Mommy bent down and nuzzled her ear. “People are mean when someone’s different.”
“I wish I wasn’t different.” Please, please God. She wished for that more than anything else in the world.
Mommy was silent for a long time. The quiet scared Bethany, and then, “Do you want to lose weight? Will that help?”
Bethany thought about it. Sniffled. Maybe if Mommy helped her, maybe she could do it. “Yeah.”
“All right. I’ll help you. But let’s start tomorrow, okay? I’m making your favorite for dessert.”
“What?” She already knew, and her tummy jumped up and down thinking about it.
“Chocolate truffles with raspberry sauce.
“Mmmm.”
Oh my, oh my, truffles were her most favorite thing in all the world. Especially the way Mommy made them with raspberry sauce. Her most favorite except maybe for bubblegum ice cream. And carrot cake with the cream cheese frosting and chopped walnuts. And ... no, no, truffles were the best.
“All right,” she whispered. Her stomach rumbled happily in anticipation. “I’ll start losing weight tomorrow.”
Max awoke to find Buzzard laying on her pillow, curled around her head, his snout pressed against her ear, his purr like the growling of Bethany’s stomach. The full moon reached through the branches of the elm outside to stretch across her bed like long, taloned fingers.
She’d never tasted truffles except in the Bethany vision. She was terrified now to try. What if she became addicted?
For Bethany had not started her diet the next day, nor the day after that. Later, when she was in her teens, she’d tried and failed at it so many times that she’d come to believe she was a failure. Max knew these things as clearly as she knew that the dream had been a fragment of Bethany’s memories. Bethany had been the ugly duckling always waiting to reach swanhood. She’d never made it. Now she never would.
Max thought of all the words she’d ascribed to the woman; neurotic, possessive, pathetic, envious, manic, pitiful, jealous. They were all an understatement, misnomers, symptoms of a larger concept. Bethany Spring had been desperate. Desperate to be accepted, to be wanted, to be needed. Desperate to be loved. The woman’s desperation seeped into Max’s bones, filling her organs, taking over her emotions.
“I have to get her out.” She said it aloud, knowing Cameron wasn’t far away. He was never far away, his ghost tethered to her like a dog on a leash or a fish on a hook.
“Solve her mystery, Max. She won’t be desperate anymore. She’ll rest. She only wants to rest.”
She turned, dislodging the cat. He stretched, extending his claws, catching her at the corner of her eye with one sharp little razor. “Shit.” Like a tear, a warm trickle of blood slid down her temple into her hair. She wiped it away, licked her finger, the taste like tin in her mouth.
“Do you realize what you did in the dream?”
She sat, she listened, she observed. She even learned something.
“You acted.”
She gingerly tested the small cut by her eye. It stung. “Huh?”
“You changed the dream.”
“What are you talking about? I didn’t do anything.”
“You made her wipe her eyes so that you could see.”
“Yeah. Big deal.”
“It is, Max. Don’t you see what it means?”
Maybe she was only half awake, but no, she didn’t get it. She was too tired to say the words aloud, letting him read her mind instead. Sometimes there were real advantages to living with a ghost.
“Come on, Max. If you can get her to wipe her eyes, you can go back into your vision of the night she died and get her to turn her head and look at the person who killed her.”
Chapter Fourteen
Max was drawn to Garden Street like a bee to honey, like a duck to water, like a fly to dead flesh. It was eleven o’clock the next morning. She’d cruised the quiet neighborhood street twice, noted two cars parked in front of the duplex—the same cinnamon Honda Civic and gray Camry station wagon that had been there last night—then parked her Miata beneath a shade tree three doors down, close enough to see the comings and goings at 452, but well out of sight of Ladybird Long’s front window.
Before leaving her room, she’d fortified herself with a bowl of cereal, a cup of coffee, two pieces of toast, a banana, and some carrot sticks. She now felt like puking. Bethany’s fault, Max was sure. The idea of her finger down her throat right now seemed quite appealing. Rolling her window down, she let the late morning breeze wash over her face and leaned against the door with her head on her hand, watching, waiting. For what, she wasn’t quite sure. She’d know it when she saw it.
Her boss, Sunny Wright of Wright Temporary Accounting Services, had woken her from a deep sleep at eight. Max couldn’t remember sleeping that late in years.