He skewered Max with a hard-edged gaze. “You don’t know she disappeared at all.”
She leaned forward, hands fisting against the Formica. Difficult to breathe and difficult to keep from shouting at him. “What, you think she’s in Cincinnati with a husband, two-point-five kids, and a minivan?”
“Don’t go off half-cocked. That’s how cops lose convictions.” He tapped the book, his gaze holding steady. “We need a helluva lot more than this album to say that girl is dead.”
Voices low, tones intent, they argued. Witt closed the book.
“We should at least ask her,” Max insisted. “She gave us the damn thing after all. She wants us to know something happened.” Max was consumed with the need to confront the woman, to demand an answer, to find Cameron’s sister. Evelyn Hastings held the key to everything, and Max wanted to pry it out of her.
But Witt was stubborn. “You’re right. Something did happen. I agree. But we haven’t started asking questions.” Gone were the chopped sentences, the laid-back speech. He was either pissed or serious. Good. She wanted him serious, wanted him to help her figure it all out.
“I want to ask her. Now.” The need was an ache at the base of her skull, a physical pain when she turned her head left or right.
His nostrils flared as he sucked in an exasperated breath. “You didn’t look at the rest of the pictures.”
“I did,” she snapped. “She’s cut Cordelia out of every one.”
“That’s your problem.” His eyes narrowed when she opened her mouth. “You jump to conclusions. You don’t mull over the evidence. You’re the proverbial bull in a china shop.”
He didn’t have to be so insulting about it. “All right, tell me what I missed.”
“The father disappears around...” He glanced down, an assessing shake to his head. “Say when the kid”—she knew he meant Cameron—“was about ten or eleven.”
“Disappears?”
“Gone from the photos. And not because he was cut out.”
“Maybe they got a divorce. He wasn’t mentioned in the obituary. And it didn’t say Mrs. Madeline Starr either.”
“Ask your husband.”
It threw her when he did that, told her to ask Cameron as if he accepted that Cameron was more than a figment of her imagination. She’d lived with the secret so long, it seemed odd when someone else acknowledged Cameron’s ghost.
“He doesn’t remember.” He didn’t remember anything, even less than she remembered with her selective memory. Damn him for getting her into this. “So the father’s gone”—not Cameron’s father, but the father—“and I missed that. Big deal. Cordelia’s more important since cutting her out is an act of aggression.”
“You don’t know what it’s an act of. And you missed that someone else was cut out in addition to the sister.”
“What?” She grabbed the book, pulling it to her, almost knocking over her water glass in her haste. He was right. The center picture on the open page of the album had two figures cut out with the Exacto knife. So did the photo opposite. Cameron remained, as did his mother and an unfamiliar girl of Cameron’s approximate age, hair long, dark, and curling. Max hadn’t looked at the album well enough to see if the girl appeared elsewhere.
“Cameron’s father,” she suggested.
Witt shook his head. “Don’t think so.”
“Grandfather?”
Again, that slight negative shake. “Too many removed. The grandfather wasn’t in there much. And the father is gone long before the pictures started getting defaced. Your husband must be”—again that assessing look—“fifteen.”
So she’d missed that, too, big deal. “Evelyn’s still the key. She can tell us.”
He regarded her with a frosty stare. “You might get only one shot at her, Max. And you damn well better know the questions you want to ask before you go in there.”
“Well, who the hell do you think this person was?”
He sat back, skimmed a few pages, then pulled the book up onto its bottom edge. “Evelyn’s husband.”
Max snorted. “She said she’d never been married.”
He eyed her over the top of the album. “Problem with you is you don’t listen. She never said she wasn’t married, just told you to call her Miss instead of Mrs.”
“Yeah? Isn’t that what Miss means, never married?”
“No.” He let the book drop, flipped it around, and shoved it across the table at Max. “Looks like a wedding picture to me.”
Damn. Evelyn, dressed in white but not a twenty-something bride, smiled for the camera, a beautiful, full-of-hopes-and-dreams smile that once again tugged at Max’s memory. She gazed at the man by her side.
Her husband, the man Evelyn had painstakingly cut from the eight-by-ten glossy. Only his arm linked through hers remained.