Wicked Game

Chapter Three

Hudson glanced around the stable, checking the horses one last time. They were all in their stalls, settling in for the night, nothing disturbed, nothing as it shouldn’t be. He snapped out the overhead light, shut the door, and dashed, head bent, across the expanse of gravel that separated the barn, stable, and machine shed from the house. The security lights gave a bluish tint to the night and overhead, through the rain, he thought he spied an owl soar into the higher branches of the old willow tree that he and his sister used to climb.

“Come on, Renee, don’t be a chicken,” he’d called to her and she, never one to turn down a dare, had struggled up the interlaced branches that he’d scaled with ease. It had pissed her off that her brother, her younger brother by nearly four minutes, was stronger and more athletic than she could hope to be.

But she’d been smart.

Had sailed through school while he’d been uninterested in classroom assignments, at least until college. She’d proudly waited for each report card to arrive in the mail and had beamed as their mother had seen the row of As next to the subject matter. Hudson had done all right, though he hadn’t really given a crap, except for the comments by the teachers. “Doesn’t work to his potential” or “Tests well, but doesn’t apply himself in the classroom” or his favorite, “Isn’t a team player.” Yeah, well. That much was as true today as it had been when his mother had read the remarks aloud in the old kitchen, some twenty-five years earlier.

Tonight, as he ran past, the willow was devoid of leaves and the owl moved to better shelter, flying through the open hay loft window to his perch high in the rafters of the barn, a structure that had been in the Walker family for over a hundred years. Hudson passed the tree and another memory sizzled through his brain, one filled with heat and passion and only the slightest worry that he and Becca would get caught making love beneath the lush, drooping branches and canopy of fluttering leaves. God, he’d had it bad for her.

Maybe worse than you had it for Jessie?

He hurried up the back walk and onto the porch, shaking drops from his hair, as a cloudburst released more slanting rain that battered the old shingles of the roof and gurgled down the gutters. He didn’t want to think about Jessie and hoped to hell that those bones found at the school weren’t hers, that she was living somewhere far away and was still as intriguing and mysterious as she’d always been.

But his gut told him differently.

He stepped into the house and it felt oddly empty tonight, more so than it had before.

“All in your head,” he told himself as he hung his jacket on a peg in the mudroom, kicked off his boots, and in stocking feet, stepped onto the worn linoleum he swore he’d replace this summer, along with the roof and changes to the bathrooms and this old kitchen. The house was starting to look worn. Tired-looking. The same as it had been for the past thirty years. His parents had “updated” it in the early seventies, and now it needed a full remodel.

Spying the phone, he remembered his short call with Becca, how the sound of her voice had taken him back in time to that summer after his first year at Oregon State. Man, he’d been horny and she, well…his groin tightened at the thought of their affair. “Too hot to handle,” he said aloud and reached into the refrigerator for a beer.

Funny, when Renee had insisted “the old gang” get together and had finally convinced Hudson that she was going to arrange a meeting whether he liked it or not, he’d offered to call Becca. Not Zeke, nor Mitch, nor Glenn, just Becca. And Renee had known that Becca would be the lure. Her eyes had actually lit with smug satisfaction when he’d reluctantly agreed and offered to call her.

“I bet Tamara has her number,” Renee said, tossing him her cell phone, Tamara Pitts’s name and number listed on her display. “Give her a call.”

She hadn’t added I dare you, but it had been there just the same. They both knew it, and no, it wasn’t a twin thing. Renee just knew how to manipulate people. “She’s not married, you know, her husband died last year and get this, he left not only a widow, but a girlfriend to boot, a pregnant girlfriend. Becca didn’t even have time to divorce the bastard before he kicked off. A real gem, that Ben Sutcliff.”

He didn’t ask how she’d known all the dirt on Becca’s husband. Renee didn’t explain. It was part of her nature, what she liked to call “reporter’s instincts,” but Hudson thought it had more to do with being a snoop and a busybody.

“So, call her. See if the widow can make it,” Renee said, her lips curling knowingly. “You know what, you never really got over her. Or Jessie. I’d call that pathetic, but considering my current marital state, that would be a little hypocritical.” She hadn’t elaborated and Hudson knew better than to prod. As far as he was concerned, Renee’s husband, Tim, was useless. But then he’d always thought so.

“I just wonder, if that skeleton does happen to be Jessie’s, what the hell happened to her?”

Hudson hadn’t let his mind travel down that dark and twisted road. He’d always assumed Jessie was alive; that she’d just taken off. Again.

He hoped he was right.

