and gotten nowhere. A return call to Tim had found him despondent. Renee’s soon-to-be-ex-husband, who too was driving to the hospital, had sounded slow and perplexed, as if he had no idea what his role was in this event.
For her part, Becca just felt still inside. A forced stillness. A way to insulate herself from whatever was coming next. She had burning questions about Renee’s accident, but neither she nor Hudson knew much more when they arrived than when they’d started.
Ringo barked at them as they left him in the truck.
“You’ll be okay,” Becca said to the dog automatically, though her mind was elsewhere and she wasn’t sure that any of them would ever be “okay” again. Even the dog.
Hudson, his expression calm but worried, clasped Becca’s hand and they entered through the emergency room’s automatic sliding doors together.
“Renee Trudeau?” Hudson said to a clerk behind an admitting window. “I was told she was admitted earlier today. Victim of an automobile accident. I’m her brother, Hudson Walker.”
“Could you wait a moment,” she said, inclining a hand toward the adjacent waiting room with its fake ficus tree and row of tired-looking chairs. Dog-eared, tattered magazines littered an old coffee table and an elderly man sat with his elbows resting on his knees, his gnarled hands tented under his unshaven chin. “I’ll let the doctor know you’re here.”
“I’d like to see my sister.” Hudson looked past the clerk to the line of doors beyond.
“I’ll let him know.” The woman, probably fifty though she sported new braces, smiled patiently, but there was something in her gaze that warned things might not be as bright as her grin suggested.
Becca perched on the edge of her seat but Hudson paced like a caged lion, glancing out the window, then at the rooms behind the glass partition and admitting desk, then Becca, then back again.
It wasn’t the doctor who approached them but a man in a crisp tan uniform with badges on his chest and upper arms. Deputy Warren Burghsmith of the Tillamook County Sheriff’s Department introduced himself to Hudson, who had been pointed out by the clerk in braces.
Becca steeled herself. This couldn’t be good news.
“You’re Renee Trudeau’s brother?” he asked.
“That’s right. How’s my sister?”
“Still alive, but barely. Lucky she didn’t die on impact.” He explained how Renee’s car had plunged through a guardrail and into the ocean, how someone had called in the accident, and how the Coast Guard had retrieved Hudson’s sister from the wreckage. The deputy was calm, grim, and careful. He asked Hudson a few questions, mostly about where Renee was going and what she’d been doing. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out something about the accident had alerted the authorities, though what that could be wasn’t apparent until the deputy admitted that Renee’s Toyota appeared to have been pushed—thrust—over the cliff.
“On purpose?” Hudson demanded.
“We don’t know.”
“When can I see her?”
“That’s up to Dr. Millay, but I’ll see what I can do.” The deputy walked through a pair of swinging doors marked No Admittance.
Minutes later a doctor in pale green surgical scrubs pushed through those same doors and while the elderly man looked up expectantly, the doctor, who had removed his gloves, headed straight for Hudson and Becca. “I’m Dr. Millay,” he introduced himself. He was tall, somewhere in his sixties, with the build of a runner. “I understand you’re Renee Trudeau’s brother?”
“Hudson Walker. Yes. How is she?” he asked, but the doctor’s somber expression said it all.
“I’m sorry. We did everything we could.”
Becca’s knees nearly buckled. What? What was he saying?
The blood drained from Hudson’s face as the doctor went on, “Your sister’s injuries were extensive. Broken clavicles, ribs, crushed pelvis, perforated lung…” In medical terms he described a body crushed from impact, but only a few of the phrases stuck in Becca’s brain. “…deep trauma to the chest and abdomen…heart and liver damage…unable to stop the internal bleeding…unconscious throughout…little or no pain…no response…” then finished with, “Ms. Trudeau died on the operating table. We called her time of death at 9:23 am.”
Hudson continued to stare at him. “Time of death?”
Becca squeezed his hand hard. Her heart started pounding in her ears so loudly she could scarcely hear.
Hudson seemed lost in another world. Becca pulled him unresistingly back to a chair but he sat on its edge, searching Dr. Millay’s craggy face for answers. The surgeon, who’d delivered the news quietly and without emotion, touched a hand to Hudson’s shoulder and said with a measure of kindness, “You can see her when you’re ready.”
Hudson rose to his feet like an automaton. Becca stood up as well, but he turned to her and said, “I want to see her alone.”
“Are you sure?”
He nodded jerkily and left with the doctor and Becca stared after them, feeling caught in a vortex that was pulling her down. Ever since the discovery of the bones at St. Elizabeth’s, death and tragedy had dogged their footsteps. How could this happen? Renee had been so vital. Such a force of nature. And now…and now she was dead?
In her mind’s eye Becca saw Jessie again, standing high on a cliff, near the ocean, the very ocean into which Renee’s car had plunged.
The ocean…
Through glazed eyes she watched as Deputy Burghsmith waited outside the inner sanctum doors. She realized Renee’s body would be moved to the morgue very soon.
A strange sound erupted from her own throat. A cry of anger and disbelief. The deputy came her way. “Are you all right, ma’am?”
“The car went over a cliff,” Becca said, as if committing it to memory. “Renee’s car.”
The deputy frowned. “Yes.”
“On Highway 101, and the car went into the ocean?”
“Yes, ma’am. Your friend was life-flighted to the hospital.”
“She lost control of the car because…someone pushed her over the edge on purpose?”
“We don’t know all the circumstances. The accident scene is still being reconstructed.” He glanced at his watch. “Well, they’ve probably about finished up by now.”
“But you believe someone ran her off the road,” she said again, though whether she was talking to herself or the deputy she wouldn’t have been able to say. She was lost in her own memories of another accident, where she’d been forced off the road by a hit-and-run driver and her car had plunged into a deep ditch, smashing into huge rocks that formed one side, crumpling the front of her car like weak cardboard. She’d been trapped inside for hours. Had to be freed by the Jaws of Life, though she remembered none of it. All she recalled was the horrific awareness that her
