AllFreeNovel
Share Us
His hands were in his pockets and he looked as if he’d aged ten years in as many hours. Unshaven and rumpled, a bit of gray showing in his hair, dark smudges under his eyes-clearly he hadn’t slept much. But then, neither had she. She wasn’t too interested in holding a mirror up to her face.
“Look,” he said, “is there somewhere we could go and talk privately?”
“There’s a coffee kiosk in the lobby and some tables. I don’t know how private it is…”
“It’ll do.”
They walked through a set of automatic glass doors behind a couple of nurses, heads bent against the wind, their uniforms visible beneath their coats, who were deep in conversation. “I’ll buy,” McNally said, and Becca asked for decaf black coffee.
A few minutes later he joined Becca at a table she’d chosen because it sat away from the rest a little bit. He handed her one of the paper cups and gazed at her soberly.
“What do you want to tell me?” she asked, suddenly scared. “Oh, God, did someone die? Another wreck?”
“Nothing like that, trust me, and your dog is fine. Getting excellent care.” He paused, then said, “Tell me about your parents.”
“My parents,” she said blankly. “What do you want to know?”
He frowned. Hesitated, then looked her squarely in the eye. “Your blood type doesn’t match to either Barbara Metzger Ryan or James Ryan. It would be impossible for you to be their biological child.”
Rebecca just stared at him. “Where is this going?”
But she knew. She knew. She belonged with those people, as did Jessie. They were connected. Both of them. Connected to him!
Her mind spun backward to the night before. “Sister,” the beast had called her. Sister. Had he meant it-literally?
She was trembling.
“You look like one of them,” the old lady had said as she’d placed her gnarled fingers over Becca’s flat abdomen. “Siren Song.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Ms. Sutcliff? Becca?” McNally asked, seeing her face pale, her attention turn inward.
She pulled herself back with an effort. “You’re saying I’m adopted.”
“Yes.”
She was related to the colony members at Siren Song. Related to that girl who looked so much like Jessie. A question trembled on her tongue. Something so bizarre, and yet it made a peculiar kind of sense.
Before she could ask it, however, McNally gave her the answer. “We have a DNA match,” he said. He told her about the lab results, as well as the bone spur on her rib that was identical to Jessie’s. “You’re Jessie Brentwood’s sister.”
“A DNA match,” she repeated.
“Your parents and Jessie’s were the same two people,” he added for clarification.
“How can this be?” Becca murmured, but the tumblers started clicking into place. She looked like Jessie in some ways. She shared a strange and troubling extra ability with her-her visions; Jessie’s precognition. Jessie came to her in visions that were real enough to make her believe they were a message.
McNally was talking, saying Jessie might have come looking for Becca, that she was a runaway and had attended more schools than not around the Portland area, that she was maybe running to something, rather than away from it.
“No.” Becca cut him off. “She was running from him.”
“Him? The guy who ran you off the road last night?”
“Yes.”
He nodded, watching her closely, as if he expected her to fall apart. “I’ve talked to the Brentwoods several times. They’re not very forthcoming about Jessie’s adoption.”
“My parents never even told me.” She made a sound of disbelief, then sank into another long silence while her mind rearranged pieces of her life like a jigsaw puzzle, trying it this way and that, discarding a piece, picking up another, moving it around.
