Wicked Game

Chapter Ten

Renee’s eyes narrowed as she pulled into the small coastal town of Deception Bay the following evening. The night before the drive had been stalled by a phone call from Tim, an excruciatingly nasty fight, then a stop to pick up a few groceries at a twenty-four-hour Safeway store, and finally the slow drive through mixed rain and snow on twisting mountain roads. She’d stayed in the cabin all day today just unwinding.

The sensation that she was being followed had hung with her all the way through the Coast Range and south along this winding stretch of Highway 101 that cut into the steep hillsides overlooking the Pacific. She’d had to creep to keep the damned car on the road. All the while she’d kept checking her rearview for the glowing headlights that had loomed behind her like the eyes of some great, feral beast.

“Puh-leeze,” she told herself now as the few streetlights of the small town emerged from the fog. She was still thinking about her fight with Tim. Jesus, he was a piece of work. He somehow thought that he could have an affair with a coworker and expect Renee to (a) understand, and (b) forgive him. Now, he insisted, he didn’t want a divorce, that he’d thought things over and decided it was better for “everyone” if they stayed married.

Like it was that easy.

Renee didn’t figure adultery was something she could get over very quickly though she herself had been tempted to step over that invisible marital line a time or two. But she hadn’t. She’d come close but had stopped short. Not that it mattered now. Tim could rant and rave, remind her that she was “his” until kingdom come. It was over. O-V-E-R, and she’d told him so tonight in no uncertain terms.

He’d been in a rage, and for the first time she’d seen the extent of his temper and had been glad there hadn’t been a gun in the house. Not that she thought he would ever really physically harm her…

Still, he’d lost it. Really lost it. His face, once boyishly handsome, had turned tomato red, and his big hands had clenched into hammy fists. He’d even gone so far as to punch through the entry hall wall. That’s when she’d left. In a hurry. Only pausing to pick up a few essentials in Hillsboro.

Had he followed her?

Decided to have it out again?

He wouldn’t, would he?

She returned to the gravel drive of the small cottage she used on her weekend getaways. Three blocks off the beach and within walking distance of town, the cabin was owned by a friend of her father’s, a man who, since his wife had died, rarely spent any time here. His kids were flung to the winds, one son in Miami, another in Denver, his daughter trying to make it as an actress in LA. No one spent any time at the cabin he’d renovated with his own hands sometime in the early eighties.

Renee nosed her Camry beneath the carport. She hurried through the fog to the porch where the exterior light, always illuminated, had burned out. “Damn it all,” she muttered, fumbling with her keys and the old, rusted lock.

She heard the sound of footsteps and turned quickly, her heart in her throat, to see someone appear through the mist. She nearly screamed until she spied the large dog ambling beside a man, out for their evening constitutional.

Get a grip, she told herself just as the lock sprang and she let herself inside. She dropped her things on a futon with a faded print cover that served as a couch, then returned outside for her two bags of groceries.

She was back in the cabin within seconds. After locking the door behind her, she flipped on the lights, lit the gas fire, and told her heart to stop its ridiculous knocking as she tossed her suitcase into the single bedroom on the main floor, then flipped open her laptop computer and waited for it to boot up.

She was lucky enough to jump onto a neighboring family’s wireless Internet as this little cottage was barely equipped with electricity, let alone anything as technologically advanced as a router; there wasn’t even a phone line. The owner refused to take any money from Renee and only asked that she “spruce the place up a bit” when she came, so she didn’t argue with him and accepted the tiny abode as her retreat away from Tim and her disintegrating marriage.

It was also here where she had first decided to do her story on the missing Jezebel Brentwood.

And Jessie Brentwood was the reason she felt such overwhelming persecution. As if she were being watched and followed. And it was all because she’d taken that first trip to Deception Bay.

Jessie’s adoptive parents, the Brentwoods, had been reluctant to talk to Renee when she’d first posed the idea to them for a story about their missing daughter. They knew Renee and liked her. She’d been a tenuous link to Jessie, the one friend who’d kept in contact with them off and on over the years, but they’d balked at the idea that Renee would drag it all up again. They still believed Jessie might walk through their door. Stranger things had happened.

