The Complete Colony Series. Lisa Jackson

enough, but he’d always been restless.

      You’re too damned young to retire, he’d told himself often enough, but he’d ended up here anyway, working on the farm, managing the properties he owned at a distance, and satisfied, if not happy with his life.

      From the moment he’d seen her at Blue Note he’d known he’d never gotten over her.

      And Jessie had brought them together, which made him feel almost guilty about falling in love again.

      He caught himself up short—Love? Jesus, you’re an idiot. Love? Ridiculous. But glancing at Becca as she climbed into his truck made him quiet that nagging little insistence. And the restlessness that had been with him for years was sliding away.

      The phone rang as they were bumping down the gravel drive. He examined the Caller ID. “Tillamook County?” he read, then punched the talk button. “Hello?”

      Becca gave him a shrug as he said, “Yeah, Tim. What’s up?” In an instant his face turned to stone. “Wait a minute…Slow down. Where?…Yeah, I know Renee went to the beach. What?”

      Becca’s heart froze.

      “Wait…which hospital?”

      Hospital? Becca’s fingers tightened over the handle of her purse. Her blood turned to ice. “Hudson?”

      All color drained from Hudson’s face. He stopped the truck at the end of the drive, his fingers crushing the phone.

      “Hudson?” she repeated, her mind racing.

      “She’s alive?” he said into the phone.

      Becca’s hand flew to her throat.

      “I’m on my way.” He clicked off, breathing shallowly. “That was Tim. Renee’s been in an accident. The sheriff’s department called him, told him she’s at Ocean Park Hospital.”

      “Is she all right?”

      “I don’t know. Shit!” He threw the truck into gear again.

      “But she’s alive.”

      “I think so.”

      Becca was trembling inside, her blood turning to ice. Another “accident,” so soon after Glenn’s death. What were the chances of that happening? “I can’t believe it,” she whispered, but that was a lie. Fleetingly she thought of Renee’s sense of persecution—Renee, with her need to return to Deception Bay, her determination to find out what happened to Jessie, her yearning to write her story.

      “I’m going straight to the hospital after I drop you off.”

      “I’m coming with you,” she said. No way was he leaving her behind.

      “It’s at—”

      “—the coast. Ocean Park. I heard.”

      “What about the dog?” Hudson asked.

      “He’ll come, too. Ringo loves to ride in the car.” To the dog, she said, “Lie down, Ringo.”

      “Are you sure about this?” They were at the end of the lane waiting for a truck towing a fifth wheeler to pass. “It doesn’t look good, Becca.”

      “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