Wicked Game Read online

  She headed back into the mall, slightly depressed by the cheery red and pink hearts in every store window. Valentine’s Day. The most miserable day of the year for the suddenly single.

  Okay. She wasn’t completely unhappy. She’d known for a long time that she and Ben weren’t going to make it. They’d never been in love. Not in the way she’d wanted, hoped, planned to be. When she’d learned he was seeing someone else, she was angry. At herself, mostly. She couldn’t really even recall what had triggered their marriage in the first place. What had she wanted? What had Ben wanted? Had it just been timing? A sense that, if not Ben, then who?

  Then she learned he’d died in the arms of his new love. Heart attack.

  Gone, gone…gone.

  She was still processing. Still getting used to the fact that he’d left her for another woman. Left her…when she’d still believed that maybe, just maybe, there would be that chance for them. That chance to start a family. Have a child. A child of their own. A child of her own…

  The window of Pink, Blue, and You, a combined baby and maternity store, materialized in front of her. She’d stopped into it earlier and picked out a gift for a pregnant coworker. It was a fine torture to be inside. She wanted a baby. She’d always wanted a baby. Her insides twisted with the memory that she’d lost an unborn baby a long, long time ago.

  Yet, at times like this, the pain returned, as fresh and raw as when she’d miscarried.

  Tears hovered behind her eyes. But she wasn’t going to break down, for God’s sake. Not now. She’d grieved far too long as it was. She held the stupid tears at bay, turning her face away from the display of pastel pinks and blues and lemony yellows. Was that why she’d married Ben? To have a baby? To replace the one who’d been taken from her?

  Becca told herself to get over it. She’d asked herself the same question countless times, had toiled and fretted over the answer. But it was all moot now. Ben was gone. And he’d left his twenty-two-year-old new lover pregnant, something he’d never wanted with Becca.

  “I don’t want children,” he’d said. “You knew it when you married me.”

  Had she? She didn’t remember that.

  “It’s just you and me, Beck. You and me.”

  Maybe she had married him to have a child. Correction. To replace a child. Maybe she’d made up the “I love you” parts. Maybe she’d just wanted the whole thing to be so much prettier than it was.

  “Damn it all.” She had no time to walk down this lane of self-pity. It was over. O-V-E-R! She turned away from the window. No need to torture herself further. No need at all.

  A food court was on her left and she glanced over as she headed the other way. But as she tried to hurry on, her vision grew blurry, forcing her to slow down and finally stop short. Her pulse was suddenly rocketing. Damn. She was going to faint. She’d been down this route before, more times than she’d like to admit. But it wasn’t really fainting. No. More like…falling into a spell. A wide-awake dream. But it hadn’t happened in years. Not for years!

  Why now? she asked herself a half-second before a sizzle of pain shot through her brain. She staggered and fell to her knees, packages tumbling from her arms. Becca bent her head, instinctively hiding her face from curious onlookers, one last moment of clarity before the vision overcame her.

  In a transformation that was both familiar and feared, Becca was no longer at the mall, no longer feeling the wrench of loss of her baby. No longer in the real world but in a watery, in-substantial one, a world that had plagued her youth yet had been curiously missing and distant for most of her adult life…until now.

  In front of her, a short distance away, a teenaged girl stood on a headland above a gray and frothy sea, her long, light brown hair teased by a stiff breeze, her shirt and jeans pressed to her skin from its force, her gaze focused across churning waves toward a small island, blurred with rain. Becca followed the girl’s gaze, staring past her to the island as well, a forlorn, rocky tor that looked as inhospitable as an alien planet. The girl shivered and so did Becca. The cold burrowed beneath her skin and gooseflesh rose on her arms.

  The girl was familiar. So familiar…

  Becca stared at her hard, putting a physical effort into it.

  Is she someone I know?

  Becca struggled to remember. Who was she? Where was she? Why was she pulling Becca into her world?

  Distantly, she felt the light-headedness, the clammy warning that she was about to pass out. No, no, no! Caught between the two worlds, her body failing in one, her mind desperately searching for answers in the other, Becca focused on the girl.

  “Who are you?” she called, but the rising wind threw the words back into her throat.

  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, 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 classmate? Gone for twenty years…

  Except now, in Becca’s vision.

  “You’re too close to the edge!” Becca warned.

  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 was saying, “Hey, lady. You okay?”

  With difficulty, Becca opened her eyes. She was in the mall. Sprawled on the tiled floor. Packages tossed asunder. No more ocean. No more wind. No more Jessie.

  Oh, God, she looked like a fool!

  Tucking her legs beneath her, Becca tried to pull herself together. It was difficult to come back to reality. It always was after one of her visions. The damn things. She’d thought they were behind 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’d 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.

  Click. Click. Click.

