Sara Shepard - Crushed

She took the very next exit. Recalculating , the GPS said. The SUV followed. Hanna slowed at a stop sign and took a left. The SUV did the same. “Oh my God,” Hanna whispered. Was it A?

She spied a Wawa ahead and pulled into the parking lot. The SUV whizzed past. Hanna reached for a pen to scribble down the license plate, but the car was out of view before she could read the last two letters. Shifting into reverse, she peeled out and took the back way to the highway. When she merged into traffic, the black SUV was nowhere in sight. She wished she could call Mike and tell him about how much of a badass she was. But as of now, Mike didn’t even have the number for her burner cell, a hideous flip-phone thing that Hanna couldn’t even buy a bejeweled Tory Burch case for.

Twenty minutes, three more suspicious vehicles, and several more evasive turns later, Hanna pulled up to a secluded street of huge, cookie-cutter mansions. A man-made lake glittered in the distance—even the plump, brilliantly colored mallard ducks looked like models. A few athletic-looking people were out walking their dogs, even though a steady rain had started to fall. Hanna pulled into the long slate driveway of number 11, noticing a light on inside.

She got out of the car and tiptoed toward the door. The heavy scent of pine bombarded her nostrils. For a neighborhood in the middle of the bustling Main Line, it was eerily quiet, the only sounds the chirps, crunches, and flutters of nature.

Before she could ring the bell, a hand grabbed her arm from behind. She started to scream, but a second hand in a black glove clapped over her mouth. “ Shh ,” Spencer whispered, pulling the hood off her face. “Didn’t I tell you not to go in the front?”

“I forgot,” Hanna said, suddenly irritated. She’d lost four tails! She couldn’t be expected to remember everything.

Spencer led her through a side entrance and into a mudroom that smelled like 409 cleaner and cinnamon candle. Then she guided her down a flight of stairs into a finished basement with a game room, wine cellar, and home theater. To the left was a heavy iron door with a spinning bank vault handle. Spencer wrenched it open. “Go,” she whispered, pushing Hanna inside like she was a hostage.

Hanna squinted in the dim light. The room had thick, solid walls. There was a small denim couch, a few chairs, and a card table in the corner, along with a bookcase that held some magazines and board games. On two walls were video cameras of the house’s massive front and back yards. Hanna watched them for a few minutes. Trees brushed back and forth. A rabbit hopped in front of one of the cameras.

One of the screens showed a cab pulling up to the driveway. Aria, wearing a black hoodie like Spencer’s, slunk out of the car and crept toward the house. Spencer appeared on the screen and led Aria to the same entrance Hanna had come through.

Emily arrived a few minutes later. Then Spencer unfurled a large piece of blank paper and taped it over the closed vault door. “Okay. Let’s get started.”

She pulled a black marker from her purse and wrote A at the top of the piece of paper. “What do we know so far?” she asked.

Hanna jiggled her leg. “Well, A killed Tabitha. So it’s someone who was in Jamaica.”

Jamaica , Spencer wrote. “What else?”

“Do you think A was a friend of Tabitha’s, or an enemy?” Emily asked. “I would say an enemy since A killed her, but maybe that’s what A wants us to think.”

Aria nodded. “A was poised on the beach, so A knew Tabitha was going up to the roof to talk to us. Do you think A told Tabitha to say all those Ali-like things to us, too? Like how you guys seemed like long-lost sisters, Spence? Or how you used to be chubby, Hanna?”

“Maybe. And A could have given that string bracelet to Tabitha, too,” Hanna said. “But why would someone want us to think Tabitha was Ali?”

“To pique our curiosity, so we would definitely go on the roof deck with her when she asked?” Aria said. “And then . . . what? Orchestrate things so that we’d push Tabitha off? How would A know that was going to happen? A’s not a mind reader.”

“It might have just been an accident that Tabitha fell,” Hanna decided. “What if A really asked Tabitha to push me ? But then Aria stepped in and pushed her instead. Everything went wrong, until A realized how to make it right. A killed Tabitha when she fell and then blamed it on us.”

Spencer capped the marker. “That could be how it went down, I suppose. But who would do something like that?”

Emily looked at the others. “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

Hanna swallowed hard. “Real Ali?”

Emily shifted her weight on the couch. “It makes sense. First of all, she knew our weaknesses—it would have been easy for her to tell Tabitha what to say. She wanted revenge once and for all. And it makes sense how she knew Tabitha—she met her at The Preserve. But how did she get Tabitha to do all that—even potentially murder for her? What did Tabitha have to gain from it? Do you think she paid her?”

“Tabitha’s family was rich.” Hanna leaned toward the TV screens. “Besides, does Ali have money? Even if she had some sort of trust account, she couldn’t draw from it—I’m sure her accounts are being monitored, if her family hasn’t already taken back all the funds.”

“Maybe someone else is giving her money.” Spencer tossed the marker from hand to hand.

There was a silence. It was so quiet inside the panic room that Hanna could hear the ticking of Spencer’s Cartier watch. “It doesn’t explain why Ali would have bludgeoned her to death, though,” she said. “I mean, someone could have seen her. She took a big risk.”

Aria breathed in. “Someone could have seen Real Ali, period. How was it that no one noticed her in Jamaica? Isn’t that weird?”

“That brings us back to the money thing,” Spencer said, writing money on the sheet of paper. “Now that I think about it, the DiLaurentis family definitely didn’t have cash. When I found out all that stuff about Ali and Courtney being my half sisters, part of it was about how the DiLaurentises were broke—probably from paying those outrageous hospital bills for all those years. So how could Ali have gotten the cash to travel to Jamaica? And if she’s A, how did she come back to Rosewood and stalk us so expertly?”

“And go on the cruise,” Aria added. “All of that takes money.”

“She has to have someone bankrolling her,” Hanna concluded. “It’s the only thing that makes sense—not just for the money aspect, but because of other stuff, too. She can’t be everywhere at once. It’s just not possible.”

“So she has a helper, then,” Spencer said. “Just like we thought.”

Hanna nodded. “Honestly, who’s to say Ali has ever been working alone? Maybe she had someone help her drag Ian’s body out of the woods that night after we found him. Remember how quickly he was gone?”

She shivered, thinking back to that cold, creepy night. They’d come upon Ian’s bloated, blue body and had run back to get Officer Wilden, only to find a matted patch of grass when they’d returned. The mechanics of it had always bothered Hanna. Ali was tough, but she wasn’t strong enough to drag a six-two, one-hundred-eighty-pound guy away from a crime scene in under ten minutes.

Spencer sat down on the couch. “Someone could have helped her carry Ian up the stairs and put him in the closet at the Poconos house, too. That same someone could have been the one to kidnap Melissa.”

“ And kill Jenna Cavanaugh,” Hanna said, shifting to the edge of the couch excitedly.