Vengeance to the Max (3 page)

But she’d never worried they’d come after her later. A part of her had wished they would, to put an end to the nightmare she’d found herself living.

“What else is there?” Cameron distracted her with his insistence.

Carefully laying the gun on the floor, she dug once more in the box. Her fingers touched something else.

Another book. Big. Protected by a plastic dust cover. A man and a woman walking on the beach before a golden sunset graced the cover. She opened the flap to a picture of bleachers filled with cheering students at a high school game of some sort. The more conservative dress of a few dedicated parents was sprinkled in amongst girls with tight shirts in bright colors, their jeans sporting bell bottoms. At the lowest edge of the picture, three cheerleaders, all blonde, had been caught in mid-bounce, their pleated skirts flying, blue and yellow pom-poms beating the air, their legs lopped off by the cut of the editor.

She held Cameron’s high school yearbook in her hands. She could have sworn she’d never seen it before nor could she remember packing it in this box.

“Turn the page.”

She responded to the urgency in his tone. Washington Irving High School—someone must have loved
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
—and the name of a town. Lines, Michigan. A fist-sized lump grew in her throat. He was from a town called Lines. Another thing she hadn’t known. So many things she’d never bothered to ask. She wasn’t normal, she’d never been normal. Learning history was so basic to a relationship, yet Max had wanted to create a world of their own, where only she and Cameron mattered. True, she’d had a job, she’d had a few friends, but when she got home at night, she’d wanted to pretend only she and Cameron were real. Home was the only place she felt safe, despite the fights they had. She’d wanted to pretend life began when they met each other.

“You didn’t need to know about my past.”

Which meant he hadn’t wanted to tell her. Her isolationism had played right into that.

“Look at the index in the back.”

Max did as he said, not willing to look their marriage in the face, not now when she could no longer change it. She went straight to his name. He was listed on several different pages, had probably been in all the clubs, on the debating team, class president, whatever.

It was the name beneath his, though, that made her gasp.

She turned to the page listed and stared at a face, framed by honey-blond hair, a face that was a feminine replica of Cameron’s.

“My sister,” he whispered, the hint of tears in his voice. “Cordelia.”

“Do you feel anything when you touch her picture?”

Max was slightly psychic—Cameron snorted at her use of the adverb. Okay, she had a gift. She had visions, she could occasionally touch an object and see things, feel things. Sometimes dead people invaded her mind.

Now, however, she looked at the unmarked face of Cameron’s sister and felt nothing, nothing beyond a vague sadness that she hadn’t known anything about this part of his life. “Maybe it’s been too long. Maybe it’s because it’s your book and not hers.”

“You’ll find her with or without emanations from that book.”

Max smoothed a hand over the page, unwilling to answer, unwilling to commit. “Were you blond, too, growing up?”

“Why don’t you look?”

Her fingers shook. “It’s not important.”

“Afraid you’ll see I was losing my hair then, too?”

She hadn’t minded his thinning hair. He was twelve years older than she. She hadn’t minded that either. “I said it’s not important,” the words sharper than she’d intended.

Of course, he picked up on that. “You’re afraid.”

Seeing him in his youth with all the promise of big things to come, his shining enthusiasm, no, she couldn’t bear it. If that constituted fear, then she was afraid. “Talk about your sister.”

The girl’s lively smile and laughing eyes gave a sense of boundless energy, limitless dreams. “Does she still live in Lines or did she move away?”

“I don’t know.”

She ran a finger over the face so much like Cameron’s. “Her senior picture. How much older was she than you?”

“I don’t know.”

She flipped to the back of the book, looked up his grade. Cordelia would have graduated one year before him. “Were you close to her?”

He took longer to answer, his voice softer, melancholy. “I don’t know.”

Irritated with his litany of I-don’t-knows, she slammed the book shut. “You must have known I’d find the book in this box. Why can’t you remember anything else?”

“I remembered”—testiness laced his words—“because I was with you when you put it there six months after I died.”

According to him, his memory began the day he died. He only remembered things from before as she pointed them out to him. That didn’t help them now. “How the hell am I supposed to find her if you can’t remember a damn thing?”

“You’ll have to go to Lines, Michigan.”

Her mouth dropped open. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

The sun seeped into the room, leaching the glow of Cameron’s eyes with its rays. The cat rose from the bed, stretched his front paws to the sill, then squeezed through the narrow opening she’d left in the window to a branch on the elm tree. Max clutched the yearbook to her chest.

“Can’t I use the internet or something? I can go to the library. I know how to do searches.”

“Not this kind of search. It’s been twenty-eight years.”

They shouldn’t have to go back that far. “Where did she go if she wasn’t in Cincinnati with you?”

“I don’t know.”

Her blood boiled at that hated phrase.

“You need to start in the last place we know she was.” Which was in Lines, Michigan for her senior year of high school.

“I can’t afford a trip to Michigan.” Even though she had once been a CPA and a partner in an up-and-coming firm, she now did temp work as an accountant. It paid the few bills she had. Last week’s assignment ended after two days, she’d spent far too much money on those new clothes in the closet, and she needed another job ASAP to replenish. Money was also a good excuse not to go.

“Use the insurance money.”

