She stepped through a side door where the wind tugged at her new hooded sweatshirt and the air was heavy with moisture. She was just wondering what was holding up McNally when she saw the detective heading toward the front door of the hospital. He veered toward her and they met on a cement path that led to an adjoining building that housed other clinics.
“Glad you showed up last night,” she said seriously.
His hands were in his pockets and he looked as if he’d aged ten years in as many hours. Unshaven and rumpled, a bit of gray showing in his hair, dark smudges under his eyes-clearly he hadn’t slept much. But then, neither had she. She wasn’t too interested in holding a mirror up to her face.
“Look,” he said, “is there somewhere we could go and talk privately?”
“There’s a coffee kiosk in the lobby and some tables. I don’t know how private it is…”
“It’ll do.”
They walked through a set of automatic glass doors behind a couple of nurses, heads bent against the wind, their uniforms visible beneath their coats, who were deep in conversation. “I’ll buy,” McNally said, and Becca asked for decaf black coffee.
A few minutes later he joined Becca at a table she’d chosen because it sat away from the rest a little bit. He handed her one of the paper cups and gazed at her soberly.
“What do you want to tell me?” she asked, suddenly scared. “Oh, God, did someone die? Another wreck?”
“Nothing like that, trust me, and your dog is fine. Getting excellent care.” He paused, then said, “Tell me about your parents.”
“My parents,” she said blankly. “What do you want to know?”
He frowned. Hesitated, then looked her squarely in the eye. “Your blood type doesn’t match to either Barbara Metzger Ryan or James Ryan. It would be impossible for you to be their biological child.”
Rebecca just stared at him. “Where is this going?”
But she knew. She knew. She belonged with those people, as did Jessie. They were connected. Both of them. Connected to him!
Her mind spun backward to the night before. “Sister,” the beast had called her. Sister. Had he meant it-literally?
She was trembling.
“You look like one of them,” the old lady had said as she’d placed her gnarled fingers over Becca’s flat abdomen. “Siren Song.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Ms. Sutcliff? Becca?” McNally asked, seeing her face pale, her attention turn inward.
She pulled herself back with an effort. “You’re saying I’m adopted.”
“Yes.”
She was related to the colony members at Siren Song. Related to that girl who looked so much like Jessie. A question trembled on her tongue. Something so bizarre, and yet it made a peculiar kind of sense.
Before she could ask it, however, McNally gave her the answer. “We have a DNA match,” he said. He told her about the lab results, as well as the bone spur on her rib that was identical to Jessie’s. “You’re Jessie Brentwood’s sister.”
“A DNA match,” she repeated.
“Your parents and Jessie’s were the same two people,” he added for clarification.
“How can this be?” Becca murmured, but the tumblers started clicking into place. She looked like Jessie in some ways. She shared a strange and troubling extra ability with her-her visions; Jessie’s precognition. Jessie came to her in visions that were real enough to make her believe they were a message.
McNally was talking, saying Jessie might have come looking for Becca, that she was a runaway and had attended more schools than not around the Portland area, that she was maybe running to something, rather than away from it.
“No.” Becca cut him off. “She was running from him.”
“Him? The guy who ran you off the road last night?”
“Yes.”
He nodded, watching her closely, as if he expected her to fall apart. “I’ve talked to the Brentwoods several times. They’re not very forthcoming about Jessie’s adoption.”
“My parents never even told me.” She made a sound of disbelief, then sank into another long silence while her mind rearranged pieces of her life like a jigsaw puzzle, trying it this way and that, discarding a piece, picking up another, moving it around.
“You do resemble her,” McNally pointed out.
Is that why Hudson “loves” me? Is that what he sees in me? She’d always wondered, and now it seemed a likely bet.
DNA was irrefutable. She believed McNally.
She stared into her untouched cup of coffee and felt as if her life, everything she’d ever held to be true, was crumbling at her feet. Why had her parents lied to her?
“Jessie never knew,” she said. Until after her death.
McNally nodded.
Becca swallowed. Hadn’t she always known she was different? Suspected that because of her visions, there was something in her past she didn’t know or understand?
Her hand tightened over her cup. Her whole life had been built on lies, and because of it she could not have predicted that this monster would relentlessly chase her down.
“He killed her,” Becca said with certainty. “He had a knife last night. He wanted to kill me but then he saw her and it stopped him.”
“Saw who?”
“Jessie. In a vision. Did I tell you I have visions? That I see Jessie standing on a cliff’s edge, whispering to me? She wants justice, and I think she wants me to end it once and for all with this demon who won’t let us be!”
“Let the police do their job,” McNally said quickly, clearly thinking she was going to charge out on her own.
And wasn’t she? Wasn’t that what she was thinking? Didn’t she feel the urgency inside her breast that was like an angry, living thing?
“We’re looking for him. He drove off, but his vehicle had to sustain damage. I believe you said it was white or tan?”
“The grill guard,” Becca said suddenly. “His truck had a grill guard.”
“A grill guard,” he repeated. “Maybe detachable, if he used the same vehicle to push Renee Trudeau’s off the road.”
“It was damaged. It was scraped.”
“Do you remember anything else? Something else that might help? Any little thing?”
She gazed at him a long time. McNally waited, wondering what was coming down the pike now. At length, she said, “I think the answer is in Deception Bay. I think he lives there.”
“Any particular reason?”
She almost told him about Siren Song. He hadn’t blinked when she’d mentioned her visions, but that only meant he was just taking in information, it wasn’t proof that he believed her. He could think she was the biggest nutcase in the world.
“There’s one more thing,” Mac said, drawing her back to the here and now. “You said this has happened before to you. That you were run off the road the last time you were pregnant.”
Her head snapped up. He knew?
“You told the paramedics and I overheard,” he explained, correctly guessing her feelings. “That accident was about sixteen years ago on the same stretch of road. My partner looked it up. Was Walker the father?”
She felt as if the life had been squeezed out of her. “Yes,” she whispered, nodding, “but I’ve never told him. If you plan on breaking that news, I should do it first.”
“If there’s a pattern, he needs to know.”
“There’s a pattern.”
“Then you need to tell him now.”
Becca couldn’t move for a moment. Every ache and pain sustained from the night before seemed to manifest itself ten times over. With the low-level energy of the elderly, she rose from her chair and headed back to Hudson’s room.
Hudson ached all over.
When he shifted in the bed, there didn’t seem to be an inch on his body that wasn’t in pain. He looked at the chart next to his bed, a sequence of “happy” and “not-so-happy” faces indicating where his pain medications should keep him. He was supposed to be in the kinda happy zone, and he definitely was not. But the nurse had just been in and adjusted his IV drip, so things would improve. The detectives from the sheriff’s department had already taken off as well.