“You know Ali,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “You’ve actually talked to her.”
Greg shook his head. “Never directly. But yes. And I love her.”
“Why?” Spencer almost shrieked.
“Because she’s fascinating. And elusive. And beautiful.”
It was the craziest thing Spencer had ever heard. “And all this time . . . that’s why you wanted to get to know me?” Tears filled her eyes. “Because she asked you to?”
Greg snorted. “She told me you’d get attached like this. She said you were emotional.”
She told me. She said. As if Ali really knew what Spencer was like. But it hurt—because Ali was right. She had gotten attached. All her promises not to trust anyone again, all her vows to be careful, and she’d stepped right into Ali’s wide-open jaws. Ali had known Spencer was lonely. She’d known she was looking for someone to bolster her ego. It was like she’d engineered Greg herself, programmed him so that he’d hit Spencer in all her soft spots.
Then something else hit her. Finally, here was someone who actually knew something. Slowly, carefully, she felt in her pocket for her phone. She had to call the police. Her fingers fumbled. She tried her hardest to dial 911.
The phone rang. Then she heard someone say, “What’s your emergency?”
Spencer looked at Greg. “Tell me how you contacted Alison DiLaurentis. And tell me where she is now.”
Greg burst out laughing. “Spencer, I’m not a fool.” With lightning-quick reflexes, he grabbed her phone from her pocket, ran into the hall, and tossed it into a large fountain. There was a loud splash, and then it sank to the bottom.
“Hey!” Spencer shrieked, plunging her hands into the cold water. Water dripped off the phone as she pulled it to the surface. The screen was dead, the 911 call disconnected.
Someone gasped behind her, and she whipped around. A little boy with a blue balloon that said ROSEWOOD RALLIES! stood in the hall, his eyes wide. “Is your phone dead?”
Spencer looked down the hall, her heart racing. Greg was gone.
“Where did the guy I was talking to go?” she asked the little boy. He just looked at her blankly, then went back to batting his balloon in the air.
This couldn’t be happening. Spencer sprinted down the hall wildly, tripping in her heels. “Greg!” she called out. She ran to the long windows that looked out on the golf course, thinking she’d see him disappearing over a hill.
But he had vanished completely. And taken her secrets with him.
28
LOOP-DE-LOOP
“There’s our final girl of the hour!” a woman in a tweed suit crowed, taking Emily’s hand and leading her farther into the country club’s lobby. “Emily Fields, I’m Sharon Winters! What a pleasure! Come in, my dear! Have some punch!”
Emily glanced nervously over her shoulder at her parents, who’d walked her in, but they were already talking to someone from her mother’s welcome wagon committee. Some support they were.
She peeked surreptitiously at her cell phone in her purse. The surveillance feed was up on her screen, the same four shots of the house unchanged except for an occasional leaf pressing up against the windows. It would be just her luck, though, that something would happen there the second she looked away. Spencer had seen someone on the cameras. That same person—or someone else—could come back.
Sharon continued to drag her into the ballroom. Emily looked around. A DJ table had been set up at the far end, and dance music pumped out of gigantic speakers. Tons of kids Emily recognized from high school were waving their arms in the air and grinding on one another. Just looking at their carefree faces made Emily want to turn around and never come back.
But Sharon’s grip was too forceful. “Here’s Hanna!” she chirped, pointing to a long table at the other side of the ballroom. Hanna was the only one sitting at it, punching desperately at her phone’s keyboard.
Emily broke away from the woman and walked over to her friend. Hanna looked up at her miserably, then pushed a plate of cookies toward her. “Sharon brought these for us. But there’s no way I can eat.” She gazed forlornly around the room, then at her hands. “Mike’s not speaking to me. Everything is a mess.”
Emily couldn’t think about eating right then, either. “How long have you been here?” she asked Hanna.
“About an hour. I don’t know where Aria went—her date went to look for her.” She sighed. “I tried texting Spencer, but I haven’t heard from her, either.”
Emily checked the surveillance images once more—nothing. Then she looked around the room. She didn’t see any signs of the other two girls anywhere. Her gaze locked on a large banner near the DJ that said WE LOVE EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE IN ROSEWOOD! There were pictures of places around the town: the shops on Lancaster Avenue, the covered bridge, the fall foliage, the Hollis spire. As Emily looked at the images, she realized she had a negative association with each one of them. She’d received texts from A by the Hollis spire and outside the shops. She remembered kicking through a pile of fallen leaves last fall, still trying to process that Ali, her old friend, had tried to kill them. And she’d tried to kill herself by jumping off the covered bridge.
“I hate everything and everyone in Rosewood,” she whispered, realizing she pretty much meant it. Aside from her friendships with Spencer, Aria, and Hanna, she would have no warm and fuzzy memories to take with her when she left. Living here, experiencing what she had with A, had ripped away years of her life.