The statement fell like a bomb into the room. Witt reared forward as if he needed to see Evelyn’s face. Max lost her voice.
Then found it. “But Cordelia would have been...” A good accountant, Max counted on her fingers. “Thirteen when he first saw her.” God, she hated that age, hated the way it always seemed to slap her in the face at every turn, as if it were an omen, or a harbinger of worse things to come. She preferred to find 452.
“BJ liked young girls.” Max wanted to throw up. Evelyn perused her fingernails. “I was a bit long in the tooth for him. I know he didn’t love me, but he was so ... attentive. Father liked him, was grooming him to take over the law firm. Father was in his sixties.” She raised her eyes to Max’s without lifting her head. “The firm was our source of income. Everyone. Me. Madeline and the children.” She pulled in a deep breath. “Father’s first choice for BJ was Madeline.” Odd phrasing, as if Calvin Hastings was more concerned for BJ than his daughters. “After all, her children needed a father. But she said...” Evelyn stopped.
Witt spoke for the first time. “What was your married name, ma’am?”
Evelyn blinked, as if for a moment she couldn’t remember. “It was Tyler. Father had me change it back.” Father ran her life.
“What reason did your sister give for not marrying BJ Tyler?” Witt let the name roll off his tongue as if testing it for something.
For the first time, emotion quivered on Evelyn’s lips. “She said he didn’t make her heart beat faster.” She blinked. “But he made mine do the two-step with all the attention he lavished. Finally being the center of attention does that.”
“The mother of a thirteen-year-old child let her sister marry a man who liked thirteen-year-olds.” Max managed the words through gritted teeth.
“I suppose she thought Cordelia was safe if they weren’t in the same house.”
Max wanted to smash her fist down on the monstrosity of a coffee table, yet her arms wouldn’t obey the simplest of instructions. Her feet failed to run. “He still molested her.”
“Molest?” Evelyn cocked her head thoughtfully, burying that earlier display of feeling. “I don’t think so. The girl positively glowed. I think she loved him as much as Cameron did.”
“You’re making excuses for him.” Bam, bam, Max’s heart slammed against the walls of her chest. “She was little more than a child. She couldn’t know her own mind.” And yet some thirteen-year-old girls did, some knew exactly what they were doing. Max had known, wished to God she hadn’t.
“You never knew about your niece and your husband.” Witt’s voice laced the background of the room and kept Evelyn talking.
“Madeline didn’t tell me until they disappeared. She was so...”
Witt didn’t finish for her. A good cop didn’t put words in a suspect’s mouth.
Head shaking vaguely, Evelyn put a hand to the black-and-white cameo fastening the neck of her dress. “It was beyond anger. She was cold and ... controlled. She wouldn’t let me cry. Not for him. Not even for Cordelia.” She looked at Max for understanding. If she’d known her better, Evelyn would have realized how useless that was. Still, she tried to explain her emotions versus her sister’s. “Madeline’s expectations were so high. Father’s, too. They had so much farther to fall than I did.”
“You didn’t cut those pictures out of the album, did you?” Witt, not missing a thing, cut to the chase. Evelyn never actually said she’d done it, even as Max accused her.
Evelyn closed her eyes, shaking her head. “Madeline did.”
By giving them the album, consciously or subconsciously, Evelyn had wanted them to know Madeline was most likely her own daughter’s killer.
*
“I’m sorry,” Max whispered to her motel room at large.
She’d run the gamut of emotions today, anger, delight, desire, fear, possession—which she considered no less an emotion than the others. Her body exhausted, her mind on overload, she lay sprawled face up on the lumpy mattress. She was alone, having sent Witt out for Chinese food, but Cameron didn’t answer. His sister was dead. His mother had killed her. Maybe there was nothing to say.
“I’m sorry I got so angry about Izzie. I understand a little more now.” Izzie had been the only connection to a past Cameron couldn’t talk about, yet could never let go, not even in death.
She and Witt were leaving on a two o’clock Chicago flight tomorrow, a two-hour drive from Lines before that. She’d learned what she’d come to learn. Her heart ached for Cameron.
“Do you believe my sister is dead?” His voice, barely discernible, seemed to come from the corner of the room.
The answer was inside her, a part of her, branded across her eyelids. “Yes.”
“You think my mother could kill her.” It wasn’t a question.
“I don’t know your mother. I only know she let BJ marry Evelyn when she already knew that he wanted Cordelia.”