“Cordelia’s spirit is gone, Max. I’ve told you that. You’re feeling something else.”
This wasn’t like any of her other possessions. Could he be right? That what she’d felt in the woods were Cordelia’s residual memories and feelings, not her spirit taking over Max’s body?
“Then what is it?” Her own wishful thinking or her own guilt?
“If she had the baby, then it could be related to the child...”
If Cordelia did have the baby, then...
Max stopped pacing. The blood drained from her head, leaving her dizzy. “Oh my God.” She put a hand to her mouth, breathed the name through her fingers. “Wendy.” Bud’s murdered daughter. “Wendy was Cordelia’s baby.” Cameron’s niece.
The hand of fate, destiny, maybe even the God that had deserted her, reached up inside Max and twisted her guts to mush. She’d mourned Wendy, she’d lived her emotions, her pain. She’d become obsessed with making Wendy’s tormentor pay. She’d lived and breathed that obsession for months now. But the connection went so much deeper, like a mighty undertow dragging her down to drowning depth. Max had stepped into Wendy’s world only months ago, but Wendy had been a part of Max’s life far longer. Since the day Max met Cameron.
“Yes, I believe she was Cordelia’s child.” Cameron’s sigh filled the small apartment.
Max’s legs shook. Her fingers numbed. She couldn’t take one more revelation without crumbling to the floor to cover her ears, screaming into the silence. But there was Cameron, and dead or alive, he’d suffered far longer than she. She tried to squeeze her own emotions into a tiny corner of her mind and heart and deal with the issue at hand, Cameron’s meeting with BJ after all these years. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. If she could touch him, hug him...
Cameron hadn’t asked for that when he was alive. He didn’t acknowledge her feelings now.
“When he pretended he didn’t know me...” Peppermint-laced air whooshed past her ear as he flitted to the other side of the room. “That’s when I knew he’d done something to Cordelia.”
If Cameron could bottle his emotions so easily, she could do him one better. She could unleash her hatred for Bud Traynor. “And he knew he’d made a mistake. He started planning to get rid of you right then.”
She wondered if Bud had experienced a moment’s panic. He’d gone with his emotions all those years ago, and the miscalculation had come home to roost. But he’d recouped the loss. By having Cameron murdered in what everyone believed was a random shooting.
“How did he find them?” Tattoo, Scarface, and Bootman. They weren’t his type of clientele. His ran to rich men who needed trust work, tax planning, and legal thievery from the government.
“His roots reach deep into the underground.”
“Into hell,” she whispered. The man had connections with both good and evil. She bundled herself into sweatpants, woolen socks, and a thick fleece pullover that might once have been Cameron’s. The chill of Michigan had followed her, burrowed deep beneath the surface of her skin. Buzzard the Cat remained on the bed, alternately regarding her and licking his privates, saying something for his disdain of the subject. Outside the window, gray clouds turned the night sky pitch black without a sign of stars. The light of the moon only scratched the surface of the cloud cover. Not Michigan, not the murky night, not the loneliness of her one-room apartment without Witt’s presence, no, none of these caused the hollow in the pit of her stomach.
The need for answers did. Traynor did. The desire to lay her hands on his throat did.
“What about the things he had them do to you, Max?”
The things they’d done to her? She remembered Scarface’s ring, the death’s head he threatened to slice her face with. She remembered the feel of steel toes, the coil of Tattoo’s snake. All that paled in comparison to Bud’s real crimes, Wendy’s subjugation, Cordelia’s loss, Cameron’s murder.
“He had them rape you, beat you with their fists and boots.”
She closed her eyes. Those images didn’t live inside her the way Cameron did amid the Cheetos and Doritos.
“Why is this only about Wendy and Cordelia and me? Why isn’t it about what those men did to you, about the rape?”
Taking a deep breath to ease the clenching of her teeth, she told him the truth, her truth, one most women would never begin to understand. “Rape is just another bodily function.”
“And so is sex?”
He knew her so well. “Yes. One feels good, one doesn’t. But neither touches your mind.” She held her breath a long moment, then let it out, letting out the words that she knew could only hurt him. “And neither touches your heart.”
They didn’t speak of her emotional revelations with Witt. They were four days old. The others had propagated in her for a lifetime.