“I’ll call her later,” he’d said, writing down Tamara’s number. He wasn’t about to have Renee listen in to a conversation between him and Rebecca Ryan.

Now, in the kitchen his parents had once owned, Hudson twisted off the cap on his bottle of Budweiser and tried not to think about either Becca or Jessie.

Two women he’d thought he’d loved.

Two women who had altered the course of his life.

Two women he might have been better off never meeting.

There was no sleeping. Not with the rain peppering the windows and tree limbs swaying like frantic beckoning arms outside Becca’s window. She watched, eyes open in the darkness, Ringo curled up beside her, snoring softly. She’d been uncertain about the dog when Ben suggested they get a pet, then had fallen in love with the mutt, rescuing him from a pet store where lots of puppies tumbled around, noses pressed to the cages. Even though the dog had been Ben’s idea, he’d been lukewarm on Ringo. He’d wanted to pick out the dog. Becca hadn’t realized it at the time, but she now knew it wasn’t about the pet, it was about Ben being able to pick out what he wanted, whether it worked for Becca or not. He’d done the same thing with the furniture, and her car, and this condo. The only choice that had been totally hers was Ringo. And Ben hadn’t liked it.

She hugged Ringo now and he let out a long doggy sigh. She tried not to think about the phone call from Hudson, but his cool voice played like a tape in her mind, looping over and over again.

Becca? Rebecca…Sutcliff? Rebecca Ryan, in high school?

Squeezing her eyes closed even tighter, Becca fought back traitorous thoughts. She was too old for romantic ideas about Hudson Walker. That was all part of a long-ago past. And even though she would be reconnecting with some of her old friends-even though she was about to physically see Hudson again, now…now that she was a widow and therefore free-it didn’t mean she should have even one romantic notion about Hudson. That affair had been all about high school. She was over it, and yet there it was, streaming into her consciousness, taking hold and not letting go.

Even now, in her darkened bedroom, with the dog snoring beside her, Becca remembered the months after she’d graduated from St. Elizabeth’s as being a turning point in her life. That blasted hot summer with Hudson had been one of those magical times when everything was working right. Becca had Hudson, and though he might not be proclaiming his undying love for her, he truly liked her and she was head over heels about him. From a few stolen moments, their relationship quickly exploded into a daily/nightly routine where as soon as they were off work they would find each other, ending up in each other’s arms, making hot love on a blanket underneath bright stars on the Walker ranch, or in his bedroom, sneakily, after his parents were asleep, or anywhere they could find to be alone.

In September Hudson prepared to go back to OSU, which was located in Corvallis, about an hour and a half down I-5 from Portland. Becca didn’t see his returning to college as a problem, but Hudson started growing more distant as the summer wound to a close. Where once he’d been as enthusiastic as she, calling her day and night, he’d started to cool as the shimmering heat of August had slipped into a cooler September.

And then there was the pregnancy.

A skipped period she’d barely thought about, and then another that had worried her. She’d always been irregular, but she felt different, and when she finally worked up the courage to buy one of the home pregnancy tests, she’d sat on the edge of the bathtub at her parents’ house and prayed she was wrong-only to see the evidence of the child growing within her, a child she’d always wanted.

But Hudson?

Oh, God. Her throat had turned to sand and tears slid from the corners of her eyes before she could take control again, wrapping all the evidence of the test kit in a brown paper bag and burning it in the wood stove before her parents arrived home from work. Neither Jim nor Barbara Ryan would welcome an unplanned grandchild from an unmarried daughter.

Becca had sniffed back her tears and only told her old cat, Fritter, a tortoise-shelled skinny stray that had attached itself to her, about the pregnancy.

Afraid, desperate, sensing something had changed with Hudson, Becca tried hard not to cling to him. She’d practiced telling him about the baby. Over and over again in the car, when she was alone, or whispering to the cat in her bedroom, but she wanted to wait for just the right moment, didn’t want to spring it on him. After all, he’d been the one who had the condoms…well, most of the time.

Finally, as a harvest moon hung low in the night sky, she’d told herself it was now or never, she had to tell him. He deserved to know. It was his right. But before she could force the words over her tongue, he mentioned that he’d known he’d been a little aloof, that it hadn’t been her fault, but he’d been plagued with thoughts about Jessie.

Once again…Jessie.

He told her when she was seated next to him on a porch swing at his parents’ ranch. He was in jeans, a work shirt, and boots, and there were bits of straw in his hair. He’d been drinking a lemonade when Becca pulled into the drive, and his mother, a tall woman with dark hair shot with gray, asked if she wanted a lemonade, too. Becca politely declined and sat down beside Hudson on the swing. Beneath her skin anxiety ran like an electric current. Something was wrong. She didn’t know if she had the courage to tell him. She had to tell him about the baby. But she couldn’t bear for him to think she’d deliberately trapped him. Couldn’t bear to think that maybe she had, a little…to have his baby.

