Meredith turned up the TV volume—apparently she couldn’t hear over her own hee breathing. More waves crashed. A gong sounded. “You and your partner will learn ways to lessen the pain of natural childbirth and hasten the labor process,” the woman instructor said. “Some techniques include water immersion, visualization exercises, and letting your partner bring you to orgasm.”
“Oh my God.” Aria clapped her hands over her ears. It was a wonder she hadn’t spontaneously gone deaf.
She looked down at the paper again. A headline was splashed across the front page. Where Is Ian Thomas? it asked.
Good question, Aria thought.
The events of last night throbbed in her mind. How could Ian’s dead body be in the woods one minute and gone the next? Had someone killed him and dragged his body away when they’d gone inside to find Wilden? Had Ian’s killer silenced him because he’d uncovered the huge secret he’d told Spencer about?
Or maybe Wilden was right—Ian was injured, not dead, and had crawled away when they ran back to the house. But if that was what happened, then Ian was still…out there. She shivered. Ian despised Aria and her friends for getting him arrested. He might want revenge.
Aria snapped on the little TV on the kitchen counter, eager for a distraction. Channel 6 was showing the cobbled-together reenactment of Ali’s murder—Aria had already seen it twice. She pressed the remote. On the next channel, the Rosewood chief of police was talking to some reporters. He wore a heavy, fur-lined navy blue jacket, and there were pine trees behind him. It looked as if he was giving an interview from the edge of Spencer’s woods. There was a big caption at the bottom of the screen that said, Ian Thomas Dead? Aria leaned forward, her heart speeding up.
“There are unsubstantiated reports that Mr. Thomas’s dead body was seen in these woods last night,” the chief was saying. “We have a great team assembled, and we began searching the woods at ten A.M. this morning. However, with all this snow…”
Kashi burbled in Aria’s stomach. She grabbed her cell phone off the little kitchen table and dialed Emily’s number. She answered immediately. “Are you watching the news?” Aria barked, in lieu of a hello.
“I just turned it on,” Emily answered, her voice worried.
“Why do you think they waited until this morning to start searching? Wilden said he was going to get a squad together last night.”
“Wilden also said something about procedure,” Emily suggested in a small voice. “Maybe it has something to do with that.”
Aria snorted. “Wilden never seemed to care about procedure before.”
“Wait, what are you saying?” Emily sounded incredulous.
Aria picked at a place mat one of Meredith’s friends had woven out of hemp. Almost twelve hours had passed since they’d seen Ian’s body, and a lot could happen in those woods between then and now. Someone could have cleared away evidence…or planted false leads. But the police—Wilden—had been careless with this entire case. Wilden hadn’t even had a suspect for Ali’s murder until Aria, Spencer, and the others handed them Ian’s head on a platter. He’d also somehow missed both when Ian broke out to visit Spencer and when he escaped on the day of his trial. According to Hanna, Wilden wanted Ian to fry as much as they did, but he hadn’t done a very good job of keeping him under lock and key.
“I don’t know,” Aria finally answered. “But it is weird they’re just getting around to it now.”
“Have you gotten any more A notes?” Emily asked.
Aria stiffened. “No. You?”
“No, but I keep thinking I’m going to get one at any minute.”
“Who do you think the new A is?” Aria asked. She had no theories whatsoever. Was it someone who wanted Ian dead, Ian himself, or someone else entirely? Wilden believed the texts were pranks from some random person in a whole other state. But A had taken incriminating photos of Aria and Xavier together last week, meaning A was here in Rosewood. A also knew about Ian’s body in the woods—all of them had gotten a note urging them to go find him. Why was A so desperate to show them Ian’s body—to scare them? To warn them? And when Hanna fell, she’d seen someone looming over her. What was the likelihood that someone else happened to be in those woods the exact same time as Ian’s body? There had to be a connection.
“I don’t know,” Emily concluded. “But I don’t want to find out.”
“Maybe A is gone,” Aria said, in the most hopeful voice she could manage.
Emily sighed and said she had to go. Aria got up, poured a glass of acai berry juice Meredith had bought at the health food store, and rubbed her temples. Could Wilden have delayed the search on purpose? If so, why? He’d seemed so fidgety and uncomfortable last night, and then he’d walked off in the opposite direction of Spencer’s house. Maybe he was hiding something. Or maybe Emily was right—the delay was due to procedure. He was just a cop dutifully playing by the rules.
It still baffled Aria that Wilden had become a cop, let alone a dutiful one. Wilden had been in Jason DiLaurentis and Ian’s year at Rosewood Day, and back then he’d been a troublemaker. The year Aria was in sixth and they were in eleventh, she often sneaked into the Upper School during her free periods to spy on Jason—she’d had such a painful crush on him, and sought him out every chance she got. For just a moment, she would gaze through the window of the wood-shop cottage as he sanded his homemade bookends, or swoon at his muscular legs as he ran up and down the soccer practice fields. Aria was always careful never to let anyone see her.
But once, someone did.
It was about a week into the school year. Aria had been watching Jason checking out books at the library from the hallway when she heard a click behind her. There was Darren Wilden, his ear pressed to the door of the lockers, slowly turning the dial. The locker opened, and Aria saw a heart-shaped mirror on the inside of the door and a box of Always maxi pads on the upper shelf. Wilden’s hand closed around a twenty-dollar bill wedged between two textbooks. Aria frowned, slowly processing what Wilden was doing.
Wilden stood up and noticed her. He stared back, unapologetic. “You’re not supposed to be here,” he sneered. “But I won’t tell…this time.”
When Aria looked at the TV again, there was a commercial on for a local furniture outlet store called The Dump. She stared at her phone on the table, realizing there was another phone call she had to make. It was almost eleven—Ella would certainly be awake.
She dialed the number to her house. The phone rang once, then twice. There was a click, and someone said, “Hello?”
Aria’s words got stuck in her throat. It was Xavier, her mother’s new boyfriend. Xavier sounded chipper and comfortable, completely at ease with answering the Montgomerys’ phone. Had he stayed overnight last night after the benefit? Ew.
“Hello?” Xavier said again.
Aria felt tongue-tied and skeeved out. When Xavier had approached Aria at the Rosewood Day benefit last night and asked if they could talk, Aria had assumed that he was going to apologize for kissing her a few days before. Only, apparently, in Xavier-speak, “talk” meant “grope.”
After a few seconds of silence, Xavier breathed out. “Is this Aria?” he said, his voice slimy. Aria made a small squeak. “There’s no need to hide,” he teased. “I thought we had an understanding.”