The phantom girl took a step forward, the tips of her boots balanced over the edge of the cliff. Becca reached out an arm. Her mouth opened in protest.
"Stop! Stop!"
Was she going to throw herself to her death?
Becca lunged forward just as the girl turned to face her. Instead of a profile shot, Becca caught a full-on view of her face. "Jessie?" she whispered in shock, her head reeling.
Jessie just stared at Becca and Becca, powerless, stared back. The wind danced through Jessie's hair and around her small, serious face. Becca's heart pounded painfully.
Jessie Brentwood? Her missing friend? Gone for twenty years...
Except now, in Becca's vision.
"Be careful!" Becca warned. "You're too close."
The phantom girl lifted a finger to her lips, then mouthed something at Becca.
"What?" Becca tried to clear her mind. "What?"
In the gathering mist the girl's image began to fade. Becca pushed forward but it felt as if her feet were mired to the ground.
"Jessie!" she cried.
The girl melded with the rain and the watery world dimmed into endless gray.
Becca sensed tears on her lashes and a dull throb in her head. Somewhere a male voice said, "Hey, lady. You okay?"
With difficulty, Becca opened her eyes. She was in the mall. Sprawled on the tile floor. Packages tossed asunder. No more ocean. No more wind. No more Jessie.
Tucking her legs beneath her, Becca swallowed hard. It was difficult to come back to reality. It always was after one of her visions. The damn things. She'd thought they were behnd her. A symptom of her childhood. She hadn't had one since high school and she was now thirty-four years old.
But she never forgot. Not completely.
"I'm fine," she said in a voice she didn't recognize as her own. Clearing her throat, she fought the blinding stabs of pain that flashed through her head. Another unwelcome part of the visions. "I tripped."
"Yeah?"
The young man bending over her wasn't buying it. A small crowd of tweenagers had gathered, small enough that Becca figured she hadn't been out that long, maybe mere seconds. One of the girls was looking at her with huge, round eyes, and Becca could still hear the reverberations of the girl's scream as she watched Becca go down. She was holding a soda from the nearby food court. Vaguely Becca remembered glancing their way just before she was overtaken by her vision.
"You were, like, having an attack," a different girl said. This one wore a hat that smashed her bangs to her forehead and she peeked out between the strands of blond hair. They all looked ready to jump and run. Briefly, Becca thought about yelling, "Boo!" and sending them stumbling over themselves, away from the crazy lady.
Flash. Flash. Flash.
Becca heard the snap of a cell phone being shut. One of the guys had clicked off a series of pictures of her fainting spell. That did it. Becca climbed unsteadily to her feet and gave the kid the evil eye. He looked torn between bravado and fear. Becca was about to give him a piece of her mind, but was saved the effort when a heavy-set woman in a dusty blue uniform steamed toward them.
"Back off," she bit out at the boy who attempted to swagger toward his friends, even though he was boiling to escape. They all half-ran, half-loped toward the food court and an exit door.
"You all right, ma'am?" the security woman asked.
Flushing with embarrassment, Becca nodded, collecting her packages. She was definitely not all right.
"You look kinda pale. Maybe you should sit down."
"This happens to me. Not enough air getting in. Vagus nerve, you know. Shuts down the whole system sometimes."
It was clearly mumbo-jumbo to the security guard, and it was a flat out lie to boot. Doctors had once rubbed their jaws, speculating what caused Becca to faint and have visions. They ignored the visions, concentrating on the cause of her fainting. They had postulated and supposed and theorized to Becca's parents, Barbara and Jim Ryan, but there had never been any satisfactory explanations.
"I'm fine," she reassured the guard one more time, hanging on to the shreds of her dignity with an effort. Before she could be questioned further, Becca headed toward the mall exit and her car, a blue Volkswagen Jetta. She tossed the packages onto the passenger seat, feeling a twinge in one shoulder from the fall. Her body was still tingling, too, as if her muscles had been asleep. Sliding behind the wheel, she dropped her forehead to the steering wheel and took several deep breaths. This vision had been different. Almost touchable.
She'd actually reached for the girl. That had never happened before.
Was it Jessie? Was it?
