Wicked Game (6 page)

“I’m not Jessie,” she said carefully.

“I know.”

“Do you? Why would you say…?” Her throat closed and her face grew hot with embarrassment. Who had she been kidding? She’d suspected, no, make that
known
Hudson had never gotten over Jessie, but to compare Becca to the missing girl…or even worse,
fantasizing and pretending
Becca was like Jessie was just sick.

Her stomach, not great anyway, began to roil and she thought she might throw up.

Hudson said, “I don’t know. Sometimes I think…”

“I don’t think I want to hear this,” she whispered, all her dreams turning to dust.

“Look, Becca, I’m leaving for school in a couple of weeks. I was talking to Zeke and we’re heading down together.” She felt a flash of rage at Zeke, sensing he’d been instrumental in Hudson’s current, sober self-reflection but couldn’t say so. “We talked about Jessie, the other day. We never really have much.” He leaned forward and sighed, his hands on his thighs, his foot stopping the swing’s arc. “I’m just wondering…”

Becca pressed her trembling lips together. A long pause ensued while she waited, dying inside.

“I just think we should take things slower. Work through some stuff. What do you think?”

What I think is that I’m pregnant with your child and you’re sitting here next to me grieving over the love of another girl, one you can never have. So now you’ve somehow twisted everything around. What I think, Hudson, is that I’m a fool, a damned, stupid fool who fell in love with the wrong man.
She gazed into his blue eyes, seeing herself reflected. A lonely girl clinging to a dream. Pathetic. She squared her shoulders, refused to cry, and managed to say in a calm voice, “Maybe you’re right. It has been a whirlwind.”

He nodded. “I don’t want to rush this.”

“No.” Her voice was brittle. She was furious; at herself, mostly. But she couldn’t help saying, “We could see each other next time you’re home.”

“Right.”

Misery. Bone-deep sadness and despair. It dragged her down inside, but she managed to make up some excuse about having to get home. Holding her dignity intact, she didn’t remember the drive, not one second of it, but somehow she got home that night. Only later, when she was in the bathroom with the shower running to hide the noise, did she break down. As Fritter sat on the ledge of the small window over the toilet, Becca cried and cried and cried. Tears poured from her eyes. Sobs wrenched from her gut. She was sick…sick…sick…Pregnant and shatteringly sad.

Yet, there was hope.

There was a life inside her, waiting to be born. She couldn’t tell Hudson now. But maybe next time they saw each other. In a few weeks. When he came home, or called. Until then, she’d pull herself together. She refused to be one of those weepy, wimpy, weak girls she’d always detested.

But he didn’t call. And time passed. And Becca was overwhelmed by a feeling of impending disaster, a dark cloud that resolved itself into her final vision, her last one until she’d passed out at the mall this afternoon.

It had been the November following their breakup, as she was driving home from Seaside, her car buffeted by strong, blustering winds. As she gripped the wheel, trying to keep the car in her lane, she was suddenly blinded by an image of thundering surf pounding a rocky bluff. It was all she could do to herd her car to the side of the road before the pain in her head exploded and the vision overtook her completely.

Once the car was idling on the narrow gravel shoulder, she saw an image of an angry, storm-tossed sea and above it, perched high in a tower, loomed a dark, malevolent force without figure or form, the embodiment of pure evil that caused her skin to crawl. She couldn’t see the monster’s face, didn’t know if it had one, but she was certain to the bottom of her soul that whoever it was,
whatever
it was, it surely meant to do her harm.

And her baby’s life was in jeopardy.

She heard nothing save the rush of the wind and the roar of the surf pounding against a rain-washed shore, but the threat came to her, echoing through her mind. A warning to her and her baby.

I am here.

And I will destroy you both; make certain the unholy chain is broken.

I smell you, Rebecca.

You are so near…

Becca had come to with a cry of fear emanating from her throat, blinking, her hands gripped around the wheel, her knuckles blanched white as bleached bones, her head dull and thundering.

“Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.”

She couldn’t panic.

Wouldn’t.

The vision was nothing.
Nothing!

But her insides were trembling and she knew that she had to leave, to find her way home, and fast. That was it. She would throw some water over her face, figure out what she was going to do, how she would care for the baby, if she would ever tell Hudson, what she would tell her parents…

Gingerly she stepped on the gas.

The road was empty and she could have sworn that the harsh winds that had just been battering the car had died. No birds called, no insects hummed, no sounds of distant traffic reached her ears. Even the car’s engine was muted. Still.

And then she heard it.

An engine.

Loud.

Rumbling.

A truck of some sort, traveling fast, coming from around the bend behind her. She didn’t dare accelerate onto the pavement until it passed. And yet…

Her heart was a tattoo, her palms wet. Something was wrong. Seriously wrong!

It’s the vision. It’s got you all hyped up. That’s all.

The engine roared more loudly.

And then a dark pickup careened around the corner at breakneck speed, its wheels nearly coming off the pavement.

“No!” she cried as the driver apparently lost control.

In a split second, the truck bore down on her, its huge grate magnified in her mirror.

She stepped on the gas, but it was too late.

The truck careened off the pavement.

She screamed. The pickup slammed into her car, nearly broadside, crumpling the back end and door of the Toyota. With a horrible shriek, the metal wrenched. Glass shattered. The driver’s door was wrenched from its hinges as the car folded. Pain screamed through her body as she saw the truck tear away, hardly slowing at all. The vision returned…a dark angry sea, a large looming form, and a deadly threat as she went in and out of consciousness.

