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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…”
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.”