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Humpty cast him a look. “Cell service ain’t great around here.”
So get into the twenty-first century! But the man was right. He couldn’t connect. Not with Becca and not with Mac, as he didn’t have the detective’s number on Zeke’s phone.
The big man knocked on the door, and when no one answered, rapped again and said, “Hello? Ms. Sutcliff?” He opened the door, and the minute it swung inward Hudson could tell that Becca hadn’t been in the room in a while. Packages were strewn on the bed, bags from a local all-in-one market. Her dirty clothes from the night before were stacked on a chair near the television stand. Grandpa Humpty nodded to himself as if he’d been an ace detective. “Whaddid I tell ya?” He looked over his shoulder at Hudson. “Maybe you should find yerself a new fiancée.”
Hudson didn’t stick around to listen. He was jogging across the parking lot, his shoulder screaming in pain, his jaw set. Once in Zeke’s Mustang, he found his vial of pain pills, tossed a couple into his mouth, and swallowed them whole. He found the card the two detectives from the sheriff’s department had given him, and dialed. They would have Mac’s number or, if not, they could damned well help him themselves.
He had no proof.
They would have to take his word for it.
But Hudson was damned sure Becca was heading for trouble.
Trouble…Jessie’s word.
The thought sent ice running through his veins.
What was Siren Song? Becca asked herself as she drove back toward Deception Bay proper. Her birthplace? A cult?
She eased the old Chevy through the streets of this sleepy little town where traffic was sparse. The wind, which hadn’t existed a few hours earlier, was beginning to pick up, sharp gusts stirring the branches of trees and pushing litter and debris inland. Night had fallen in earnest and the few streetlights’ bluish lights cast a pool of illumination down the main street.
But Becca was on her way to see Mad Maddie. The young woman at Siren Song had mentioned her name, almost like a direction to what Becca sought. And Renee had talked about the sometime psychic who’d warned her that she was marked for death. Becca herself had wanted to see her, but then had gotten sidetracked by the cult at Siren Song.
She turned her car northward. Driving mostly by instinct, she headed for the cliff area and the area she suspected was the old woman’s home. She’d never been to Maddie’s before but knew it was on the sea, so she only had to follow the road running along the shoreline. The beachfront road turned inland for a bit as it climbed away from the downtown area and the sandy crescent that was connected to the bay at the south end of town.
She recognized the old motel the minute she turned the corner, so she eased the car onto the pockmarked gravel lot. A few lights were shining on the long, low building, an old motel, situated on a ridge overlooking the dark, whitecapped ocean. Another storm was in full force now, wind screaming, rain on its way.
Becca wasn’t sure what she was going to say to the old woman. Something about “Mad Maddie” was definitely off. But Mad Maddie had first mentioned Siren Song to Becca, so the connection between her and the cult members existed.
From one end of the building, a light glowed. Or was it illumination from a television? A silvery blue flickering patch of light came from the window of the end unit. The manager’s home, if the battered vacancy sign was to be believed. The other apartments, eight or ten “homey cottages with cable TV,” were connected by vacant carports that were dilapidated and weathered and worn. Peeling gray paint covered rusted gutters that had worked themselves loose and swung and groaned in the wind that rose above the sea. The motel was untended and unkempt. Tall beach grass and berry vines encroached, the concrete was cracked and fissured, the gravel pounded into potholes, a sorry-looking picket fence undulating and bent from age and rot.
But it wasn’t the ramshackle buildings that caught Becca’s attention. No. As she sat in the car, her windshield wipers clapping away the gathering mist, she stared through the streaky glass to the cliff beyond.
So familiar.
So like that rocky outcropping where she saw Jessie in her visions, where she’d witnessed the embodiment of evil, the murderous bastard who had loomed over Jessie in her visions.
This was the scene of those visions, not Siren Song.
“Dear God,” she whispered, her throat tightening.
Her cell phone jangled and she jumped, then realiz
ed that it hadn’t actually rung, but that a message had been left on her voicemail. She punched buttons to retrieve it and heard, over the pounding of the surf far below, Hudson’s worried voice. He asked her to call, to meet him at the motel as he was checking himself out of the hospital. And she was to call Zeke’s number, as Hudson was using his friend’s phone. He signed off with a quick “love you,” which nearly brought tears to her eyes. He’d forgive her for keeping the secret about the baby. Maybe he really did love her. Maybe it wasn’t all about Jessie.
She tried to call him back, once, twice, three times, and three times she failed.
“Damn,” she whispered as she climbed out of the car and the wind, fierce now, tore at her clothes and hair. She considered leaving, driving into cell phone range and calling Hudson, but she didn’t want to take the time.
Not when she had the overwhelming sensation that time was running out, faster and faster, grains of sand slipping through the hourglass that was her life.
But she tried to call Hudson one more time and failed again, the call never going through. Swearing softly, she tucked the phone into her pocket and started up the broken flagstones to the “office” door. Glancing around the side of the building to the open sea, she hesitated briefly. Darkness made it hard to see the shifting gray waters of the Pacific, but she could hear the waves pounding the base of the cliffs, spraying upward while the wind wailed.
Spiderwebs of realization brushed up her arms.
She had been here before. She was certain of it. What was it about this place? Nervous, she walked along the exterior of the decaying motel, barely noticing that some of the glass panes of the windows had been replaced with plywood, the plywood having grayed and buckled over the years. When she reached the back of the motel she stopped short.
“Jessie,” she whispered as her hair whipped over her face.