  Becca heard the snap of a cell phone being shut. One of the guys had taken a series of pictures of her fainting spell. That did it! Stupid punk kid. Becca climbed unsteadily to her feet and gave the boy 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 heavyset woman in a dusty blue uniform steamed toward them.

  “Back off,” s
he 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, and 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 out the mall exit and ducked through a drizzling rain to her car, a blue Volkswagen Jetta wedged into a spot between two oversized SUVs. Feeling a twinge in one shoulder from her fall, Becca squeezed through the driver’s side door and tossed her bags into the passenger seat, then climbed in. Her body was still tingling, too, as if her muscles had been asleep. 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 shoved her rain-damped hair from her eyes, silently told herself to get over it, then lifted her head only to gaze blankly through the windshield at the mall’s cream-colored stucco walls. A twentysomething woman was standing under the portico near the doorway while smoking a cigarette and talking on a cell phone, but Becca, lost in her own thoughts, barely saw her.

  Becca hadn’t had a vision 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?

  “Nothing! Face it, you’re just a freak,” she muttered under her breath. What she did not need now in her life, absolutely did not, was any kind of eerie visions or attacks or whatever you wanted to call them. She’d hoped they had died a quick and lasting death.

  Trying to shake the weird sensation clinging to her, Becca drove from the parking lot, her wipers slapping at the rain. The sky had darkened, night dropping quickly. One of her packages had tipped over and the baby gift she’d purchased was spilled on the seat, a bright, whimsical mermaid puppet sewn in silver lamé and pink and green sequins.

  That old sadness threatened to overcome her again, but she wouldn’t have any of it. Driving with one hand, she stuffed the puppet back into the shopping bag and headed purposely for the condo she’d once shared with Ben. Now the two-bed-room unit was all hers-all nine hundred square feet of “charming midcentury” architecture, as the literature boasted. In layman’s terms this meant an apartment building constructed in the late fifties and converted to condos with a little updating in the late nineties. But it was home. Even without Ben.

  By the time she pulled into her designated slot, Becca had managed to push the damned vision and her own case of the unwanted blues aside, but dusk was gathering quickly and the clouds opened up again.

  Rain tossed around her in shivery waves as she headed for the front door, fumbling with her keys. The evening paper was in a plastic sleeve on the stoop and she reached down and grabbed it, juggling it with her packages, as she spilled through the door. She dumped everything she was carrying onto the drop-leaf table that stood in the small foyer, then 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 as she headed to the kitchen. She pulled out a jar of small, dog-shaped treats. Ringo barked twice, happily, as Becca unscrewed the lid and fished out a couple of biscuits, 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 treats and hurried to his bowl, munching on his meal with the same enthusiasm as the biscuits. 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 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 had never come home that night and Becca had opened the champagne alone, drunk half a glass, and poured the rest down the drain in the kitchen sink. Calls to his cell phone and text messages had been left unanswered until late in the night when he’d simply texted back: Something came up. Don’t worry. I’m okay. She would have panicked and called the police, but deep in her heart she’d known what was coming. He’d shown up the next day to break the news that he was in love with someone else, and that the someone else was pregnant.

  Despite telling herself that she’d suspected something like this, Becca had tried not to be shocked, hurt, and upset, but she’d failed on all counts.

  Suspecting him of having an affair was one thing.

  Having that affair and pregnancy confirmed was quite another.

  “You told me you never wanted kids,” Becca reminded him, trying to keep from screaming at him at the top of her lungs.

  “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. Did he think she was a moron?

  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 yanked down another bag and stuffed it full of his clothes. Her outrage, her all-consuming fury, helped her cram his Brooks Brothers button-downs into small wads. “Take everything. Everything. Don’t come back. Ever.”

  “Becca, you’re 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, dropping one of his white shirts onto the bedroom floor.

  Ben, the coward, couldn’t hold her gaze. In tense silence he snatched up the shirt, 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-the someone else-who between sobs, shrieks, and tears explained that Ben had died in her arms of an apparent heart attack. At forty-two.

  For a good ten minutes Becca heard nothing else. Nothing past the fact that Ben was dead. She surfaced to finally understand 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. Ben was going to be a father…

  “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?

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “You need someone-”

  “I need Ben and he’s dead!” she said, sniffing and sobbing. “And…and…you’ll be hearing from my lawyer.”

  “Your lawyer? Why…” Then it hit her. The divorce wasn’t even final, the arrangement for separating their finances not quite nailed down. Oh, Jesus.

  Kendra 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. Then when, after two months, she received no call, she dialed Kendra on the number that Caller ID had coughed up and learned 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, and was told, in a chilly voice, that Kendra’s boyfriend was adopting the little boy and it was none…of…her…concern. The lawyers would handle everything.