“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?”
“She had a boyfriend,” Aria offered. “Matt Doolittle. He moved away.” As she sat back, her T-shirt slid off her shoulder, revealing a lacy, fire engine red bra strap. Slut.
“She was hanging out with these older field hockey girls,” Emily volunteered.
Wilden looked at his notes. “Right. Katy Houghton and Violet Keyes. I got them. How about Alison’s behavior. Was she acting strangely?”
They fell silent. Yes, she was, Hanna thought. She thought of one memory straightaway. On a blustery spring day, a few weeks before Ali disappeared, her dad had taken them both to a Phillies game. Ali was jittery the whole night, as if she’d downed packs and packs of Skittles. She kept checking her cell phone for texts and had seemed livid that her inbox was empty. During the seventh inning stretch, when they sneaked to the balcony to ogle a group of cute boys sitting in one of the skyboxes, Hanna noticed Ali’s hands trembling. “Are you okay?” Hanna asked. Ali smiled at her. “I’m just cold,” she explained.