Vengeance to the Max (21 page)

“You never answered that first question, Ms. Hastings.” Max waited a beat. “Did you kill them?”

Evelyn’s next words answered nothing directly, yet somehow protested her innocence. “I never loved BJ, you know. I was tired of being alone.”

“Why slash the photos?”

“He made us unhappy. He took away Cordelia. He disappointed my father. Then there was what he did to Cameron.”

A closed fist twisted inside Max. “What did he do?”

Evelyn smiled and looked fifteen years younger. “Cameron adored BJ. His own father had let him down. BJ came along and did all those fatherly things, campouts, coached Cameron’s baseball team at the Rec Center, taught him to drive, took him to a few Notre Dame games.” She shook her head. “BJ always had a line on tickets.” Her eyes refocused on Max. “He treated Cameron like the son he’d never had.” A little spurt of laughter shot out her nose. “And all the while, what he wanted was Cordelia.”

Cameron had never told Max a thing. BJ must have crushed him before he was even a man.
Oh Cameron, how could you blame me
? They’d both had their painful childhood secrets. Perhaps he’d turned his own guilt over his inability to face his past against her.

“When did you suspect he was the father of Cordelia’s baby?”

“I didn’t.” Evelyn smoothed the line of her skirt in what was fast becoming a compulsive gesture. “Madeline did.”

“Cameron’s mother? But ... didn’t she tell you?” Questions jumped off Max’s tongue. “How long had she known?” She pointed a finger at no one in particular. “She must have been the one who first realized Cordelia was pregnant.”

“Madeline knew what BJ was...” Evelyn pursed her lips. “What his proclivities were ... before I married him.”

The statement fell like a bomb into the room. Witt reared forward as if he needed to see Evelyn’s face. Max lost her voice.

Then found it. “But Cordelia would have been...” A good accountant, Max counted on her fingers. “Thirteen when he first saw her.” God, she hated that age, hated the way it always seemed to slap her in the face at every turn, as if it were an omen, or a harbinger of worse things to come. She preferred to find 452.

“BJ liked young girls.” Max wanted to throw up. Evelyn perused her fingernails. “I was a bit long in the tooth for him. I know he didn’t love me, but he was so ... attentive. Father liked him, was grooming him to take over the law firm. Father was in his sixties.” She raised her eyes to Max’s without lifting her head. “The firm was our source of income. Everyone. Me. Madeline and the children.” She pulled in a deep breath. “Father’s first choice for BJ was Madeline.” Odd phrasing, as if Calvin Hastings was more concerned for BJ than his daughters. “After all, her children needed a father. But she said...” Evelyn stopped.

Witt spoke for the first time. “What was your married name, ma’am?”

Evelyn blinked, as if for a moment she couldn’t remember. “It was Tyler. Father had me change it back.”
Father
ran her life.

“What reason did your sister give for not marrying BJ Tyler?” Witt let the name roll off his tongue as if testing it for something.

For the first time, emotion quivered on Evelyn’s lips. “She said he didn’t make her heart beat faster.” She blinked. “But he made mine do the two-step with all the attention he lavished. Finally being the center of attention does that.”

“The mother of a thirteen-year-old child let her sister marry a man who liked thirteen-year-olds.” Max managed the words through gritted teeth.

“I suppose she thought Cordelia was safe if they weren’t in the same house.”

Max wanted to smash her fist down on the monstrosity of a coffee table, yet her arms wouldn’t obey the simplest of instructions. Her feet failed to run. “He still molested her.”

“Molest?” Evelyn cocked her head thoughtfully, burying that earlier display of feeling. “I don’t think so. The girl positively glowed. I think she loved him as much as Cameron did.”

“You’re making excuses for him.”
Bam, bam,
Max’s heart slammed against the walls of her chest. “She was little more than a child. She couldn’t know her own mind.” And yet some thirteen-year-old girls did, some knew exactly what they were doing. Max had known, wished to God she hadn’t.

“You never knew about your niece and your husband.” Witt’s voice laced the background of the room and kept Evelyn talking.

“Madeline didn’t tell me until they disappeared. She was so...”

Witt didn’t finish for her. A good cop didn’t put words in a suspect’s mouth.

Head shaking vaguely, Evelyn put a hand to the black-and-white cameo fastening the neck of her dress. “It was beyond anger. She was cold and ... controlled. She wouldn’t let me cry. Not for him. Not even for Cordelia.” She looked at Max for understanding. If she’d known her better, Evelyn would have realized how useless that was. Still, she tried to explain her emotions versus her sister’s. “Madeline’s expectations were so high. Father’s, too. They had so much farther to fall than I did.”

“You didn’t cut those pictures out of the album, did you?” Witt, not missing a thing, cut to the chase. Evelyn never actually said she’d done it, even as Max accused her.

Evelyn closed her eyes, shaking her head. “Madeline did.”

By giving them the album, consciously or subconsciously, Evelyn had wanted them to know Madeline was most likely her own daughter’s killer.

* * * * *

“I’m sorry,” Max whispered to her motel room at large.

She’d run the gamut of emotions today, anger, delight, desire, fear, possession—which she considered no less an emotion than the others. Her body exhausted, her mind on overload, she lay sprawled face up on the lumpy mattress. She was alone, having sent Witt out for Chinese food, but Cameron didn’t answer. His sister was dead. His mother had killed her. Maybe there was nothing to say.

“I’m sorry I got so angry about Izzie. I understand a little more now.” Izzie had been the only connection to a past Cameron couldn’t talk about, yet could never let go, not even in death.

