“Or access to the internet,” she snapped. He made Spartan living sound like a disease.
“But you kept the box, didn’t you?” His whisper-soft voice in her head made her chest tighten until it hurt to breathe.
“That was the zinger you wanted to hit me with all along.”
“Look in the box.”
Kneeling on the floor, she lifted the bedspread. The box, a black lump in the near darkness, hid beneath the bed along with dust bunnies and musty air. Max sneezed. The bunnies made a run for the back. She touched cardboard with the tips of her nails. Drawing it to her, she got a good grip and pulled it all the way out.
A shipping box with the label torn off, flaps folded one under the other, it smelled old and moldy, as though the bottom had gotten wet at one time.
“Open it,” Cameron urged.
She reached to her bedside lamp, turned it on, and looked at the box. Cameron was so good at pushing her to do what she didn’t want to do. He’d pushed her into following those visions of murder to their natural conclusion. He’d pushed her at Witt. And now this box. Was there a point in fighting him? In the end, she’d do it to shut him up.
Pulling up one flap, the others came apart on their own. Stale air washed over her as if she’d opened long buried treasure.
Treasure was what it held, Cameron’s favorite things, the ones she hadn’t been able throw out, sell, or give away. With a reverent hand, she held still above the first item in the box. Warmth spread across her palm, through the bones of her arm, as if a piece of Cameron had remained with his things.
On top lay his favorite CD. Romantic music for cold and stormy nights before a fire. Johnny Desmond singing standards on his album Blue Smoke. Max had grown to love it because of the rhapsodic look it produced on his face. She’d saved it, but she hadn’t listened to it since he died.
The CD now on her lap, she pulled out the next jewel. What else but a book, Lost Horizon. Cameron had believed in Shangri-La, a place of perfect beauty and happiness.
“Shangri-La is a state of mind,” he whispered.
A state of mind Max had never been able to achieve, not before she met him, not during the years they were married, and certainly not in the two since the 7-11.
Underneath the book were his favorite movies. Three of them. Steve McQueen’s Bullitt because Cameron thought it had the best car chase ever filmed. On Any Sunday, an obscure film about racing motorcycles, Cameron’s teenage fantasy. And the 1937 version of Lost Horizon. The last two were videotapes because when Cameron bought them, they weren’t on DVD yet.
Every night for six months after he died, she’d watched that movie, over and over until the tape began to squeak. She’d watched it because she thought she was crazy hearing his voice, and because somehow, some way, she thought she could find Shangri-La if she did. She watched it because when she closed her eyes, she could feel his arms around her and remember his voice in her ear whispering, “Let’s go there together.”
She put a hand to her cheek, the flesh dry despite the ache in her eyes and the tingle in her nose. She hadn’t cried, not in two years. After six months, she’d thrown out the VCR so she couldn’t watch the movie again. But she hadn’t thrown out the tape.
“What else is there?” Cameron urged, making no comment on the torrent of emotions flooding through her.
Hands shaking, she laid the tapes in her lap, along with the book and the CD. His Rolex watch stared up at her. They’d argued as they always had, she fearing they couldn’t afford it. She hadn’t thought they could afford the Miata he bought her when she made partner at the CPA firm, either. Hell, she was an accountant; she hated spending money on principal.
“What’s the engraving?”
She turned the heavy gold watch in her hand and read the words aloud. “To Cameron. This is the last one. Love, Max.”
Watches were to a man what rings, necklaces, and bracelets were to a woman. Any woman but Max. Cameron could never have enough. She’d given in. Both to the Miata and the watch.
It had been the last expensive thing he ever bought.
A pair of gold cufflinks bearing his initials chinked against the watch as she set it back in the box. Cameron wore French cuff shirts when he had to appear in court. And there, next to the cufflinks, the tie pin his father left him, a ruby surrounded by several tiny diamonds. He’d worn it daily. It shone amidst a strange assortment of clothing she’d kept.
A couple of white dress shirts, ties, underwear, and socks. She moved them aside with a gentle touch. A toothbrush clattered to the bottom of the box, falling from the shaving kit she hadn’t quite zippered. Why had she saved all this stuff? The ties weren’t favorites. And his underwear and socks? She’d admit to being a little out of her head at the time, but keeping all this? God, she’d been pathetic, more so than she’d ever imagined.
“They don’t have anything to do with my sister. Dig deeper.”