“Quite an isolated couple,” he agreed.
No wonder she’d bared her soul to Lilah Bloom. Wendy had no one else. A deep loneliness washed over Max, her vision blurred, her chest hurt, her throat clogged. Wendy flailed inside her.
“Where’s the Cajun Spice lover?”
The question popped Max out of whatever spell had fallen over her. “What?”
“Cajun Spice, the color she wore the night she died, instead of her usual. Points to a lover.”
“Cajun Spice and navy blue mascara,” she murmured. “If she had a lover, Hal wouldn’t have put him at the top of the guest list.” Should she tell him Wendy had allegedly left Hal before she died? She turned, almost fully facing Witt. Beyond his shoulder, at the edge of the baseball diamond in the park across the street, something glinted in the sunlight. A man, the sun on his watch as he put his hand to his jaw.
She knew who it was without seeing his face. Nickie. He’d come to say good-bye. He was the kind of man who would do so despite the danger to himself.
She averted her eyes before the detective could follow her gaze. “Hal did it,” she jumped in. “Give me time. I’ll use a little sweetness to get him to spill his guts.”
“Good cop, bad cop?”
The man had now risen from the bleachers and disappeared around the corner of the public restrooms. Max released her breath. “Yeah.” She met the detective’s gaze. “Partners?”
Witt countered with a slow side-to-side shake of his head. The preacher had fallen silent. Hal, then Wendy’s father, dropped clods of dirt on the mahogany-colored coffin. The remaining mourners, all pitiful four of them, filed past.
Hal approached her. Witt melted into the background. The good cop was on stage now.
“I can’t thank you enough for coming.” Hal grasped her hand in his, fingers cold and clammy, like the place in which he’d just buried his wife. Max returned his squeeze, despite the “yuk” that wanted desperately to burst from her lips.
Right. Seven mourners looked better than six. “I hope it helped.”
“I’d like you to meet Wendy’s father, Bud Traynor.”
The man had cold, assessing eyes and a strong grip. In his grasp, her wedding band dug against her middle finger. Wendy hid in terror, buried so deep, her emotions became no more than distant memories. Max looked down and ruthlessly cut off the scream in her throat.
Bud Traynor wore a ruby class ring on the fourth finger of his right hand.
Chapter Fourteen
Remy drove them back to work in his cushy Cadillac. Theresa sat in the front seat and drove Max crazy with her incessant sixteen-year-old chatter. Remy shushed the girl every time she brought up Wendy’s death—one of his new rules, thou shalt not speak of murdered persons.
Listening to the two of them, Max barely had energy to think about the implications of Bud Traynor’s ring, beyond the obvious, of course. If Traynor was the man in her dream, then Wendy, as a child, had been physically and verbally abused by her father.
So what’s new, Cameron whispered.
“You’re certainly unsympathetic,” Max scoffed aloud.
Theresa turned to glare at her. Remy eyed her in the mirror. Max contained the rest of her feelings until she’d climbed from Remy’s immaculate car and closed her office door on Theresa’s flaming description of Wendy’s final resting place.
Cameron started in on her immediately. “Wendy doesn’t need your sympathy. She needs your—”
“Help. I know, but she also needs someone to feel sorry for her. Nobody cared she was dead.”
“Lilah was there.”
“Give me a break. Lilah’s dead.”
“She was still there. At the funeral.”
“No more ghost stories, okay?” She was too angry to let the impact of his words sway her. “What about her father? He doesn’t even know how to spell the words love or grief, let alone feel them.” Max dropped her purse into the filing cabinet and slammed the drawer. “That man hit her, I felt it. That wasn’t the first time he’d done it, wasn’t the last either. And he liked it.” Her heartbeat accelerated, her blood pumped furiously.
“I only meant—”
“You have no idea what it’s like, to be shunned, to be treated like you’re less than nothing for something that isn’t even your fault.” She paced the small office, turning on her heel at the door and marching back to the desk.
“That wasn’t your dream, Max.”
“No, it was Wendy’s nightmare, and someone’s got to do something about what that man did to her.”
“You missed my point—”
“I’m not missing anything.”
“Listen to me.”
The sharpness of his tone was enough to stop her pacing. She crossed her arms beneath her breasts. “I’m listening.”