She returned to the issue of the car, because the question hurt less. “But why remember that particular point? My car couldn’t have been important to what happened that night.”
The night he died. It was getting so easy to say it in her mind. A mind that Cameron could read freely when he chose to.
“Everything in that vision is important. Everything is a clue to what you’re supposed to accomplish.”
As with all the visions she’d had. She rolled her lips between her teeth and held them until it hurt. “They killed the clerk. They killed you. They did it because I opened that door.”
His sigh surrounded her. “Please, not another guilt trip. First it was that you threw my cigarettes down the garbage disposal—”
“Which is why you went out that night,” she finished for him in a whisper.
“Maybe,” he countered. “Then again, maybe you simply haven’t let yourself remember everything that went on.”
Maybe she never would. But here was another of those times when he seemed to know things she didn’t. He shouldn’t have been able to do that. Max closed her eyes. “Tell me the truth. Did they kill you because I walked into the middle of their robbery?”
Again he sighed, and the bed seemed to dip beside her. “We have no way of knowing.”
A mere shifting of air currents, and his peppermint candy scent enveloped her. He’d sucked the mints since quitting smoking two months ago. How either of those things were possible after he’d been dead for two years made her head whirl so she’d chosen not to think about it.
Of course, he should have quit before he died, before he went to that 7-11 for another pack.
Hearing the words as if she’d said them aloud, he murmured without a hint of censure, “That’s better. Blame me.”
She pulled her legs up, nudging the cat. “I want to know what the dream means. That’s all.”
“It’s telling you to find my sister. The reason will come later.” His voice vibrated against her cheek, her throat, and her back. She could hear him, and with her eyes closed, she could feel him, too.
She gave in. “I’ll look for your sister. But it won’t be simple. The letter I sent telling your family you were dead”—there, the word again, aloud and getting easier to say all the time—“came back marked return to sender. No one lives there anymore.”
“You won’t find her in Cincinnati. She never went there.”
Suspicion crept into her voice. “How do you know that?” Especially since he claimed his memories died with him.
“You have to go back to the place where I was born,” he insisted instead of answering.
Her turn to sigh. He wasn’t going to enlighten her, so she asked what he obviously wanted her to ask, “Where were you born?” She should have known but didn’t.
“Look in the box you keep hidden under the bed.”
She hadn’t looked in that box in ... at least a year and a half. Six months after he died, when she could no longer bear to look at his things, she’d hidden the box and all the emotions that went with it beneath the bed.
“It’s time to feel again.”
Max had done more than enough feeling to last a lifetime.
Outside the dawn lightened the sky from pitch black to shades of gray, the tree by her window outlined in relief. On the street, a car engine turned over, then roared to life. Max dangled her legs over the side of the bed, her bare feet touching the cold floor where the throw rug had slid away. Reaching out with her toes, she grappled it to her.
The room was stark. She hadn’t needed much when she’d moved from the condo where she’d lived with Cameron. Taking the studio already furnished, she hadn’t added much to the contents.
“You’ve got a bed too small for Witt to fit in—”
“Are you trying to palm me off on another man?”
Cameron had damn near succeeded. Witt crept into her life like a parasite she couldn’t get rid of, like Buzzard the stray who kept coming back. They now had this weird sort of symbiotic connection she craved. The most terrifying aspect of it was that she didn’t even find it all that terrifying anymore. She kind of liked having Witt around. She even liked Ladybird, his mother.
A wave of nausea traveled through her belly. She’d thought admitting she and Witt had a relationship would mitigate the fear. She’d thought fear would be a thing of the past. Fear of losing Witt. Fear of losing Cameron. Fear of the latest damn vision.
She stuffed down the emotions. She would stop being afraid of her own damn shadow.
Cameron went on, listing the flaws in her life. “You’ve got some black suits for work, a couple of shirts, some shoes—”
Again, she jumped in. “What about all those new clothes I bought?” And what about her beautiful black suede pumps with the four-inch heels? They weren’t mere shoes, they were—
“You bought that stuff in order to draw out a killer.”
“Not the shoes. And it doesn’t mean I’ll chuck any of it.”
“A chest of drawers, a refrigerator,” he catalogued. “You don’t even have a DVD player.”