her heart began to race. A face appeared, shadowed as if by a hood or a cowl, and eyes as dead as she’d ever seen seemed to look through the glass.
Jesus!
Her heart squeezed.
She bit back a scream and pushed her chair back so quickly the legs screeched against the floor.
Searching wildly around the room for a weapon, any kind of weapon, expecting at any second for the glass to shatter, she nearly fell off the chair, then ran, half-stumbled into the hallway and the darkness beyond.
You’re imagining things, you’re imagining things, you’re goddamned imagining things! She slipped into the darkened kitchen where the palest of light shone through the windows and back door…Oh, hell, was it locked? She crossed the room, tested the dead bolt, then, with every hair standing straight up on her arms, she grabbed a butcher knife from the block on the kitchen counter and fled to the windowless hall again.
Cold sweat collected over her spine and the sound of the wind whistled through the rafters.
The cell phone! Use the damned phone!
“Oh, God,” she whispered, realizing her phone was in her purse, at her desk.
Moving silently, her heartbeat echoing in her eardrums, she inched down the hall. Her fingers, gripping the handle of the knife, were sweating and she was certain at any second someone or something would leap at her from the back bedroom or broom closet.
Carefully, heartbeat roaring in her ears, she eased back to the archway to the living area. She barely dared breathe as she poked her head around to view the room and beyond the window.
No figure.
No dark shadow.
Nor was there anything but pure darkness at the other window near the door.
Had it gone?
Or had her fertile mind played a horrid trick on her?
She snapped out the lights, and the interior, aside from a soft glow from the computer screen, was as dark as the night outside. Waiting for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, she eased to the window and peered out.
No face.
No dead eyes.
No one looming, ready to pounce.
Just the shivering shadows from the fir tree standing near the porch.
A raving, paranoid freak, that’s what you are!
She returned the knife to its spot, then quickly she closed all the shades, double-checked the windows and latches, then went back to her computer, one eye ever vigilant. On the Internet she searched for anything she could learn about Jezebel Brentwood, St. Elizabeth’s High School, girls who’d gone missing around the same time as Jessie, and Detective Samuel McNally of the Laurelton Police Department.
She didn’t go to bed until after two, only after rechecking all the locks. Keeping the butcher knife on the bedside table, she fell into a restless sleep where dreams of high school kept her tossing and turning.
The next morning, suffering from sleeplessness, she saw the big-bladed knife she’d left on the nightstand and mentally chastised herself. “Fool,” she muttered. She was still letting herself be affected by the odd elements of the story.
Determined to shake it off, she showered, threw on beach clothes, and spent nearly two hours walking along the foggy beach, feeling the salt spray against her nose and cheeks. Then she hiked back to the cabin and reviewed her notes again, hoping something would leap out at her. She had an address for the Brentwoods’ cabin. One of the reasons she’d come to the beach was to find it, so she climbed into her Camry and tried to follow a local map of the area, wishing she owned a GPS system. It took a while, and she drove down a number of dead-end streets, but she finally found the place. The house was weather beaten and slightly tired, like many others along this stretch of coastline. She eyed it carefully, a low-slung ranch with a picture window and, when the sun was out, an incredible view of the ocean. Today, though, it was still gray and close, with mist clinging to the surrounding hills and obscuring the horizon. The sea itself, the color of steel, was hard to discern in the fog, the abandoned lighthouse on that craggy rock off the shore, invisible.
Had Jessie ever been here during one of her runaway adventures? Renee was half inclined to wander around the place and check, but changed her mind when a maid-cleaning crew arrived in a van and parked in the drive. They glanced toward Renee, who turned back to her car. The house was obviously a rental now. No place for Jessie to hide.
Renee returned to Deception Bay and parked near a local coffee shop and bakery where a few patrons were sipping their morning jolts of java and munching on cinnamon rolls, croissants, and scones. The interior of the Sands of Thyme was warm and smelled of coffee and spices. Newspapers were left open on a few tables and the walls were lined with coffee, tea, utensils, and cups, all for sale.
“Do you know Madame Madeline?” Renee asked the girl at the cashier stand.
She made a disparaging sound. “She’s more than a few rolls short of a dozen, if you ask me. Makes those cultees at Siren Song look normal.”
“Hey!” a man in the back yelled, shooting the girl a don’t-gossip-with-the-customers look as he bagged the sliced loaf and the espresso machine screamed as it spewed white foam into huge cups.
“Siren Song?”
“That big house up on the cliff.” She pointed away from the ocean toward the other side of the highway where the land broke upward sharply into the Coast Range. “They all wear weird stuff and act strange. I expect their heads to turn around if you look at ’em too long.”
“They mind their own business,” the man from the back said loudly.
The cashier mouthed, “Sorry,” to Renee, who took her cappuccino to a table, picked up the newspaper, scanned the headlines, and decided the Coastal Clarion made a rag like the Star look sophisticated. Thinking it might be better to approach Maddie a little later in the day, Renee passed the time working on a word puzzle, realizing that an elderly man and woman at a nearby table must have overheard her conversation with the cashier because she heard Siren Song mentioned several times. The elderly woman unfolded a plastic rain hat from her purse and said tartly, “…nothing but trouble up there, if you ask me. Like those ones in Waco or…Arizona. Got all kinds of strange ways of behavin’. Been that way for over a hundred years.”
The man with her, in thick glasses, plaid jacket, and driving cap, nodded as he stood and folded his paper under his arm. “Bad news, that. Good thing they keep to themselves.”
They walked—he with a cane, she with her arm linked through his—out of the bakery and into light, sprinkling rain, leaving Renee to eavesdrop on a trio of women obviously on a weekend getaway together but laughing and outtalking each other about the hilarious antics of their small children.
Renee packed it in, making tracks from the bakery and taking a turn through town, her breath fogging in the chilly air, the smell of the sea ever present, and peek-a-boo views of the sea visible along the streets running east and west. A few cars ambled along the narrow roads, though few pedestrians braved the winter elements as a thin drizzle leaked from the sky. She wasted some time at a cozy antique shop whose proprietor, a middle-aged woman with a silvery gray bob,
