Vengeance to the Max (15 page)

“You don’t know what it’s an act of. And you missed that someone else was cut out in addition to the sister.”

“What?” She grabbed the book, pulling it to her, almost knocking over her water glass in her haste. He was right. The center picture on the open page of the album had two figures cut out with the Exacto knife. So did the photo opposite. Cameron remained, as did his mother and an unfamiliar girl of Cameron’s approximate age, hair long, dark, and curling. Max hadn’t looked at the album well enough to see if the girl appeared elsewhere.

“Cameron’s father,” she suggested.

Witt shook his head. “Don’t think so.”

“Grandfather?”

Again, that slight negative shake. “Too many removed. The grandfather wasn’t in there much. And the father is gone long before the pictures started getting defaced. Your husband must be”—again that assessing look—“fifteen.”

So she’d missed that, too, big deal. “Evelyn’s still the key. She can tell us.”

He regarded her with a frosty stare. “You might get only one shot at her, Max. And you damn well better know the questions you want to ask before you go in there.”

“Well, who the hell do you think this person was?”

He sat back, skimmed a few pages, then pulled the book up onto its bottom edge. “Evelyn’s husband.”

Max snorted. “She said she’d never been married.”

He eyed her over the top of the album. “Problem with you is you don’t listen. She never said she wasn’t married, just told you to call her Miss instead of Mrs.”

“Yeah? Isn’t that what Miss means, never married?”

“No.” He let the book drop, flipped it around, and shoved it across the table at Max. “Looks like a wedding picture to me.”

Damn. Evelyn, dressed in white but not a twenty-something bride, smiled for the camera, a beautiful, full-of-hopes-and-dreams smile that once again tugged at Max’s memory. She gazed at the man by her side.

Her husband, the man Evelyn had painstakingly cut from the eight-by-ten glossy. Only his arm linked through hers remained.

Keeping his eyes on Max, Witt reached in his pocket to pull out a neatly folded piece of paper. “Here’s a list of names, a list of your husband’s friends who still live in Lines. We talk to these people. We see what we can find out.
Then
we go back to Evelyn.”

“Don’t cops go to the source?” Breathless, she hadn’t gotten over the shock of the photo and what it said about Evelyn’s state of mind.

His blue eyes hardened. “We go when we know the right questions to ask. I want background info before I confront her.”

“But she
wants
us to ask. That’s why she gave us the book.”

“And I want to be able to verify what she says.”

She sat back, rolled her bottom lip between her teeth. He was immovable. He got like that sometimes. She could push the guy so far before he slammed her down. It didn’t happen often, once or twice in their two-and-a-half month so-called relationship, but he did it now.

Max admitted defeat. She also admitted, if only to herself, that he was right. They had to know all the right questions before they tackled Evelyn. “Fine. Then let’s go talk to the names on that list.”

“That’s why we’re here.”

She eyed him suspiciously. “What do you mean?”

He unfolded the paper ceremoniously. “First name I wrote down was Izzie Monroe?”

“Izzie?”

He gave her a hard smile, lifted his hand enough to point.

Max’s gaze followed. “Izzie the Waitress?”

“Izzie Monroe. Your husband’s girlfriend in high school.”

Bastard. “You should have warned me.”

Witt watched Max a moment amid low voices, laughter, the crackle of newspaper to wash another window, the drip of brewing coffee, the hiss of another burger on the grill, and the spatter of fries set in the vat.

“Didn’t want you to have any preconceptions when you met her.” Witt drank from his water glass, eyes on Max.

“I never have preconceptions.” Except when she decided someone was a killer after only a few words.

He snorted. “Even I did when I met my ex-wife’s husband.”

“She’s remarried?” Max had never asked, afraid of making his business her business.

“Swell guy.”

Her turn to snort. “And I bet he sits when he takes a leak.” She didn’t mention that other thing Debbie Doodoo had done. Not again. She didn’t want to remind him.

With a ghost of a smile, Witt tipped his head. “Suspect he leaves a spic-n-span toilet when he’s done, sitting or not.”

Max grimaced. She had the immediate image of a thin wimpy guy who stooped. It was overridden by an image of Izzie, same curling hair but without the gray, same smile that would have tempted a teenager’s heart. She gasped. “The girl in the pictures.” She didn’t need to flip through it; the young girl had appeared several times. A younger, slimmer version of Izzie. “But how’d you know she was Cameron’s girlfriend?”

“Short but sweet note in his yearbook.”

Of course. Witt hadn’t had Evelyn’s photo album at the time he’d compiled his list.

“Didn’t sign with a last name,” he went on, “but there was only one Isabel. Helped they put
Izzie
in quotes under her picture.” Smugness wasn’t a Witt characteristic, but his tone and the slight smile curving his lips implied it.

“You’re enjoying having one up on me, aren’t you?”

The smile died as quickly as it had come. “I’m sorry that it still has the power to hurt you.”

He was right about the hurt. Maybe he’d been hoping it wouldn’t. But it did. Lightheaded and a little nauseous, she didn’t want to think about what Izzie Monroe wrote to Cameron. Right then and there, she promised herself she’d never look.

Witt closed the pages of the photo album and set it on the seat beside him. “How ya gonna approach her?”

