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“Me, too. But…there’s something I need to tell you.”
“Can’t wait.”
“Stop being a bastard. I think I might be…in serious trouble…”
Jessie was silhouetted by the light from the staircase and there was something in her expression that gave him pause. Something darker than their petty argument, something that made her bite her lower lip, as if she were afraid of the next words she might utter. She gazed down at the bottom step, the one his father had replaced, but he knew she wasn’t seeing the new boards or nails holding the stair in place. She was somewhere else. Lost in her own thoughts.
“What?” he asked.
“Trouble. Serious trouble.” She wouldn’t look at him.
Swallowing hard, he prepared himself for the fact that she might be admitting she was pregnant. No matter what she tells you, you have to be a man, Walker. Tough up.
She looked up at him, worry and more-terror?-shadowing her eyes. “Trouble’s coming to find me,” she said almost inaudibly over the rumble of the furnace and the frantic beating of his own heart.
“What kind of trouble?”
“Bad trouble.” She ran a hand nervously through her hair, pushing the golden brown strands from her face. Her fingers trembled slightly. “I don’t know what I was thinking…I…I should have stopped. But I just couldn’t.”
“Stopped what?”
“Searching.”
“Searching for what?” he asked, totally confounded. She wasn’t pregnant? Relief washed over him, but still he was confused. He crossed to her and reached for her hand resting on the banister.
Instead of explaining further, she changed her mood in her quicksilver way. As if by sheer willpower, she straightened up, then winked at him slyly and said, “You’re not over me, no matter what you think. You’re hooked.”
Hudson stared down at her. She was like that. One way one moment, completely changed the next.
“I’m in your blood,” she said.
And then she was gone.
She’d run up the stairs and out the back door, and as he’d followed and reached the porch, he heard the engine of her car turn over. From the porch he watched the glow of her taillights disappear in the rising fog.
Now he trudged back up the stairs, hearing the ancient boards creak under his weight.
He’d never seen her again.
And what had he done after Jessie disappeared that night twenty years ago? Mourned? Grieved? Longed for her return?
Well, maybe he had a little, in the beginning. Then there had been the questions from the cops and the wondering, always the wondering what had happened to the girl he was supposed to have loved.
But in the end he’d sought solace, comfort, and a chance to forget in sex with Becca. Yes, it had been a few years later, but it hadn’t felt right. He’d wanted to drown himself in her, but Jessie’s face, her voice, her ways…had never gone away, not completely.
Had it been his own guilt eating at him? Undoubtedly. But that feeling had been real and raw enough that it had forced him to give up on Becca. Forced him to discover a new life. Forced him to move on.
I see things… That’s what she’d said, what Tamara had echoed tonight at the restaurant. It was as if they, the friends who’d known her, understood that she was different, a bit ethereal.
He drained his glass, left it in the sink, then walked into his living room and threw himself down on the sofa. The blank screen of the television stared at him but his mind was viewing a film of its own making.
Were those Jessie’s bones found in the maze? The only news released through the media was that they belonged to a young female victim. Nobody was saying whether they’d been lying there twenty years or if they were newly deposited. The police were mum, and the story had been eclipsed by more recent local news: a murder apparently from a burglary gone wrong; flooding along lower elevations from a rapidly melting snowpack; a defendant in a criminal trial suddenly hauling off and smacking his own lawyer in the face.
Hudson sighed. He’d been running for years from thoughts of Jessie…and Becca. He’d been running for years from his own feelings. Regardless of what was decided about the bones found at the base of the Madonna statue, maybe it was time to remember, think, even conjecture. Figure out what happened, if anyone could.
It was time to stop running.
Chapter Six