Becca swallowed and lifted her head, gazing blankly through the windshield at the mall's cream stucco walls. Not since that last year of high school. Not once. She'd managed to convince herself over the years that she wasn't odd. Some kind of freak. That she wasn't losing her mind.
But this vision of Jessie had been stronger than anything she'd experienced before. And a helluva lot more frightening.
What did it mean?
Shaken, Becca drove from the parking lot, aware that the sky had darkened, night dropping quickly. One of her packages dumped over and the baby gift she'd purchased spilled onto the seat. It was a bright, whimsical mermaid puppet sewn in silver lame and pink and green sequins.
Sadness filled her again. Pulling her eyes away from the puppet with an effort, she headed purposely for the little condo she'd once shared with Ben but which was now all hers.
It had been a hell of a day already, and she wasn't going to dwell on "what could have been" any more.
By the time she pulled in to her designated slot, Becca had pushed the vision and her own sadness aside...at least for the moment. Rain spattered in shivery waves as she headed for the front door, fumbling for her key. The evening paper was in a plastic sleeve on the stoop and she reached down and grabbed it, juggling it with her packages. Becca practically spilled herself inside, dumping everything on the dropleaf table that stood by the door. She shrugged out of her dampened coat and hung it in the closet as the ticky-tick of Ringo's nails across her oak floors heralded her dog's arrival.
"Hey, bud," she said as the curly-haired black and white mutt furiously waved his tail, gazing at her expectantly. "Look what I got you."
She held up the blue collar with its little white dog bone motif, but Ringo kept his eyes on hers. If it wasn't food, he simply wasn't interested.
"Okay," Becca relented, pulling out a jar of small, dog-shaped treats. Ringo barked twice, happily, as Becca unscrewed the lid and fished out a couple, tossing them to the dog, who leaped up and caught them in his jaws, one by one, then raced back to his bed and snuffled and chewed them.
"We'll go for a walk in a minute," she said, adding some of his regular dog food to his bowl. Ringo quickly finished his treat and hurried to the bowl, munching on his meal with the same enthusiasm as his treats. He was not a picky dog.
She gazed out the kitchen window, which faced the back of another condo across an expanse of grass. She could see right inside to the other kitchen, which was festooned with red and pink foil hearts. A young girl was seated at the table, licking the icing off a cupcake which was decorated with candy hearts.
She recalled last year's Valentine's Day. She'd been waiting for Ben. Though she'd sensed-known, really-that their marriage was in its death throes, she'd spontaneously bought a cake and a bottle of champagne. The cake had been heart shaped with white icing and in red gel script, it read: BE MINE.
Ben never came home that night. Becca opened the champagne alone, drank half a glass, and poured the rest out. Later that week, Ben broke the news that he was in love with someone else, and that that someone else was pregnant. Becca had tried not to be shocked, hurt and upset, but she'd failed on all counts.
"You told me you never wanted kids," Becca reminded him, trying to keep from yelling.
"I guess I changed my mind," he responded, turning away from her accusing face.
"You guess?"
"Look, I'm sorry. I didn't mean for it to happen."
"If you didn't mean for it to happen, you should have used a condom."
"Who says I didn't?"
"Did you?" Becca demanded.
He almost lied to her. She could see him thinking whether he could make her believe him. But he knew her almost as well as she knew him. "It wasn't supposed to be this way," he mumbled, heading for the bedroom and his suitcase.
She followed him, too betrayed to let him just go. She grabbed down another bag and stuffed it full of his clothes, cramming them inside. "Take everything. Everything. Don't come back. Ever."
"Becca your just upset. I've gotta come back and get-"
"Don't be reasonable, Ben. I swear to God. Don't be reasonable or I'll scream." She glared at him but all she saw was the baby. The one he was having...with someone else. "If you can't carry it now, it'll be on the front porch."
"Don't be ridiculous!"
"I'm ridiculous?" she demanded.
