A rush of air swept up the steps, swirled around her pants leg. She shivered. Yet shimmers of heat rose off the concrete parking lot, the shadow of the tree still covered her car, and she was sweating inside her black jacket.
A sleek white Cadillac pulled into the lot and parked next to her car. Tinting obscured the windows, but she didn’t need to see inside to know who was driving.
Something momentous. She’d thought it had to do with Hal, but he was just the appetizer.
Bud Traynor climbed from the car and slammed the door. He was dressed for golf, saddle shoes, plaid polyester slacks, and a polo shirt. His gray hair gleamed in the sun. Max stood in the shadow of the second floor stairwell, watching his approach. Walking in bright light with his sunglasses on, he shouldn’t have been able to see her.
Yet like the devil, he could see everything. He smiled.
Max was frozen to the spot by Wendy’s terror. Her mouth dried up, her heart pounded, and her ears rushed with a sound akin to a speeding freight train.
“Max.” He reached up to remove his glasses. Max winced, paralyzed for a moment by the mere thought of what lay hidden behind those dark lenses. Traynor slid them slowly from behind his ears, folded each stem, then slipped them in his shirt pocket. “How good to see you.”
She sighed, looking into his eyes. Just a man, she told herself. Not the devil ready to steal her soul.
She was on the third step from the bottom, and therefore held a height advantage. It should have been an advantage. It wasn’t. She immediately went into attack mode, didn’t even think about the wisdom of it.
“I know what you did.” The challenge was out, lying on the pebbled cement between them.
His eyes flashed. Grey to black to grey again. Too fast to follow, she had no idea what the expression meant. “What do you think you know, Max?” His voice was low, malignant.
She wanted to see him dead, had never wanted anything more in her life, yet she was debased by the strength of that need. Because it hadn’t come from Wendy. She suddenly wished for Cameron’s sweet peppermint scent, his energy, his sanity.
The thought of him rushed through her, calmed her. She started again. “Did you love your daughter, Mr. Traynor?”
The smile was slow to grow. A cold smile that never touched his cheeks or his eyes. “No.”
She wasn’t sure what she’d expected. A lie, at best. Certainly not such unvarnished truth. Wendy’s pain stabbed her heart. “God, the men she chose to surround herself with.”
A father who didn’t love her, a husband who’d ended up hating her.
“I like your wording. She chose.”
“Why?” The question came out on a breath.
“She needed strong men around her. She was that way.”
“Weak?” Max shook her head. “Not that last day.”
“Because she packed a bag and left? She would have been back before the week was out. I’d even have bet on Tuesday.”
Max heard phones ringing until she wanted to clamp her hands over her ears and scream to shut the sound out. Phones ringing. All day. That day. Monday. Wendy’s death day. “How many times did you call her the day she died?”
He wagged a finger at her. “Very intuitive, Max. You’re good at following things to their logical conclusion.”
“No, I’m just psychic.” God, she prayed Cameron could hear her, that he knew how much the admission cost her, that she’d done it for him. Or she’d done it for Wendy, to get back at Bud.
“Why did you call her, Bud?”
“I wanted to help her understand what things would be like without Hal. Without me. The car needed regular service. Hal always took care of that. He took her grocery shopping, bought her clothes, and paid her bills. Did you know she’d never filled her own car with gas? Or taken it through the car wash?”
Oh yes, Max knew. “Small things scared her the most.” Small things for which, as a child, Wendy’d received the severest of punishments.
“How would she have been able to get an apartment, start up the electricity, the phone, buy the furniture, and get her own insurance policy? The tasks ahead of her were horrendous.”
Max’s eyelids drifted down briefly. She bit her lip. Her insides turned to jelly. The immensity of it. Wendy had been terrified. Bud Traynor had known. He’d twisted the knife in her fear, poured salt, and listened to her writhe on the end of that phone line.
And enjoyed every gram of power he wielded over her.
“If you didn’t love her, why did you want her back?”
The smile disappeared, his nostrils flared, then relaxed. “I don’t like losing. Remember that.”
A dream image shuddered through her mind. Wendy cowering in the closet, praying for daylight when her good Daddy would come back. Wendy survived because of her delusions, but they’d also kept her prisoner. Bud Traynor had always been that nighttime Daddy, even in the light of day. If she’d known that, Wendy might have left long ago.
Left and lived.