Lisa Jackson - Wicked Game

In her mind’s eye Becca conjured up Hudson’s sister-tall and thin, with dark hair that had, in high school, feathered around large eyes as brown as her twin’s were blue. Renee had never liked Becca much and had made no secret of her feelings. “So she was calling about what those kids found in the maze at St. Lizzie’s? The bones?”

“Yeah.” His voice lowered a bit and she imagined his dark eyebrows pulled together in a knot, just as they had years ago whenever he’d been disturbed.

“You think it’s Jessie.” There was no reason to pull punches. After all, he was the guy who’d wanted things honest way back when…well, at least until things had gotten tense between them. Then where had the honesty fled?

“Maybe.”

“And you called me?”

“I got your number from Tamara. I take it you sometimes still hang out?”

Tamara, with her curly red hair, porcelain skin, and belief in all things mystical, was one of the few people with whom Becca had kept in contact. At St. Elizabeth’s Tamara had been a couple of steps outside of mainstream, but she’d still been a part of Hudson’s crowd, even putting up with the constant teasing from some of the other kids, including Christopher Delacroix, the richest kid in the school at the time and the only one who had numerals after his name, as he had the same name as Daddy and Granddaddy. Hence his nickname of The Third. As Becca remembered him, The Third was a privileged kid who got his kicks out of embarrassing others. In short, a dyed-in-the-wool jerk. He had constantly needled Tamara.

“Tamara and I keep in touch. See each other once in a while,” Becca admitted.

“Renee is pretty freaked out about the discovery of the skeleton and she wants us all to get together,” Hudson said, sounding not quite certain about the wisdom of that.

I bet she doesn’t want me, Becca thought, but kept it to herself. She was trying her best to concentrate on the conversation at hand and not on eighteen-year-old questions she wanted to ask him. She hadn’t spoken to Hudson in years, had only run into him twice since that summer of their affair. But both of those times she’d been with Ben, and nothing more than a few polite hellos had been exchanged between them.

Which was probably just as well.

Let sleeping dogs lie, Becca. No need to bring up the past that you’ve worked so hard to bury.

“What does she think will come of that?” Becca asked as Ringo, opening his eyes, stretched on the couch.

“I don’t know. She thinks the bones are Jessie’s.”

So do I. That’s why I had the vision. “What do you think?”

“I always thought she ran away,” Hudson stated. “She had a history of it.”

“I remember.”

This was surreal. Her first phone call with Hudson, and they were talking about Jessie again after all these years.

“Renee’s a reporter for the Valley Star.”

Becca knew as much. The Star was a local paper; not exactly the big time that Renee had always talked up years before. Even in high school, Renee Walker had ambitions that had been far reaching, a lot farther reaching than the circulation of a second-rate newspaper.

“She’s already talked to the kids who found the body, even though their parents were cautioned by the police. But you know her, she gets what she wants.”

Except that dream job.

“Anyway, Renee’s been doing some follow-up. She wants us all to get together at Blue Note on Thursday.”

“The restaurant? Why?” The request seemed to come out of left field.

“To find out if anyone can remember anything that might help identify the bones.”

“You mean if they’re Jessie’s.”

“Well, yeah, that would be the first supposition.”

Becca wasn’t sure getting the old gang together because of a shallow grave and remains up at the school was such a good idea, but she said, “Okay.”

“Scott and Glenn own Blue Note. It’s in Raleigh Hills. I’ve got the address…” He rattled off the street address and she remembered the area in the west hills, only a few minutes’ drive through a tunnel and into the heart of Portland.

“Scott Pascal and Glenn Stafford own a restaurant together?” she asked, thinking of two of the boys she’d known at St. Elizabeth’s. She hadn’t heard that they’d gone into business together and she didn’t recall them being particularly good friends in school, but that had been a long time ago. Things change. And business partners didn’t necessarily make the best friends or bedfellows.

“Not just Blue Note. They have another restaurant in Lincoln City, I think.”

“I wouldn’t have guessed,” she said. But then I wouldn’t have guessed that you would call me after all this time, or that a body that could be Jessie’s would be discovered at the school…

“Renee wants everyone to meet Thursday after work, around seven, if they can make it.” Becca heard a bit of hesitation in his voice, as if he was second-guessing his sister’s plan.

“I can be there.”

“Good.”

“Is it?”

Again a bit of hesitation, then he said, “Who knows? Renee seems to think none of us have gotten over it.”

“‘It’ being Jessie’s disappearance.”

“Yeah.”

Have you? Becca wondered and doubted it.

Hudson added, “She thinks there’s maybe some course of action we should take to find out if it’s Jessie.”

“Like going to the police?” Becca said dryly.

“The police weren’t exactly our friends,” Hudson agreed.

Becca leaned back against the couch and glanced out the living room window. The night was dark. Thick. Rain still ran down the windowpanes. Absently she rubbed Ringo’s furry head and thought back. The police had subjected them all to hours of interrogation in the wake of Jessie’s disappearance. The guys had suffered the brunt of the authorities’ scrutiny, but the girls had been interviewed as well. Though the general consensus at the school and police department had been that Jessie had run away again, there’d been one cop who’d insisted she was murdered and he put Hudson and the guys in their group through the wringer, interrogating them over and over again until The Third’s father, a Portland lawyer who owned several buildings near the waterfront, had threatened to sue the department for harassment. The cop had backed off a little, or so it had seemed, but Becca had felt that he’d had a personal vendetta to fulfill.

Between Christopher Delacroix Junior’s threats, lack of evidence, and a missing body, the case had gone stone cold.

“I’ll see you Thursday,” Hudson said, breaking into Becca’s reverie.

“Will Tamara be there?”

“Think so.”

“Good. Hey, before you hang up, what was that cop’s name? The one who wouldn’t believe Jessie ran away?”

“Sam McNally,” Hudson said, a distinct chill to his voice.

“Mac,” Becca said, remembering. Though the cop, only about ten years older than the kids he was interrogating, had mostly left her alone, he’d haunted their days and nights long after Jessie disappeared. “So now do you think he was right? About Jessie being murdered?”

“I don’t know.” He was terse. Suddenly distant again. “I sure as hell hope not.”

“But if she’s still alive…where’s she been all this time?”

“Somewhere else.”

“Yeah…”

“I’ve got to call a few more people, see if they’ll join us.”

“Okay.”

He hesitated a second, then said, “Good talking to you, Becca,” and hung up.

Becca carefully replaced the phone. “Good talking to you, too,” she said softly to the empty room.

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.