Ben, the coward, couldn't hold her gaze. In tense silence, he finished packing his bag and stormed out. She tossed the other suitcase after him, not caring whether he picked it up or not. It sat on the porch for two days while she stacked other items beside it, crowning the pile with his most prized golf trophy. She half-expected the homeowner's association to complain about the mess, but Ben managed to sweep everything up before that happened. He came when Becca was away, so there were no more angry words. In fact, there were no more words at all for several months. Becca had just determined to open the lines of communication again, preparing for the inevitable divorce, when she got a call from Kendra Wallace, who between sobs, shrieks and tears, explained that Ben had died in her arms. For a good ten minutes Becca heard nothing else. Nothing past the fact that Ben was dead. She finally understood that Kendra's wailing was along the "poor me, what am I going to do" line.
"The baby," Becca said, moving from shock back to reality.
"The baby is mine!" Kendra snapped sharply, as if aware of Becca's desire to have a child of her own.
"Do you have family?" Someone to help you?
"You'll be hearing from my lawyer," Kendra choked back and slammed down the phone.
Becca was left staring into space. She was aware Kendra was going to come after her financially, but if the child was Ben's, so be it. When she received no call, she dialed Kendra on the number caller ID coughed up. She learned that it belonged to Kendra's mother, who told Becca that Kendra had moved to Los Angeles with her new boyfriend.
"What about the baby?" Becca asked.
She was told, in a chilly voice, that Kendra's boyfriend was adopting the little boy and it was none...of...her...concern.
Now, Becca fitted Ringo with his new collar and clipped on his leash. They walked into a night black with rain and cold and strolled around the condo's grounds. Ringo waved his tail at several other dogs, but he didn't bark. Apart from a woof or two when food was coming his way, he was pretty quiet. Rarely did he growl or make any noise.
So, it was with a sense of the hair rising on the back of her neck when, about a block away from her front door, Ringo suddenly stopped, planted his feet, and growled low in his throat, that Becca glanced around jerkily, half-expecting the bogeyman to pounce on her.
Ringo stared into a space about a hundred yards away, where a thick grove of firs, branches waving like beckoning arms, stood tall and dark in the slanting rain. Ringo was so planted that Becca couldn't drag him away. He stared and stared toward the trees.
"You're freaking me out, dog," Becca murmured, sliding the wet dog into her arms and hurrying toward her stairs. Ringo's head swiveled to keep sight of the trees. She could feel the low "grrrrrr" that rumbled through his body.
Inside, she grabbed a towel she kept in the front closet and tried to towel Ringo off but he shot to the nearest window, rising on his back legs, nosed pressed to the glass, lips pulled back in a silent snarl. A shiver that shot down Becca's neck.
"Stop that," she ordered as she headed to the kitchen and filled a teakettle with water. No champagne this Valentine's Day. Tea would be just fine.
When she returned to the living room, Ringo was sitting on his haunches, but his eyes were still fixed on something outside the window.
Becca tried to woo him to sit on the couch beside her, but when she went to pick him up, he sidled away and paced in front of the glass. Unnerved by the dog, she picked up the paper and slid it from its plastic sleeve. Her eye fell on a picture of a statue. The Madonna inside the maze at St. Elizabeth's. The bold headline read: BOYS DISCOVER HUMAN SKELETON INSIDE MAZE.
She inhaled in shock.
The teakettle shrieked.
Becca bit back a scream, sending Ringo into frenzied barking. It took long moments before she could calm the dog and her own rocketing pulse enough to actually read the article.
When she was finished, she stared at the rivulets of rain running down her window but her thoughts were far from this miserable Valentine's Day, her deceased husband, and whatever had spooked Ringo. Her mind was in the past.
For she knew the skeletal remains belonged to Jessie Brentwood, the girl from her visions, the friend from high school who'd disappeared without a trace, the girlfriend of Hudson Walker, Becca's own secret crush and the father of Becca's unborn child, had he but known it.
Jezebel "Jessie" Brentwood. She'd come to Becca in a dream today. She'd said something. Something important. While the wind had tossed her hair and she'd eased her toes over the edge of the cliff. It meant something. Something Becca needed to understand.
"Jessie..." she said aloud.
Books by Nancy Bush.
CANDY APPLE RED.
ELECTRIC BLUE.
ULTRAVIOLET.