She and Witt were leaving on a two o’clock Chicago flight tomorrow, a two-hour drive from Lines before that. She’d learned what she’d come to learn. Her heart ached for Cameron.

“Do you believe my sister is dead?” His voice, barely discernible, seemed to come from the corner of the room.

The answer was inside her, a part of her, branded across her eyelids. “Yes.”

“You think my mother could kill her.” It wasn’t a question.

“I don’t know your mother. I only know she let BJ marry Evelyn when she already knew that he wanted Cordelia.”

“Maybe it was a feeling of something being wrong, something she didn’t understand until it was too late.”

“Do I have to show you the pictures in that album again?” Her words harsh, she used as gentle a tone as possible. “She gouged them, sliced them, ripped them. Not only his, but Cordelia’s, too, all the ones after she turned thirteen.”

“As if she blamed Cordelia.” Blamed Cordelia
the most
went unspoken between them.

“Yes.”

“We never even said Cordelia’s name. She wouldn’t allow it.”

“You remember?”

“I remember it all now. The pain of losing her. It was as if she’d never existed. I couldn’t talk about her. I couldn’t try to find her. In the end, it was easier not to think about her.”

He moved onto the bed; she knew him by the gentle brush of air as if it were his body. They lay in silence. “I’m sorry, Cameron.” The word seemed so inadequate. “Witt and I talked about having the authorities search for her body. He says there isn’t an iota of evidence to make them even drive out there.” Unsaid between them was that finding Cordelia’s body would only lead the cops to Max’s conclusion. That Madeline Starr had killed her daughter and her daughter’s lover. Madeline had already had her own judgment day.

“Let Cordelia stay where she is, undisturbed.”

That way, Cameron’s mother’s name wouldn’t be tarnished.

Cameron heard the thought. “Cordelia would have wanted it that way. She loved those woods.”

“But she isn’t content there. She’s possessing me. That has to mean she wants justice.”

“She isn’t possessing you.”

Max snorted before thinking how thoughtless it would sound under the circumstances. Softly, in deference to his pain, she said what had to be said. “I felt her out there. Those were her feelings. It was her snow angel. That wasn’t me, Cameron.”

“Those were residual memories. Pieces of herself she left behind. But she’s gone, Max.”

She didn’t believe him, even though hours ago, she’d wanted to deny the possession. “I know this is all hard for you to deal with. What happened to Cordelia. Your mom. But I know when I’ve been possessed.”

“Do you feel her now?”

Well, that was odd. She didn’t. Not really. She felt ... alone in her own body.

“The times you’ve been possessed in the past, the feelings were always negative and they made your skin crawl.”

The sensation was hard to describe. She hadn’t felt ... alone. She couldn’t come up with anything better than that. But he was right, the emotions she’d felt had been negative for the most part.

“You didn’t feel anything bad with Cordelia. You felt only her joy of life. Cordelia might have been murdered, but she didn’t hang around the earthly plane for thirty years waiting for you to give her justice. Cordelia wouldn’t have needed vengeance.”

“Obviously you didn’t know her as well as you thought you did. You didn’t know she was in love with BJ.” God, that was cruel. “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to understand all this.”

“My mother wasn’t a murderer.”

She searched for the right words. “I know it’s hard to accept. But the evidence, her anger—”

“You haven’t seen all the evidence. Get my yearbook.”

“Your yearbook?” The swift change confused and alarmed her, and for a moment she couldn’t remember where she’d put it.

“In the bedside table.”

Yes. Before she’d thrown the bible at the door, at him. Rolling to the other side, she opened the drawer. The corner of the yellow sunset on Cameron’s yearbook lay beneath the photo album.

“Open to the front.”

Sitting up, she pulled the book out, set it in her lap to open to page one. The year, his high school, his town. “Cameron, what has this got to do with your mother?”

“Look at the inside cover.”

The picture of a ballgame crowd, the laughing, yelling students in tight shirts and bell-bottomed jeans, cheerleaders with bouncing yellow and blue pom-poms, teenagers on the cusp of life. She saw now that the middle cheerleader was Cordelia, a fact she’d missed when she’d first looked at the book.

His voice dropped until it was nothing more than a message in her head. “Second row from the bottom, four in from the left.”

She traced the directions with her finger, counting, one, two, three, four. The hand of God or the Devil smashed up through her ribcage and clenched her heart in a tight fist, squeezed her lungs until she could neither drag in air nor let it out. Bright lights exploded behind her eyes. She couldn’t scream, couldn’t speak, couldn’t move her eyes from the picture on that page.

“My uncle BJ,” Cameron murmured without inflection.

Uncle BJ. The photo grainy in spots and the crowd muted against the bouncing pom-poms in the foreground, Max would still know that face, even from almost thirty years in the past. She would know those black eyes and that cool smile.

But she would call him Bud Traynor.

“Bud Traynor killed Cameron.” The knowledge seethed in her heart, her bones, her head.

Max grabbed Witt as soon as he walked through the door. She forgot the Chinese food, forgot everything, as she shoved the yearbook beneath his nose.

“He paid those men to kill Cameron.”

She said it over and over that night until she’d driven Witt into a merciful sleep on the covers of her bed. She repeated it like a mantra as she lay next to him and in the morning as she stood beneath the stinging spray of the shower. She told Witt a thousand times on the drive to the airport. Holding his hand, she whispered it in his ear as the plane took off, soothed him with it as his fingers clenched on his thighs, recited it like a prayer as they winged through the sky, puffy clouds below them, chanted it as they deplaned, again and again until Witt, in the middle of the causeway, stopped her with his hands on her face.