Wicked Game

by Lisa Jackson

  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 disembodi
ed 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…”

  Chapter Four

  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 t
he 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.