Page 100 of Wicked Game (Wicked)

“I want to be with you.”

“The hospital is a good two hours away.” He glanced through the windshield to the fields beyond, not, she suspected, seeing the stubble of bent yellow grass in the fields.

“Then we’d better not waste any time.”

“Okay.” He accelerated onto Highway 26, heading west where the sun, sheltered by thin clouds, was already lowering behind the ridge of mountains separating the Willamette Valley from the Pacific Ocean.

Becca sent a prayer toward the gauzy heavens. Renee couldn’t die. She just couldn’t. They’d lost too many already.

But as she stared ahead, she thought about Jessie and her warning…

What was it she’d tried to tell her? Two syllables? Maybe one word?

As Hudson’s truck roared upward into the foothills and the towering fir and oak obliterated the sun, Becca felt a cold chill settle in her spine.

Ocean Park Hospital was known for the twisted pine trees that flanked its blacktopped entrance. The pines, their trunks and limbs tortured over the years by blasting gusts of wind, shivered and bent their heads as Hudson’s truck barreled between them on his way to the low-rise concrete hospital that had been constructed for function, not beauty.

Hudson had placed a call to the sheriff’s department 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.

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