Wicked Game (7 page)

Becca pulled her car into the parking lot through driving rain. Her wipers could scarcely keep up with the deluge, and as she turned off the ignition she watched the neon script lights that read
BLUE NOTE
blur into an indistinct azure haze. So Scott Pascal and Glenn Stafford owned this brick building on the outskirts of Portland in the area known as Raleigh Hills and uncomfortably close to St. Elizabeth’s campus. She still found it odd that the two had teamed up. In high school Scott was a bit of a show-off, all swagger and winks, a flirt, always hinting of something racy or naughty or indecent, while Glenn…she barely remembered him. He did belong to the group, she decided, but he was on the fringe, always hanging close to The Third, like a little lost puppy, hoping to be noticed. As for The Third, he’d always been a pain, had always rubbed her the wrong way; even his nickname had bothered her.

But it was Hudson who had really occupied her thoughts ever since he called. Maybe it would be good to finally see him, to put that old nostalgia and sense of regret behind her once and for all. She didn’t think he was married, at least he hadn’t said so, but who knew? He could be fat and balding and have had three wives and eight or nine children since she’d last seen him.

Somehow she doubted it.

She figured he was probably one of those men who got better looking as they aged, and as for wives, exes, and children, she’d never heard that he’d been married.
So now’s your chance to find out.
Her hands gripped the wheel. She seemed to forever be waiting in a car, almost afraid to take a breath, conscious that something unpleasant or just plain bad lay ahead of her. This time she was about to meet her old high school friends. Her “gang.” Her buddies.

Her lover.

Becca inhaled a long breath, held it, let it out slowly. Hudson Walker hadn’t been hers. Yes, she’d made love to him. Yes, she’d wanted him. But he’d been Jessie Brentwood’s right from the start, and after Jessie’s disappearance he’d been Becca’s only briefly, and only because Jessie was gone.

She needed to keep reminding herself of that fact.

Pocketing her keys, she stepped out of her Jetta, locked the door, then flipped the hood of her coat over her hair. Walking rapidly through the rain, she headed for the main entrance of Blue Note while traffic streamed by on a nearby arterial that ran east to west. Three steps across the lot and her feet were soaked through her black pumps. Four more steps and she lost feeling in her toes.

What a night.

Shouldering her way through the double doors, Becca headed toward a small maitre d’s podium. A young woman wearing a body-hugging indigo dress and a bright smile greeted her. “Welcome to Blue Note.”

“Thanks.” Becca pushed her hood off her head. “I’m meeting a group of people here, kind of a reunion. We’re with Glenn and Scott, the owners? I think Renee Walker organized it?”

“You mean Renee Trudeau.”

“Right.” Becca had known Renee was married, but she’d forgotten her last name.

“They’re in the private dining room. Right this way.” The hostess led Becca across a polished herringbone floor and through several “rooms” that were really curtained-off sections of a larger space, which added an intimacy to the restaurant, making it seem more luxurious than Becca would have believed possible. The tables were mostly empty on this Thursday night; the votive candles flickering in crystal holders were welcoming despite the lack of patrons to enjoy the ambience. Soft jazz emanating from discreet speakers was wasted on the lonely chairs while outside wind threw rain against the windows that banked one wall.

“Right here,” the girl said, pushing on the bronze levers to a set of frosted French doors. Inside was a long, distressed black table with heavy carved legs. Around the massive table, seated on taupe armchairs, were Becca’s high school friends, every one of whom turned and looked at her as she entered. Water glasses, a few wine goblets, and a couple of short old-fashioned glasses littered the table.

“Becca!” Tamara called, but Becca was still taking in all of the faces. She saw them in a rush of memories, a dizzying kaleidoscope not unlike one of her visions. It was all she could do to murmur a hello to their chorus of greetings and fumble her way to a seat.

“I wondered when you’d get here,” Tamara said, a friendly smile stretching across her face. Tan in the dead of winter, Tamara was crowned with the same wild red hair she possessed in high school.
Flamboyant
was the word Becca would use to describe her, then and now. Her arms jingled and glittered with rows of bracelets, her hair curled around a face that showed little aging in the twenty years since she’d been a pain in the neck for the nuns and lay teachers at St. Elizabeth’s.

