Wicked Game (40 page)

Her head cleared. “Sorry.”

“Friggin’ locals. All a bunch of whack jobs,” the guy in the pickup said under his breath as he drove past.

If you only knew,
Becca thought, still quaking inside as she looked toward the corner and the spruce tree where she’d seen the man she was certain had tried to take her life. “Brother,” she said, and the word tasted foul.

Had she seen him? Had she? She’d certainly sensed his presence, but did that mean he was actually here?

Drawing a long breath, Becca shook it off. There was no time to waste. She needed to get to Siren Song and find the answers. Now.

The doctor wasn’t going to release him, but Hudson couldn’t stay cooped up another minute. He decided that he’d sign whatever releases he needed to, absolve the hospital, doctor, and any damned hospital worker who had stuck his or her head into the room of any liability, and walk out on his own two legs.

He’d already convinced Zeke to loan him his wheels.

Zeke had been reluctant, and though Hudson couldn’t blame him, he was on a mission. And yes, he’d played on Zeke’s guilt, so that his one-time friend had handed over the keys to his vintage Mustang to a man with one arm who was sporting a bad attitude and was loaded up on pain meds. The Third had told Zeke he was crazy, but Zeke had snapped back, “Just gimme a ride back, okay?”

“Vangie waiting for you at home?” Jarrett asked meanly.

“No.”

Hudson hadn’t wanted them to disintegrate into high school one-upmanship, so he’d stated firmly, “Zeke and Vangie are through. Nothing more to say about it.”

And then he’d taken his request one step further, asking for Zeke’s cell phone. “Mine was lost in the accident,” Hudson explained, and Zeke slapped it into his hand, holding his gaze.

“We square, then?” Zeke asked.

There were a lot of things Hudson could have said, a lot more recriminations. But like Zeke and Vangie, it was time to simply move on. “We’re good.”

As soon as they were gone, he climbed from the bed. Pain shot up his arm and his head ached like a hammer was striking an anvil somewhere behind his eyes. Bad idea. And yet, the only idea. He didn’t care how much it cost him, he needed to leave. He needed to find out if Becca was really depending on McNally, or if she’d taken matters into her own hands.

He was betting on the latter.

Becca drove toward Siren Song. She didn’t have much of a game plan but seeing her nemesis—whether real or imagined—had spurred her on. She’d face the son of a bitch. Track him down. It was time for the hunter to be the prey.

If only Hudson were with her—but she didn’t want him to be drawn into
her
battle. She’d already risked his life. He was lying in a hospital bed because of it.

The afternoon was dark enough to seem like night. For a moment she considered calling McNally. She reached for her purse and her cell phone, but then hesitated.

And what’re you going to tell him? That you
feel
him?

She would seem as crazy as Mad Maddie. More so.

Gritting her teeth, Becca bumped up the pothole-riddled land to the gates of Siren Song.

Where Renee had sought information on Jessie’s past.

Where it had all begun.

The wrought-iron barrier was closed, of course, and, as it was getting dark, she couldn’t see much beyond the outline of the lodge. She climbed out of the rental and stepped to the gates. “Hello?” she yelled. “Anyone there?”

She waited, yelled again, then waited some more. After twenty minutes, she went back to the rental. There was no daylight left now, so she switched on her headlights, pointing them through the black fencing as the mist rose and swirled in the twin beams that cut through the tall fencing. The side door and a stone path were illuminated and the arms of surrounding trees seemed to reach inward in long fingers.

She honked the horn of her car, and it sounded like the pathetic bleat of a dying lamb over the dull roar of the Pacific, which could be heard as if it were right next door.

Should she try and scale the fence with its pointed arrow-like spikes piercing upward? She honked again and this time there was movement, a flash of color in her headlights.

What if it’s him?

You didn’t think of that, did you?

What if you’ve walked into a trap? You have no weapon, nothing to protect yourself.

She started the car, but as she did, she saw the same girl who had been at the gate before appear in her headlights. Tonight she was wearing a long coat with a hood. She stared at Becca with wide eyes. Jessie’s eyes.

Becca clambered out of the rental and approached the gate.

“You need to leave,” the girl said in a quiet voice.

“I can’t.”

“Drive away. Now.”

“Jessie Brentwood came here years ago, and someone else just recently, a reporter. With dark, short hair. Renee Trudeau. She wanted information on Jessie.”

“She did not come in.”

“You didn’t let her in,” Becca realized.

“It wasn’t safe.”

