Vengeance to the Max (2 page)

“Are they what bothered you most about the dream?”

Besides watching him take a bullet in the head? “No.”

“Then what?”

Max swallowed with difficulty. “Why was I driving my car?”

Silent less than a second, his pause still made her rub her arms for warmth. “I don’t know, Max.”

Some strange trick of death had robbed Cameron of his memories. Except that he loved her. Beyond that, he remembered only what she remembered, his recollection coming back as hers did, as if she were the conduit for his past, his life. There had been moments, though, in the last three months where she could have sworn he knew more than he was saying.

“Tell me why the car bothers you,” he urged.

“Because I don’t know why I followed you there.” She closed her eyes. The image of his death pounded against her eyes, and her lids popped open again. “Why would I forget a thing like that?”

He snorted. “You always have been exceptional at forgetting what you don’t want to remember. It’s time you remembered the before, during, and after of that night.”

She knew all she needed to know. She simply chose not to feel. He was still here with her, so the rest could be ignored. At least she thought it could until the dream brought it back.

She returned to the issue of the car, because the question hurt less. “But why remember that particular point? My car couldn’t have been important to what happened that night.”

The night he died. It was getting so easy to say it in her mind. A mind that Cameron could read freely when he chose to.

“Everything in that vision is important. Everything is a clue to what you’re supposed to accomplish.”

As with all the visions she’d had. She rolled her lips between her teeth and held them until it hurt. “They killed the clerk. They killed you. They did it because I opened that door.”

His sigh surrounded her. “Please, not another guilt trip. First it was that you threw my cigarettes down the garbage disposal—”

“Which is why you went out that night,” she finished for him in a whisper.

“Maybe,” he countered. “Then again, maybe you simply haven’t let yourself remember everything that went on.”

Maybe she never would. But here was another of those times when he seemed to know things she didn’t. He shouldn’t have been able to do that. Max closed her eyes. “Tell me the truth. Did they kill you because I walked into the middle of their robbery?”

Again he sighed, and the bed seemed to dip beside her. “We have no way of knowing.”

A mere shifting of air currents, and his peppermint candy scent enveloped her. He’d sucked the mints since quitting smoking two months ago. How either of those things were possible after he’d been dead for two years made her head whirl so she’d chosen not to think about it.

Of course, he should have quit
before
he died, before he went to that 7-11 for another pack.

Hearing the words as if she’d said them aloud, he murmured without a hint of censure, “That’s better. Blame me.”

She pulled her legs up, nudging the cat. “I want to know what the dream means. That’s all.”

“It’s telling you to find my sister. The reason will come later.” His voice vibrated against her cheek, her throat, and her back. She could hear him, and with her eyes closed, she could feel him, too.

She gave in. “I’ll look for your sister. But it won’t be simple. The letter I sent telling your family you were dead”—there, the word again, aloud and getting easier to say all the time—“came back marked
return to sender
. No one lives there anymore.”

“You won’t find her in Cincinnati. She never went there.”

Suspicion crept into her voice. “How do you know that?” Especially since he claimed his memories died with him.

“You have to go back to the place where I was born,” he insisted instead of answering.

Her turn to sigh. He wasn’t going to enlighten her, so she asked what he obviously wanted her to ask, “Where were you born?” She should have known but didn’t.

“Look in the box you keep hidden under the bed.”

She hadn’t looked in that box in ... at least a year and a half. Six months after he died, when she could no longer bear to look at his things, she’d hidden the box and all the emotions that went with it beneath the bed.

“It’s time to feel again.”

Max had done more than enough
feeling
to last a lifetime.

Outside the dawn lightened the sky from pitch black to shades of gray, the tree by her window outlined in relief. On the street, a car engine turned over, then roared to life. Max dangled her legs over the side of the bed, her bare feet touching the cold floor where the throw rug had slid away. Reaching out with her toes, she grappled it to her.

The room was stark. She hadn’t needed much when she’d moved from the condo where she’d lived with Cameron. Taking the studio already furnished, she hadn’t added much to the contents.

“You’ve got a bed too small for Witt to fit in—”

“Are you trying to palm me off on another man?”

Cameron had damn near succeeded. Witt crept into her life like a parasite she couldn’t get rid of, like Buzzard the stray who kept coming back. They now had this weird sort of symbiotic connection she craved. The most terrifying aspect of it was that she didn’t even find it all that terrifying anymore. She kind of liked having Witt around. She even liked Ladybird, his mother.

A wave of nausea traveled through her belly. She’d thought admitting she and Witt had a relationship would mitigate the fear. She’d thought fear would be a thing of the past. Fear of losing Witt. Fear of losing Cameron. Fear of the latest damn vision.

She stuffed down the emotions. She
would
stop being afraid of her own damn shadow.

Cameron went on, listing the flaws in her life. “You’ve got some black suits for work, a couple of shirts, some shoes—”

Again, she jumped in. “What about all those new clothes I bought?” And what about her beautiful black suede pumps with the four-inch heels? They weren’t mere shoes, they were—

“You bought that stuff in order to draw out a killer.”

“Not the shoes. And it doesn’t mean I’ll chuck any of it.”

“A chest of drawers, a refrigerator,” he catalogued. “You don’t even have a DVD player.”

