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  Praise for Lisa and Laura Roecker

  “I was sucked into this series from the very first page, tearing through to the end. So suspenseful, and full of twists and turns!”

  —Laurie Faria Stolarz, New York Times bestselling author of Deadly Little Secret

  “No character is above suspicion in this chilling, suspenseful, and smart debut.”—Publishers Weekly

  “[A] smartly paced and plotted first novel, full of twists, clues, and sleuthing. Add this to your go-to list of mysteries.”—Booklist

  “A book for mystery lovers everywhere … will suck you in and leave you hanging until the very end.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “The Liar Society is full of boarding school awesome, secret societies, and misunderstood hot teen boys. It takes a very unique plot for me to enjoy a contemporary YA and The Liar Society has unique coming out of the authors’ little pink brains.”—Bookalicious

  Copyright © 2013 by Lisa & Laura Roecker

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States in 2013 by Soho Teen

  an imprint of

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Roecker, Lisa, 1978–

  This is W.A.R. / by Lisa and Laura Roecker.

  p cm

  eISBN: 978-1-61695-262-4

  1. Murder—Fiction. 2. Vigilantes—Fiction. I. Roecker, Laura.

  II. Title. III. Title: This is war.

  PZ7.R62515Th 2013

  [Fic]—dc23 2013006455

  v3.1

  To Michael Roecker for teaching us that girls can do

  anything and everything that boys can do. Usually better.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part 1: S.A.R. (Search and Rescue)

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part 2: C.O.I.N. (Counterinsurgency)

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part 3: A.W.O.L. (Absence With Out Leave)

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part 4: F.U.B.A.R. (F***ed Up Beyond All Recognition)

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Part 5: T.A.C.A.M.O. Take Charge And Move Out

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Acknowledgments

  July 4th, 11:32 P.M.

  Willa Ames-Rowan never thought she would die. She firmly believed white should be worn before Labor Day, champagne was best enjoyed on an empty stomach, and sleep was for the weak. If it weren’t for the inky black water tugging at her limbs, clawing its way into her mouth, she might have welcomed the dark solitude of Hawthorne Lake. She might have floated on her back, counting stars, dreaming about what it would be like to wake up next to her future husband. What it might be like to marry James Gregory.

  But not tonight.

  Tonight, Willa Ames-Rowan was drowning.

  As luck would have it, she’d just read an article recounting a tsunami survivor’s near-death experience in a tattered copy of Reader’s Digest while waiting for her acupuncture appointment earlier in the week. Willa took comfort in the survivor’s story because just before he passed out from lack of oxygen, he felt a moment of peace. He gave himself to the water, accepted his fate.

  So Willa knew she couldn’t be dying because there was nothing peaceful about her struggle to determine which way was up, down, left, or right. The moment she went under, she’d decided to decline death’s invitation—with the socially acceptable level of regret, of course. She knew enough to remain calm, tread water, back float until someone noticed she was missing. Contrary to her sister’s judgy texts, Willa was a fighter. She would never let her life slip away in a Hallmark movie moment of blissful surrender.

  She’d only had a couple of drinks, but her head was cloudy and her limbs sluggish and heavy. She’d been raised on the water—boating trips, beach vacations, the Club pool—she should have been above the surface, not under it. Earlier in the afternoon, Willa had taken a dip in this very same water while the girls lounged on the beach. Madge had yelled at her not to swim out too far, brown hair swirling around her face in the wind, her fair skin shielded by layers of sunscreen and a long, gauzy cover-up. Next to her, Lina was burying her nose in a magazine, all boobs and legs, doing her best impression of not giving a shit. And then there was Sloane with her pin-straight hair and black almond eyes, looking like a tiny beacon in her bright pink bikini. She stood next to Madge, shielding the sun with her hand. Even from the distance, Willa could see the smile tugging at her lips. If Sloane weren’t so self-conscious, she might have been cheering.

  And so it was her friend’s silent encouragement that pushed Willa on as brief bursts of light shone in the dark sky overhead, fireworks guiding her toward the surface. She scissored her legs toward the red, white, and blue explosions. Her lungs burned, the muscles of her arms wept for a break. But still, she fought.

  Images of the Gregory brothers bubbled to the surface of her consciousness. She couldn’t think of them now. She couldn’t think of the look on Rose McCaan’s face when Rose saw her kissing James Gregory.

  Willa knew Rose had a thing for James Gregory.

  She knew but she didn’t care, and now she couldn’t help but wonder if that kiss had somehow landed her here in this water. Willa would take it back if she could. She’d take a lot of things back. And for a moment she thought she might actually have the chance. She finally broke free of the lake’s slippery grip. Her head bobbed into the cool night air. But she opened her mouth too early and choked on the stagnant water. Hacking and sputtering, she was able to keep her head up long enough to drink in gasps of oxygen between coughs. The agony in her lungs slowly faded, and for the briefest of moments, she thought she was going to live to write a much more accurate drowning survival story, preferably for Teen Vogue.

