Sara Shepard - Unbelievable

“Are you okay?” Hanna gasped, crouching down and touching Spencer’s shoulder. She felt cold and wet.

Spencer could barely get the words out, she was sobbing so hard. “I’m so sorry, Hanna. I’m so sorry.”

“Why?” Hanna asked, clutching Spencer’s hands.

“Because…” Spencer gestured to the edge of the quarry. “I think she fell.”

Almost instantly, an ambulance screamed behind them, followed by another police car. The rescue team and more cops surrounded Spencer.

Hanna backed away numbly as the paramedics began to ask Spencer if she could move everything, what hurt, and what happened. “Mona was threatening me,” Spencer said over and over. “She was strangling me. I tried to run away from her, but we fought. And then she…” She gestured again toward the quarry’s edge.

Mona was threatening me. Hanna’s knees buckled. This was real .

The cops had fanned out around the quarry with German shepherds, flashlights, and guns. Within minutes, one of them yelled, “We got something!”

Hanna leaped to her feet and sprinted over to the cop. Wilden, who was closer, caught her from behind. “Hanna,” he said into her ear. “No. You shouldn’t.”

“But I have to see!” Hanna screamed.

Wilden wrapped his arms around her. “Just stay here, okay? Just stay with me.”

Hanna watched as a team of cops disappeared over the lip of the quarry, down toward the rushing water. “We need a stretcher!” one of them screamed. More EMS workers emerged with supplies. Wilden kept petting Hanna’s hair, using part of his body to shield her from what was happening. But Hanna could hear it. She heard them saying that Mona was caught between two rocks. And that it looked like Mona’s neck was broken. And that they needed to be very, very careful pulling her out. She heard their grunts of encouragement as they lifted Mona to the surface, loaded her onto a stretcher, and tucked her into the ambulance. As they passed, Hanna saw a shock of Mona’s white-blond hair. She twisted free of Wilden and started to run.

“Hanna!” Wilden screamed. “No!”

But Hanna didn’t run toward the ambulance. She ran to the other side of Mona’s Hummer, crouched down, and threw up. She wiped her palms on the grass and curled up into a tiny ball. The ambulance doors shut and the engine roared, but they didn’t turn on the siren. Hanna wondered if that was because Mona was already dead.

She sobbed until it felt like there were no more tears left in her body. Drained, she rolled over on her back. Something hard and square pressed into her thigh. Hanna sat up and wrapped her hands around it. It was a tan suede phone case, one Hanna didn’t recognize. She brought it to her face and breathed in. It smelled like Jean Patou Joy, which had been Mona’s favorite perfume for years.

Only, the phone nestled inside wasn’t the Chanel limited edition Sidekick Mona had begged her father to bring back from Japan, nor did it have MV embossed in Swarovski crystals on the back. This phone was a plain and generic BlackBerry, giving nothing away.

Hanna’s heart sank, realizing what this second phone signified. All she needed to do to prove to herself that Mona had really done this to them was turn the phone on and look. The scent of the quarry’s raspberry bushes drifted past her nose, and she suddenly felt like she was back three years ago, she in her Missoni string bikini and Mona in her one-piece Calvin tank. They had made their fashion show a game—if the Drury boys looked only mildly amused, they lost. If the boys salivated like starved dogs, they would buy each other a spa treatment. Afterward, Hanna chose the jasmine seaweed scrub, and Mona had a jasmine, carrot, and sesame body buff.

Hanna heard footsteps approaching behind her. She touched her thumb to the BlackBerry’s blank, innocent screen, then dropped it into her silk purse, stumbling to find the others. People were talking all around her, but all she could hear was a voice in her head screaming, “Mona’s dead.”

Spencer limped to the back of the squad car with Aria and Wilden’s help. They asked her again and again if she needed an ambulance. Spencer said she was pretty sure she didn’t—nothing felt broken, and luckily, she’d fallen on the grass, knocking herself out for a moment, but not damaging anything. She dangled her legs out the squad car’s back door and Wilden crouched in front of her, holding a notepad and a tape recorder. “Are you sure you want to do this right now?”

Spencer nodded forcefully.

Emily, Aria, and Hanna gathered behind Wilden as he pressed the RECORD button. The headlights of another squad car made a halo around him, backlighting his body in red. It reminded Spencer of the way bonfires used to silhouette her friends’ bodies at summer camp. If only she were really at summer camp, right now.

Wilden took a deep breath. “So. You’re sure she told you Ian Thomas killed Ali.”

Spencer nodded. “Ali had given him an ultimatum the night she went missing. She wanted them to meet…and she said that if Ian didn’t break up with Melissa by the time she went to Prague, Ali would tell everyone what was going on.” She pushed her greasy, mud-caked hair off her face. “It’s written in Ali’s diary. Mona has it. I don’t know where, but—”

“We’re going to search Mona’s house,” Wilden interrupted, placing a hand on Spencer’s knee. “Don’t worry.” He turned away and spoke into his walkie-talkie, radioing other cops to locate Ian to bring him in for questioning. Spencer listened, staring numbly at the dirt caked under her fingernails.

Her friends stood around for a long time, stunned. “God,” Emily whispered. “Ian Thomas ? That just sounds…crazy. But I guess it makes sense. He was so much older, and if she ever told anyone, well…”

Spencer pulled her arms around herself, feeling goose bumps rising on her skin. To her, Ian didn’t make sense. Spencer believed that Ali had threatened him, and she believed that Ian might’ve gotten angry, but angry enough to kill her? It was eerie, too, that in all the time Spencer had spent with him, she hadn’t suspected Ian one bit. He hadn’t seemed nervous or remorseful or pensive whenever Ali’s murder came up.

But perhaps she’d misinterpreted the signs—she’d missed plenty of others. She’d gotten into the car with Mona, after all. Who knew what else was right in front of her face that she didn’t see?

A beep came over Wilden’s walkie-talkie. “The suspect isn’t at his residence,” a female cop’s voice called. “What do you want us to do?”

“Shit.” Wilden looked at Spencer. “Can you think where else Ian might be?”

Spencer shook her head, her brain feeling like it was plodding through a swamp. Wilden threw himself in the front seat. “I’ll drive you home,” he said. “Your parents are on their way home from the country club, too.”

“We want to go to Spencer’s with you.” Aria indicated for Spencer to move over, then she, Hanna, and Emily all crammed into the backseat. “We don’t want to leave her alone.”

“You guys, you don’t have to,” Spencer said softly. “And anyway, Aria, your car.” She motioned to Aria’s Subaru, which looked like it was sinking into the mud.

“I can leave it overnight.” Aria smirked. “Maybe I’ll get lucky and someone will steal it.”

Spencer folded her hands in her lap, too weak to protest. The car was silent as Wilden rolled past the Floating Man Quarry sign, then along the narrow trail that led to the main road. It was hard to believe that just an hour and a half had passed since Spencer left the party. Things were so different now.