Sara Shepard - Ruthless

“Agreed,” Spencer said.

They were pulling through the Penn gates when two bright lights hit the rear-view mirror. Sirens blared. Kelsey and Spencer turned around to see the campus police bearing down on them. “ Shit ,” Spencer hissed, tossing the bottle of pills out the window.

The police car pulled over and signaled for Spencer to do the same. Kelsey looked at Spencer, her eyes bulging wide. “What the hell are we going to do?”

Spencer stared into Kelsey’s frantic face. Suddenly, a calm feeling washed over her. Everything she’d been through with Ali, all those A notes and near-death experiences she’d had to endure, made this moment seem manageable in comparison. “Listen,” she said forcefully to Kelsey. “We didn’t do anything wrong.”

“What if they followed us from the deal? What if it was a sting? What if they find the pills?”

“We—” A cop tapped on the window. She rolled it down and gazed innocently into his stern face.

The cop glared hard at the girls. “Can you two get out of the car?”

Kelsey and Spencer looked at each other. Neither said anything. The cop sighed loudly. “Get. Out. Of. The. Car.”

“Kelsey’s right. Let’s take a break, guys,” Amelia said. Spencer looked up, snapping instantly out of the memory. All of the orchestra girls rose from the couches.

Panicked, she stepped backward and slipped into the hall closet, which held winter coats, an old dog gate, and three different vacuum cleaners for various types of dust and pet hair. She waited until everyone filed into the kitchen, praying no one would open the door and find her here. Through a slit in the door, she could see the guests’ bags and coats piled on the wooden bench across the hall. Amid the Burberry trenches, J. Crew puffer coats, and Kate Spade satchels, was a shimmery gold tote that matched hers.

We’re twinsies! Kelsey had said a few days ago when she’d seen the bag.

Maybe there was a way to see if Kelsey knew more. Spencer waited until the break was over, then darted to the front door and grabbed her own Dior bag. Then she scurried to the pile of coats, set down her Dior bag in place of Kelsey’s, and lifted Kelsey’s bag into her arms. It smelled different from hers, like a fruity candle. It would only take her minutes to go through it. Kelsey wouldn’t even know it was gone.

She took the stairs two at a time, slammed her bedroom door shut, and upended Kelsey’s purse on the bed. There was the same snakeskin leather wallet Kelsey had used at Penn last summer and a pair of Tweezerman tweezers—she never went anywhere without them. Out tumbled an extra set of violin strings, a flyer for a band called The Chambermaids with a phone number for someone named Rob scrawled across the top, a tube of lip gloss, and a bunch of different-colored pens.

Spencer sat back. There was nothing incriminating in here. Maybe she was being paranoid.

Then she noticed Kelsey’s iPhone tucked into the front pocket. She yanked it out, scrolling through the sent-texts folder for notes from A. There weren’t any, but that didn’t mean anything—Kelsey could own a second phone, like Mona had. On the main screen was a folder titled “Photos.” Spencer tapped it, and several subfolders appeared. There were shots from prom, a graduation, and Kelsey with a bunch of smiling girls from St. Agnes, none of whom Spencer recognized from orchestra practice. But then she noticed a folder that made her blood run cold.

Jamaica, Spring Break.

Downstairs, the orchestra music ramped up again, clumsy and dissonant. Spencer stared at the folder icon. It was a coincidence, right? Lots of people went to Jamaica during spring break—hadn’t she’d read in Us Weekly that it was the number one party location for high school and college students?

With a shaking finger, she pressed the button to access the folder’s contents. When the first photo appeared on the screen, Spencer saw the familiar cliffs that she, Aria, Emily, and Hanna had jumped from their first day at the resort. The next photo featured the rooftop deck where the four of them had dined almost every night. There was a photo of Kelsey posing with Jacques, the Rastafarian bartender who made a mean rum punch.

Her stomach roiled. It was The Cliffs.

She scrolled through more pictures at breakneck speed, revisiting the huge pool, the blue mosaic hallway to the spa, the speckled pygmy goats that wandered outside the resort’s high stucco walls. In a picture of a crowd at the restaurant, a face stuck out among the rest. There, clear as day, looking sunburned and wearing the lacrosse T-shirt he’d had on the day they’d arrived, was Noel Kahn. Mike Montgomery stood next to him, holding a Red Stripe. If a few random guests had moved out of the way, Kelsey would have gotten Spencer, Aria, Emily, and Hanna in the shot, too.

She scrolled to the next photo and almost screamed. Tabitha stared back at her, happy and alive, wearing the golden sundress she’d worn the night Spencer and the others had killed her.

The iPhone slipped from her hands. It felt like something heavy and hard was sitting on her chest, preventing air from reaching her lungs. Details crystallized in her mind. Kelsey had been at The Cliffs the same time as she and her friends were. Perhaps Kelsey knew Tabitha. Perhaps Kelsey saw what Spencer and the others did to her. And then, when she met Spencer again at Penn, she made the connection. And when Spencer framed Kelsey for something she was responsible for, Kelsey had decided to exact revenge . . . as the new A.

She had her proof. Kelsey was A. And she wasn’t going to stop until she brought Spencer down once and for all.

Later that night, Aria sat on the couch at Byron’s house, rain pounding on the windowpanes. She should have been looking at her art history project—Klaudia had cancelled their second Wordsmith’s meeting and rescheduled for a coffee shop on Friday—but instead she was on a website called BrooklynLofts, which featured gorgeous apartments in the Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Williamsburg, and Red Hook neighborhoods. The more she read about Brooklyn, the more she was convinced that it was where she and Ezra belonged. Practically every writer who mattered lived in Brooklyn. Ezra could probably get his book published just by walking to the local coffee shop.

Mike strolled into the room wearing a remarkably clean T-shirt and dark jeans. “Going somewhere?” Aria asked, looking up.

“Just out,” Mike mumbled, grabbing an organic, sugar-free candy from the bowl Meredith had set on the side table. She was one of those people who believed sugar consumption shortened one’s life span.

“On a date ?” Aria goaded. Mike was wearing his nice Vans after all—the ones that weren’t covered in dirt.

Mike made a big deal of unwrapping the plastic on the candy. “Colleen and I are hanging out. It’s not a big deal.”

“Are you two getting cozy at play practice?”

Mike winced. “It’s not like that. And, I mean, she’s not . . .” He clamped his mouth shut and stared off at the teardrop-shaped prism that Meredith had hung in the window.

Aria sat up straighter. “She’s not . . . Hanna ?”

“No,” Mike said quickly. “I was going to say she isn’t, like, the Hooters honey who’s totally digging me on Skype.” Then he plopped down in the ancient Stickley chair Byron claimed to have found on the street in his college days. “Okay. Maybe I was going to say that.”

“If you miss Hanna so much, why don’t you tell her?”

Mike looked horrified. “Because guys don’t do that. That’d make me look girly.”