familiar. And when she whispered something to the guy she was with, he started coughing maniacally. Aria straightened up.

It was her father. And Meredith.

Aria bolted back to Mike. “We have to go.”

Mike rolled his eyes. “But I just asked for a second shot of Jaeger.”

“Too bad.” Aria grabbed her jacket. “We’re leaving. Now.” She threw forty bucks on the table and pulled on Mike’s arm until he stood. He was a little wobbly, but she managed to push him toward the door.

Unfortunately, Byron chose that very moment to let out one of his very distinctive laughs, which Aria always said sounded like a dying whale. Mike froze, recognizing it too. Their father’s face was turned to the side, and he was touching Meredith’s hand across the table.

Aria watched Mike recognize Byron. He knitted his brow. “Wait,” he squeaked, looking confusedly at Aria. She willed her face to look unworried, but instead, she felt the corners of her mouth wiggle down. She knew she was making the same face Ella did when she tried to protect Aria or Mike from things that might hurt them.

Mike narrowed his eyes at her, then looked back at their father and Meredith. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it, taking a step toward them. Aria reached out to stop him—she didn’t want this happening right now. She didn’t want this happening ever. Then Mike steeled his jaw, turned away from their dad, and stormed out of Victory, bumping into their waitress as he went.

Aria pushed through the door after him. She squinted in the bright afternoon light of the parking lot, looking back and forth for Mike. But her brother was gone.

5

A HOUSE DIVIDED

Spencer awoke on the floor of her upstairs bathroom with no idea how she’d gotten there. The clock on the shower radio said 6:45 P.M., and out the window, the evening sun cast long shadows on their yard. It was still Monday, the day of Ali’s funeral. She must have fallen asleep…and sleepwalked. She used to be a chronic sleepwalker—it got so bad that in seventh grade, she had to spend a night at the University of Pennsylvania Sleep Evaluation Clinic with her brain hooked up to electrodes. The doctors said it was just stress.

She stood up and ran cold water over her face, looking at herself in the mirror: long blond hair, emerald-green eyes, pointed chin. Her skin was flawless and her teeth were radiantly white. It was preposterous that she didn’t look as wrecked as the felt.

She ran the equation over again in her head: A knew about Toby and The Jenna Thing. Toby was back. Therefore, Toby had to be A. And he was telling Spencer to keep her mouth shut. It was the same torture from sixth grade, all over again.

She went back to her bedroom and pressed her forehead to the window. To her left was her family’s own private windmill—it had long since stopped working, but her parents loved how it gave their property such a rustic, authentic look. To her right, the Do Not Cross tape was still all over the DiLaurentises’ lawn. The Ali shrine, which consisted of flowers, candles, photos, and other knickknacks in Ali’s honor, had grown larger, swallowing the whole cul-de-sac.

Across the street from that was the Cavanaughs’ house. Two cars in the driveway, a basketball in the yard, the little red flag up on the mailbox. From the outside, everything seemed so normal. But inside…

Spencer closed her eyes, remembering May of seventh grade, a year after The Jenna Thing. She had boarded the Philadelphia-bound SEPTA train to meet Ali in the city to go shopping. She was so busy texting Ali on her spanking-new Sidekick that it was five or six stops before she noticed there was someone across the aisle. It was Toby. Staring.

Her hands started shaking. Toby had been at boarding school all year, so Spencer hadn’t seen him in months. As usual, his hair hung over his eyes and he wore enormous headphones, but something about him that day seemed…stronger. Scarier.

All of the guilty, anxious feelings about The Jenna Thing that Spencer had tried to bury flooded back. I’ll get you. She didn’t want to be in the same train car as him. She slid one leg into the aisle, then the other, but the conductor abruptly stepped in her way. “You going to Thirtieth Street or Market East?” he boomed.

Spencer shrank back. “Thirtieth,” she whispered. When the conductor passed, she glanced at Toby again. His face bloomed into a huge, sinister smile. A split second later, his mouth became impassive again, but his eyes said, Just. You. Wait.

*** Copyright: Novel12.Com