“But she knew this is where Jessie came from. I think I came from here, too.” The girl gazed at Becca soulfully. Becca had no idea what she was thinking. “Can’t I come in?” Becca cajoled. “I just have so many questions.”

“It’s not safe for you, either.”

“Do you know who I am?”

She glanced behind her, then down at her feet. “Rebecca…”

Becca’s pulse jumped. “Look, I think…I think I might be related to someone here and it’s very important that I find him.”

Jessie saw the girl’s eyes dilate, the pupils making her eyes two black orbs with the faintest halo of color around them. “You won’t find him here,” she said.

“You know who I’m talking about?”

The girl hesitated. “You’ve met Madeline?”

“Yes,” Becca said, surprised by the non sequitur. “But I’m looking for someone else and it’s really important. People have died. I need to find him.”

She half turned away.

“No, wait!” Becca called, but she was already leaving.

She stopped when she was about thirty feet away. “Whoever you’re looking for is not here.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you asked for ‘him,’” she said without inflection. “There are no men at Siren Song.”

Hudson stared at the pimply-faced clerk on the other side of the faux-wood counter in the lobby of the tired-looking motel where he, Becca, and Ringo had stayed only a few short weeks ago. A striped yellow tabby viewed the interplay with utter disdain from the back of a worn couch as the clerk, who was all of fourteen or so, gazed at him in consternation.

“I—I—can’t talk about our guests. It’s, um, the privacy policy.” The kid kept looking over his shoulder, hoping someone would come to the rescue while the cat yawned and stretched his legs.

“I’m her fiancé,” Hudson tried. A stretch maybe, but close enough, and the next time he saw her, he damned well was going to ask her to marry him. He’d spent too many hours in the hospital wondering about her, worrying about her, loving her, to let her go again.

“Do you, like, have some kind of proof or somethin’?” The kid’s gaze slid to the sling supporting Hudson’s left arm, and Hudson realized he looked like hell in his filthy clothes, disheveled hair, and scruffy beard. He probably appeared to the kid to be one of those loner, killer types from the movies.

But Hudson was too panicked, too sick with worry to go into it or explain anything. Time was running out. “Just tell me what unit she’s in.”

“Grandpa?” the boy called nervously over his shoulder to the open door at the back.

“What?” a male voice bellowed.

“I, uh, could use a little help out here.”

With a huge sigh, “Grandpa,” a large man built like Humpty Dumpty, shuffled into view. Suspenders looped from his faded denim pants, doing nothing as they dangled uselessly from his waist. A thin, tank-style T-shirt was half covered by an open flannel shirt. He peered over the tops of half-glasses. “What’s the problem?”

Irritated, Hudson repeated his request. “My fiancée checked in earlier. I’m supposed to meet her, but I don’t know what room she’s in.”

The man swiped a hand over the graying stubble on his jaw, started to argue, then said, “Oh, forget it. A woman checked into unit seven today. I can’t let you in, but I can go there myself. You can come along.” He glanced out the window. “But I’d bet Butterfinger over there,” he said, nodding to the orange tabby, “that she’s not in. Her car’s missing. No lights on. No television, either.”

The kid walked over to pick up the cat, stroking its head.

Butterfinger snuggled up to the boy, his long tail twitching as he, too, gave Grandpa Humpty the evil eye. Gramps found a baseball cap and jacket, then, with a jangling set of keys, waddled toward unit seven.

It was all Hudson could do not to run in front of him. The fact that Becca wasn’t here made him crazy. Where was she? God, what was she doing? He had a deep, driving fear that she might be out baiting the madman. As they crossed the seedy parking lot, he tried her cell phone again.

Humpty cast him a look. “Cell service ain’t great around here.”

So get into the twenty-first century!
But the man was right. He couldn’t connect. Not with Becca and not with Mac, as he didn’t have the detective’s number on Zeke’s phone.

The big man knocked on the door, and when no one answered, rapped again and said, “Hello? Ms. Sutcliff?” He opened the door, and the minute it swung inward Hudson could tell that Becca hadn’t been in the room in a while. Packages were strewn on the bed, bags from a local all-in-one market. Her dirty clothes from the night before were stacked on a chair near the television stand. Grandpa Humpty nodded to himself as if he’d been an ace detective. “Whaddid I tell ya?” He looked over his shoulder at Hudson. “Maybe you should find yerself a new fiancée.”

Hudson didn’t stick around to listen. He was jogging across the parking lot, his shoulder screaming in pain, his jaw set. Once in Zeke’s Mustang, he found his vial of pain pills, tossed a couple into his mouth, and swallowed them whole. He found the card the two detectives from the sheriff’s department had given him, and dialed. They would have Mac’s number or, if not, they could damned well help him themselves.

