“Maybe it was a feeling of something being wrong, something she didn’t understand until it was too late.”
“Do I have to show you the pictures in that album again?” Her words harsh, she used as gentle a tone as possible. “She gouged them, sliced them, ripped them. Not only his, but Cordelia’s, too, all the ones after she turned thirteen.”
“As if she blamed Cordelia.” Blamed Cordelia the most went unspoken between them.
“Yes.”
“We never even said Cordelia’s name. She wouldn’t allow it.”
“You remember?”
“I remember it all now. The pain of losing her. It was as if she’d never existed. I couldn’t talk about her. I couldn’t try to find her. In the end, it was easier not to think about her.”
He moved onto the bed; she knew him by the gentle brush of air as if it were his body. They lay in silence. “I’m sorry, Cameron.” The word seemed so inadequate. “Witt and I talked about having the authorities search for her body. He says there isn’t an iota of evidence to make them even drive out there.” Unsaid between them was that finding Cordelia’s body would only lead the cops to Max’s conclusion. That Madeline Starr had killed her daughter and her daughter’s lover. Madeline had already had her own judgment day.
“Let Cordelia stay where she is, undisturbed.”
That way, Cameron’s mother’s name wouldn’t be tarnished.
Cameron heard the thought. “Cordelia would have wanted it that way. She loved those woods.”
“But she isn’t content there. She’s possessing me. That has to mean she wants justice.”
“She isn’t possessing you.”
Max snorted before thinking how thoughtless it would sound under the circumstances. Softly, in deference to his pain, she said what had to be said. “I felt her out there. Those were her feelings. It was her snow angel. That wasn’t me, Cameron.”
“Those were residual memories. Pieces of herself she left behind. But she’s gone, Max.”
She didn’t believe him, even though hours ago, she’d wanted to deny the possession. “I know this is all hard for you to deal with. What happened to Cordelia. Your mom. But I know when I’ve been possessed.”
“Do you feel her now?”
Well, that was odd. She didn’t. Not really. She felt ... alone in her own body.
“The times you’ve been possessed in the past, the feelings were always negative and they made your skin crawl.”
The sensation was hard to describe. She hadn’t felt ... alone. She couldn’t come up with anything better than that. But he was right, the emotions she’d felt had been negative for the most part.
“You didn’t feel anything bad with Cordelia. You felt only her joy of life. Cordelia might have been murdered, but she didn’t hang around the earthly plane for thirty years waiting for you to give her justice. Cordelia wouldn’t have needed vengeance.”
“Obviously you didn’t know her as well as you thought you did. You didn’t know she was in love with BJ.” God, that was cruel. “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to understand all this.”
“My mother wasn’t a murderer.”
She searched for the right words. “I know it’s hard to accept. But the evidence, her anger—”
“You haven’t seen all the evidence. Get my yearbook.”
“Your yearbook?” The swift change confused and alarmed her, and for a moment she couldn’t remember where she’d put it.
“In the bedside table.”
Yes. Before she’d thrown the bible at the door, at him. Rolling to the other side, she opened the drawer. The corner of the yellow sunset on Cameron’s yearbook lay beneath the photo album.
“Open to the front.”
Sitting up, she pulled the book out, set it in her lap to open to page one. The year, his high school, his town. “Cameron, what has this got to do with your mother?”
“Look at the inside cover.”
The picture of a ballgame crowd, the laughing, yelling students in tight shirts and bell-bottomed jeans, cheerleaders with bouncing yellow and blue pom-poms, teenagers on the cusp of life. She saw now that the middle cheerleader was Cordelia, a fact she’d missed when she’d first looked at the book.
His voice dropped until it was nothing more than a message in her head. “Second row from the bottom, four in from the left.”
She traced the directions with her finger, counting, one, two, three, four. The hand of God or the Devil smashed up through her ribcage and clenched her heart in a tight fist, squeezed her lungs until she could neither drag in air nor let it out. Bright lights exploded behind her eyes. She couldn’t scream, couldn’t speak, couldn’t move her eyes from the picture on that page.
“My uncle BJ,” Cameron murmured without inflection.
Uncle BJ. The photo grainy in spots and the crowd muted against the bouncing pom-poms in the foreground, Max would still know that face, even from almost thirty years in the past. She would know those black eyes and that cool smile.
But she would call him Bud Traynor.
Chapter Nineteen