Sara Shepard - Burned

“Or maybe he’ll think we’re crazy,” Hanna snapped.

Aria shook her head. “You should have told us about this before now.”

“I know.” Emily looked tortured. “And I’m sorry. But would it really have changed anything? We probably would have been even more convinced Tabitha was Ali in Jamaica.”

“Or we would have gone to the police instead of handling it ourselves,” Aria said.

“This might never have happened,” Spencer added.

Emily slumped down. “I’m sorry.”

“Do you realize what this means?” Aria pushed her fingers through her hair. “Real Ali could be out there! She could be A!”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Emily urged. “Ali makes the most sense. She and Tabitha had been such good friends that Tabitha carried her picture in a locket. Maybe she was with Tabitha in Jamaica, and maybe the plan had been to push us off the roof, not the other way around. Maybe that was why she was waiting on the sand, taking those pictures. But then, when things went wrong, she’d decided to torture us instead.”

“But what about Graham?” Spencer asked. “ He makes a lot of sense, too. And we’re certain he’s alive.”

Aria swallowed hard. “I thought it didn’t matter since we were confessing, but I overheard Jeremy and this cop talking yesterday, and Graham’s in the hospital.”

Hanna squinted. “Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe from the blast. It was unclear.”

“Who cares if Graham’s in the hospital?” Spencer threw up her hands. “He’ll get out eventually. And then he’ll tell about everything we did.”

“There was something else weird, too,” Aria said. “The cop said they identified two figures on the surveillance tape from the boiler room—one was definitely Graham. They couldn’t identify the second person, but they thought it was a guy.”

Spencer cocked her head. “Do you remember anyone else being down there?”

Aria shook her head. Emily tapped the table. “Maybe they just caught you at a weird angle or something. Or maybe it was a worker just randomly down there the same time you were.”

“Maybe,” Aria said slowly. Then she shut her eyes. She was so sick of talking about this, going back and forth as to who might be A, letting A torment their lives. She was done.

“We’re telling the cops about Tabitha right now,” she decided.

“Okay,” Emily whispered, widening her eyes at Aria’s authoritative tone. Spencer just nodded. Hanna swallowed hard, but then nudged her head toward Aria’s cell phone.

“Good.” Aria felt electrically charged and a little crazy. She grabbed her phone and looked up the number for Michael Paulson, the man at the FBI in charge of the murder trial. It was a Washington, DC, area code. She punched the numbers on her phone unnecessarily hard.

She pressed the last digit and listened as the line rang. After a moment, someone at the front desk answered. “Can I speak to Michael Paulson, please?” she asked, placing the call on speaker.

“May I ask who’s calling?” the woman said in a bored voice.

Aria glanced at her friends, then turned back to the phone. “Someone who has information on the Tabitha Clark murder case.”

There was a loaded pause. “Mr. Paulson’s at a press conference right now,” she said after a moment. “But if it’s important, I’ll be able to reach him. Can he call you back shortly?”

Aria said that was fine and hung up. She set the phone down on the coffee table, her heart hammering. What was she going to say when the detective called her? How was she going to blurt it out? As soon as she did this, their lives would change. Was she seriously ready for that?

Hanna grabbed for the remote and turned on the TV. “I need some noise,” she said. “I can’t stand this.” A commercial for ice cream cakes popped on the screen. Everyone stared at it absently. Aria wondered if they were all thinking the same thing—they’d probably never have something as frivolous and celebratory as ice cream cake again.

The commercial for ice cream cake ended, and one for Ford trucks came on. Then one for a local pizza parlor, then life insurance. After that, the local news appeared. The weatherman blathered about how it was going to be cloudy today, but there was a high-pressure system moving in tomorrow. “Break out your shorts and T-shirts!” he announced. “It’s going to be unseasonably warm!”

“God, does he have to be so cheerful?” Spencer snarled at the screen.

Emily looked desperately at the phone. “Why doesn’t he call back? Doesn’t he know it’s important?”

Hanna cradled a pillow. “There’s something I didn’t mention about my conversation with Naomi yesterday. Apparently, Real Ali called her when she was back in Rosewood as Courtney and told her everything.”

Now it was her everyone stared at. “What do you mean, everything ?” Aria asked.

“The truth, I guess. Everything that was in that letter she slid under the door at the Poconos. Naomi didn’t believe her, though. She thought she was crazy.”

Spencer blinked hard. “Why would Ali give away such a big secret?”

Hanna shrugged. “She thought Naomi would take her side. She told me Ali tried to recruit her, just like Mona tried to recruit you, Spencer. Ali said, ‘We’re going to get those bitches, Naomi.’”

“‘ We ’?” Aria blurted.

“That’s what she said,” Hanna looked at Aria in puzzlement. “What’s weird about that?”

Aria pushed her hair behind her ear. “I don’t know. It just sounded weird for a second, like Ali had a team of people out to get us. But maybe not.”

Suddenly, Spencer, who had been looking at her phone, lifted her head. “You know how you said Graham was in the hospital, Aria? Actually, I think he’s in a coma.”

She turned her phone outward. THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE CRUISE CLAIMS A VICTIM, said the headline of an online story. Aria scanned the text. Graham Pratt was hospitalized from injuries following the explosion on board the Splendor of the Seas Eco Cruise ship. The medical staff in Bermuda says he is in a coma but resting comfortably .

“Whoa,” Aria whispered, her heart pounding hard. A coma? Had he been knocked out from the blast? But why hadn’t she seen him lying like an X on the boiler-room floor, unconscious?

The news anchor materialized on the screen with a story about a traffic accident near the Conshohocken Curve, breaking her concentration. Aria grabbed the remote, wanting to put on something else, when the camera turned to a familiar face. Tabitha’s blue eyes gleamed. Her smile was sparkly and flirtatious, as though she was keeping a secret. NEW DEVELOPMENTS, read a caption under her photo.

The remote fell from Aria’s fingers to the floor. Hanna grabbed her arm and squeezed.

“We just received new information about Tabitha Clark, the teenager who was murdered in Jamaica last year,” the blond reporter said. “The medical examiner has finished the autopsy, and he has some surprising results. For more, here’s Jennifer Rubenstein.”

Emily’s face went pale. “Oh my God.”

“Here we go,” Spencer whispered. “They’re going to say Tabitha was pushed.”

The picture cut to Michael Paulson, the very man they were waiting for, standing in front of a sea of microphones. A man in a white lab coat stood next to him. Flashbulbs popped.

“After a lengthy examination of Miss Clark’s remains,” Paulson said, stepping forward, “my team and I have concluded that she was killed by severe trauma to the head. There were multiple blows to her skull, and it appears that she was beaten with a blunt object.”

Hanna, who had been covering her eyes with her hands, peeked out. “Wait. What? ”