  Willa never saw the hands that pushed her head back under.

  She never felt the water fill her lungs.

  And she was completely unaware of the champion-sized trout grazing her lifeless arm.

  Willa Ames-Rowan never gave up and welcomed death.

  Willa Ames-Rowan simply died.

  Chapter 1

  Rose stared at the water and whispered the Hail Mary in Spanish, the way her grandmother had taught her. She wasn’t sure if she believed in God, at least not the one the nuns at St. Agnes ranted and raved about, but Mary was a different story. Every summer she’d spent with her grandmother, she’d been reminded that Mary watched out for good little girls, especially good little girls with the middle name Marie. And something about the way her grandmother clutched the Rosary to her chest, blue beads tinkling against the silver cross, her knuckles white beneath papery skin, had always made Rose want to believe.

  The repetition calmed her. She understood why people prayed in the face of tragedy. Praying provided the illusion of control. And of course, there was the niggling possibility that the prayer might actually work. A miracle like the ones her grandmother had read to her from the back pages of Spanish tabloid magazines.
r />   Rose shivered in spite of the humid air. It looked like every member of Hawthorne Lake Country Club was on the beach. The women stood in tight circles, whispering and crying, while their husbands rushed around trying to look useful. Their movements seemed designed to look important. If they walked with enough authority and spoke in quiet, reassuring tones, they might be able to bring Willa Ames-Rowan back to life.

  But it was all a lie. Like everything else at Hawthorne Lake.

  Willa was dead. The ambulance had screamed off in a blaze of sirens twenty minutes ago. Even in the darkness, Rose saw the blue of Willa’s lips and the way her arm dangled off the side of the stretcher before it was gently placed back at her side. Now there was nothing left to do but pray to her grandmother’s Mary.

  “Rose! Thank the lord.” Her mom wrapped her thin arms around Rose’s body and squeezed too hard. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.” She was dressed like all of the other women on the beach that night, but with her jet-black eyes and café au lait skin, she might as well have been wearing a Club worker’s uniform. As Hawthorne Lake’s event planner, Pilar McCaan was afforded most of the same privileges as members, but she was still considered “staff” by everyone who mattered. Despite her efforts to suppress it, the accent that snuck its way into a handful of her words didn’t help.

  Rose stiffened in her mom’s arms. She wanted to forget everything she’d seen over the course of the night. To un-know all the secrets. But she had watched Willa stumble around the yacht. And she’d seen her mom navigate the party as if social climbing were an extreme sport. The past six hours ran on repeat in her brain like some kind of terrible movie. But there was no director calling scenes or strategically fading to black when images grew too intense. No Oscar award-winning makeup artist had perfected the blue of Willa’s lips or added silicone strips to mimic the bloating of her skin.

  Every moment was real. And it was all burned in high-definition into Rose’s memory.

  “Are you okay?” Rose’s mom held her at arm’s length, her thick-lashed eyes probing her daughter’s. “Did you see? I mean, I can’t believe she’s … You can’t tell him.” Her mom was using the voice she reserved for male members when their hands wandered a little too low at one of the Club’s famous star-lit parties. Rose always thought of it as her business voice, and it normally stopped her dead in her tracks. But tonight she just shrugged her mom’s hands off her shoulders and resumed her vigil, her lips moving, the sound trapped inside.

  Dios te salve, María, llena eres de gracia …

  “He’s going to ask you questions. You have to be prepared to answer them.” White shone around the black of her mom’s wide eyes. “You know what will happen if you tell him the truth,” she whispered.

  Rose nodded, her eyes fixed on the black and blue expanse of water in front of her. As the sky lightened on the cusp of morning, the color resembled an angry bruise.

  Santa María, Madre de Dios …

  Rose had lived the first seventeen years of her life without ever having made a mistake. Well, unless you counted the time she’d let Katelyn Norris copy her English homework on the bus to school and was too afraid to speak up when her teacher questioned the identical paragraphs.

  Her mom’s short, square nails dug into her Rose’s flesh as they wove their way through the small groups of members still scattered across the beach. Rose regretted wearing sandals that pinched her toes, the heels sinking into the sand, slipping with every step. How stupid she’d been standing in front of her closet, pushing her feet into different shoes, yanking shirt after shirt over her head, and leaving the rejects heaped in a corner. She’d never cared before. Tonight she cared too much. Maybe that was her first mistake.

  No. She knew better.

  Her first mistake had come long before criticizing her reflection in the mirror. It was the moment she’d accepted James Gregory’s invitation to his family’s annual Fourth of July party. Or maybe it went even farther back, to the moment he caught her hiding in the boathouse, the night of the Club’s Summer Swing.

  Rose shook her head slightly, her mouth still moving through the prayer. None of it mattered. Pinpointing the exact moment everything began to fall apart wasn’t going to change a thing.

  And yet … maybe it was her last mistake that really counted: the moment her dad had swung her off the yacht, his detective’s badge catching the moonlight.