Renee had been quietly persistent and when she asked about Jessie’s birth parents, they both clamped their jaws shut as if afraid of revealing government secrets. Renee had asked them point-blank why they seemed so-scared-to talk about the adoption, but neither would open up to her. The one piece of information she gleaned was that the adoption-a private one-had taken place in the small coastal town of Deception Bay. The Brentwoods had a cabin there, although it appeared they hadn’t returned there in a long time. Renee asked if Jessie knew about the cabin. Had she been there before, on previous occasions? Could that be where she went as a runaway? The Brentwoods assured her that no, Jessie never went to the cabin. It was one of the first places they always looked for her, but she was never there and certainly hadn’t been since the last time she disappeared.

That information was what had sent Renee initially to the beach and Deception Bay. She’d asked some questions of the town residents about the area, what it had been like, who were some of the notable families, whatever she could think of to get the conversation rolling. Then she would insert that she knew a family who’d adopted a daughter from somewhere around Deception Bay, that daughter being a friend of hers from high school. No one seemed to know anything, but an old salt who spent his time on a lookout bench above the ocean and fed the seagulls, much to the annoyance of the townies who found them scavenging pests, told her she should go see Mad Maddie.

“Mad Maddie?” Renee asked dubiously.

“Lives up there…” He waved in the direction of a rocky tor. “Coupla nice motels there once. Run down now. Maddie owns one of ’em, I guess. Leastwise she stays there. Someday some big resort company’ll buy it up and build somethin’ hee-uge. Cost a fortune to stay there, but ain’t happened yet.”

“You think Mad Maddie could help my friend locate her biological parents?”

“She’s as fruity as a punchbowl. Lost her marbles. She reads the future.” He snorted out a few chuckles. “She’ll tell ya a whole buncha drivel.”

“She’s a psychic reader?”

He snorted. “Call it what you want. Her and her crazy family.”

Renee had driven up a winding road to the crest of the tor and had to agree with the old salt about the beauty of the area. Someday maybe a resort company would build “somethin’ hee-uge” here and it would have an amazing view of the Pacific. But for now there wasn’t much left of the motel but a gray, weathered, beaten-down, one-story set of buildings with sagging carports and weed-choked gravel parking. There were a couple of equally sad cars parked outside, vacation renters, who could stay by the day, week, or month, according to the handwritten sign propped against the wall.

Renee guessed the unit at the end was Mad Maddie’s residence, as there were items stacked outside the front door: used furniture, old plastic toys, a propane stove that had seen better days, various and sundry kitchen and bathroom items, and a couple of lawn chairs set out to view the approach of visitors, not the commanding view on the back, western side. A hoarder’s dream.

She’d knocked on the door that sported a cockeyed sign that read: Office. It took a while, but Mad Maddie opened the door to reveal a woman with iron-gray hair pulled into a severe bun and a stony, oddly blank expression. She appeared to be somewhere in her late sixties, but Renee figured she could be off a decade either way.

“Are you…Maddie?” Renee asked.

“You wantin’ a room?”

“Actually I-was told you do-readings?”

Something shifted in her gray eyes. “You want to see Madame Madeline.” She stepped aside and Renee hurried across the threshold.

“Yes.”

And so Mad Maddie aka Madame Madeline had sat Renee down on a faux-leather couch with springs that felt as if they were going to break through the worn surface at any moment, and then she’d pulled out an equally worn set of Tarot cards. Renee had been fascinated. A frisson had actually crawled up her spine. There was something eerie and authentic about this old woman that the almost antiseptic, staged Tarot reader she’d visited with Tamara couldn’t compete with. Here, the ambience was rich, and instead of the heady scent of incense, she smelled rotting wood and the salt of the sea.

Premonition had feathered along her arms and Renee automatically rubbed her elbows. Mad Maddie regarded her in a blank way that caused Renee’s heart to beat a little faster. She didn’t look down at the cards. She stared straight at Renee.

“What do you want?” she asked.

So Renee had rambled on about her friend, searching for her biological parents, her friend from high school, St. Elizabeth’s, who’d been missing for years and who Renee was searching for. She told more than she expected to, a little unnerved by Maddie’s great silences. Only once did Maddie move during the recitation, and that was to look a bit wildly over one shoulder toward the back of the motel. Renee automatically looked as well, but there was nothing there. A gust of wind had rattled the panes and Renee had started.

“She’s dead,” Maddie told Renee.

“Jessie? Jezebel?” Renee had been stunned at her bald announcement.

“Jezebel…” That’s when Maddie threw the fearful look over her shoulder.

“You see that?”

