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“We have to go.”
“Fine. Then I’m driving.”
He helped her into the passenger side, alarmed at how white her face had become. Ringo, now in the back, bounced around wildly, scrabbling to reach Becca, but Hudson held up his hand to the dog. “Stay,” he ordered.
“It was Jessie,” Becca whispered. “You saw. It was Jessie, wasn’t it? She’s our age now.” Becca’s eyes fearfully peered through the windshield at the sudden driving rain. The lodge was barely visible. Faint smearings of light.
“It wasn’t Jessie,” Hudson said, though he’d had a moment of shock himself. “She was younger than we are.”
“Who are these people? I don’t look like them.” She threw Hudson a panicked glance. “Do I?”
“Not-like that,” he said.
“Not like Jessie, you mean?”
“We don’t know what Jessie would look like now.”
“She would look like that!” Becca flailed an arm in the girl’s direction. “Please! I want to go. Now.”
Hudson didn’t hesitate further. He jerked on the wheel, turning the Jetta around in a tight space. Branches scratched against the sides of the car.
“Hurry,” Becca said.
Her attitude worried him; he would have liked to stay and try to ask a few questions. But it was clear the woman in the dress had no interest in talking to them. It was not Jessie. He knew it wasn’t.
But she’d been the spitting image.
The Jetta bumped, shimmied, and jostled as Hudson ran it faster than he should back down the rutted track. When they reached 101, Hudson turned the car’s nose north and the wheels zinged along the wet pavement toward the turnoff to Highway 26.
Becca sat tensely for several miles, then said in a voice so low he could scarcely hear her, “In my vision, he was standing behind Jessie with a knife. He was going to stab her and then he looked at me. Hudson, he knows I’m pregnant!”
“Was he at Siren Song?” he asked carefully. He didn’t know how far he believed in her ability to see the man who intended her harm, but her fear had infected him. She believed it, and that’s what counted right now.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I thought so. Before we went. But then we saw the girl…”
“Woman.”
“Yes, woman.” She drew a hard breath. “Jessie was adopted. Are these people…did she come from this cult? If that woman wasn’t her, is she Jessie’s sister?”
“Some kind of relative, maybe.” Hudson didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but Lord, there had been a resemblance.
He shot a glance Becca’s way. In profile, she possessed a striking similarity as well. It had always been there, to some degree, but until he’d seen the Jessie lookalike, he’d never really taken it seriously.
“Jessie came to find them, but then she encountered him,” Becca murmured, watching the rivulets of rain run down her side window.
“Who is he?”
“One of them? I don’t know. But he hates me. I can feel it, and it’s real.”
“We’ll go home,” Hudson said grimly. “Make sure you and the baby are safe.”
Something in his tone cued Becca to his unspoken thoughts. “You’re going to come back here without me!”
“Not tonight. I want to get home. Safe. Have a late dinner. And think about this.”
“I don’t want you to come back here.”
“I need to know what Renee learned.”