  “Rose, what happened? Did you see anything?” His voice had probably sounded calm and professional to the perfectly coiffed couple standing behind her, but Rose could hear the note of panic underlining every word like a silent exclamation mark. Her dad had been around long enough to know that accidents didn’t happen at Hawthorne Lake. Rose had started to respond but choked on her words when she saw the paramedics frantically pumping Willa’s chest on the beach directly behind her dad. She had watched as they finally gave up and wheeled her slowly toward the truck.

  “I have no idea what happened.”

  Out of all the mistakes she’d made that night, this was the one she regretted the most.

  Her mom yanked hard on her arm, pulling her through the crowd of people standing around the parking lot. Rose stared blankly at their old Lexus. It seemed wrong for it to be there. Normal, unchanged after everything that had happened tonight. She finished the prayer in English, the words barely a whisper.

  Pray for us sinners,

  Now and at the hour of our death.

  To her surprise, before her mom unlocked the door, she met Rose’s dark eyes with her own and whispered, “Amen.”

  Chapter 2

  It was strange to see Carolina Winthrop cry. Rose had known her since they were little, not that Lina had ever acknowledged her existence. The tears looked out of place on Lina’s heavily made-up face, like rain in the desert. Her shoulders hunched over, the deep-V falling along the back of her shirt revealing the requisite Chinese character tattoo. (It probably translated into something like: “poor little rich girl with serious daddy issues.”) Her black bra strap fell off her shoulder and hung loosely over her upper arm, also covered in intricate inked designs.

  Lina was made up of jagged angles and hard lines, all pointy elbows and razor-sharp cheekbones. Everything about Lina—from her aggressively short, bleached-blonde hair to her infamous eyebrows cocked in permanent judgment—screamed bitch.

  Rose’s mom sighed and shook her head as she watched her husband comfort the girl.

  “Unbelievable. She knows, but she’ll never tell. It’s a good thing your father’s a terrible cop.” There was grim satisfaction in her mom’s voice.

  Rose hated herself for feeling the same skepticism that radiated off her mom. On one hand, she wanted, needed Lina to keep Willa’s death a secret. Rose had lied to her dad for reasons she couldn’t even bring herself to think about. Reasons that were tied up in late nights spent on the beach with James Gregory. Her mind flashed back to his dark blonde hair, the way his lips had felt on hers, the way his fingers left a trail of electricity behind as they slid underneath her shirt. She’d trusted him with her secrets and maybe even a tiny piece of her heart. How could she have been so wrong about him? How could she have given herself so completely to someone who was capable of something so awful?

  Rose and Lina and pretty much every single person on the damn boat knew who had killed Willa that night. But even with a yacht full of witnesses, her dad would never hear the truth. Not even from his own daughter, not from one of Willa’s best friends, and especially not from his wife.

  Rose flung open the door and sat on the curb in front of the car. It wasn’t much cooler outside, but at least she wouldn’t have to be trapped with her mom. Thankfully the gently lapping water made it impossible for her to hear the conversation between Lina and her dad. She didn’t trust herself to listen to all the lies. If she heard enough, the truth might just come spilling out.

  Mari Jacobs plopped down next to Rose on the curb.

  “Five thousand dollars.” Her voice was f
lat.

  Rose didn’t need to ask Mari what she meant. She knew that was the money she’d been offered by the Gregory family to keep quiet, and she knew Mari had taken it. No one turned down a bribe from the Gregorys, especially not a waitress putting herself through college.

  For a minute Rose looked into Mari’s dark brown eyes, took in her perfect heart-shaped face and coconut-colored skin. It drove Rose’s mom insane that she spent so much time talking to “the help” instead of hanging out with kids her own age. Never mind that Mari read actual books and was funny as hell. Rose had far more in common with Mari than she did with girls like Lina Winthrop. As the daughter of a cop and Hawthorne Lake’s event planner, Rose was treated with the same faux respect reserved for crossing guards and doormen. She looked at her dad, scribbling on a tiny notebook with his favorite chewed up pen, while Lina Winthrop sobbed out lie after lie.

  Joe McCaan was of average height, average build, and if Rose was being completely honest, slightly below-average intellect. That’s not to say that her dad was dumb; he was just the kind of man who always saw the best in people. A great quality for a dad, not the best quality for a detective.

  Her mom was a different story, of course. As one of the highest-ranking employees at the Club, it was Pilar McCaan’s job to see everything and know everyone. Club employees were terrified of her while most members ignored her completely. Like the new curtains that hung in the grand foyer: she was too gauche and shiny to match the rest of the Club, but too bothersome to replace. As Pilar’s daughter, Rose fit the same bill. There were only three people who seemed to ignore her dubious pedigree. One of them was Mari Jacobs. The other was James Gregory. The last person was dead.

  Mari’s hand shook a little as she reached into her bag and pulled out a cigarette. “Same price they were offering last summer. You’d think they’d at least adjust for inflation.”