Lie in Plain Sight

by Maggie Barbieri

  Farringville was a place that appreciated its history and wanted to preserve it. The upcoming Founders Day celebration was a testament to that.

  After she returned to the store, having been gone longer than she should have, Maeve had one of those off days, the kind where every fondant turned to cement, every sauce broke, every batter was wrong. She started over on the fondant, taking care to add water when necessary, just a little bit, so that it didn’t tear when she tried to form a nice ball to wrap in plastic, thinking that with time and care, anything could change for the better. She just had to have patience, take her time, take things into her own hands. It had been in the back of her mind, she realized, the thought of a missing young girl. It wasn’t about clearing her name. It was a new mission, a new reason to engage. She had done it the year before when she had found Evelyn, missing to her for many years, but whose whereabouts had been no secret to her father and his best friend; it would have been a hell of a lot easier if they had both been honest with her, but that was water under the bridge. The fact remained that she knew she had the chops to do what the Farringville Police Department couldn’t, and she started thinking, as she stared at the plastic-wrapped fondant, about what those steps would be.

  She would find her.

  Using whatever means necessary.

  In the front of the store, Maeve could hear a male voice extolling the virtues of her cupcakes, how his birthday had been “the best ever” because his father had brought him some of Maeve’s treats. Maeve heard something unusual, something almost foreign, as well and realized it was the sound of Heather laughing. She peeked through the window in the kitchen door and saw Mark Messer, Kurt’s son and one of her regular DPW customers, leaning on the counter, talking to Heather, making the girl laugh at whatever he was saying. In front of him was a large cup of coffee and half a doughnut, the other half of which he offered to Maeve’s daughter, who took it and nibbled at it while they chatted.

  Things could change with time. The relaxed girl eating the doughnut at the counter was evidence of that.

  CHAPTER 12

  “It’s always a nice day when I get to see my old friend,” he said, strolling into the coffee shop on Broadway later that afternoon.

  Rodney Poole always characterized their relationship as one of friendship; Maeve thought it might be a bit more complicated than that. But there was something about his easy nature—the one that hid the dark truth about who he was and what he was capable of—that made it easy for her to pretend that what they were doing was what old friends did. Meet for coffee. Catch up on their lives. Talk about their kids.

  He knew that Maeve didn’t do casual meet-ups with him, though. Two years earlier, he had investigated her cousin’s death. His murder, really, if Maeve wanted to be specific, a loss that she considered just and necessary. What had come from that was unexpected and strange but had grown into a comfortable relationship, one built on a secret that they both knew the other would keep. After they covered the usual topics, he looked across the table at her. “What’s going on, my warrior queen?” he asked, using his nickname for her.

  “I don’t know if you’ve seen the news, but a girl went missing in Farringville.”

  “Yes. Saw that.”

  “She’s the same age as Heather. Looks like her a bit, too, which is a little disconcerting,” Maeve said, adding a creamer to her coffee.

  “Friends with your daughter?”

  “No. I don’t get the sense Taylor had a lot of friends, really, but I could be making that up,” Maeve admitted. In her mind, she had cast Taylor as an outcast, a loner. But she wasn’t sure.

  “Why are you involved?” he asked. “Was the girl abused? I know you can’t abide that.”

  Maeve shook her head. “Not that I’m aware of.” She recounted her phone call with Judy Wilkerson, the lies going around town. “People think that I wouldn’t go get her, that somehow I am implicated in all of this.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Poole said. “Anyone who knows you knows that’s just ridiculous.”

  She sighed, relieved. No one understood her like Poole, someone she had only seen in person a handful of times. Life was complicated, and their relationship more so. She couldn’t explain to anyone why that was, but they both understood, and that was the most important thing. “It’s all over town.” She looked out at the traffic going up and down the busy avenue, thinking that although she was a native of this borough, she was more content in sleepy Farringville, something she never would have imagined when she was growing up. “There was another girl, too. Last year.”

  “So what do you want to do, Maeve Conlon?” he asked.

  “Tell me what you do,” she said. “Tell me how you find someone.”

  He stared across the table at her as if he knew that trying to talk her out of it was an exercise in futility. “You start at the beginning, where she was last seen. You pound the pavement. You talk to everyone who knew her, could have possibly seen her. You talk to her friends. Her family. And you look at what you’ve got, every single night, until one puzzle piece, usually the one that seems the most innocuous, becomes the one that tells you ‘This kid is a pawn in a domestic dispute, a bad divorce.’ Or ‘This teenager is a runaway.’” He paused. “‘This person is dead.’”

  She was silent. She had considered that Taylor might be dead—everyone must have, without giving the notion voice—but she tried not to think about it.

  “So you want to find her because you’re tangentially implicated in her disappearance?” he asked. “Or something else?”

  “It’s always something else, Poole,” she said, pushing her coffee to the side, unable to drink it. It, or something else, was leaving a bitter taste in her throat. “It’s always about making sure that everyone is safe. Where they need to be.”

  He nodded. “I understand.”