But then Maddie had moved on to the cards, making banal predictions that seemed to peter out as if she forgot them before the end of her thought. Renee’s attention had wandered around the room and she thought she saw a shadow creep inside the partially opened door to the back.

And then Maddie had said she was marked for death. Just like that. She, or one of her friends from that school.

And that had been the end of the reading.

Now Renee wasn’t sure what she’d learned. She’d come to believe the “she’s dead” line was just something Maddie threw out to jolt her. A tactic. A pretty damn impressive one, actually, as it had followed Renee ever since. And then when the skeleton was discovered inside the maze, Renee got a total, all-over sense of the heebie-jeebies.

She’s dead?

How was that for coincidence?

Even now another shiver slid down her spine, and Renee shook it off with an effort. She vowed to herself that she would not be so susceptible, and purposely headed toward the galley kitchen. She sliced cheese and apples, placed them on a plate with some crackers, then found the coffee she’d left in the cupboard from her last stay, brewed up a pot of decaf, and sat at the old desk tucked into the corner on which she’d propped her laptop. Sipping the coffee and picking at the fruit and cheese, she began working on her story.

Instead of going on impressions and feelings, she turned to her usual methods of preparing for a story. She began by deciphering her notes from the meeting at Blue Note, what she thought of the girls who had supposedly been Jessie’s best friends and who had known her intimately, and the boys who had lusted after her and ended up being suspects, at least for Detective Sam McNally, now a homicide cop. When Jessie had gone missing, McNally had been with missing persons, but he’d been particularly rabid about finding the whereabouts of a girl who’d been known for running away. It was almost as if he’d had a thing for her. Renee made a note to herself to check and see if McNally had some other connection to Jessie, especially something romantic or sexual. Now that angle would turn the story on its ear. Though Jessie had been Hudson’s girl, Renee guessed-by virtue of her sexy behavior-that Jessie had been involved with other boys and men. How many or how much, she didn’t know, but maybe she should concentrate on McNally.

She frowned, her coffee forgotten. The thing of it was, no one really had known Jessie. Not her parents, not the boy who had supposedly loved her, not her friends. She’d been a mystery in life and was even more so now, in death.

Renee glanced over the names of the guys and her eyes settled thoughtfully on her brother’s: Hudson Walker. He had always been pretty mum on the subject of Jessie. Renee had once thought it was a matter of not kissing and telling, Hudson’s personal code of honor, but maybe Hudson hadn’t really been as involved emotionally as everyone had thought.

She scribbled a note to herself and wrote down Becca’s name with a question mark. Her brother had sure been hot for her several years after Jessie went missing; and now, it seemed that fire was still burning.

From the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of a shadow in the windowpane at the side of the house.

Oh, God! She froze as the dark figure shifted and her heart began to race. A face appeared, shadowed as if by a hood or a cowl, and eyes as dead as she’d ever seen seemed to look through the glass.

Jesus!

Her heart squeezed.

She bit back a scream and pushed her chair back so quickly the legs screeched against the floor.

Searching wildly around the room for a weapon, any kind of weapon, expecting at any second for the glass to shatter, she nearly fell off the chair, then ran, half-stumbled into the hallway and the darkness beyond.

You’re imagining things, you’re imagining things, you’re goddamned imagining things! She slipped into the darkened kitchen where the palest of light shone through the windows and back door…Oh, hell, was it locked? She crossed the room, tested the dead bolt, then, with every hair standing straight up on her arms, she grabbed a butcher knife from the block on the kitchen counter and fled to the windowless hall again.

Cold sweat collected over her spine and the sound of the wind whistled through the rafters.

The cell phone! Use the damned phone!

“Oh, God,” she whispered, realizing her phone was in her purse, at her desk.

Moving silently, her heartbeat echoing in her eardrums, she inched down the hall. Her fingers, gripping the handle of the knife, were sweating and she was certain at any second someone or something would leap at her from the back bedroom or broom closet.

Carefully, heartbeat roaring in her ears, she eased back to the archway to the living area. She barely dared breathe as she poked her head around to view the room and beyond the window.

No figure.

No dark shadow.

Nor was there anything but pure darkness at the other window near the door.

Had it gone?

Or had her fertile mind played a horrid trick on her?

She snapped out the lights, and the interior, aside from a soft glow from the computer screen, was as dark as the night outside. Waiting for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, she eased to the window and peered out.

No face.