“Becca Ryan. God, it’s been a while,” a man with blond, short-cropped hair said before Becca could do no more than murmur a hello to Tamara.

Her heart sank. She’d know that voice anywhere even if she didn’t recognize the sharp features of Christopher Delacroix III. The Third hadn’t changed much in the twenty years since Jessie’s disappearance. Older, a bit thicker, maybe, although it looked like all muscle, he still possessed the leadership quality—or should she say “belief that they should all do his bidding”—that had made him their unofficial but indisputable ruler. In the past Hudson hadn’t paid attention to The Third’s despot ways, but he hadn’t challenged him for the role, either. Hudson hadn’t been interested in those group dynamics. A part of the group and yet not. Even then, he’d been his own person and had told The Third to “shove it” more often than not. Somehow, despite his disdain for authority, or maybe because of it, he’d been allowed to stay. And Becca had loved him for it.

“It has been a long while,” Becca admitted. “And it’s Becca Sutcliff now.”

“That’s right, you’re married.” He snapped his fingers as he remembered. “You’re with Bennett, Bretherton, aren’t you?” The Third was a lawyer at another firm, and Becca had spoken on the phone with him a couple of times.

Already Becca was regretting attending this meeting. Two minutes with The Third and she remembered what she’d hated about high school. “I’m widowed, actually.” She didn’t add anything else, didn’t want to expose herself. Let them think what they wanted.

He snorted, intense blue eyes focusing on her. “Divorced, here. Don’t know why I ever thought I could be married to anything other than my job.”

She forced a smile and dared a glance around the table. No sign of Hudson yet, though his sister Renee was seated at the end of the table, her dark hair in the same short style Becca remembered from high school. She gave Becca a tight return smile, but Becca sensed it wasn’t anything personal. Renee seemed her usual uptight, disinterested self.

But she called the meeting, remember? According to Hudson, this get-together was her idea.
On the table in front of Renee, near an untouched glass of wine, was a stack of papers—along with a neatly folded newspaper with the picture of the Madonna statue.

Tamara said to the group at large, “Is Hudson going to show?”

“He’ll be here. He’s always running late.” Renee met Becca’s eyes, and for the first time in her life, Becca definitely did
not
feel invisible to Hudson’s twin.

“Well, of course he’ll show,” the woman at the other end of the table stated emphatically as Becca took an empty chair between Tamara and a man she recognized as Jarrett Erikson, another one of The Third’s buddies. With dark hair and a swarthy complexion, he, along with The Third, had loved mercilessly teasing Mitch and Glenn, referring to Glenn as a “nerd with a complex.”

“We all had to show, didn’t we?” the same woman said. She was petite, blond, and nervous, and clung to the hand of the man seated on her left. Beneath the pendant lights suspended above the table, a huge diamond glittered on her left hand. “Kind of a command performance.” She shot a dark look toward Renee.

Becca took a second to remember her: Evangeline Adamson. “Vangie.” She was seated next to Zeke St. John, who greeted Becca with a silent nod. As Becca remembered, Evangeline had always been chasing Zeke, but Zeke hadn’t seemed to want to commit to a relationship. It appeared now, after over twenty years of clinging to a dream, that she’d finally gotten her wish, as there was no question the ring she was wearing was for an engagement. Zeke, meanwhile, looked a little worse for wear. His chiseled jaw had loosened with age, his athletic build was softer, and his once-dark hair was shot with silver.

Hudson’s best friend, who, when he’d been nineteen, hadn’t given Becca the time of day.

Renee pushed back her chair, its legs scraping over the dark hardwood. “Let’s get to it, okay? We don’t need to wait for Hud.”

“You’re pretty hot about that skeleton those kids found up at St. Lizzie’s,” The Third observed. “That’s what this is about, right? You think it’s Jessie’s.”

Leave it to The Third to cut to the chase and ruin all of Renee’s drama. Becca and the rest of the group turned their collective eyes toward her. “Yes,” she said, but before she could go on, Evangeline cut in.

“It can’t be Jessie. I mean…she ran away, right? She was always running away. She
told
me she was going to run away.”

Vangie had been one of Jessie’s closest friends, an inner circle among the larger clique, Becca recalled.

Jarrett Erikson’s dark eyes gazed coldly at Vangie. “It’s not like we forgot what you told the police.”