“Or access to the internet,” she snapped. He made Spartan living sound like a disease.

“But you kept the box, didn’t you?” His whisper-soft voice in her head made her chest tighten until it hurt to breathe.

“That was the zinger you wanted to hit me with all along.”

“Look in the box.”

Kneeling on the floor, she lifted the bedspread. The box, a black lump in the near darkness, hid beneath the bed along with dust bunnies and musty air. Max sneezed. The bunnies made a run for the back. She touched cardboard with the tips of her nails. Drawing it to her, she got a good grip and pulled it all the way out.

A shipping box with the label torn off, flaps folded one under the other, it smelled old and moldy, as though the bottom had gotten wet at one time.

“Open it,” Cameron urged.

She reached to her bedside lamp, turned it on, and looked at the box. Cameron was so good at pushing her to do what she didn’t want to do. He’d pushed her into following those visions of murder to their natural conclusion. He’d pushed her at Witt. And now this box. Was there a point in fighting him? In the end, she’d do it to shut him up.

Pulling up one flap, the others came apart on their own. Stale air washed over her as if she’d opened long buried treasure.

Treasure was what it held, Cameron’s favorite things, the ones she hadn’t been able throw out, sell, or give away. With a reverent hand, she held still above the first item in the box. Warmth spread across her palm, through the bones of her arm, as if a piece of Cameron had remained with his things.

On top lay his favorite CD. Romantic music for cold and stormy nights before a fire. Johnny Desmond singing standards on his album
Blue Smoke
. Max had grown to love it because of the rhapsodic look it produced on his face. She’d saved it, but she hadn’t listened to it since he died.

The CD now on her lap, she pulled out the next jewel. What else but a book,
Lost Horizon
. Cameron had believed in Shangri-La, a place of perfect beauty and happiness.

“Shangri-La is a state of mind,” he whispered.

A state of mind Max had never been able to achieve, not before she met him, not during the years they were married, and certainly not in the two since the 7-11.

Underneath the book were his favorite movies. Three of them. Steve McQueen’s
Bullitt
because Cameron thought it had the best car chase ever filmed.
On Any Sunday
, an obscure film about racing motorcycles, Cameron’s teenage fantasy. And the 1937 version of
Lost Horizon
. The last two were videotapes because when Cameron bought them, they weren’t on DVD yet.

Every night for six months after he died, she’d watched that movie, over and over until the tape began to squeak. She’d watched it because she thought she was crazy hearing his voice, and because somehow, some way, she thought she could find Shangri-La if she did. She watched it because when she closed her eyes, she could feel his arms around her and remember his voice in her ear whispering, “Let’s go there together.”

She put a hand to her cheek, the flesh dry despite the ache in her eyes and the tingle in her nose. She hadn’t cried, not in two years. After six months, she’d thrown out the VCR so she couldn’t watch the movie again. But she hadn’t thrown out the tape.

“What else is there?” Cameron urged, making no comment on the torrent of emotions flooding through her.

Hands shaking, she laid the tapes in her lap, along with the book and the CD. His Rolex watch stared up at her. They’d argued as they always had, she fearing they couldn’t afford it. She hadn’t thought they could afford the Miata he bought her when she made partner at the CPA firm, either. Hell, she was an accountant; she hated spending money on principal.

“What’s the engraving?”

She turned the heavy gold watch in her hand and read the words aloud. “To Cameron. This is the last one. Love, Max.”

Watches were to a man what rings, necklaces, and bracelets were to a woman. Any woman but Max. Cameron could never have enough. She’d given in. Both to the Miata and the watch.

It
had
been the last expensive thing he ever bought.

A pair of gold cufflinks bearing his initials chinked against the watch as she set it back in the box. Cameron wore French cuff shirts when he had to appear in court. And there, next to the cufflinks, the tie pin his father left him, a ruby surrounded by several tiny diamonds. He’d worn it daily. It shone amidst a strange assortment of clothing she’d kept.

A couple of white dress shirts, ties, underwear, and socks. She moved them aside with a gentle touch. A toothbrush clattered to the bottom of the box, falling from the shaving kit she hadn’t quite zippered. Why had she saved all this stuff? The ties weren’t favorites. And his underwear and socks? She’d admit to being a little out of her head at the time, but keeping all this? God, she’d been pathetic, more so than she’d ever imagined.

“They don’t have anything to do with my sister. Dig deeper.”

She did. And came up with a gun.

“Jesus Christ.” Max held it suspended between thumb and forefinger. A Glock nine millimeter semi-automatic, magazine still in it. She wondered if she’d been idiotic enough to leave it loaded.

“Where’d this come from?” She searched the room for the fine points of red that were Cameron’s eyes.

“We got it for protection, remember?”

No, she didn’t.

“But you remember me teaching you how to fire it.”

Yes. But somehow she’d thought they’d borrowed a friend’s gun. Okay, so her memory sucked. “But why’d I keep it?”

“You were afraid they’d come back for you?”

His killers. They’d raped her, beaten her, and left her for dead alongside a hiking trail. It was a miracle that Cameron returned from wherever dead people went to talk to her, to keep her alive long enough for the dawn and a jogger to find her.