No dead eyes.

No one looming, ready to pounce.

Just the shivering shadows from the fir tree standing near the porch.

A raving, paranoid freak, that’s what you are!

She returned the knife to its spot, then quickly she closed all the shades, double-checked the windows and latches, then went back to her computer, one eye ever vigilant. On the Internet she searched for anything she could learn about Jezebel Brentwood, St. Elizabeth’s High School, girls who’d gone missing around the same time as Jessie, and Detective Samuel McNally of the Laurelton Police Department.

She didn’t go to bed until after two, only after rechecking all the locks. Keeping the butcher knife on the bedside table, she fell into a restless sleep where dreams of high school kept her tossing and turning.

The next morning, suffering from sleeplessness, she saw the big-bladed knife she’d left on the nightstand and mentally chastised herself. “Fool,” she muttered. She was still letting herself be affected by the odd elements of the story.

Determined to shake it off, she showered, threw on beach clothes, and spent nearly two hours walking along the foggy beach, feeling the salt spray against her nose and cheeks. Then she hiked back to the cabin and reviewed her notes again, hoping something would leap out at her. She had an address for the Brentwoods’ cabin. One of the reasons she’d come to the beach was to find it, so she climbed into her Camry and tried to follow a local map of the area, wishing she owned a GPS system. It took a while, and she drove down a number of dead-end streets, but she finally found the place. The house was weather beaten and slightly tired, like many others along this stretch of coastline. She eyed it carefully, a low-slung ranch with a picture window and, when the sun was out, an incredible view of the ocean. Today, though, it was still gray and close, with mist clinging to the surrounding hills and obscuring the horizon. The sea itself, the color of steel, was hard to discern in the fog, the abandoned lighthouse on that craggy rock off the shore, invisible.

Had Jessie ever been here during one of her runaway adventures? Renee was half inclined to wander around the place and check, but changed her mind when a maid-cleaning crew arrived in a van and parked in the drive. They glanced toward Renee, who turned back to her car. The house was obviously a rental now. No place for Jessie to hide.

Renee returned to Deception Bay and parked near a local coffee shop and bakery where a few patrons were sipping their morning jolts of java and munching on cinnamon rolls, croissants, and scones. The interior of the Sands of Thyme was warm and smelled of coffee and spices. Newspapers were left open on a few tables and the walls were lined with coffee, tea, utensils, and cups, all for sale.

“Do you know Madame Madeline?” Renee asked the girl at the cashier stand.

She made a disparaging sound. “She’s more than a few rolls short of a dozen, if you ask me. Makes those cultees at Siren Song look normal.”

“Hey!” a man in the back yelled, shooting the girl a don’t-gossip-with-the-customers look as he bagged the sliced loaf and the espresso machine screamed as it spewed white foam into huge cups.

“Siren Song?”

“That big house up on the cliff.” She pointed away from the ocean toward the other side of the highway where the land broke upward sharply into the Coast Range. “They all wear weird stuff and act strange. I expect their heads to turn around if you look at ’em too long.”

“They mind their own business,” the man from the back said loudly.

The cashier mouthed, “Sorry,” to Renee, who took her cappuccino to a table, picked up the newspaper, scanned the headlines, and decided the Coastal Clarion made a rag like the Star look sophisticated. Thinking it might be better to approach Maddie a little later in the day, Renee passed the time working on a word puzzle, realizing that an elderly man and woman at a nearby table must have overheard her conversation with the cashier because she heard Siren Song mentioned several times. The elderly woman unfolded a plastic rain hat from her purse and said tartly, “…nothing but trouble up there, if you ask me. Like those ones in Waco or…Arizona. Got all kinds of strange ways of behavin’. Been that way for over a hundred years.”

The man with her, in thick glasses, plaid jacket, and driving cap, nodded as he stood and folded his paper under his arm. “Bad news, that. Good thing they keep to themselves.”

They walked-he with a cane, she with her arm linked through his-out of the bakery and into light, sprinkling rain, leaving Renee to eavesdrop on a trio of women obviously on a weekend getaway together but laughing and outtalking each other about the hilarious antics of their small children.