  Their shared history—the abuse, the fear, the terror—made them kindred spirits. That and the fact that he had once let her get away with murder.

  “How’s your sister?” he asked.

  “She’s great,” Maeve said, and that was the truth. There was no one happier or healthier or more positive than Evelyn Rose Conlon. Maeve felt a twinge of guilt at the mention of her sister. Evelyn wanted to see her more often, but she would never understand how many directions Maeve was pulled in, nor should she have to, in Maeve’s opinion. “I’m glad you asked about her.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve been thinking about something, about an unanswered question.”

  “You hate those,” he said.

  She smiled. “I do. You’re right about that.”

  “So what is it?”

  “Right before he died, my father made me a DVD and told me that he wasn’t my sister’s father.” She looked him in the eye as she said it, matter-of-fact, even though it was less matter-of-fact, more emotional, than she would ever let on. He knew, though. He always did. “It still is hard to say out loud.”

  Poole wisely didn’t respond.

  “He took care of her and made sure she was safe, but he wasn’t her biological father.”

  Poole knew her well. “And you want to know who is.”

  “Exactly.”

  Poole pursed his lips. “Not exactly my forte, Maeve Conlon.” He thought for a moment. “Who’s on the birth certificate?”

  “My father.”

  “So they had some help there, maybe. Someone to fudge the paternity.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Just a guess.”

  The same thought had crossed Maeve’s mind.

  “Let me see what I can do,” he said.

  He helped her, time and time again, and she didn’t know why. There was no romantic love between them, just a shared hurt transcending that. There was an inexplicable, unholy bond between them, and in that, she only found comfort. Nothing else.

  He finished his coffee, asked the waitress for one to go. “I’m getting divorced.”

  Since they were sharing, she confessed, too. “I slept
with my ex-husband.”

  He chuckled. “Well, he’s a good-looking guy.”

  “True. But he’s kind of an idiot, too. I had forgotten about that part.”

  He let that go. “You ever think we’ll be like normal people, Maeve Conlon?”

  “I try so hard, Poole, but I’m not sure I’ve got it in me.”

  The waitress delivered his coffee, and he threw a couple of singles onto the table. “Let’s go,” he said, holding the door for Maeve. Out on the street, he pulled back the tab on his coffee and blew into the little hole in the lid. “So what do you need? What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to do what you said,” she said, a little woman looking up into the sad, knowing eyes of the taller man. “That’s it, right? There’s nothing else I should think about?”

  “You still got the gun?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I don’t have the gun,” she said, whispering.

  He laughed. “No one around here cares, Maeve Conlon. You could be wearing a holster with two six-shooters and no one, except maybe some of my more conscientious colleagues, would give a damn.” He shook his head. “Too many freaking guns on the street.” He looked up at the train on the elevated track overhead, pulling into the station. “Where’d it go? Why’d you get rid of it?”

  “My sister. I can’t do this anymore, not with her around. She’s inquisitive, Poole, goes through my things. There was nowhere to put it.” She smiled. “Takes every tube of lip gloss that comes into my house. I couldn’t run the risk of keeping the gun.”

  “Girls love the gloss.”

  “And don’t worry about where it went. The gun. It will never come back.”

  “Okay. I understand.”

  “I feel as if that part of my life is over. Does that make sense?” she asked.

  He did understand. Sometimes she felt he was the only person who did.

  “Let me know what else I can do.” He took a sip of the coffee. “Swill,” he pronounced it. “Name is Taylor? Dvorak? Like the composer?”

  Maeve shrugged. “I guess.” She spelled it for him.

  “I’ll keep an eye out. An ear to the ground.”

  Before he walked away, she touched his arm. “Your decision or hers? The divorce?”

  He laughed again, the most mirth she had ever seen him show. “Oh, definitely hers. You might be surprised to hear this, but I’m not exactly what you’d call marriage material.”

  “But you’ve been married a long time,” Maeve said.

  “I have.”

  “So why now? Your kids are older. You’re close to retirement, right? Shouldn’t this be the good part?”

  He put a paternal hand on her shoulder. “It should be. You’re right about that.”

  “So? What happened?”

  “You know. This and that,” he said, before walking away. “Plus, there’s no good part with me.”

  CHAPTER 13

  It hadn’t been that long ago that she had been back here, her old street, driving up and down and reliving memories both good and bad. Today, in the neighborhood after her coffee with Poole, she tried to focus on the good, thinking about riding her bike until the sun had set, the streetlights coming on and attracting all sorts of bugs. Lightning bugs had been her favorite, magical in their own way. She remembered catching them in her hands and watching their lights flicker on and off in her palm. Jack would tell her to keep them in a jar so she could watch them flicker on and off all night but she always set them free.

