Of course, there were pictures of Cordelia, too, blond, pretty, with a sweet, anxious-to-please smile. Her round face, seemingly unformed, bore only slight resemblance to the graduation picture in the yearbook.
“Why did she deny Cordelia existed, then give me the book?”
“Guess she wanted you to figure it out for yourself.”
“Figure out what?” Only Evelyn knew for sure.
Their food arrived, Izzie plopping the plates down across from them and smiling at their togetherness. “Eat before it gets cold,” she admonished with a grin when they didn’t immediately dig in. “Can I get you anything else? Ketchup, mustard?”
Witt turned on that hundred-watt smile Max hadn’t known existed until at least two weeks after first setting eyes on him. “Ketchup would be great.”
Ketchup? On chili?
Izzie brought the sauce, set it on the table between them. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
“California,” Max offered.
Izzie’s eyes lit up. “I went there once. To Disneyland. But I wouldn’t want to live in California.”
Witt raised a brow, which was question enough from him.
“No snow. I don’t know how anyone could live without snow,” Izzie said with a child-like glow that belied her forty-something face. She put a hand to her mouth. “Now I’m the one making your food get cold. Eat up.” She scurried off, a hint of her floral scent remaining.
Max pulled Witt’s bowl of chili close and taste-tested. She wanted it before he dumped the ketchup in it. Damn, it was good. “I’d rather have yours.”
“Wouldn’t want yours.” He pushed the album aside, replaced it with the bowl, though he didn’t pour ketchup in it, thank God.
Max had always stolen from Cameron’s plate. Now she’d started doing it to Witt. The ache was there again, deep inside. She moved back to the other side of the booth and started in on her burger, getting a third of the way through before the meat began to churn in her stomach.
Witt stole a fry, then asked, “You gonna eat those?”
Max shook her head. He tugged the plate to the center of the table, practically emptied the ketchup bottle, added a mountain of salt, then dug in. So that’s why he wanted the ketchup, for her fries. It was too damn ... married, even if she had been planning on sharing his chili.
Max couldn’t eat another bite.
“What’s wrong?” Witt stopped, a French fry in mid-air. “You’re green.”
She was scared, of the pain she still felt over Cameron, of the pain she might yet feel over Witt. But she wouldn’t tell Witt that.
Grabbing the album, she flipped it around, opening it to the same place they’d been before the food came. She went through several pages. The children grew up fast. People always said they did. Cordelia slimmed down, her hair grew long, she looked more like the picture in the yearbook with each turn of the page.
And Cameron. Max couldn’t look at him against the burning in her chest.
Max didn’t pay much attention to Madeline, or to Cameron’s father, a man whose name she didn’t know. It was enough to concentrate on the sister, to have met the aunt. Somehow the mother and father were too much for Max to handle. Thinking of the aunt, there was a flash of familiarity again. Evelyn dressed more staidly than her sister, longer skirts, higher necklines. She looked older, and before long there was a filtering of gray through her hair, though Max would have guessed she could have been no more than forty-five at the most in those particular pictures. She didn’t look like Cameron, nor much like her sister. Yet there was something that nagged at Max, something about Evelyn’s face...
Unable to grasp the reason behind the fleeting impression, Max moved on. Another page, then one more. That was when the mutilation began.
Pictures had been cut down the middle, one half ripped away from the page. She breezed through the remainder, her fingers flipping faster and faster as her heart climbed into her throat. Some photos had been torn out, others merely cut in two. In still other pictures, an Exacto knife or some other blade had been used to remove the face and body, cuts clean, precise, and scary.
There wasn’t a single photo of Cordelia left.
She’d been cut out of the album, cut out of Evelyn’s life.
“She killed her,” Max whispered.
Witt popped the last French fry, dripping with ketchup, into his mouth, and regarded her with ... another look. This one said he’d realized long ago she was insane, but he forgave her for it.
“I’m serious. Look at this.” Max shoved aside the plates and turned the scrapbook toward him—and it was scrap now.
His blond brow wrinkled. His thick, blunt fingers went through the book, slowly, methodically, page by page. His cop mask slid over his features, his gaze intense, concentrated, and unreadable.
“Now tell me that’s not a little sick. And then Cordelia disappears right after graduation.”