Renee packed it in, making tracks from the bakery and taking a turn through town, her breath fogging in the chilly air, the smell of the sea ever present, and peek-a-boo views of the sea visible along the streets running east and west. A few cars ambled along the narrow roads, though few pedestrians braved the winter elements as a thin drizzle leaked from the sky. She wasted some time at a cozy antique shop whose proprietor, a middle-aged woman with a silvery gray bob, watched her closely. Renee struck up a conversation with her by asking about the lodge called Siren Song, but the woman responded quickly, “It’s a cult. Mostly women. Been there longer than Deception Bay. You could look it up. I heard a couple of the girls worked in town for a while, but they were yanked back real quick-like.”

“You have some colorful characters here,” Renee observed. “I ran into Madame Madeline earlier.”

“Madame Madeline?” She snorted. “If she’s a psychic, I’m the Queen of Sheba.”

Renee didn’t know whether that made her feel better or worse. But when her watch read ten, she walked back to her Camry and headed in the direction of Maddie’s old motel. Her tires scrunched on the weedy gravel, and as she pulled to a stop a dark cloud blocked out the faint rays of a watery sun. She climbed from the car and then hesitated again. Why was she here, really? What could this old woman tell her that she didn’t already know? What kind of answers could there be?

Annoyed with herself, Renee got back in her car and drove back toward the cabin, taking a last-minute detour to drive in the direction of Siren Song. It took her a while to find the large house shaded by fir trees from the road. All she could see were snatches of windows and cedar shakes and stone chimneys, and she was reminded of an old northwest lodge much like the one built at Crater Lake or Timberline, although not nearly as large.

At the cabin, she headed for her laptop, wondering whether she should stay and work some more or head back to Portland and the myriad of problems that awaited her with Tim. Stuffing the laptop into its case, she headed for the bedroom, grabbing up a T-shirt she used as a nightgown and tossing it into her bag. She packed up some toiletries from the bathroom, then shot a last look around the bedroom, intending to close her bag.

Her gaze skated over the nightstand, then snapped back.

No knife.

She looked more closely. Not on the nightstand, nor was it on the floor beside the bed.

She inhaled and exhaled a long breath, then headed to the kitchen where the knife block was filled-except for the single slot wherein the butcher knife had rested.

Renee bit back a sound of disbelief.

Where the hell was it?

Dear God…how? Who?

Oh, shit.

Listening to the sound of the wind pushing against the old cabin, the creak of ancient timbers, the light patter of rain on the roof, the thunder of her heart, she strained to hear any foreign noise. Was someone in the cabin with her even now? She thought of the loft, the second bedroom where she never ventured, and her blood became ice water.

She had to go up and check it out. The prospect filled Renee with dread. She was on the bottom step when she thought better of it and turned, grabbed her bag, laptop, and purse, and headed swiftly out the door, locking it behind her.

She had seen a face in the window. She had. A dark figure with soulless eyes.

She had…hadn’t she?

Sliding behind the wheel of her Camry, Renee spun backward out of the driveway, nearly hitting a post before slamming the car into Drive and glancing at the cabin again. The curtains in the loft window moved slightly and she was damned sure there was something dark and ominous behind them.

Only when her car was miles away, heading north on 101, and she was pushing the speed limit on the winding road high above the sea, the lighthouse barely visible on its tiny island, did she breathe again.

From the upstairs window, I watch her leave.

Frightened.

Trembling.

Scrabbling around like a frantic chicken running from a fox. Throwing her bags into the backseat. Too late. I’ve seen what’s on her computer screen, know where she’s been, what she’s doing. She’s getting close-stopping by the old woman’s shop, asking questions.

That damned old hag. Never to be trusted. I should have known, should have dealt with the crone.

I think of it-the killing of the old one, the traitor. I’ve thought of it often enough, suspected she knows more than she pretends, but here, in this tiny gossipy town, it might prove difficult.

And now there are others, one of whom is fleeing even now.

But she can’t run far.

And I know where she’ll go.

Back to the others.

She’ll lead me to them.

Standing behind the gossamer curtains, I finger the long-bladed knife in my hands and wait until the taillights of her car disappear around the corner, heading east, away from the sea, to the highway that runs parallel to the ocean, wandering in twisting turns north until it reaches the intersection where it splits and she’ll head inland.

To the others.

As she vanishes I rub my thumb over the razor-sharp blade, imagining what the thin steel edge can do. Quick and clean, a neat slice across the jugular and carotid.

But the time isn’t right. I need this one to lead me to the others.

Even though she has no scent, no odor.

She’s not one of them.

But she must be followed.

And she must be stopped.

Once I have no further use for her.