It was surreal to see her three ex–best friends here. The last time they’d sat on Hanna’s back porch had been at the end of seventh grade—and Hanna had been the dorkiest and ugliest of the group. But now, Emily’s shoulders had broadened and her hair had a slight greenish tint. Spencer looked stressed and constipated. And Aria was a zombie, with her black hair and pale skin. If Hanna was a couture Proenza Schouler, then Aria was a pilly, ill-fitting sweatshirt dress from the Target line.
Hanna took a deep breath and pushed through the French doors. Wilden turned around. There was a serious look on his face. The tiniest bit of a black tattoo peeked out from under the collar of his cop uniform. It still amazed Hanna that Wilden, a former Rosewood Day badass, had gone into law enforcement. “Hanna. Have a seat.”
Hanna scraped a chair back from the table and slumped down next to Spencer. “Is this going to take long?” She examined her pink diamond-encrusted Dior watch. “I’m late for something.”
“Not if we get started,” Wilden looked around at all of them. Spencer stared at her fingernails, Aria chomped on her gum with her eyes freakishly closed, and Emily fixated on the citronella candle in the middle of the table, like she was about to cry.
“First thing,” Wilden said. “Someone has leaked a homemade video of you girls to the press.” He glanced at Aria. “It was one of the videos you gave the Rosewood PD years ago. So you might see it on TV—all the news channels got it. We’re looking for whoever leaked it—and they’ll be punished. I wanted to let you girls know first.”
“Which video is it?” Aria asked.
“Something about text messages?” he answered.
Hanna sat back, trying to remember which video it could be—there were so many. Aria used to be obsessive about videotaping them. Hanna had always tried her hardest to duck out of every shot, because for her, the camera added not ten pounds but twenty.
Wilden cracked his knuckles and fiddled with a phallic-looking pepper grinder that sat in the center of the table. Some pepper spilled on the tablecloth, and the air immediately smelled spicy. “The other thing I want to talk about is Alison herself. We have reason to believe that Alison’s killer might be someone from Rosewood. Someone who possibly still lives here today…and that person may still be dangerous.”
Everyone drew in a breath.
“We’re looking at everything with a fresh eye,” Wilden went on, rising from the table and strolling around with his hands clasped behind his back. He’d probably seen someone on CSI do that and thought it was cool. “We’re trying to reconstruct Alison’s life right before she went missing. We want to start with the people who knew her best.”
Just then, Hanna’s BlackBerry buzzed. She pulled it out of her purse. Mona.
“Mon,” Hanna answered quietly, getting up from her chair and wandering to the far side of the porch by her mother’s rosebushes. “I’m going to be a couple minutes late.”
“Bitch,” Mona teased. “That sucks. I’m already at our table at Rive Gauche.”
“Hanna,” Wilden called gruffly. “Can you please call whoever that is back?”
At the same time, Aria sneezed. “Bless you,” Emily said.
“Where are you?” Mona sounded suspicious. “Are you with someone?”
“I’m at home,” Hanna answered. “And I’m with Emily, Aria, Spencer, and Off—”
“You’re with your old friends?” Mona interrupted.
“They were here when I got home,” Hanna protested.
“Let me get this straight.” Mona’s voice rose higher.
“You invited your old friends to your house. On the night of our Frenniversary.”
“I didn’t invite them.” Hanna laughed. It was still hard to believe Mona could feel threatened by her old friends.
“I was just—”
“You know what?” Mona cut her off. “Forget it. The Frenniversary is cancelled.”
“Mona, don’t be—” Then she stopped. Wilden was next to her.
He plucked the phone from her hand and snapped it shut. “We’re discussing a murder,” he said in a low voice. “Your social life can wait.”
Hanna glared at him behind his back. How dare Wilden hang up her phone! Just because he was dating her mom didn’t mean he could get all dadlike on her. She stormed back to the table, trying to calm down. Mona was the queen of overreacting, but she couldn’t ice Hanna out for long. Most of their fights only lasted a few hours, tops.
“Okay,” Wilden said when Hanna sat back down. “I received something interesting a few weeks ago that I think we should talk about.” He pulled his notepad out.
“Your friend, Toby Cavanaugh? He wrote a suicide note.”
“W-we know,” Spencer stuttered. “His sister let us read part of it.”
“So you know it mentioned Alison.” Wilden flipped back through his notebook. “Toby wrote, ‘I promised Alison DiLaurentis I’d keep a secret for her if she kept a secret for me.’” His olive-colored eyes scanned each of them.
“What was Alison’s secret?”
Hanna slumped down in her seat. We were the ones who blinded Jenna. That was the secret Toby had kept for Ali. Hanna and her friends hadn’t realized Toby knew that—until Spencer spilled the beans three weeks ago.
Spencer blurted out, “We don’t know. Ali didn’t tell any of us.”
Wilden’s brow crinkled. He leaned over the patio table. “Hanna, a while ago you thought Toby killed Alison.”
Hanna shrugged impassively. She’d gone to Wilden during the time they’d thought Toby was A and Ali’s killer. “Well…Toby didn’t like Ali.”
“Actually, he did like Ali, but Ali didn’t like him back,” Spencer clarified. “He used to spy on her all the time. But I’m not sure if that had anything to do with his secret.”
Emily made a small whimper. Hanna eyed her suspiciously. All Emily talked about lately was how guilty she felt about Toby. What if she wanted to tell Wilden that they were responsible for his death—and Jenna’s accident? Hanna might have taken the rap for The Jenna Thing weeks ago when she had nothing to live for, but there was no way in hell she would confess now. Her life was finally back to normal, and she was in no mood to be known as one of The Psycho Blinders, or whatever they’d inevitably be called on TV.
Wilden flipped a few pages on his pad. “Well, everyone think about it. Moving on…let’s talk about the night Alison went missing. Spencer, it says here that right before she disappeared, Ali tried to hypnotize you. The two of you fought, she ran out of the barn, you ran after her, but you couldn’t find her. Right?”
Spencer stiffened. “Um. Yeah. That’s right.”
“You have no idea where she went?”
Spencer shrugged. “Sorry.”
Hanna tried to remember the night Ali vanished. One minute, Ali was hypnotizing them; the next, she was gone. Hanna really felt like Ali had put her in a trance: as Ali counted down from one hundred, the vanilla candle wafting pungently through the barn, Hanna had felt heavy and sleepy, the popcorn and Doritos she’d eaten earlier roiling uncomfortably in her stomach. Spooky images began to flicker in front of her eyes: Ali and the others ran through a dense jungle. Large, man-eating plants surrounded them. One plant snapped its jaws and grabbed Ali’s leg. When Hanna had snapped out of it, Spencer was standing in the doorway of the barn, looking worried…and Ali was gone.
Wilden continued to stroll around the porch. He picked up a Southwest-style ceramic pot and turned it over, like he was checking for a price tag. Nosy bastard. “I need you girls to remember all you can. Think about what was happening around the time Alison disappeared. Did she have a boyfriend? Any new friends?”