Max swallowed as if she’d betrayed her best friend. Her heart pounded, her throat dried up, her palms grew sweaty. “You’re missing your daughter’s funeral.”
Virginia’s expensive pumps left indentations in the linoleum as she crossed to the pantry. Pulling out Tupperware containers from an overhead shelf, she plopped them on the counter, her proximity to the row of drawers effectively cutting Max off from the gun before she’d gathered her wits.
“Do you like Snickerdoodles?”
“Snickerdoodles?” Max repeated idiotically.
“Sugar cookies rolled in cinnamon.” Virginia pulled out a breadboard, the bottom drawer still open beneath it.
“I’ve never tried them.”
She’d really stepped into Wonderland this time. Virginia actually planned to make cookies while her daughter went six feet under. Stretching her psychic feelers, she tried to read the other woman’s mood, thoughts, anything and came up with only a slate filled up by recipes and weights and measures. As if Virginia felt nothing, thought nothing, was nothing except an extension of the cookies she planned to bake.
“They were another of Bethany’s favorite. I made them whenever she felt bad.”
Max closed her eyes as Bethany once more tasted the sugar and cinnamon on her tongue. Suddenly everything was clear.
Just as Bethany had gained comfort from eating, Virginia gained it from cooking. They’d enabled each other. Whenever something went wrong, they’d chosen food as a way out.
Something had gone terribly wrong. Virginia, however, merely cooked her way through it.
“I couldn’t get into the car, just couldn’t do it, you see,” Virginia said as she pulled the mixer away from the wall and removed the cover. “Bud took Jada without me.”
Jesus, the woman had been here the whole time Max was banging around in her drawers. She remembering the breathing she thought she’d imagined. “I’m sorry I invaded your privacy. But I have to know what happened to Bethany.”
Virginia turned on the oven, preheating it. “Bud says that’s how you were with Wendy. Tenacious. Unstoppable. Why is it so important to you?”
“Don’t you want to know what happened to her?”
The woman concentrated on measuring her ingredients, but Max heard the deep sigh. “I wanted it to be over when Walter died. I want it to be over now.”
Max thought about the myriad emotions she’d had right after Cameron died. She’d wanted him back. She’d wanted to die. She’d wanted to sleep for a million years. But she’d never really thought much about making his killers pay. No, in fact, she hadn’t given them much thought at all. She was sure a psychiatrist could have told her why. She didn’t want to know that either.
“Is that why you didn’t want to watch her being buried?”
“Pass me an egg, would you?”
Max opened the fridge, found the eggs in the door, and handed one to Virginia. “You didn’t answer.”
Virginia cracked the egg in one clean, practiced break. “If you don’t have the memories, you can’t keep replaying them over and over in your head.”
Max felt a bone-deep understanding. “What happened to your rolling pin?”
She neither flinched nor missed a beat in her measuring technique. “There was a crack in it. I had to throw it away. Bud promised to get me another one.”
Had Jada cleaned it so thoroughly her mother never even suspected it had been used to kill her other daughter?
The question was whether she could lead Virginia into facing the truth. “How do you think it got cracked?”
Virginia stilled with her fingertips on the handle of a Pyrex measuring cup. Only a missed beat in the conversation, yet so telling. Then the woman went on as if nothing had happened, as if Max had never asked, skipping to other things for reasons only her mind could follow. “I’ll miss Bethany’s cat.”
Kitty-Kat. “Did she run away?”
Virginia leaned down, opened a cupboard filled with pans and cookie sheets. “No. Jada and I couldn’t take care of the cat. I had it put down on Thursday.”
Max heard the news like a sucker punch to the belly.
Virginia straightened. Instead of the expected cookie sheet, she held her husband’s suicide gun in her hand.
Way too late for Max, Virginia’s mind was open, messy and truthful.
“It was you, not Jada.”
“Bud said you’d figure that out, too. Why couldn’t you leave us alone?”
Max stared down the barrel of the gun that had killed at least once, and begged, “Tell me why.” She had to hear the words, though in her heart, she’d already heard the answer the night Bethany died.
Virginia didn’t have to be psychic to understand Max’s demand. “She was doing evil things on the phone at night.”
“You killed her because of the phone sex?”