He had no proof.

They would have to take his word for it.

But Hudson was damned sure Becca was heading for trouble.

Trouble
…Jessie’s word.

The thought sent ice running through his veins.

What
was
Siren Song? Becca asked herself as she drove back toward Deception Bay proper. Her birthplace? A cult?

She eased the old Chevy through the streets of this sleepy little town where traffic was sparse. The wind, which hadn’t existed a few hours earlier, was beginning to pick up, sharp gusts stirring the branches of trees and pushing litter and debris inland. Night had fallen in earnest and the few streetlights’ bluish lights cast a pool of illumination down the main street.

But Becca was on her way to see Mad Maddie. The young woman at Siren Song had mentioned her name, almost like a direction to what Becca sought. And Renee had talked about the sometime psychic who’d warned her that she was marked for death. Becca herself had wanted to see her, but then had gotten sidetracked by the cult at Siren Song.

She turned her car northward. Driving mostly by instinct, she headed for the cliff area and the area she suspected was the old woman’s home. She’d never been to Maddie’s before but knew it was on the sea, so she only had to follow the road running along the shoreline. The beachfront road turned inland for a bit as it climbed away from the downtown area and the sandy crescent that was connected to the bay at the south end of town.

She recognized the old motel the minute she turned the corner, so she eased the car onto the pockmarked gravel lot. A few lights were shining on the long, low building, an old motel, situated on a ridge overlooking the dark, whitecapped ocean. Another storm was in full force now, wind screaming, rain on its way.

Becca wasn’t sure what she was going to say to the old woman. Something about “Mad Maddie” was definitely off. But Mad Maddie had first mentioned Siren Song to Becca, so the connection between her and the cult members existed.

From one end of the building, a light glowed. Or was it illumination from a television? A silvery blue flickering patch of light came from the window of the end unit. The manager’s home, if the battered vacancy sign was to be believed. The other apartments, eight or ten “homey cottages with cable TV,” were connected by vacant carports that were dilapidated and weathered and worn. Peeling gray paint covered rusted gutters that had worked themselves loose and swung and groaned in the wind that rose above the sea. The motel was untended and unkempt. Tall beach grass and berry vines encroached, the concrete was cracked and fissured, the gravel pounded into potholes, a sorry-looking picket fence undulating and bent from age and rot.

But it wasn’t the ramshackle buildings that caught Becca’s attention. No. As she sat in the car, her windshield wipers clapping away the gathering mist, she stared through the streaky glass to the cliff beyond.

So familiar.

So like that rocky outcropping where she saw Jessie in her visions, where she’d witnessed the embodiment of evil, the murderous bastard who had loomed over Jessie in her visions.

This was the scene of those visions, not Siren Song.

“Dear God,” she whispered, her throat tightening.

Her cell phone jangled and she jumped, then realized that it hadn’t actually rung, but that a message had been left on her voicemail. She punched buttons to retrieve it and heard, over the pounding of the surf far below, Hudson’s worried voice. He asked her to call, to meet him at the motel as he was checking himself out of the hospital. And she was to call Zeke’s number, as Hudson was using his friend’s phone. He signed off with a quick “love you,” which nearly brought tears to her eyes. He’d forgive her for keeping the secret about the baby. Maybe he really did love her. Maybe it wasn’t all about Jessie.

She tried to call him back, once, twice, three times, and three times she failed.

“Damn,” she whispered as she climbed out of the car and the wind, fierce now, tore at her clothes and hair. She considered leaving, driving into cell phone range and calling Hudson, but she didn’t want to take the time.

Not when she had the overwhelming sensation that time was running out, faster and faster, grains of sand slipping through the hourglass that was her life.

But she tried to call Hudson one more time and failed again, the call never going through. Swearing softly, she tucked the phone into her pocket and started up the broken flagstones to the “office” door. Glancing around the side of the building to the open sea, she hesitated briefly. Darkness made it hard to see the shifting gray waters of the Pacific, but she could hear the waves pounding the base of the cliffs, spraying upward while the wind wailed.

Spiderwebs of realization brushed up her arms.

She had been here before. She was certain of it. What was it about this place? Nervous, she walked along the exterior of the decaying motel, barely noticing that some of the glass panes of the windows had been replaced with plywood, the plywood having grayed and buckled over the years. When she reached the back of the motel she stopped short.

“Jessie,” she whispered as her hair whipped over her face.