There had been policemen and EMTs and gawkers as the car had been opened with the Jaws of Life and she’d been extracted from the wreckage. People had shouted or whispered or talked into walkie-talkies, but it was all a blur as she was carried into a waiting ambulance.

Please let me keep my baby
, she prayed to the ceiling of the ambulance as the siren screamed, resounding.
Please. Please!

She’d woken up in the hospital, her parents worn and raw, her mother’s eyes red-rimmed and teary as she sat in a bedside chair, a wadded tissue in her fingers. Her father, appearing to have aged a decade in the past ten hours, stood near his wife’s chair, a big steadying hand on Barbara’s shoulders.

“The baby?” she asked in a voice that sounded a million miles away. She felt empty inside, oddly at war with her own body as an IV leaked fluids into her wrist, and outside the private room, through a door slightly ajar, she saw a large, curved desk—the nurses’ station.

Her parents had looked at her and shaken their heads. Tears leaked from her mother’s eyes and her father’s lips pressed flat together.

Her prayers had gone unanswered and a somber-faced doctor only a few years older than she had explained that the force of the accident had caused her placenta to rupture. The baby could not be saved and Becca was “lucky” to have only sustained a broken clavicle, bruised ribs, and facial contusions from the flying glass.

Lucky? When my baby died?

Despair coiled over her heart. Becca’s parents took care of their distraught daughter, who refused to tell them the baby’s father’s name, though surely they could have guessed. She’d never introduced Hudson as her “boyfriend,” had usually gone out with a crowd that included several boys, as far as her mother and father were concerned, but surely they could guess.

They just never asked after the first initial weeks.

Her mother confided in her months later that “it really didn’t matter” who the boy was. Obviously Becca didn’t care enough about him to even give him a name or tell him about his child.

Becca had winced inside but held her ground, never once mentioning Hudson Walker. She recovered slowly, consumed with the worry that the accident might cause her to never be able to have children. Her collarbone finally mended, her ribs and face healed. She was assured that she was fine. That what had happened was just an unfortunate and tragic accident. There was no reason that she couldn’t have other children.

The police never located the driver of the truck, and as Becca had no image of the person behind the wheel, and no license number, and no local body shops had reported a truck coming in with the kind of damage it should have sustained in the accident, no citations were issued.

Never admitting to her “vision,” Becca went back to school winter term and tried to put the pain of losing her baby behind her. Hudson didn’t call, nor did she phone him. She thought about it, but told herself to let the past die. A few months later she moved into an apartment and continued her job in the law firm, never intending to make it a career. But time passed and Ben came to work at the firm and…and it felt like the years had suddenly telescoped, as if it could still be that fall when she and Hudson broke up and the automobile accident robbed her of her child.

She’d blocked most of the past. Blocked it on purpose. She’d never told Hudson about the pregnancy. Never really had a chance to toil over whether she should or shouldn’t before it was over. She’d forced herself to look forward, not back.

Eventually, she’d married Benjamin Sutcliff. They’d dated, grown close, married, and she’d hoped for a family, that, as it turned out, he didn’t want. But that section of her life was over, too.

And now this part of her past, the part with Hudson and Jessie, the part that she’d steadfastly buried and covered with concrete, had suddenly come to life, broken through all of her careful barricades and reared its painful head.

Now, unable to sleep, she shoved her hair from her eyes and snapped on the bedside light. She couldn’t,
wouldn’t
dwell on the past. If it took every ounce of grit she had, she wasn’t about to travel down the thorny path that was her own life’s history. No, damn it, she was going to concentrate on her life as it was. As it had become. Reality. She was a widow. An almost divorcée. After Ben’s rejection, she’d spent the rest of last year and the beginning of this one in a strange exercise of forced forward motion. One foot in front of the other. Keep going. Push on. Fight your way through and hope to come out the other side stronger, wiser, and maybe even better off.

It had been a tough fight. Her secretarial work at Bennett, Bretherton, and Pfeiffer had tapered off with the decline of the law firm’s clients—an aspect of a decline in health of one of the senior partners and disinterest in the others. Now Becca worked mostly from home, using a fax machine to receive her eldest boss’s hand-scratched notes, or using e-mail and the Internet to download drafts of contracts, legal notes, letters, and memoranda before rewriting, polishing, and sending the finished product back via the Internet. It was a disembodied way to work, and there wasn’t really enough of it to sustain her much longer. The firm was tightening up—keeping their information “in-house” due to confidentiality issues.

Becca was at a crossroads. Choices were going to have to be made. Maybe her earlier vision of Jessie was a result of the low-grade stress she wasn’t acknowledging. Or maybe it was that she was a weirdo and just couldn’t admit it.

“Damn it all to hell,” she said, flipping off the light and yanking the covers to her neck.

Sighing, Ringo stretched his legs and pushed against her with his paws.

And beneath everything she’d thought about tonight was the image of Jessie on that cliff, her hair caught in the wind, the sound of the surf blocking out her words. What had she mouthed so desperately? What had she wanted Becca to know? Was it her own subconscious trying to tell her something, or was it something more?

Becca squeezed her eyes shut, but the image of the girl on the cliff remained, as if permanently etched on her eyelids. Was the skeleton that had been discovered in the maze Jessie’s? She kind of thought so, and it left her with an all-consuming feeling of dread.

Something bad was about to happen.