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She heard the sound of footsteps and turned quickly, her heart in her throat, to see someone appear through the mist. She nearly screamed until she spied the large dog ambling beside a man, out for their evening constitutional.
Get a grip, she told herself just as the lock sprang and she let herself inside. She dropped her things on a futon with a faded print cover that served as a couch, then returned outside for her two bags of groceries.
She was back in the cabin within seconds. After locking the door behind her, she flipped on the lights, lit the gas fire, and told her heart to stop its ridiculous knocking as she tossed her suitcase into the single bedroom on the main floor, then flipped open her laptop computer and waited for it to boot up.
She was lucky enough to jump onto a neighboring family’s wireless Internet as this little cottage was barely equipped with electricity, let alone anything as technologically advanced as a router; there wasn’t even a phone line. The owner refused to take any money from Renee and only asked that she “spruce the place up a bit” when she came, so she didn’t argue with him and accepted the tiny abode as her retreat away from Tim and her disintegrating marriage.
It was also here where she had first decided to do her story on the missing Jezebel Brentwood.
And Jessie Brentwood was the reason she felt such overwhelming persecution. As if she were being watched and followed. And it was all because she’d taken that first trip to Deception Bay.
Jessie’s adoptive parents, the Brentwoods, had been reluctant to talk to Renee when she’d first posed the idea to them for a story about their missing daughter. They knew Renee and liked her. She’d been a tenuous link to Jessie, the one friend who’d kept in contact with them off and on over the years, but they’d balked at the idea that Renee would drag it all up again. They still believed Jessie might walk through their door. Stranger things had happened.
Renee had been quietly persistent and when she asked about Jessie’s birth parents, they both clamped their jaws shut as if afraid of revealing government secrets. Renee had asked them point-blank why they seemed so-scared-to talk about the adoption, but neither would open up to her. The one piece of information she gleaned was that the adoption-a private one-had taken place in the small coastal town of Deception Bay. The Brentwoods had a cabin there, although it appeared they hadn’t returned there in a long time. Renee asked if Jessie knew about the cabin. Had she been there before, on previous occasions? Could that be where she went as a runaway? The Brentwoods assured her that no, Jessie never went to the cabin. It was one of the first places they always looked for her, but she was never there and certainly hadn’t been since the last time she disappeared.
That information was what had sent Renee initially to the beach and Deception Bay. She’d asked some questions of the town residents about the area, what it had been like, who were some of the notable families, whatever she could think of to get the conversation rolling. Then she would insert that she knew a family who’d adopted a daughter from somewhere around Deception Bay, that daughter being a friend of hers from high school. No one seemed to know anything, but an old salt who spent his time on a lookout bench above the ocean and fed the seagulls, much to the annoyance of the townies who found them scavenging pests, told her she should go see Mad Maddie.
“Mad Maddie?” Renee asked dubiously.
“Lives up there…” He waved in the direction of a rocky tor. “Coupla nice motels there once. Run down now. Maddie owns one of ’em, I guess. Leastwise she stays there. Someday some big resort company’ll buy it up and build somethin’ hee-uge. Cost a fortune to stay there, but ain’t happened yet.”
“You think Mad Maddie could help my friend locate her biological parents?”
“She’s as fruity as a punchbowl. Lost her marbles. She reads the future.” He snorted out a few chuckles. “She’ll tell ya a whole buncha drivel.”
“She’s a psychic reader?”
He snorted. “Call it what you want. Her and her crazy family.”
Renee had driven up a winding road to the crest of the tor and had to agree with the old salt about the beauty of the area. Someday maybe a resort company would build “somethin’ hee-uge” here and it would have an amazing view of the Pacific. But for now there wasn’t much left of the m
otel but a gray, weathered, beaten-down, one-story set of buildings with sagging carports and weed-choked gravel parking. There were a couple of equally sad cars parked outside, vacation renters, who could stay by the day, week, or month, according to the handwritten sign propped against the wall.
Renee guessed the unit at the end was Mad Maddie’s residence, as there were items stacked outside the front door: used furniture, old plastic toys, a propane stove that had seen better days, various and sundry kitchen and bathroom items, and a couple of lawn chairs set out to view the approach of visitors, not the commanding view on the back, western side. A hoarder’s dream.
She’d knocked on the door that sported a cockeyed sign that read: Office. It took a while, but Mad Maddie opened the door to reveal a woman with iron-gray hair pulled into a severe bun and a stony, oddly blank expression. She appeared to be somewhere in her late sixties, but Renee figured she could be off a decade either way.
“Are you…Maddie?” Renee asked.
“You wantin’ a room?”
“Actually I-was told you do-readings?”
Something shifted in her gray eyes. “You want to see Madame Madeline.” She stepped aside and Renee hurried across the threshold.
“Yes.”
And so Mad Maddie aka Madame Madeline had sat Renee down on a faux-leather couch with springs that felt as if they were going to break through the worn surface at any moment, and then she’d pulled out an equally worn set of Tarot cards. Renee had been fascinated. A frisson had actually crawled up her spine. There was something eerie and authentic about this old woman that the almost antiseptic, staged Tarot reader she’d visited with Tamara couldn’t compete with. Here, the ambience was rich, and instead of the heady scent of incense, she smelled rotting wood and the salt of the sea.
Premonition had feathered along her arms and Renee automatically rubbed her elbows. Mad Maddie regarded her in a blank way that caused Renee’s heart to beat a little faster. She didn’t look down at the cards. She stared straight at Renee.
“What do you want?” she asked.
So Renee had rambled on about her friend, searching for her biological parents, her friend from high school, St. Elizabeth’s, who’d been missing for years and who Renee was searching for. She told more than she expected to, a little unnerved by Maddie’s great silences. Only once did Maddie move during the recitation, and that was to look a bit wildly over one shoulder toward the back of the motel. Renee automatically looked as well, but there was nothing there. A gust of wind had rattled the panes and Renee had started.
“She’s dead,” Maddie told Renee.
“Jessie? Jezebel?” Renee had been stunned at her bald announcement.