Shit. She could not, would not, use the money from his life insurance, the blood money. “You had to die for that cash.”

“I know, and you swore you’d never use it.”

“I won’t.”

“It’s the only way you’re going to get to Michigan.”

She raised a haughty brow. “Then I won’t go.”

Dropping the book into the box and piling the rest of Cameron’s stuff on top, she shoved the whole shebang back under the bed. Climbing to her feet, she dusted off her hands, then brushed her knees clean below her sleep shirt.

His voice wrapped itself around her spine and rendered her immobile. “Do you want to live the rest of your life believing I died because you walked in on the middle of a hold up?”

Only her vocal chords moved, though even that ability shocked her. “Do you mean it was more than a robbery gone bad?”

“It was your vision, Max, only you can say. But I’d be willing to bet there’s a clue in it. Follow it. Find out where it leads.”

* * * * *

“You didn’t have to tag along, you know.”

Detective DeWitt Quentin Long propped his feet on his overnighter. “Shoulda said that before you booked the flight for both of us.”

Max squirmed. She’d squirmed for two days since the dream, two days in which to finance the trip out of the blood money fund, two days of hating the fact that she
had
used the tainted cash. One and a half days since she worked up the courage to speak to Witt about accompanying her to Lines. She’d been afraid he’d say no if she gave him half a chance, and equally afraid he’d say yes. But she needed someone to watch her back—why, she hadn’t been able to answer. It was just a sense. A psychic sense, Cameron said. Who better than a cop? A flesh and blood man rather than a ghost.

Due to the lateness of the hour—Max had chosen a red-eye flight—the bay was a black hole outside San Francisco International Airport. Businessmen and women dotted the waiting area. Few families had chosen to travel this late. After eating dinner in one of the airport restaurants, she and Witt had chosen seats overlooking the dark tarmac.

After a full two minutes and the announcement of their flight for boarding, Witt tacked on, “Not like I had anything to do.”

She shot a glance in his direction. Was that some sort of dig at her? His serene face and neutral blue eyes gave no hint. It
was
her fault he was on administrative leave, or whatever they called it when a cop is given time off “pending investigation of an officer-involved shooting.”

For a week, he hadn’t admitted he was on leave, and then he’d explained only because Ladybird spilled the beans. Of course, he’d minimized the whole thing to make both Max and his mother feel better, saying that it was no big deal, routine, yadda, yadda. His job was his life and if he lost it because of her...

“Wasn’t a jab at you,” he said with the smallest of smiles. The damn man was a mind reader. Or her every emotion showed on her face. Scary thought.

If he wasn’t jabbing at her, he should have been. If she hadn’t thought she had everything under control. If she hadn’t been stupid enough to climb into a killer’s car like a lamb to the slaughter. If Witt didn’t seem to have the overpowering need to protect from her own folly. If, if, if.

He was too tolerant of her antics when she gave him nothing in return. But she would pay him back, if only by giving him her trust and playing along with his line that the leave was no big deal. She patted his hand. “Everything will work out.”

Witt tipped his head and stared as if she’d suddenly morphed into a tall, gorgeous blonde with a triple-D chest. Then he smiled that heart-flipping smile of his. “Yeah, it will.”

He bent to pick up their two carry-ons—they both believed in packing light—with his big hands. Partial to big hands, she hadn’t always been partial to big blond cops with Dudley Do-Right dimples in their chins. She was five-foot-six; he was well over six. She’d never been partial to tall guys either. In a little over two months, Witt sort of grew on her, to the point where she now had trouble prying him off. Worse, most of the time she didn’t want to.

Until she thought about a cop’s mortality rate being higher than the average Joe.

Beneath a military-style buzz cut, Witt’s broad forehead would make a perfect target. In her mind’s eye, a bullet hole blossomed in his flesh, blood spurted. She dizzied with the sickening crunch of skull bone.

“Max?”

Breathe, in, out. She opened her eyes to the concern in his.

“A vision?” he asked as they shuffled forward in line.

“Yes.” As real in sentiment as her vision two nights ago of Cameron’s death. Witt shouldn’t be hanging around her. She shouldn’t be hanging around him. Taking him on this trip had been a stupid idea ... Cameron’s stupid idea. She was bad news. Together, they’d be a disaster.

Stop it
. She’d agreed to put her trust in Witt. He wouldn’t die on her. He wouldn’t dare.

“A vision is why we’re taking this little impromptu trip?”

A vision of a dead man, yes. She nodded. It spoke to Witt’s feelings for her that he’d agreed to accompany her without a single question. He’d long since accepted that she was psychic. And she’d finally been willing to admit she had feelings for him, too. They’d come a long way.
She’d
come a long way.

But was she leading him into more danger? Maybe he was a lot safer without her around.

He bumped her leg with the edge of her travel bag, the one she’d bought yesterday with some of the cash she’d taken from the blood money fund.

“Hey.”

She couldn’t remember his question. Oh yeah, the vision and the impromptu trip. She scraped a hand through her short, dark hair, a lock of it falling forward. She needed a cut, badly. The longer it was, the more unmanageable it became. She was into easy maintenance. She was also into avoidance. Witt stared her down.