LITMIR.BIZ

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that read: Office. It took a while, but Mad Maddie opened the door to reveal a woman with iron-gray hair pulled into a severe bun and a stony, oddly blank expression. She appeared to be somewhere in her late sixties, but Renee figured she could be off a decade either way.

      “Are you…Maddie?” Renee asked.

      “You wantin’ a room?”

      “Actually I—was told you do—readings?”

      Something shifted in her gray eyes. “You want to see Madame Madeline.” She stepped aside and Renee hurried across the threshold.

      “Yes.”

      And so Mad Maddie aka Madame Madeline had sat Renee down on a faux-leather couch with springs that felt as if they were going to break through the worn surface at any moment, and then she’d pulled out an equally worn set of Tarot cards. Renee had been fascinated. A frisson had actually crawled up her spine. There was something eerie and authentic about this old woman that the almost antiseptic, staged Tarot reader she’d visited with Tamara couldn’t compete with. Here, the ambience was rich, and instead of the heady scent of incense, she smelled rotting wood and the salt of the sea.

      Premonition had feathered along her arms and Renee automatically rubbed her elbows. Mad Maddie regarded her in a blank way that caused Renee’s heart to beat a little faster. She didn’t look down at the cards. She stared straight at Renee.

      “What do you want?” she asked.

      So Renee had rambled on about her friend, searching for her biological parents, her friend from high school, St. Elizabeth’s, who’d been missing for years and who Renee was searching for. She told more than she expected to, a little unnerved by Maddie’s great silences. Only once did Maddie move during the recitation, and that was to look a bit wildly over one shoulder toward the back of the motel. Renee automatically looked as well, but there was nothing there. A gust of wind had rattled the panes and Renee had started.

      “She’s dead,” Maddie told Renee.

      “Jessie? Jezebel?” Renee had been stunned at her bald announcement.

      “Jezebel…” That’s when Maddie threw the fearful look over her shoulder.

      “You see that?”

      But then Maddie had moved on to the cards, making banal predictions that seemed to peter out as if she forgot them before the end of her thought. Renee’s attention had wandered around the room and she thought she saw a shadow creep inside the partially opened door to the back.

      And then Maddie had said she was marked for death. Just like that. She, or one of her friends from that school.

      And that had been the end of the reading.

      Now Renee wasn’t sure what she’d learned. She’d come to believe the “she’s dead” line was just something Maddie threw out to jolt her. A tactic. A pretty damn impressive one, actually, as it had followed Renee ever since. And then when the skeleton was discovered inside the maze, Renee got a total, all-over sense of the heebie-jeebies.

      She’s dead?

      How was that for coincidence?

      Even now another shiver slid down her spine, and Renee shook it off with an effort. She vowed to herself that she would not be so susceptible, and purposely headed toward the galley kitchen. She sliced cheese and apples, placed them on a plate with some crackers, then found the coffee she’d left in the cupboard from her last stay, brewed up a pot of decaf, and sat at the old desk tucked into the corner on which she’d propped her laptop. Sipping the coffee and picking at the fruit and cheese, she began working on her story.

      Instead of going on impressions and feelings, she turned to her usual methods of preparing for a story. She began by deciphering her notes from the meeting at Blue Note, what she thought of the girls who had supposedly been Jessie’s best friends and who had known her intimately, and the boys who had lusted after her and ended up being suspects, at least for Detective Sam McNally, now a homicide cop. When Jessie had gone missing, McNally had been with missing persons, but he’d been particularly rabid about finding the whereabouts of a girl who’d been known for running away. It was almost as if he’d had a thing for her. Renee made a note to herself to check and see if McNally had some other connection to Jessie, especially something romantic or sexual. Now that angle would turn the story on its ear. Though Jessie had been Hudson’s girl, Renee guessed—by virtue of her sexy behavior—that Jessie had been involved with other boys and men. How many or how much, she didn’t know, but maybe she should concentrate on McNally.

      She frowned, her coffee forgotten. The thing of it was, no one really had known Jessie. Not her parents, not the boy who had supposedly loved her, not her friends. She’d been a mystery in life and was even more so now, in death.

      Renee glanced over the names of the guys and her eyes settled thoughtfully on her brother’s: Hudson Walker. He had always been pretty mum on the subject of Jessie. Renee had once thought it was a matter of not kissing and telling, Hudson’s personal code of honor, but maybe Hudson hadn’t really been as involved emotionally as everyone had thought.

      She scribbled a note to herself and wrote down Becca’s name with a question mark. Her brother had sure been hot for her several years after Jessie went missing; and now, it seemed that fire was still burning.

      From the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of a shadow in the windowpane at the side of the house.

      Oh, God! She froze as the dark figure shifted and her heart began to race. A face appeared, shadowed as if by a hood or a cowl, and eyes as dead as she’d ever seen seemed to look through the glass.

      Jesus!

      Her heart squeezed.

      She bit back a scream and pushed her chair back so quickly the legs screeched against the floor.

      Searching wildly around the room for a weapon, any kind of weapon, expecting at any second for the glass to shatter, she nearly fell off the chair, then ran, half-stumbled into the hallway and the darkness beyond.

      You’re imagining things, you’re imagining things, you’re goddamned imagining things! She slipped into the darkened kitchen where the palest of light shone through the windows and back door…Oh, hell, was it locked? She crossed the room, tested the dead bolt, then, with every hair standing straight up on her arms, she grabbed a butcher knife from the block on the kitchen counter and fled to the windowless hall again.

      Cold sweat collected over her spine and the sound of the wind whistled through the rafters.

      The cell phone! Use the damned phone!

      “Oh, God,” she whispered, realizing her phone was in her purse, at her desk.

      Moving silently, her heartbeat echoing in her eardrums, she inched down the hall. Her fingers, gripping the handle of the knife, were sweating and she was certain at any second someone or something would leap at her from the back bedroom or broom closet.

      Carefully, heartbeat roaring in her ears, she eased back to the archway to the living area. She barely dared breathe as she poked her head around to view the room and beyond the window.

      No figure.

      No dark shadow.

      Nor was there anything but pure darkness at the other window near the door.

      Had it gone?

      Or had her fertile mind played a horrid trick on her?

      She snapped out the lights, and the interior, aside from a soft glow from the computer screen, was as dark as the night outside. Waiting for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, she eased to the window and peered out.

      No face.

      No dead eyes.

      No one looming, ready to pounce.

      Just the shivering shadows from the fir tree standing near the porch.

      A raving, paranoid freak, that’s what you are!

      She

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