Becca wasn’t sure what she was going to say to the old woman. Something about “Mad Maddie” was definitely off. But Mad Maddie had first mentioned Siren Song to Becca, so the connection between her and the cult members existed.

From one end of the building, a light glowed. Or was it illumination from a television? A silvery blue flickering patch of light came from the window of the end unit. The manager’s home, if the battered vacancy sign was to be believed. The other apartments, eight or ten “homey cottages with cable TV,” were connected by vacant carports that were dilapidated and weathered and worn. Peeling gray paint covered rusted gutters that had worked themselves loose and swung and groaned in the wind that rose above the sea. The motel was untended and unkempt. Tall beach grass and berry vines encroached, the concrete was cracked and fissured, the gravel pounded into potholes, a sorry-looking picket fence undulating and bent from age and rot.

But it wasn’t the ramshackle buildings that caught Becca’s attention. No. As she sat in the car, her windshield wipers clapping away the gathering mist, she stared through the streaky glass to the cliff beyond.

So familiar.

So like that rocky outcropping where she saw Jessie in her visions, where she’d witnessed the embodiment of evil, the murderous bastard who had loomed over Jessie in her visions.

This was the scene of those visions, not Siren Song.

“Dear God,” she whispered, her throat tightening.

Her cell phone jangled and she jumped, then realized that it hadn’t actually rung, but that a message had been left on her voicemail. She punched buttons to retrieve it and heard, over the pounding of the surf far below, Hudson’s worried voice. He asked her to call, to meet him at the motel as he was checking himself out of the hospital. And she was to call Zeke’s number, as Hudson was using his friend’s phone. He signed off with a quick “love you,” which nearly brought tears to her eyes. He’d forgive her for keeping the secret about the baby. Maybe he really did love her. Maybe it wasn’t all about Jessie.

She tried to call him back, once, twice, three times, and three times she failed.

“Damn,” she whispered as she climbed out of the car and the wind, fierce now, tore at her clothes and hair. She considered leaving, driving into cell phone range and calling Hudson, but she didn’t want to take the time.

Not when she had the overwhelming sensation that time was running out, faster and faster, grains of sand slipping through the hourglass that was her life.

But she tried to call Hudson one more time and failed again, the call never going through. Swearing softly, she tucked the phone into her pocket and started up the broken flagstones to the “office” door. Glancing around the side of the building to the open sea, she hesitated briefly. Darkness made it hard to see the shifting gray waters of the Pacific, but she could hear the waves pounding the base of the cliffs, spraying upward while the wind wailed.

Spiderwebs of realization brushed up her arms.

She had been here before. She was certain of it. What was it about this place? Nervous, she walked along the exterior of the decaying motel, barely noticing that some of the glass panes of the windows had been replaced with plywood, the plywood having grayed and buckled over the years. When she reached the back of the motel she stopped short.

“Jessie,” she whispered as her hair whipped over her face.

This narrow point of land on which she now stood was the ridge in her visions, the one in which Jessie was poised over the angry, rushing sea. It had to be. She felt familiar here, and she thought for just an instant that the girl she’d seen in her trancelike state hadn’t been Jessie at all, but herself. Hadn’t people said they resembled each other?

But, no, the girl she’d seen had been Jessie. Jessie, trying to tell her to get justice from the man who’d murdered her. Becca recalled suddenly that Jessie had told Renee when she was sixteen, “It’s all about justice,” which made Becca wonder if Jessie had seen her own death approaching.

She shivered, then gazed at the surrounding cliffs, seeing the dark shape of the lighthouse on its rocky mound and the island farther out, barely distinguishable tonight in shades of black and gray.

How many times had she witnessed just this view? How many times had it terrified her? “No more,” she vowed as her sweatshirt flapped around her. “Jessie?” Becca called. “Tell me what to do.” She closed her eyes for just a second, willing the dead girl, her newfound sister, to enter her mind. If the dark figure, the image of the killer, joined the ghost of Jessie, so be it. “Come on, come on,” she said, feeling the cold from the ever-changing Pacific seep through her skin and burrow into her heart.

But nothing came to her.

Just as she had in life, Jezebel Brentwood played by her own rules, stubbornly refused to bend to anyone else’s whims.

Becca opened her eyes. It was dark and she was alone. Alone and on her own.

Backtracking to the front of the motel, Becca walked up a couple of steps to a sagging porch and pressed the doorbell. Over the keening howl of the wind, she heard the faint sound of a buzzer and then nothing. No footsteps. Maybe the old gal had fallen asleep in front of the television. Or maybe she wasn’t home. Becca rang again, heard the buzzer, but no other sound.

“Maddie?” she called loudly. “Madame Madeline? It’s me, Rebecca Sutcliff. Ryan. We met at the antique store?” She started to pound on the door only to have it creak open. She froze, arm raised to beat on the weathered panels again. “Maddie?”

From within came a low, pain-filled moan.

Becca’s heart dropped through the rotted floorboards of the porch. She thrust open the door and stepped inside to the smell of fried fish and ashes from a wood stove and something else. Something metallic and out of place. “Maddie?” she called again and was already extracting her cell phone from her pocket. The living room with its flickering television screen was empty, the worn recliner sitting near a TV tray with a plate of food-tater tots, cole slaw, and fish sticks-half eaten. A fork with some white sauce still globbed on its tines had clattered to the floor. A cigarette burned in an ashtray.

And stains on the floor? Dark red stains. Blood…?

Oh, dear God, what was this?

The hairs at Becca’s nape stood on end. She speed-dialed Mac, but the call didn’t go through. She should turn back now, drive into town, call the police…

Another groan emanated from a doorway at the back of the house.

Carefully, her pulse racing, her nerves wound tight as watch springs, Becca peeked around the corner to a bedroom where Madame Madeline lay slumped on the floor, blood pouring from her abdomen, a pistol in one hand.

“Maddie!” Becca said, trying to remain calm, not knowing what the wounded, crazed woman would do. Maddie looked up, her bloody fingers wrapped around the butt of the gun. “Justice,” she whispered and leveled the barrel of the pistol straight at Becca’s heart.

Mac took the call, a patch in through the sheriff’s department, and he couldn’t make out much, mostly static that the detectives had to repeat. The upshot was that Hudson Walker had checked himself out of the hospital against doctor’s orders and now he was worried sick that Rebecca Sutcliff might’ve taken off after the killer-the same sicko that so far had eluded capture by all the authorities in Tillamook County. Hudson was certain Becca had gone back to Siren Song-a place Detective Clausen informed Mac was a cult.

“What the hell’s she doing?” Mac growled as he noticed a turnout in the road and pulled a quick U-turn. “Son of a goddamned bitch.”

“Don’t shoot,” Becca said as calmly as she could, though her heart rate was zooming wildly. “Don’t shoot. Please…”