Sara Shepard - Deadly

Spencer watched them for a while, feeling ambivalent. It was strange to have people care so passionately about something she was so directly and intimately caught up in.

Then she noticed a news van parked across the street, with a female reporter sitting in the passenger seat. Spencer ducked her head and strode quickly to her car, afraid that in seconds, the reporter would recognize her.

“Spencer?”

She gritted her teeth and whirled around—but it was Chase, a new sort-of friend. He was standing under the hospital awning wearing a black nylon coat and a gray baseball cap.

Spencer reluctantly crossed to Chase and pulled him into a more secluded nook near a service entrance. “What are you doing here?” she whispered.

Chase tugged at his mangled ear, a wound from a stalker in boarding school. “Weren’t we supposed to meet today? I looked all over for you. Your mom finally told me where you were.”

“Did she tell you why I was here?”

Chase shook his head.

“Okay,” Spencer said, and told him everything. She knew she could trust Chase. He ran an unsolved-crime blog, and they’d met up when she was trying to track down Ali. There had been some identity confusion at first—Chase was trying to pass his brother Curtis off as himself because he was self-conscious about his ear, and for a while Spencer had even worried he was A. But he’d eventually come clean.

When Spencer finally finished telling him about Noel and the storage shed, Chase narrowed his green eyes. “So . . . Noel isn’t Ali’s boyfriend?”

Spencer sighed. “Nope. We’re back to square one.”

“Well then, we’d better get going,” Chase said, linking his arm around Spencer’s elbow.

Spencer planted her feet. “Where?”

Chase blinked. “We’re going to stake out that town house on the surveillance video.”

When Chase visited her yesterday, he’d shown her a grainy surveillance video of the outside of a town house in Rosewood. A girl who looked a lot like Ali was visible in a few frames. They’d made plans to investigate it today, but after everything that had happened with Noel, Spencer had forgotten.

A city bus whooshed by, spewing out exhaust. “Someone’s boyfriend ended up in a storage shed because of us,” Spencer said nervously. “Ali knows we’re on to her. I can’t let anyone else get hurt.”

“But what if this is where she lives ?” Chase asked. “If we could find proof that she’s still alive, we could turn it in to the cops and put an end to this, once and for all. And then no one else would get hurt.”

Spencer twisted her mouth. A shadow flickered across the window of a car parked across the street, for a moment looking like a person.

Chase did have a point. What if they found something at the apartment? What if they could end this whole nightmare today?

She looked up at Chase and nodded ever so slightly. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

Twenty minutes later, as low clouds rolled across the sky, Spencer and Chase steered into a housing complex in West Rosewood, the low-rent part of town. Of course, low-rent was relative: A big FOR SALE sign in the development entrance boasted hardwood floors and marble countertops in every unit. A brand-new community swimming pool glistened in the distance. And the local grocery store was Fresh Fields, where you couldn’t buy a quart of milk for less than five bucks.

“There it is,” Chase said, pointing at a block of town houses. Each unit looked the same, with a fake, old-timey gaslight in the front yard, a faux dormer window set into the roof, and gingerbreadlike scallop details around the windows. In the surveillance photos, Ali had been walking into the unit on the corner.

Spencer pulled the car into park and stared at the house, shivering in the suddenly cold air. The house had a red-painted door and dried leaves all over the front porch. There were no blinds on the windows—she’d have thought Ali would insist on absolute privacy. Could this really be Ali’s secret lair?

Then she peered at the units next to it. The grass in all the front yards hadn’t been cut in a while, and newspapers were piled up on a front porch. There wasn’t a single light on in any of the windows, and no dogs barked from inside. Before Spencer and Chase had left Philly, they’d checked the county courthouse records for information on the housing complex and found that most of the units hadn’t yet sold. The house Ali was entering in the photo had been on the market since its construction last year. A couple in their seventies named Joseph and Harriet Maxwell had bought the unit next door two Novembers ago, right when Ian Thomas was arraigned for Courtney DiLaurentis’s murder; but the plant on their front stoop was withered, and there were a bunch of flyers wedged inside the storm door.

“This seems like the perfect place for Ali to hide out,” Spencer murmured. “It’s so deserted. No one would ever see her coming and going.”

“Exactly.” Chase started to get out of the car, then paused and turned back to her. “Spencer. Are you sure you’re ready for this?”

Spencer’s stomach swirled. Was she? She looked around the parking lot. Though it was empty, it still felt like she was being watched. She stared at a thick line of shrubs on the other side of the lot, then peered worriedly at a locked-up realtor’s office across the street. Could someone be hiding inside?

“Yes,” she said, getting out of the car and slamming the door firmly behind her. She needed to do this.

The sky was ominously gray, and the air felt thick and electrified. Something made a scraping sound behind her, and the hair on her arms stood on end. “Did you hear that?”

Chase stopped short and listened. “No . . .”

Then something fluttered in the woods that bordered the lot. Spencer stared hard at a splotch between the trees. “H-hello?” she stammered. Nothing.

Chase’s swallow was audible in the eerie silence. “It was probably a rabbit. Or a deer.”

Spencer nodded shakily. She tiptoed up the corner unit’s front walk and peered through the window, but it was too dark to tell what—or who—was inside. She inspected the front door. There were no scuffs, no footprints, and no welcome mat. Then, sliding on the gloves Chase gave her—they didn’t want to leave prints—she touched the metal doorknob tentatively, as if it were wired to set off a bomb. Her skin tingled. She glanced over her shoulder again toward the realtor’s office. Thunder rumbled. The wind gusted. A few raindrops landed on Spencer’s head.

“Excuse me?”

Spencer yelped and spun around. A man walking a dog approached them down the sidewalk. He seemed older, a bit stooped. The collie’s tongue lolled out of its mouth. Spencer couldn’t tell if the dog was on a leash or not.

The man gazed from Spencer to Chase. “What are you doing?” he asked sharply.

Spencer’s mind went blank. “Uh, we thought our friend lived here.”

“No one lives there,” the man said, squinting at the house. “That place has been vacant since they built it.”

It didn’t seem like he was lying. It also didn’t seem like he had any idea who they were—he was just an old guy out for a walk with his dog. “Have you ever seen anyone coming and going out of this place?” she dared to ask. “Anyone at all?”

“Nope, not even a light on,” the man said. “But it’s private property. You should move along.” He gave them another long look, and for a moment, Spencer wondered if she’d trusted him too quickly. But then he whistled at his dog, and the dog stood. As they passed, the dog stiffened and turned its head toward the realtor’s office across the street. Spencer sucked in her stomach. Did the dog sense a presence? But then it loped off and lifted its leg on a clump of dandelions. The man and dog disappeared, all footsteps and jingling tags.