The question caught her off guard, though she knew Witt meant Izzie Monroe. The idea of it wiped all other thoughts clean. “Me?” she croaked.

“Yeah, you.”

Well, of course, she would do it. Cameron was her husband, this woman his old girlfriend, and Max wasn’t afraid of a confrontation, which was what she was sure Witt thought. She shot him a venomous glare. “I’ll make up a really good story, I’ll—” She stopped.
What
good story?

“What lie you gonna tell her?”

She didn’t like his tone, one suggesting she’d lied to Evelyn Hastings. Which she hadn’t. Not at all. Had she? Damn Witt for getting on her case. “It’s my husband, and it’ll be my lie.”

“Why lie at all?”

Her breath came out in a huffy puff. “So what, you think I’m supposed to tell her I had a dream where my husband told me I had to find his sister and flew across the country so I could ask his old girlfriend what she knew?”

Witt didn’t move a muscle. “Yeah.”

Then it was too late to plan what she would say. Izzie arrived at their table, her smile a permanent etching on her face. She eyed their dirty dishes. “You’re done. Sorry, I wasn’t watching.”

Being Saturday, the lunch hour had extended past the weekday norm of one-thirty, but with the Copper Penny Café now close to empty, a second waitress seated herself at a table by the window, presumably to chat with friends. The window-washer used his vinegar mixture on the stainless behind the counter. And Izzie had been preoccupied with ... something.

Max beamed a smile she didn’t feel. “Join us.”

“Join you?” Izzie’s own smile disappeared, her thoughts written on her face. She watched
CSI
and
Criminal Minds
, and though she lived in a small town, she knew serial killers, rapists, and torturers lurked in every corner, waiting for the innocent and the unsuspecting. One shouldn’t be fooled by a couple, because sometimes they could be the worst.

“I was married to Cameron Starr.”

Izzie sagged into the seat beside Witt, lips trembling, face white. “Oh my God.” It was all Max would have said if their roles were switched. The silence went on. Max struggled not to fill it.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Izzie mouthed the words, then put a hand to her mouth.

“Why do you think that?” Witt asked when Max couldn’t.

“His letters stopped.”

His letters? “When did they stop?” Max’s palms had started to sweat. Her pulse pounded behind her eyes, at her throat, and throbbed in her fingertips.

“A couple of years ago.”

Cameron hadn’t told her about letters from Izzie. He hadn’t told her about Lines, about his sister, his aunt, Izzie, about his whole goddamn life that existed before they met.

Cameron had been writing to this woman. A waitress in a tiny town in the corner of Michigan, a town nobody of any consequence had ever heard of. Max didn’t care that it sounded snobbish, didn’t care that everything in front of her was now bathed in shades of green, jealous, angry, envious green, didn’t care about Evelyn or Cordelia or all the stupid questions she was supposed to ask.

Witt’s gaze sat on her, his sympathy burning her flesh like battery acid. She almost hated him for it. She wanted to speak, wanted to scream, wanted to run. Her muscles didn’t respond.

Her husband had betrayed her in letters to a girlfriend from high school. It wasn’t about sex: it was about secrets and lies.

“He died two years ago,” Witt supplied.

Izzie Monroe’s green eyes misted. “How?”

Death by gunshot at a 7-11 a mile and a half from our home
.

Over the roaring in her ears, Max wasn’t sure how Witt replied, but a single tear slipped from the corner of Izzie’s eye.

Max had never cried for Cameron. Izzie Monroe did it within seconds of learning he was gone.

Dead but not gone, not from Max. That was something this woman could
never
take away.

“What happened to his sister?”

Izzie frowned, reaction to Max’s harsh, unbending tone. Witt dared to look at her with pity.

“Didn’t he tell you?”

Hating Cameron in that instant and glad she’d never shed a tear for him, Max sucked in a deep breath. She needed calm, a steady voice, a I that masked the anger boiling deep inside. Cameron was lucky he hadn’t voiced his thoughts inside Max’s head. She might have done something unforgivable if he had, the least of which would have been screeching at Izzie.

She liked the quality of her voice when it came. Reasonable, not too soft, not too loud, devoid of emotion, precise, formal. “I need to find Cameron’s sister. I haven’t been able to do so up to this point, hence my journey to Lines.”

Izzie regarded her with tilted head and furrowed brow, as if Max were an idiot or an alien. “No one’s heard from Cordelia in years, not since she ran away, not as far as I know.”

You’re a fucking waitress, how would you know anything
? Max clamped her mouth over the words before they spilled out.
Don’t upset the woman, don’t blow up at her, she might have answers, she might know something we can use.

One, two, three breaths, long ones, allowing oxygen into her brain, soothing like a drug. She felt calm, in control. As long as she didn’t look at Witt, at that compassionate gaze.

“When did she run away?” A good question, a safe and necessary question.

Izzie’s eyes were wide and bewildered. “Right after high school. That summer.”
Didn’t Cameron tell you all this
?

“Does anyone know why she ran away?” Two sets of eyes, one green, one startling blue and too damn understanding, stared at her as she spoke.

“Why, because she was pregnant. She ran away with BJ. She thought they’d get married.”

“BJ?” What the hell kind of guy would call himself BJ?