Vengeance to the Max (14 page)

Max sensed something from Cameron, a restlessness, a throb of something she couldn’t define. Without words, he was telling her to get on with looking at Evelyn’s album.

Witt got the chili. Max decided she’d share, though he didn’t know it yet. Izzie wafted away, leaving behind a subtle flowery fragrance and the warmth of her smile.

“How long you gonna stall?” Witt seconded Cameron’s push.

Max didn’t answer. The place wasn’t busy. Coffee perked behind the counter. Through the open window of the kitchen, her burger sizzled on the grill. She really didn’t have an excuse.

“It’s not as if it’s going to tell us where Cordelia is. It’s a bunch of pictures.”

“A start,” Witt insisted.

What he didn’t say was that they had nothing else. Max came here to find Cameron’s sister. The photo album was the first thing someone, anyone, in Lines had offered them. Still, she hadn’t come to delve into Cameron’s past, their past together. She hadn’t come to bring the pain of losing him out into the light of the snow-covered countryside, nor into the light of Witt’s blue gaze. And that’s what might happen when she looked in that album.

“Oh, look, it’s starting to snow.” She put her fingertips to the cold window, belatedly remembering the boy’s window-washing efforts. Ah well, she’d wipe her prints off with a napkin. For now, she wanted to watch the light flakes and to forget for a moment why she was here.

“I love the snow. I used to make snow angels all the time. That’s always the first thing I did when it snowed deep enough.” In the reflection caused by the light behind her and the dark sky beyond the glass, she saw not her grown-up self, but a child laughing, dressed in navy snow pants and lying in pristine snow, her arms and legs swinging.

“You were born and raised in the San Francisco area.” Witt paused. She didn’t turn to see the look on his face. When he spoke again, his voice was low. “Where’d you play snow angel?”

She cocked her head, never taking her eyes off the flakes that could almost have been rain if they hadn’t fallen so slowly. “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Must have been Tahoe.” Her mother had taken her to Tahoe when she was six, two years before she died.

“Max.”

She knew what he wanted, like Cameron, always something she wasn’t ready for. The book’s plain cover shrieked at her. She left the snow and the pleasant memories and turned to Witt. Concern shone in his blue eyes. She’d gotten used to seeing that lovely shade of blue. Cameron’s eyes had been brown.

“You okay?”

“Fine.” She wouldn’t let Witt see her fall apart all over again because of Cameron, the way she had those first weeks after his death, watching
Lost Horizon
again and again until she couldn’t see past the ache of holding her tears in. Touching his things, his trinkets, listening to his music... Until she’d thrown out the VCR and hidden the box beneath the bed.

Pushing aside Witt’s glass of water, she shoved the book at him. “You open it.” Not the words of defeat, but the sound of command. She was
not
a coward, and she
would
get through this.

Without question, he turned the album his way and opened to the first page.

Max waited, worrying her bottom lip.

Somehow she knew Witt held her destiny in his hands.

“Who is it?” she couldn’t resist asking.

He described what he saw. “By the clothes they’re wearing, looks like the fifties. Two women and a man. He’s got his arm around the one.” Witt looked up. “Think the other is Evelyn.”

“No names or anything written underneath.”

“Not even a year.” He flipped the page. Described the scenes, more of the same people. Then an older man. Cameron’s grandfather, Evelyn’s father?

A baby appeared. Pictures of the christening filled four pages. Still no names, no dates. She assumed they were Cameron’s parents and the child was his sister, older by one year.

Max couldn’t stand it anymore. She sidled around the booth and slid in next to Witt. He made little room—on purpose, she was sure—forcing her to scrunch up next to his big, warm thigh.

Another baby. More photos of loving parents, an indulgent grandfather, perhaps taken by a doting aunt. This time the child had to be Cameron.

With so few pictures of Evelyn, the album might well have belonged to Cameron’s family. Or Evelyn might never have had a life of her own.

Page after page of the Starr family presented itself. Cameron in Little League, camping trips, his hair blond and beautiful as a young child, growing darker as he sprouted.

Max kept her hands in her lap, afraid her fingers might act on their own and trace the lines of the Cameron’s childhood face.

Of course, there were pictures of Cordelia, too, blond, pretty, with a sweet, anxious-to-please smile. Her round face, seemingly unformed, bore only slight resemblance to the graduation picture in the yearbook.

“Why did she deny Cordelia existed, then give me the book?”

“Guess she wanted you to figure it out for yourself.”

“Figure out what?” Only Evelyn knew for sure.

Their food arrived, Izzie plopping the plates down across from them and smiling at their togetherness. “Eat before it gets cold,” she admonished with a grin when they didn’t immediately dig in. “Can I get you anything else? Ketchup, mustard?”

Witt turned on that hundred-watt smile Max hadn’t known existed until at least two weeks after first setting eyes on him. “Ketchup would be great.”

Ketchup? On chili?

Izzie brought the sauce, set it on the table between them. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

“California,” Max offered.

Izzie’s eyes lit up. “I went there once. To Disneyland. But I wouldn’t want to live in California.”

Witt raised a brow, which was question enough from him.

“No snow. I don’t know how anyone could live without snow,” Izzie said with a child-like glow that belied her forty-something face. She put a hand to her mouth. “Now I’m the one making your food get cold. Eat up.” She scurried off, a hint of her floral scent remaining.