  Jack would lean out the front door, and his voice, loud and distinctive, would call her home. “Mavy! Dinner!” Dinner was some kind of well-done meat—a London broil or a pork chop that could never be revived from its desiccated state, even with a helping of ketchup—mashed potatoes if he had had time, and string beans or peas from a can. Everything was salty and, after a day in the sun and playing outside, would taste delicious in a way that she could never understand now, her tastes having become more sophisticated and cultivated over time. He would have a beer, and she would have a giant glass of milk, and they would sit across the Formica table from each other, Jack quizzing Maeve on her times tables, even in the summer, and Maeve regaling Jack with what had happened on the block while he was at work.

  “Mary Lou Donaldson got stitches in her foot.”

  Or “I hit the ball the farthest in stickball.”

  And him, reporting, “I caught another bad guy today, Mavy!” in a way that made her laugh, as if bad guys were like butterflies that he caught in a net and put in a jar somewhere like the ones he told her to put her lightning bugs in, not how they really were.

  They would exchange the news of the day. She would leave out certain things, though, and she suspected he did, too, and that created a space between them that neither knew existed.

  Now she parked a few houses down from the one in which she had grown up, counting off the numbers, remembering the names of the people who lived inside their four walls in what seemed like a completely different and forgotten time. The Bresnahans. The O’Rourkes. The Haggertys. The McGills. The McSweeneys.

  She stopped. In front of the McSweeneys’ house, she noticed that it still bore their surname on the door, that an S still adorned what had to be the original screen door that had fronted the house from the beginning. She sat up straighter in her seat and wondered if Mrs. McSweeney—Colette, if she recalled correctly—was still here, probably one of the last holdovers from her youth.

  Maeve opened the wrought-iron fence and walked up the tidy flagstone path to the front door. Mrs. McSweeney had been a large woman with a full head of jet-black hair that contrasted nicely with her nurse’s cap. Maeve remembered Jack telling her that when Mrs. McSweeney’s husband died, she had gone back to school, walking a few blocks to the all-female Catholic college on the avenue that specialized in nursing, her crisp white uniform and cap generating awe in young Maeve, a girl without a mother. Of all the neighbors, Mrs. McSweeney kept to herself the most, not inserting herself into other people’s business or affairs, not concerned that Maeve was a little “sassy,” according to more than one good Christian mother, or that her father didn’t dress her like a little girl should be dressed, that it wasn’t an accomplishment to hit the ball in stickball farther than any boy on the street. Mrs. McSweeney kept a tidy house, probably to avoid the gossip that a messy yard would generate, and Maeve would pass her every Saturday, as she herself made her way to the deli to buy Jack his paper, out front, weeding or even mowing the grass herself. The woman wore pants all the time when she wasn’t wearing her nurse’s uniform, and sometimes, when it was dark and Maeve was supposed to be asleep, she would look out her back window and see the glow of a cigarette in the night, the woman sitting atop the picnic bench in her backyard, silently putting the day to rest.

  The woman who answered the door didn’t have black hair anymore, but she was still turned out in a blousy white shirt and slim jeans, a miraculous medal around her neck. “Can I help you?” she said when she saw Maeve.

  “Hello, Mrs. McSweeney. It’s Maeve. Maeve Conlon,” she said, feeling like a young girl again in this imposing woman’s presence.

  It took a moment for the realization to dawn on the woman’s face that the small woman before her had once been a little girl. Mrs. McSweeney was old now, as old as Jack had been when he died, but still sharp, still living life, unlike her late former neighbor, Maeve’s father. “Maeve Conlon?” she said. “It must be…” She searched her brain for the number of years.

  “Almost thirty probably,” Maeve said.

  The woman opened the screen door. “Nothing like seeing a grown-up you knew as a child to make you feel old,” she said, letting Maeve in.

  In the narrow hallway, pictures hung on a wallpapered wall. Although it had been a long time ago, Maeve remembered the day Jamie McSweeney—his picture hanging in the center of all of the other family photos—had died, two uniformed military men showing up on Mrs. McSweeney’s stoop to let her know that he had serve
d honorably and well.

  Mrs. McSweeney stood in back of Maeve, reaching over her shoulder to touch the large photo. “Phuoc Long sounds like a very exotic place, and today, probably is. For all I know, it’s got fancy hotels and spas. Back then, it was hell.”

  “I’m sorry,” Maeve said, though it sounded empty. Her recollections of Jamie McSweeney were few, but she did remember seeing him once in his uniform and thinking that he looked old, older than she would ever be. Little had she known that that was as old as he would get. “I remember Jamie.”

  “Great boy,” the woman said. “Come.”

  They walked into a living room that seemed frozen in time, an overstuffed, chintz-covered sofa against another wallpapered wall, a large mahogany coffee table in front of it. Mrs. McSweeney lived in a house almost identical in layout to the one in which Maeve had grown up, the difference being that the orientation was opposite. Her living room had been on the other side of the house, the stairs going up on the north side instead of the south. She took a seat in a Queen Anne armchair, sitting near the edge, not wanting to get comfortable or give the impression that she was staying for long.

  “Something to drink?” Mrs. McSweeney asked.

  “No, thank you,” Maeve said. “I’m sorry to barge in like this, but I wanted to ask you a few questions.”