Thicker Than Water
“You’re not serious?” Aria asks, as Spencer starts gathering her makeshift pile of weapons into a messenger bag. “They might as well have sent you an engraved invitation to meet them at the GIANT TRAP!”
“You don’t have to go,” Spencer replies. “I do.”
“No way,” Emily insists. “No way are we letting you go down there alone.”
“Especially not to save Melissa’s evil ass,” Hanna declares. “I saw Naomi Campbell try to shove Janice Dickinson’s hair into a garbage disposal after one of Claudia’s dinner parties - and Melissa is still the scariest size two I’ve ever met.”
“Seriously, Spencer,” Alison says, her eyes on the grim set of Spencer’s mouth. “Melissa can take care of herself.”
“What would you do?” Spencer asks. “If it was your sister?”
Alison flinches. “I’d go after her,” she admits. “But Emily’s right - you’re not going alone. We can’t afford to lose you.” She looks at the others, and it’s as if they’re all fourteen again, waiting for her to pronounce whether they’ll spend the day at the mall or the lake. “I’m going with you.”
“I still think this is a terrible idea,” Emily grumbles. “But -”
“Yeah, yeah,” Mona interrupts. “As Ali goes, so goes your nation.” She sighs. “You’re like a bunch of highly codependent musketeers.”
Aria clasps a hand over Spencer’s. “So it’s all of us, right?”
Hanna makes a face. “I don’t care if Melissa gets eaten by a pit full of alligators,” she tells Spencer. “But I care about you. I’m in.”
“This is just like that after school special about smoking,” Mona says. “But seeing as how you already lost Hanna down there once this week, I’m coming too.”
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The tunnel is dark and as unpleasant smelling as it was a few nights ago, Emily thinks to herself. It seems worse now, without the adrenaline rush coursing through her, covering her fear with endorphins.
“Were you texting someone?” she asks Ali, as they bring up the rear of the search party. “In the car?”
“Jason,” Ali says quietly. “He’s useless, but he’s the best back up plan I could come up with on short notice. If he doesn’t hear back in an hour, he’ll send in the cavalry. I hope.”
“How much farther?” Hanna asks. “I think I wore the wrong shoes.”
“We’re still at least a mile from where the tunnels converge,” Emily estimates. “Probably more like a mile and a half.”
“Spencer,” Alison says, trying to break through Spencer’s anxiety. “Did Jason get any info from your dad? They looked like they were having a heart to heart earlier.”
“He did,” Spencer tells her. “But we’re on a rescue mission. This isn’t the time for a debriefing.”
“Actually, it’s the perfect time,” Mona suggests. “If you’re assuming the bad guys have Melissa, and we know Mary Drake is one of our villains, the more we know about her, the better.”
Hanna beams at her, her teeth flashing white in the darkness of the tunnel.
Aria drops back to walk close to Emily. “Have you noticed the weirdness of them?”
“We’re in Rosewood,” Emily mutters. “Weirdness is a sliding scale.”
“Why is Mona here?” Aria hisses. “Risking her life with us when she could be getting a mani pedi? And what is Hanna doing with her flashlight?”
Emily follows her gaze, notices that Hanna does seem to be more interested in illuminating Mona’s shapely backside than the floor of the tunnel.
“Maybe she’s afraid of getting separated?” Emily suggests, as Mona reaches behind her and takes Hanna’s hand.
Aria gives her a doubtful look, but further conversation is cut short by Spencer.
“It’s not a pretty story,” Spencer says, keeping her voice low. She doesn’t stop walking, and they all huddle closer to her as they continue moving forward, not wanting to miss a word. “At least not the version Jason got out of him.”
Peter Hastings was twenty years old and poring over a thick legal tome while distractedly eating a piece of peach pie in a Georgia diner.
“You’re not from around here,” Jessica Drake says to him, deliberately accentuating her drawl. She sits down across from him, uninvited, twirling her honey colored hair as she does so.
“No,” he says, politely. “I’m not.”
“Good looking fellas like you don’t buy themselves cufflinks,” she observes, reaching over to run a fingernail over the delicate silver designs at his wrists. They were shaped like the scales of justice. Understated. Old money. “You have a girlfriend back home?”
