Twice Kissed - Lisa Jackson [134]
The seconds ticked by, and Becca’s heartbeat finally slowed. The house remained still. Throat dry, Becca finally let out her breath, clicked on the television, the volume muted and low. As she switched through a billion stations, she caught a glimpse of her mother’s face—no, wait, it was Aunt Marquise. She stopped channel-surfing and caught the news out of Denver, that her aunt was still missing, and the police were beginning to suspect foul play.
What? Foul play?
Her heart hammered. What exactly did that mean? Foul play? Murder? Oh, man, she hoped not. Kidnapping? Rape? All those horrible things that she saw on the news or in those police-drama shows? Geez, not Marquise. No way. Anxiously, Becca listened to the report, learned nothing new, and was suddenly worried sick. Something big was going on, more than she had ever imagined. She snapped off the set and pulled the covers over her head. Where was Marquise? Nobody could really hurt her, could they? Hadn’t Aunt Connie said that Becca’s mother had called earlier, when she and Jenny had been at a movie? Had she been calling about Aunt Marquise? Oh, man, oh, man, this was bad.
It was just a dumb news report. She couldn’t let herself get freaked out by it.
And yet she started to shake. She thought about her favorite beautiful but wild aunt, who looked so much like her mother but was ten times cooler.
Becca blinked against a sudden, stupid wash of tears. Swallowing hard and feeling a thick lump clog her throat, she realized how badly she missed her mom and her dad. Tears threatened her eyes, and she set her jaw to combat them. Why had her mom decided to divorce her dad? She’d never really gotten a straight answer on that one. And, crap, why had he ended up dead? That old dull ache, the one that throbbed in her chest for months after her father’s accident, started up again, and she hugged her pillow close to her body. She missed him. So much. And now she missed her mother. Something she’d have sworn was never possible.
Sniffing loudly, she thought of the last few months when they had been living in Idaho. Maggie had wanted to get away from L.A. and “all the memories, all the pain.” Becca had fought the move tooth and nail, had refused to speak to Maggie, had even wished she could die, and hadn’t been afraid to tell her mother just how she felt.
Now, Becca cringed at the thought. At the time, Maggie had been seeing a shrink and had insisted that Becca visit him, too. Maggie McCrae had been a basket case—well, they both had been. Thinking back on that painful scene, Becca was embarrassed that she’d laid so much guilt on her mother and, though she hated to admit it, she had decided that living in Settler’s Ridge wasn’t all bad. In fact, some of it she actually liked.
Like riding Jasper through the woods at night with that stupid, ugly, Barkley loping on three legs behind the horse. That one-eared dog had turned out to be her best friend in the world. Barkley slept on the end of her bed and followed her everywhere she went, just like he would have if she’d raised him from a pup. Yeah, he was dumb.
Then there were the kids in school. Lots of ’em were geeks—country bumpkins who didn’t know anything about L.A. or surfing or beach volleyball or anything other than what they saw on MTV, but some of the girls seemed okay, and there was one boy in her class, Austin Peters, who was pretty cool. He had shaggy blond hair, cut kinda long, and he was on the shy side; but he smiled at Becca sometimes, and when he did her heart went ker-thunk. Austin Peters had the greatest blue eyes she’d ever seen.
Oh, man, why was she thinking of Austin now, when she was a million miles away from him, her mom was in Denver, and her aunt Marquise was possibly the victim of “foul play”? Becca cleared her throat, sniffed back her tears, and