Lisa Jackson - Wicked Game

Hudson didn’t stick around to listen. He was jogging across the parking lot, his shoulder screaming in pain, his jaw set. Once in Zeke’s Mustang, he found his vial of pain pills, tossed a couple into his mouth, and swallowed them whole. He found the card the two detectives from the sheriff’s department had given him, and dialed. They would have Mac’s number or, if not, they could damned well help him themselves.

He had no proof.

They would have to take his word for it.

But Hudson was damned sure Becca was heading for trouble.

Trouble…Jessie’s word.

The thought sent ice running through his veins.

What was Siren Song? Becca asked herself as she drove back toward Deception Bay proper. Her birthplace? A cult?

She eased the old Chevy through the streets of this sleepy little town where traffic was sparse. The wind, which hadn’t existed a few hours earlier, was beginning to pick up, sharp gusts stirring the branches of trees and pushing litter and debris inland. Night had fallen in earnest and the few streetlights’ bluish lights cast a pool of illumination down the main street.

But Becca was on her way to see Mad Maddie. The young woman at Siren Song had mentioned her name, almost like a direction to what Becca sought. And Renee had talked about the sometime psychic who’d warned her that she was marked for death. Becca herself had wanted to see her, but then had gotten sidetracked by the cult at Siren Song.

She turned her car northward. Driving mostly by instinct, she headed for the cliff area and the area she suspected was the old woman’s home. She’d never been to Maddie’s before but knew it was on the sea, so she only had to follow the road running along the shoreline. The beachfront road turned inland for a bit as it climbed away from the downtown area and the sandy crescent that was connected to the bay at the south end of town.

She recognized the old motel the minute she turned the corner, so she eased the car onto the pockmarked gravel lot. A few lights were shining on the long, low building, an old motel, situated on a ridge overlooking the dark, whitecapped ocean. Another storm was in full force now, wind screaming, rain on its way.

Becca wasn’t sure what she was going to say to the old woman. Something about “Mad Maddie” was definitely off. But Mad Maddie had first mentioned Siren Song to Becca, so the connection between her and the cult members existed.

From one end of the building, a light glowed. Or was it illumination from a television? A silvery blue flickering patch of light came from the window of the end unit. The manager’s home, if the battered vacancy sign was to be believed. The other apartments, eight or ten “homey cottages with cable TV,” were connected by vacant carports that were dilapidated and weathered and worn. Peeling gray paint covered rusted gutters that had worked themselves loose and swung and groaned in the wind that rose above the sea. The motel was untended and unkempt. Tall beach grass and berry vines encroached, the concrete was cracked and fissured, the gravel pounded into potholes, a sorry-looking picket fence undulating and bent from age and rot.

But it wasn’t the ramshackle buildings that caught Becca’s attention. No. As she sat in the car, her windshield wipers clapping away the gathering mist, she stared through the streaky glass to the cliff beyond.

So familiar.

So like that rocky outcropping where she saw Jessie in her visions, where she’d witnessed the embodiment of evil, the murderous bastard who had loomed over Jessie in her visions.

This was the scene of those visions, not Siren Song.

“Dear God,” she whispered, her throat tightening.

Her cell phone jangled and she jumped, then realized that it hadn’t actually rung, but that a message had been left on her voicemail. She punched buttons to retrieve it and heard, over the pounding of the surf far below, Hudson’s worried voice. He asked her to call, to meet him at the motel as he was checking himself out of the hospital. And she was to call Zeke’s number, as Hudson was using his friend’s phone. He signed off with a quick “love you,” which nearly brought tears to her eyes. He’d forgive her for keeping the secret about the baby. Maybe he really did love her. Maybe it wasn’t all about Jessie.

She tried to call him back, once, twice, three times, and three times she failed.

“Damn,” she whispered as she climbed out of the car and the wind, fierce now, tore at her clothes and hair. She considered leaving, driving into cell phone range and calling Hudson, but she didn’t want to take the time.

Not when she had the overwhelming sensation that time was running out, faster and faster, grains of sand slipping through the hourglass that was her life.

But she tried to call Hudson one more time and failed again, the call never going through. Swearing softly, she tucked the phone into her pocket and started up the broken flagstones to the “office” door. Glancing around the side of the building to the open sea, she hesitated briefly. Darkness made it hard to see the shifting gray waters of the Pacific, but she could hear the waves pounding the base of the cliffs, spraying upward while the wind wailed.

Spiderwebs of realization brushed up her arms.

She had been here before. She was certain of it. What was it about this place? Nervous, she walked along the exterior of the decaying motel, barely noticing that some of the glass panes of the windows had been replaced with plywood, the plywood having grayed and buckled over the years. When she reached the back of the motel she stopped short.

“Jessie,” she whispered as her hair whipped over her face.

This narrow point of land on which she now stood was the ridge in her visions, the one in which Jessie was poised over the angry, rushing sea. It had to be. She felt familiar here, and she thought for just an instant that the girl she’d seen in her trancelike state hadn’t been Jessie at all, but herself. Hadn’t people said they resembled each other?

But, no, the girl she’d seen had been Jessie. Jessie, trying to tell her to get justice from the man who’d murdered her. Becca recalled suddenly that Jessie had told Renee when she was sixteen, “It’s all about justice,” which made Becca wonder if Jessie had seen her own death approaching.

She shivered, then gazed at the surrounding cliffs, seeing the dark shape of the lighthouse on its rocky mound and the island farther out, barely distinguishable tonight in shades of black and gray.

How many times had she witnessed just this view? How many times had it terrified her? “No more,” she vowed as her sweatshirt flapped around her. “Jessie?” Becca called. “Tell me what to do.” She closed her eyes for just a second, willing the dead girl, her newfound sister, to enter her mind. If the dark figure, the image of the killer, joined the ghost of Jessie, so be it. “Come on, come on,” she said, feeling the cold from the ever-changing Pacific seep through her skin and burrow into her heart.

But nothing came to her.

Just as she had in life, Jezebel Brentwood played by her own rules, stubbornly refused to bend to anyone else’s whims.

Becca opened her eyes. It was dark and she was alone. Alone and on her own.

Backtracking to the front of the motel, Becca walked up a couple of steps to a sagging porch and pressed the doorbell. Over the keening howl of the wind, she heard the faint sound of a buzzer and then nothing. No footsteps. Maybe the old gal had fallen asleep in front of the television. Or maybe she wasn’t home. Becca rang again, heard the buzzer, but no other sound.

“Maddie?” she called loudly. “Madame Madeline? It’s me, Rebecca Sutcliff. Ryan. We met at the antique store?” She started to pound on the door only to have it creak open. She froze, arm raised to beat on the weathered panels again. “Maddie?”