The Complete Colony Series. Lisa Jackson

      He squinted at her, wondering if he was just feeling the effects of the Bushmills or if Renee was hiding something, holding something in. “Talk to Scott. He was here when McNally showed up.”

      “Is he around?”

      “Yeah. He’s going back to the beach tomorrow.”

      Was it his imagination or did she stiffen slightly? “Where’s your restaurant again? What part of the coast?”

      “Lincoln City.”

      “Oh. South.”

      “South of what?”

      She hesitated. “Deception Bay. I go there sometimes.”

      “Really? Why? It’s like…nowhere. We checked out all the towns before we opened Blue Ocean, well, Scott, he did the searching, and Deception Bay didn’t make the top ten, or even the top fifty.”

      “It’s…a good place to get away. Writers, we need peace and quiet. But anyway, back to the cops.”

      “Yeah?”

      “If you thought you knew something. Nothing concrete, but…something that might actually have bearing on the investigation…would you tell the detective?”

      “I wouldn’t tell him anything. Nada.” He thought about the nursery rhyme and wondered if he should mention it to Renee, but saw no reason. “You’ve been working this story. What do you think? Did you learn something?”

      “No,” she said quickly.

      “That sounds like a lie.”

      “It wasn’t,” she assured him and seemed about to unload. God, he hoped it wasn’t about her divorce. Women loved to talk about relationships, good or bad, but he just wasn’t interested. He had his own domestic problems.

      “What then?”

      “I was at the coast a couple of days ago. I ran into some people…that I think knew Jessie.” Renee looked away from him, to the pictures on the wall, snapshots of Scott and Glenn when they opened the restaurant.

      “At Deception Bay, right?” Glenn was having trouble following and sitting up straight. The booze was hitting hard.

      “Jessie’s family used to have a house there and there was talk of a cult nearby and—”

      “Does this have a point?” Glenn asked just as the door opened and Scott stepped into the room.

      “Renee,” he said in surprise.

      Doesn’t anybody goddamned knock anymore?

      Renee got to her feet. “I’m glad you’re here. I came by because I heard that you two met with McNally.”

      “More like he met with us.” Frowning slightly, Scott threw a look Glenn’s way. “Are you drunk?”

      “Workin’ on it,” Glenn said, wishing they’d both just go away so he could continue his drinking in peace.

      It wasn’t about to be.

      Renee and Scott discussed McNally for what felt like eons before they headed out together.

      As soon as the door closed behind them, Glenn drew out the bottle and sloshed his glass a hefty refill.

      He just wanted to stop thinking.

      Chapter Fourteen

      Mac rubbed his face as he sat at his desk, poring over all the details from twenty years ago, trying to mesh the past with what the Preppy Pricks recalled now. He’d been at it all day and should hang it up. But the station was quiet now and he had time to himself, time to concentrate. Not that being alone was helping. There was nothing new. Nothing he could grasp on to. It was all just as it had been. Maybes. Possibles. Tiny mysteries. Nothing concrete and credible.

      He’d listened to the cassette tapes he’d taken of their interviews twenty years ago and thought how young their voices sounded, how young his own voice sounded. He wasn’t taking audio notes now, though he supposed he should. Instead, he wrote copious notes on the interviews from today, comparing them to the tapes and chicken scratchings he’d jotted down at the time of Jessie’s disappearance.

      Now he glanced at the more detailed report from the lab that had been tossed on his desk earlier that day. No DNA results. Just more about the bits of detritus found at the scene. The little bit of white plastic turned out to be a teensy bit of oyster shell—no prints on it.

      Mac thought about that hard. Oyster shell…from the beach? Was it significant? Was it even related to the victim in the shallow grave?

      And then the thought he’d tried to come up with when he’d been interviewing Hudson surfaced. It had been prompted by Hudson’s mentioning a weekend getaway. Mac’s mind had touched on a trip to the beach. And that reminded him of something about a guy—a caller who, twenty years earlier, after seeing mention of Jezebel Brentwood’s disappearance on the news, claimed to have picked her up hitchhiking several weeks before. It had seemed superfluous to the girl’s disappearance and Mac had pushed the incident aside, deeming it not that important. Her parents had a cabin in some little burg on the coast, and he’d assumed she’d been coming back from there.

      Now Mac meticulously combed through his notes till he found the small information he’d written on the stranger. He remembered how impatient he’d been. How little he’d cared for any information that took him away from the Preppy Pricks. He’d been so hotheaded, with his head stuck up his ass in those days. A young buck determined to nail one of those kids.

      Hell.

      He reread the passage. The stranger was a man named Calvin Gilbert who lived outside of Seaside and made a living selling firewood from an old pickup. He traversed Highway 26 from Astoria, Seaside, Cannon Beach, and a string of smaller coastal cities through the Coast Range and nearly to North Plains and Laurelton. He happened to catch a news report about Jessie on his television and he called the Laurelton police and was connected to Mac.

      Re-examining his notes, Mac could almost hear the guy’s voice again. “I picked ’er up outside of the cutoff to Jewell and Mist, y’know? It was black as hell’s furnace and rain sheetin’ somethin’ fierce. This little girl is just trompin’ along, so I rolls down the window and says, ‘I could be one of them psychos, or I could be a guy just offerin’ you a lift,’ and she says back, ‘You’re not a psycho—probably a nicer guy than people think,’ and she jumps in and asks me to take her to this school. Saint Teresa’s, I guess.” Mac had interjected at that point, “St. Elizabeth’s,” and the fellow had said, “Could be. So I drives her there, and it’s still black as hell’s furnace, so I try to talk her outta gettin’ outta the truck, but she gets a little stubborn and says it’s where she wants to go. To change the subject, she asks if I cut my firewood off Highway 53. And I says, ‘Yeah, missy. How’d you know?’ And she gives me this sexy little smile and says, ‘I know things,’ as she gets out of the truck. Kinda eerie, like out of one of them damned Stephen King movies. Anyways, she slams the door and doesn’t look back. Not once. Which was okay with me, cuz I’m thinkin’ she might have snake eyes or somethin’, you know—that she wasn’t quite human. I watch her go, till she was out of the glare from the headlights, you know, and she kinda disappears into the darkness. Then I leave, though I didn’t want to, fire up the truck again and take off. Then I saw ’er face on the news, so I called you.”

      “I appreciate it,” Mac had told him, though it didn’t mean much.

      “You know what’s weird, son? My pickup was empty that trip. I’d dropped my load and swept the truck bed. How’d she know about the firewood?”

      Mac hadn’t offered any explanation, expecting there was more evidence of Calvin Gilbert’s pursuits in his vehicle than he’d believed—sawdust, a chainsaw, bits of bark. Now he thought about that odd bit of information and wondered what Jessie Brentwood had been doing hitchhiking in the dead of night and why