style="font-size:15px;"> Again a bit of hesitation, then he said, “Who knows? Renee seems to think none of us have gotten over it.”
“‘It’ being Jessie’s disappearance.”
“Yeah.”
Have you? Becca wondered and doubted it.
Hudson added, “She thinks there’s maybe some course of action we should take to find out if it’s Jessie.”
“Like going to the police?” Becca said dryly.
“The police weren’t exactly our friends,” Hudson agreed.
Becca leaned back against the couch and glanced out the living room window. The night was dark. Thick. Rain still ran down the windowpanes. Absently she rubbed Ringo’s furry head and thought back. The police had subjected them all to hours of interrogation in the wake of Jessie’s disappearance. The guys had suffered the brunt of the authorities’ scrutiny, but the girls had been interviewed as well. Though the general consensus at the school and police department had been that Jessie had run away again, there’d been one cop who’d insisted she was murdered and he put Hudson and the guys in their group through the wringer, interrogating them over and over again until The Third’s father, a Portland lawyer who owned several buildings near the waterfront, had threatened to sue the department for harassment. The cop had backed off a little, or so it had seemed, but Becca had felt that he’d had a personal vendetta to fulfill.
Between Christopher Delacroix Junior’s threats, lack of evidence, and a missing body, the case had gone stone cold.
“I’ll see you Thursday,” Hudson said, breaking into Becca’s reverie.
“Will Tamara be there?”
“Think so.”
“Good. Hey, before you hang up, what was that cop’s name? The one who wouldn’t believe Jessie ran away?”
“Sam McNally,” Hudson said, a distinct chill to his voice.
“Mac,” Becca said, remembering. Though the cop, only about ten years older than the kids he was interrogating, had mostly left her alone, he’d haunted their days and nights long after Jessie disappeared. “So now do you think he was right? About Jessie being murdered?”
“I don’t know.” He was terse. Suddenly distant again. “I sure as hell hope not.”
“But if she’s still alive…where’s she been all this time?”
“Somewhere else.”
“Yeah…”
“I’ve got to call a few more people, see if they’ll join us.”
“Okay.”
He hesitated a second, then said, “Good talking to you, Becca,” and hung up.
Becca carefully replaced the phone. “Good talking to you, too,” she said softly to the empty room.
Chapter Three
Hudson glanced around the stable, checking the horses one last time. They were all in their stalls, settling in for the night, nothing disturbed, nothing as it shouldn’t be. He snapped out the overhead light, shut the door, and dashed, head bent, across the expanse of gravel that separated the barn, stable, and machine shed from the house. The security lights gave a bluish tint to the night and overhead, through the rain, he thought he spied an owl soar into the higher branches of the old willow tree that he and his sister used to climb.
“Come on, Renee, don’t be a chicken,” he’d called to her and she, never one to turn down a dare, had struggled up the interlaced branches that he’d scaled with ease. It had pissed her off that her brother, her younger brother by nearly four minutes, was stronger and more athletic than she could hope to be.
But she’d been smart.
Had sailed through school while he’d been uninterested in classroom assignments, at least until college. She’d proudly waited for each report card to arrive in the mail and had beamed as their mother had seen the row of As next to the subject matter. Hudson had done all right, though he hadn’t really given a crap, except for the comments by the teachers. “Doesn’t work to his potential” or “Tests well, but doesn’t apply himself in the classroom” or his favorite, “Isn’t a team player.” Yeah, well. That much was as true today as it had been when his mother had read the remarks aloud in the old kitchen, some twenty-five years earlier.
Tonight, as he ran past, the willow was devoid of leaves and the owl moved to better shelter, flying through the open hay loft window to his perch high in the rafters of the barn, a structure that had been in the Walker family for over a hundred years. Hudson passed the tree and another memory sizzled through his brain, one filled with heat and passion and only the slightest worry that he and Becca would get caught making love beneath the lush, drooping branches and canopy of fluttering leaves. God, he’d had it bad for her.
Maybe worse than you had it for Jessie?
He hurried up the back walk and onto the porch, shaking drops from his hair, as a cloudburst released more slanting rain that battered the old shingles of the roof and gurgled down the gutters. He didn’t want to think about Jessie and hoped to hell that those bones found at the school weren’t hers, that she was living somewhere far away and was still as intriguing and mysterious as she’d always been.
But his gut told him differently.
He stepped into the house and it felt oddly empty tonight, more so than it had before.
“All in your head,” he told himself as he hung his jacket on a peg in the mudroom, kicked off his boots, and in stocking feet, stepped onto the worn linoleum he swore he’d replace this summer, along with the roof and changes to the bathrooms and this old kitchen. The house was starting to look worn. Tired-looking. The same as it had been for the past thirty years. His parents had “updated” it in the early seventies, and now it needed a full remodel.
Spying the phone, he remembered his short call with Becca, how the sound of her voice had taken him back in time to that summer after his first year at Oregon State. Man, he’d been horny and she, well…his groin tightened at the thought of their affair. “Too hot to handle,” he said aloud and reached into the refrigerator for a beer.
Funny, when Renee had insisted “the old gang” get together and had finally convinced Hudson that she was going to arrange a meeting whether he liked it or not, he’d offered to call Becca. Not Zeke, nor Mitch, nor Glenn, just Becca. And Renee had known that Becca would be the lure. Her eyes had actually lit with smug satisfaction when he’d reluctantly agreed and offered to call her.
“I bet Tamara has her number,” Renee said, tossing him her cell phone, Tamara Pitts’s name and number listed on her display. “Give her a call.”
She hadn’t added I dare you, but it had been there just the same. They both knew it, and no, it wasn’t a twin thing. Renee just knew how to manipulate people. “She’s not married, you know, her husband died last year and get this, he left not only a widow, but a girlfriend to boot, a pregnant girlfriend. Becca didn’t even have time to divorce the bastard before he kicked off. A real gem, that Ben Sutcliff.”
He
