The doorbell rang, and she shed the blouse, changed again, and padded downstairs in a blue oxford shirt and skinny khakis. Aria, Emily, and Hanna stood on the porch, bouncing and quivering like a trio of shaken-up soda bottles. They rushed inside.
“We’ve got to do something,” Hanna said.
“I think A’s reading my e-mails,” Emily wailed at the same time.
“I got a note on an unlisted phone,” Aria blurted out.
“Hold up.” Spencer stopped at the border of the hall and the living room. “Start over.”
Each girl explained that they’d all gotten A notes in the past forty-eight hours. All of them had to do with telling the cops on them, like Spencer’s had, and several mentioned Agent Fuji by name. Aria’s was especially disconcerting—A had cracked her unlisted number in a matter of hours.
“Does A have an in with Verizon or something?” she moaned. “And I think A is trying to frame us for hurting Graham. As if I set off that explosion.”
“A could try to do that with Gayle, too,” Emily said. “We were in her driveway when she was shot. I’m sure A has something up his or her sleeve about all of that.”
“Don’t forget A’s threat to kill us,” Hanna added.
“This is getting ridiculous. It’s like A’s everywhere.” Spencer thought about how A had texted her almost the minute Reefer left. But how had A known? Spencer had been inside her house. It was like A had bugged the place or something.
She blinked. Was it possible? She peered into the corners of the room, the spaces under the couches, at the high windowsills. A rearing horse in the garish Civil War painting Mr. Pennythistle had hung in the hall leered at her.
Suddenly, she hit on an idea. “Come on,” she commanded the others over her shoulder, heading toward the backyard.
Everyone followed her out the sliding door. It was wet and gray outside, and the air smelled like freshly cut grass and the swampy creek in the woods at the back of the property. A big blue tarp covered the family’s swimming pool. An eerie haze hung over the trees where the Hastingses’ refurbished barn had once stood—before Ali burned it down. To the left was the DiLaurentises’ old house, though the only reminder that they’d lived there was the big boulder in the middle of the backyard that they never dug up—the new family had removed all other traces of them by now, including their old deck, and there was no longer an Ali shrine on the front curb.
Spencer marched to the shed Mr. Pennythistle had installed a few weeks ago, unlocked the door, and looked around. An orange leaf blower leaned against the left wall. She grabbed it, dragged it to the middle of the yard, and pulled the starter chain. Her three friends stared at her like she was crazy, but there was a method to her madness. Everyone’s hair flew about until Spencer pointed the nozzle at the ground. The air filled with the noxious scent of gasoline. The best and most important part was the deafening noise the thing made. No one, not even A, would be able to hear the girls over it.
Spencer gestured for the girls to move in closer. “This has got to stop,” she said angrily. “If A knows where we are at all times, then A must be bugging us somehow. A’s trying to pin all these crimes we didn’t commit on us, and if we don’t act soon, A might just succeed.”
“What do we do?” Hanna yelled over the leaf blower.
“I say we go rogue,” Spencer declared. “We get rid of our current phones and phone numbers. If we need cell phones for absolute emergencies, we can get a burner cell, but we can’t tell one another anything critical on calls or voicemails. We should use a code phrase.”
“What about not it?” Emily piped up.
“That’s perfect,” Spencer said. “And we can’t give the number out to anyone else except for our parents.”
Aria shifted her weight. “What about boyfriends?”
Spencer shook her head. “It’s too risky.”
Aria frowned. “Noel won’t tell anyone.”
“He might leave his phone out somewhere that A might see, though. And you’ll have to explain to him why you got a burner phone.”
“How am I going to explain why I’m not using a phone at all?” Aria asked, hands on her hips.
Spencer stared at her, exasperated. “I don’t know! Say you’re doing it for a school project about living for a week without technology.”
“What about e-mail?” Hanna asked.
“We can still use school e-mail for schoolwork—maybe we could carry our old phones around but only use WiFi. I’m pretty sure WiFi usage on phones can’t be tracked in the same way as usage on a data plan. And we shouldn’t use the Internet on our home computers—for all we know A has hacked into our systems. We need to use computers that won’t be linked to us and definitely don’t have any spyware installed.”
Emily glanced at the spot where the barn had stood. “All that sounds well and good for A not knowing where we are now. But A could still frame us.”
“That’s the second part of my plan,” Spencer shouted over the leaf blower. “As soon as possible, we need to go somewhere really secret and safe and sit down and figure out who A could be. There are probably all kinds of clues that we aren’t even thinking about. And now that we know what happened the night of the fire, A could be Real Ali.”
The leaf blower sputtered. The trees at the back of the property swayed, and for a moment, Spencer swore she saw a figure in the woods.
“That sounds like a good idea to me,” Hanna said. “Where should we go?”