“I was going to make him admit what he’d done. Then I was going to stop him.”
The gun. The yearbook. “With a gun in his face, you were going to show him his own picture and force him to confess?”
“Yes.”
“You were hiding that shit in your overnight bag before you even packed it.”
“Yes.”
“You lied the other day, too. You did teach me to shoot with what’s-his-face’s gun, not that one.” God, she couldn’t remember Cameron’s friend’s name now, remembered only the recoil snapping her arms.
“Yes. It all ended up in your treasure box. Including your memories.”
Lies upon lies. She no longer knew what was real. “What do you really know, Cameron? Everything down to the last detail? Was all that stuff about remembering only your love for me just more shit?”
“No. Loving you is what this is all about.”
As if that answered anything. Weariness weighted her eyelids. “You should have told me about Bud and what you planned to do.”
“You wouldn’t have understood before.”
Not then. Not about the overwhelming number of lies. But about threatening Bud? About the lofty goal of making sure he never hurt anyone again? About killing him? “That’s why you stayed. So I would understand.”
Maybe so she’d act on it for him.
He neither denied nor agreed, but urged her to the bed like a mighty wind at her back. “The box, Max.”
“I’m so mad at you, why the hell should I do what you say?”
Peppermint overlaid the sickly stench of Traynor’s cologne. “Be mad at me later. Remember Wendy now. Remember the closet and her terror when her father opened the door.”
A lump choked her. “The box is about you, not Wendy.”
“The box is arming yourself with your memories. You can’t vanquish the evil you don’t understand.”
She knelt on the floor to fumble beneath the darkness of the bed, an eerie sensation crawling along her spine. The child in her feared the monsters under the bed. The adult feared the truths she didn’t want to face. Monsters did live under her bed, in that box. It harbored all their dreams, all their secrets, hers and Cameron’s.
“Touch them, smell them, taste them. All the memories, Max. To win the battle, we need them all now. It’s time.”
She did it for little girls like Wendy. Like the little girl she herself had been so long ago. Sitting up straight, Max dragged the box into the open, onto the rag rug.
“Remember. Then Bud can’t use it against you.”
Yes, Bud had been playing the divide and conquer game. Cameron had an affair. Cameron didn’t love you. She’d almost fallen for it. Now she had to arm herself with every detail about the night Cameron died, the before, during, and after.
But God, what worse things were to come?
Know the demon and it can’t hurt you.
“You can start by remembering that I loved you with all my heart. No matter what happened between us that night.”
Oh God, the demon was bad. Really bad. Mustiness and truth rose like a cloud from the box, from his clothes, his underwear. His shaving kit. A sob rose in her throat. She sliced it off, but couldn’t stop the plea. “Tell me you weren’t leaving me.”
Cameron didn’t answer.
Her eyes stung. If he’d been corporeal, she’d have flung her fist through his gut. “You weren’t leaving. Tell me.”
“Look in the box.”
Don’t be a coward.
She couldn’t see, the dark all-encompassing. Magically, the light beside the bed flipped on. Fear of Witt discovering her vanished with what she saw.
She hadn’t closed the flaps. She’d thrown everything back in willy-nilly, leaving a jumbled mess that, with new knowledge, formed a picture of their last night.
They’d argued about adopting. She was against it. Adopting meant her body was inadequate, she was inadequate, barren. What a horrible word. That’s what she’d told him. It hadn’t been the whole truth. She’d never told him the whole truth about anything, not her feelings, not her childhood, not her uncle, not the reason she couldn’t have kids.
“Tell me now.” No anger, no judgment, only his need.
What did any of it have to do with fortifying against Bud?
Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. But like Bud’s weak point was his own victimization, hers lay half concealed in that box.
She clenched her teeth. Her nose tingled and began to run. But she told Cameron the thing she should have told him the night he died, the thing that might have kept him from going to that damn 7-11. “I was afraid I’d fuck up a kid as badly as I was fucked up. I was afraid I’d turn out as bad as my uncle.”
As bad as Bud?