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“I turned it on after I got a call from my sister.”
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.