Max pulled Witt’s bowl of chili close and taste-tested. She wanted it before he dumped the ketchup in it. Damn, it was good. “I’d rather have yours.”

“
Wouldn’t
want yours.” He pushed the album aside, replaced it with the bowl, though he didn’t pour ketchup in it, thank God.

Max had always stolen from Cameron’s plate. Now she’d started doing it to Witt. The ache was there again, deep inside. She moved back to the other side of the booth and started in on her burger, getting a third of the way through before the meat began to churn in her stomach.

Witt stole a fry, then asked, “You gonna eat those?”

Max shook her head. He tugged the plate to the center of the table, practically emptied the ketchup bottle, added a mountain of salt, then dug in. So that’s why he wanted the ketchup, for
her
fries. It was too damn ... married, even if she had been planning on sharing his chili.

Max couldn’t eat another bite.

“What’s wrong?” Witt stopped, a French fry in mid-air. “You’re green.”

She was scared, of the pain she still felt over Cameron, of the pain she might yet feel over Witt. But she wouldn’t tell Witt that.

Grabbing the album, she flipped it around, opening it to the same place they’d been before the food came. She went through several pages. The children grew up fast. People always said they did. Cordelia slimmed down, her hair grew long, she looked more like the picture in the yearbook with each turn of the page.

And Cameron. Max couldn’t look at him against the burning in her chest.

Max didn’t pay much attention to Madeline, or to Cameron’s father, a man whose name she didn’t know. It was enough to concentrate on the sister, to have met the aunt. Somehow the mother and father were too much for Max to handle. Thinking of the aunt, there was a flash of familiarity again. Evelyn dressed more staidly than her sister, longer skirts, higher necklines. She looked older, and before long there was a filtering of gray through her hair, though Max would have guessed she could have been no more than forty-five at the most in those particular pictures. She didn’t look like Cameron, nor much like her sister. Yet there was something that nagged at Max, something about Evelyn’s face...

Unable to grasp the reason behind the fleeting impression, Max moved on. Another page, then one more. That was when the mutilation began.

Pictures had been cut down the middle, one half ripped away from the page. She breezed through the remainder, her fingers flipping faster and faster as her heart climbed into her throat. Some photos had been torn out, others merely cut in two. In still other pictures, an Exacto knife or some other blade had been used to remove the face and body, cuts clean, precise, and scary.

There wasn’t a single photo of Cordelia left.

She’d been cut out of the album, cut out of Evelyn’s life.

“She killed her,” Max whispered.

Witt popped the last French fry, dripping with ketchup, into his mouth, and regarded her with ... another look. This one said he’d realized long ago she was insane, but he forgave her for it.

“I’m serious. Look at this.” Max shoved aside the plates and turned the scrapbook toward him—and it
was
scrap now.

His blond brow wrinkled. His thick, blunt fingers went through the book, slowly, methodically, page by page. His cop mask slid over his features, his gaze intense, concentrated, and unreadable.

“Now tell me that’s not a little sick. And then Cordelia disappears right after graduation.”

He skewered Max with a hard-edged gaze. “You don’t know she disappeared at all.”

She leaned forward, hands fisting against the Formica. Difficult to breathe and difficult to keep from shouting at him. “What, you think she’s in Cincinnati with a husband, two-point-five kids, and a minivan?”

“Don’t go off half-cocked. That’s how cops lose convictions.” He tapped the book, his gaze holding steady. “We need a helluva lot more than this album to say that girl is dead.”

Voices low, tones intent, they argued. Witt closed the book.

“We should at least ask her,” Max insisted. “She gave us the damn thing after all. She wants us to know something happened.” Max was consumed with the need to confront the woman, to demand an answer, to find Cameron’s sister. Evelyn Hastings held the key to everything, and Max wanted to pry it out of her.

But Witt was stubborn. “You’re right. Something did happen. I agree. But we haven’t started asking questions.” Gone were the chopped sentences, the laid-back speech. He was either pissed or serious. Good. She wanted him serious, wanted him to help her figure it all out.

“I want to ask
her
. Now.” The need was an ache at the base of her skull, a physical pain when she turned her head left or right.

His nostrils flared as he sucked in an exasperated breath. “You didn’t look at the rest of the pictures.”

“I did,” she snapped. “She’s cut Cordelia out of every one.”

“That’s your problem.” His eyes narrowed when she opened her mouth. “You jump to conclusions. You don’t mull over the evidence. You’re the proverbial bull in a china shop.”

He didn’t have to be so insulting about it. “All right, tell me what I missed.”

“The father disappears around...” He glanced down, an assessing shake to his head. “Say when the kid”—she knew he meant Cameron—“was about ten or eleven.”

“Disappears?”

“Gone from the photos. And not because he was cut out.”

“Maybe they got a divorce. He wasn’t mentioned in the obituary. And it didn’t say
Mrs
. Madeline Starr either.”

“Ask your husband.”

It threw her when he did that, told her to ask Cameron as if he accepted that Cameron was more than a figment of her imagination. She’d lived with the secret so long, it seemed odd when someone else acknowledged Cameron’s ghost.

“He doesn’t remember.” He didn’t remember anything, even less than she remembered with her selective memory. Damn him for getting her into this. “So the father’s gone”—not Cameron’s father, but
the
father—“and I missed that. Big deal. Cordelia’s more important since cutting her out is an act of aggression.”