She hadn’t even thought of it. Had they all come home at the end of the day to watch reruns of Father Knows Best on TV? Or maybe that was Incest Is Best. Max shuddered.
“Is that one of the questions you had when you were investigating his death, Cameron?”
“I don’t remember. But it’s one of the questions I have now. And there’s another.”
His voice hung in the air, ringing in her ears. “What?”
“Did you see Virginia’s furniture? Her clothes?”
The rosewood dining set, the velvet settee, the mahogany coffee table. That knit dress must have been a St. Johns.
Cameron went on. “Walter was a partner in a wealthy law firm. Why is his widow living on Garden Street, in a sixty-year-old two-bedroom duplex, and driving an old Camry station wagon?”
Max didn’t have any answers. She should have remembered Spring in the name of Bud Traynor’s law firm. She should have remembered a lot of things. Instead, she couldn’t forget the way Traynor made her skin crawl with maggots.
“You’re too hard on yourself. Seeing him was a shock. Get over it, and get on with finding answers.”
Her fingers tore at the plastic bag she’d emptied. “What if the man Jada should have been suing wasn’t her father?”
“If it wasn’t, why would she finger him?”
Max cut him off. “The memory’s a tricky thing. How many times have we argued about what I do and don’t remember?”
Cameron grunted agreement.
“Maybe she remembered being molested and immediately thought it was her father. Only it wasn’t.”
“Who do you think it was, Max?”
He already knew what she was going to say, but it pleased her to make the accusation aloud. “The man who molested his own daughter. Her godfather. Bud Traynor.”
Cameron said nothing. Max was glad. She didn’t want to do the obsession argument again.
She put the milk and bread in her tiny fridge, stored the cans, then stared at the potato chips and cookies. Whatever had possessed her? Well, duh, Max. Bethany had.
God, she was tired. She’d been up too late the night before. Despite the fact that she’d slept in, she was still dog-tired. Strong emotion—okay, panic—did that to a person. She didn’t want to think about Bud Traynor anymore.
Wimp, a little voice inside her whispered. It was neither Cameron nor Bethany.
The message light blinked at her. She hadn’t noticed it before. Pushing the button, she heard Witt’s slightly irritated cop voice. “Call me.”
She didn’t. Instead, she erased his message and turned down the phone’s ringer. She’d turn it back up when she had to, like when her first official call came in at midnight.
Hanging her blazer in the closet, she was suddenly too tired to undress further. Her red silk tie slipped from around her neck, landed on the chair back, and, except for her shoes, that was it. “I’m taking a nap.” The solace of sleep or the inability to deal any longer?
Super wimp.
“I have to spend all night talking to those perverts who used to call Bethany.”
“You don’t have to explain, Max. At least not to me. Maybe when you wake up, you’ll know how to approach Jada.”
My, how solicitous he was. She wanted to smack him, would have, too, if he’d been flesh and blood. As it was, she climbed beneath the spread and ignored him.
Sleep. She wanted sleep and nothing more.
Chapter Twenty
Maybe Cameron’s words echoing in her ears as her head hit the pillow brought on the dream. Maybe the insistent chant of Jada, Jada, Jada in her mind—which didn’t quite seem to be her own anymore—set up her subconscious to receive the images. Or maybe it was picturing Jada’s sunken, haunted face before she fell asleep.
The why of it didn’t really matter. Max fell into the dream as if it had been waiting around the corner to jump on her.
She stood in a white room with padded walls facing an empty institutional gray chair with a green vinyl seat. She blinked, and the chair was no longer empty.
Jada Spring sat in the chair, and she was smiling. Her bony cheeks were now full and rosy, her eyes lit with humor, her skeletal hands now plump, her nails manicured and painted a pretty coral that matched the health of her skin. Her sable hair, cut short, flounced prettily around her face. She wore a close-fitting sweater that accentuated her ample breasts.
She was beautiful. She was happy. She was the woman Jada could have been, would have been, if someone hadn’t stolen her precious childhood from her.
Max blinked. Jada’s left hand now held a bag of sweets. No, not sweets, dried fruit. Dried prunes, to be exact. She pulled one from the bag, her white teeth sinking into the delicious fruit. Max’s mouth watered.
Max blinked once more, and Jada’s skin began to change. First the color shifted, from a blooming pink glow to gray-green, then the texture morphed. Before Max’s eyes, the woman’s flesh turned to ... shards of shale, thin, flat, chipped bits of shale rock that covered her face like tiles.