Though she was near him, they didn’t touch. She sensed there was an invisible barrier between them. Maybe he knew she was pregnant and didn’t want to be saddled with a child? But she’d told no one, no one, and she’d even purchased the pregnancy kit from a huge store in Portland, not the local pharmacy where someone might recognize her.

Hudson finished his lemonade. There was a heavy pause as they swayed gently on the swing and the sun slanted late-afternoon heat waves at them. A breeze ruffled her hair and pushed a few dry leaves across the walkway. Hudson was silent. Not moody, just not really there, his mind somewhere far away. He stared into the middle distance and Becca had the feeling he’d forgotten she was sitting next to him, just a hairsbreadth from his body. How, when she was so aware of him, wanted to kiss him and hold him and tell him she loved him, could he act as if she were invisible?

It hurt and, in truth, it bugged her.

They were having a child together!

“What’s wrong?” she asked him, when she finally found her courage.

Before he could answer a car bounced down the long lane, its engine thrumming, his sister behind the wheel. Renee slammed on the brakes and the sedan, screeching, jerked to a stop a few feet away, dust from its tires wafting in a cloud their way. Renee stepped out of the car and tossed her short, dark hair. A small notebook stuck out of her purse and Becca remembered she was taking some kind of journalism classes. Probably acing them. She flew up the walk and scarcely looked at Becca as she hurried up the porch steps. But then she’d acted as if she’d barely noticed Becca all summer. They hadn’t been great friends in high school, but when they were classmates at St. Lizzie’s, Becca hadn’t felt quite the resentment she now sensed.

Or was this feeling of dismissal, of invisibility, just her overactive imagination?

A product of her crumbling relationship with Hudson?

“Goddamned brakes,” she muttered, almost to herself. “Hey,” she said, spying Hudson. “You think you could fix them?”

He shook his head. “You’d better call Mitch.”

“Bellotti? That moron?”

“He’s pretty good with cars.”

“Yeah, he’d probably think I’d go out with him or make out with him or-” She gave a mock shiver.

“He’s engaged.”

“Send the girl my condolences. No, I’m not talking to Mitch. Great idea, Hud. Real helpful.”

“You asked.”

“Well, forget it. I’m not owing that fat-ass, has-been jock any favors. I heard he already flunked out of OSU. Big surprise.” She opened the screen door and nodded toward Hudson’s glass and the few remaining drops of lemonade settling near the bottom. “Any more of that left?”

“I think so.”

She brushed inside, never once acknowledging Becca. But then Renee always had been a bitch. An ambitious bitch.

Hudson set his empty glass on a table beside the swing. He gazed at her through the shadows but she couldn’t read his expression. Finally, he said, “You know, you remind me a little of Jessie.”

Becca stared. “What?” she demanded, her voice shaking. The comparison stung, and it hurt far more than Becca wanted it to. Obviously she’d been kidding herself about her affair with Hudson, wrapping it up in love and romance when he’d been harboring feelings for Jessie all along. She understood instinctively that there was no way to fight Jessie’s memory. Jessie Brentwood had been missing for over three years, but she was still very much here.

“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.

She feels me…

As I drive through the rain, watching the road shimmer darkly under the beams of my headlights, my blood boils with anticipation. I’ve had to bide my time. Wait in seclusion.

But now another has led me back here. One that will have to be taken later, but her interference has given me what I seek: The woman! Missing for all these years because I could not smell her. But now…I know where she dwells…I can find her.

And she senses me, too. I can almost feel the thud of her heartbeats. Taste her fear.

This should have been over long ago but has lingered. Because of the mistake.

My jaw clenches so hard it hurts as I think back on it, and when I check the rearview mirror, I almost witness my own failure on the road behind.

But I won’t think of the time I failed when last I was called…Though the woman survived, her demon-spawn did not, my mission only partially fulfilled.

Now is the time for second chances, to right that error.

I will not fail.

Not this time.

Not ever again.

If anyone gets in my way, they, too, will be laid to waste.

There is no room for error.

The tires of my car sing across the wet pavement as I regretfully draw away from her. I have been close, but must pull back to plan. But soon…

“Rebecca.” Her name comes easily to my lips and I feel heat in my veins, the anticipation of release to come when, at last, she will breathe no more and her heartbeat, the one I hear pounding in my ears, will be stilled forever.

“Rebecca…”