Peter nods, flashing for a moment on the way Veronica looks in their Constitutional Law class. Confident. Determined. Intense. Ready to take the world by storm all on her own. He remembers their third date, when they ran into a girl Veronica had gone to high school with. A drunken sorority girl, who’d asked Veronica if he was her boyfriend in a tone of complete disbelief. “No,” Veronica had said coolly. “He’s my equal.”
“Well,” Jessica continues. “Be that as it may, I’m going to take it on myself to show a Yankee boy like you some good old fashioned Southern hospitality.”
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Peter isn’t stupid. He doesn’t imagine he’s the only guy Jessica is seeing. She reminds him of Scarlett O’Hara, the scene where she has a whole crowd of men captivated and jockeying to sit next to her at the barbeque. She’s a girl who wants to get out of this sleepy Southern town, who’s looking around for a man willing to fly her into a whole new life. Or maybe drive her there in a luxury car. Something with a flashy paint job and leather seats.
Peter has a car like that.
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His dates with Veronica were always to museums, foreign film festivals, political debates. Restaurants that have different forks for each course.
His dates with Jessica are impromptu picnics. Sandwiches and lemonade. Shucking off their clothes to swim in the creek afterward. They ride horses. She takes him hunting, explains that even a debutante should be able to shoot a coyote. He’s a city boy, he’s never even fired a gun before. He likes it. Likes the feeling of power when the shell explodes out of the barrel. She sneaks him into a distillery after hours, they get drunk on stolen whiskey and have sex right there on the hardwood floor, the smell of spirits in the air all around them.
He stops thinking about Veronica at all.
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Peter is down to his last two weeks clerking for Judge Clemens. It’s August. There’s a new guy in town, his family runs a hedge fund in Philadelphia and Jessica seems to be spending a lot of time with him. Peter never thought he was her only iron in the fire. But he had flattered himself that he was her favorite.
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Five days before he’s supposed to leave, he’s lying awake in bed in his rooming house when he hears the screen of his bedroom window being lifted. He smells Jessica’s warm floral perfume, sees her silhouette climbing through the window in the moonlight. She comes to him, honey blond hair tickling his chest.
He feels like the luckiest guy in the world.
Hours later, she looks up at him, her eyes shining. “Take me away from here, Peter. Now. Tonight.”
He grins wolfishly at the thought. He could do it. They could start driving and never look back. He thinks he might love Jessica, her warmth, her unpredictability. The way being with her makes him feel looser, like she’s a release valve on his buttoned up life. The rip cord on a parachute, all he has to do is jump out of the plane.
“I’ll take you,” he says. “I can’t go yet - Clemens hasn’t given me my recommendation. But start packing. I love you, Jessica.”
She bristles in spite of his words. “If you really loved me, you wouldn’t make me wait.”
He laughs, he thinks she’s teasing. “What’s four more days?” he asks. “We have the rest of our lives ahead of us.”
“We don’t,” the woman in his arms said angrily. “I’m not spending another minute with you, you filthy coward!” She smacked him hard across the face, leaving a stinging red handprint against his cheek.
Before he could recover from the shock, she was gone.
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He was eating a last piece of pie in the diner. His car was packed and parked outside.
Jessica slid into the seat across from him. “Hey stranger.”
He gazed at her warily. “I’m sorry about the other night.”
She bats her eyelashes. “What happened the other night?”
This is the first time he hears the name Mary Drake, the first time he feels like his life has wandered so far off script he may be in a telenovela. An insane sister. A twin.
He drives back to U Penn alone.
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“That’s not the whole story,” Spencer editorializes. “But it’s as much as Jason got.”
“That’s terrible!” Hanna exclaims. “He was willing to marry her and then Mary Drake scared him off?”
“Did she, though?” Alison says, curiously. “That wasn’t the end for them. They wound up living next door to each other. And making Jason.”
“That’s not exactly a happily ever after,” Emily points out.
Aria shushes them as the other tunnels come into view. She shines her flashlight in a wide circle, looking for any trace of Melissa or her captor. Spencer comes up behind her, and immediately heads for the second tunnel.
“We should take the one towards the Lost Woods Resort,” Emily whispers. “Ezra said that one was a dead end.”
“Can we not say ‘dead end,’” Mona requests. “I don’t want us to jinx ourselves.”
Spencer isn’t listening. She’s picking something up from the slimy floor. The red sole of Melissa’s left red soled Louboutin heel is dangling from her hand.