“What did I say?” she demanded, affronted.

“Just that. You were her best friend and Jessie told you she was running away.”

“I wasn’t her best friend.”

“We were all good friends,” Renee put in brusquely, intent on pulling the conversation back to her own agenda. “I was a good friend of hers.”

“Yeah, but Vangie acted like she and Jessie were like this,” The Third said, crossing his fingers.

“I don’t know why you’re picking on me!” Vangie sniffed.

“Hard to believe it’s Jessie,” Zeke cut in. His gaze fell on the way Evangeline’s hand clung to his and he moved it to his lap, as if embarrassed.

A cell phone chirped. The Third reached into his pocket, withdrew a sleek BlackBerry, checked the number, then clicked the phone off. “Sorry.”

Renee said tightly, “Okay, so if it’s not Jessie, then whose bones are they?” She glanced around the table, but no one responded. “Come on. Whether we like it or not, we all know that the body up there is Jessie Brentwood and it’ll only be a few days, maybe even shorter, before the police put two and two together.”

“Is that what this is all about, going to the police?” For a split second, The Third seemed unnerved. He grabbed his short, near-empty glass, jiggled the ice cubes, and took a last swallow before cracking one of the melting cubes between his teeth.

Renee shook her head. “No. But they’re bound to come to us again. It’s what they do.” Her gaze skated around the table, to the faces staring at her. “Come on, we all know this thing’s been eating at us for years. Everyone of us has said, ‘I wonder what happened to Jessie. Where she went.’” Renee took a sip of her wine. “Now it looks like she’s been found. Part of the mystery solved.”

“Nothing’s been eating at me,” The Third pointed out, and he seemed relaxed again. An act? Or for real? “And I don’t know what the hell you mean about a mystery. Vangie’s right. Jessie ran away.”

“Are we all going to order something, or what?” Scott asked, his now-bald pate gleaming in the subdued lighting. Becca realized he scarcely had any hair left and apparently chose to shave it off completely. “How about a couple of bottles of wine? Looks like we could use some refills and a few new glasses. Glenn…” He glanced pointedly at his business partner.

Glenn Stafford looked like he’d been enjoying the fruits of his own kitchen. Once thin to the point of being gaunt, he’d packed on the pounds over the years. His shirt stretched a little tight around his middle, whereas Scott was as lean as he’d been in high school and his face was remarkably unlined. Glenn, on the other hand, had deep furrows dug into his forehead, as if the worries of the world lay on his shoulders. His hair was still its same medium brown shade and it was close-cropped and neat. He sent Scott a black look, then pushed back his chair and headed toward a wooden swinging door that presumably led straight to the kitchen.

“Are we ordering food, or just drinks?” Mitch Bellotti asked cautiously.

“Oh, sure.” Scott nodded emphatically. “Glenn, how about a couple of appetizer sampler plates, show everyone our specialties. That way maybe they’ll come back.”

Glenn managed a scowl as he left the room, and Mitch seemed satisfied. The ex-lineman was even thicker around the middle than Glenn, but then he’d always been on the heavy side. He’d had a love of cars that had translated into a career as a mechanic. He’d also always had a love of women and was twice divorced, according to his own admission. Becca could feel his appreciative eye fall on her, but she ignored it, as much to give him the message as to keep The Third and Jarrett Erikson from exchanging amused glances. In high school, Mitch had been the group’s resident clown, always joking. The Third and Jarrett Erikson had referred to him as the Village Idiot behind his back, and Becca sensed their disparagement of him hadn’t changed over the years.

She slid a sideways look at Jarrett, seated on her left. His black hair and black eyes under beetle brows made him seem as if he were hiding secrets. He’d been the least easy to read in high school, and it looked like nothing had changed.

There were a couple of others who had been part of their group, but more peripherally, and they hadn’t been invited to this command performance, apparently, as the only chair unoccupied was waiting for Hudson.

This group of friends, their core, was made up of the people most affected by Jessie’s disappearance.

But Becca still didn’t get why Renee had so wanted this meeting. It wasn’t like they could do anything about Jessie now. She glanced again at the notes so neatly stacked on the black table in front of Renee. Hudson’s twin. And direct opposite.

The door opened, letting in a whoosh of air that touched the back of Becca’s neck.