This narrow point of land on which she now stood was the ridge in her visions, the one in which Jessie was poised over the angry, rushing sea. It had to be. She felt familiar here, and she thought for just an instant that the girl she’d seen in her trancelike state hadn’t been Jessie at all, but herself. Hadn’t people said they resembled each other?

But, no, the girl she’d seen had been Jessie. Jessie, trying to tell her to get justice from the man who’d murdered her. Becca recalled suddenly that Jessie had told Renee when she was sixteen, “It’s all about justice,” which made Becca wonder if Jessie had seen her own death approaching.

She shivered, then gazed at the surrounding cliffs, seeing the dark shape of the lighthouse on its rocky mound and the island farther out, barely distinguishable tonight in shades of black and gray.

How many times had she witnessed just this view? How many times had it terrified her? “No more,” she vowed as her sweatshirt flapped around her. “Jessie?” Becca called. “Tell me what to do.” She closed her eyes for just a second, willing the dead girl, her newfound sister, to enter her mind. If the dark figure, the image of the killer, joined the ghost of Jessie, so be it. “Come on, come on,” she said, feeling the cold from the ever-changing Pacific seep through her skin and burrow into her heart.

But nothing came to her.

Just as she had in life, Jezebel Brentwood played by her own rules, stubbornly refused to bend to anyone else’s whims.

Becca opened her eyes. It was dark and she was alone. Alone and on her own.

Backtracking to the front of the motel, Becca walked up a couple of steps to a sagging porch and pressed the doorbell. Over the keening howl of the wind, she heard the faint sound of a buzzer and then nothing. No footsteps. Maybe the old gal had fallen asleep in front of the television. Or maybe she wasn’t home. Becca rang again, heard the buzzer, but no other sound.

“Maddie?” she called loudly. “Madame Madeline? It’s me, Rebecca Sutcliff. Ryan. We met at the antique store?” She started to pound on the door only to have it creak open. She froze, arm raised to beat on the weathered panels again. “Maddie?”

From within came a low, pain-filled moan.

Becca’s heart dropped through the rotted floorboards of the porch. She thrust open the door and stepped inside to the smell of fried fish and ashes from a wood stove and something else. Something metallic and out of place. “Maddie?” she called again and was already extracting her cell phone from her pocket. The living room with its flickering television screen was empty, the worn recliner sitting near a TV tray with a plate of food—tater tots, cole slaw, and fish sticks—half eaten. A fork with some white sauce still globbed on its tines had clattered to the floor. A cigarette burned in an ashtray.

And stains on the floor? Dark red stains. Blood…?

Oh, dear God, what was this?

The hairs at Becca’s nape stood on end. She speed-dialed Mac, but the call didn’t go through. She should turn back now, drive into town, call the police…

Another groan emanated from a doorway at the back of the house.

Carefully, her pulse racing, her nerves wound tight as watch springs, Becca peeked around the corner to a bedroom where Madame Madeline lay slumped on the floor, blood pouring from her abdomen, a pistol in one hand.

“Maddie!” Becca said, trying to remain calm, not knowing what the wounded, crazed woman would do. Maddie looked up, her bloody fingers wrapped around the butt of the gun. “Justice,” she whispered and leveled the barrel of the pistol straight at Becca’s heart.

Mac took the call, a patch in through the sheriff’s department, and he couldn’t make out much, mostly static that the detectives had to repeat. The upshot was that Hudson Walker had checked himself out of the hospital against doctor’s orders and now he was worried sick that Rebecca Sutcliff might’ve taken off after the killer—the same sicko that so far had eluded capture by all the authorities in Tillamook County. Hudson was certain Becca had gone back to Siren Song—a place Detective Clausen informed Mac was a cult.

“What the hell’s she doing?” Mac growled as he noticed a turnout in the road and pulled a quick U-turn. “Son of a goddamned bitch.”

“Don’t shoot,” Becca said as calmly as she could, though her heart rate was zooming wildly. “Don’t shoot. Please…”

“Justice!” Maddie cried again, her face ashen, her eyes round with terror, the gun wobbling in her hands.

“You’ll get justice, I swear, but now we need to get you to a hospital. Drop the gun,” Becca said, terror striking deep in her heart. She thought of Hudson, of their unborn child, and she knew she couldn’t die. Heart jack-hammering, she stepped out of the gun’s sights, and miraculously, the old woman didn’t train the muzzle on Becca’s moving form, just kept the barrel pointed at the doorway. “It’s all right,” Becca lied, a wary eye on the weapon and the heavy-knuckled fingers curled possessively over it. “It’s all right,” she said softly, again.