“What are you doing now?” Jo asked.
Maeve removed herself from the case and held up the bottle of glass cleaner. “Cleaning.”
“No. I mean now. After work.”
“I was supposed to go out with Chris later, but he canceled,” Maeve said, trying not to let Jo see that she was secretly relieved. He was working overtime, something about the case requiring his attention. She made an attempt to sound disappointed, but even he had remarked that she didn’t sound terribly upset. He chalked it up to her exhaustion, the bump on her head.
Whatever he wanted to believe. She had other things to do. Something had occurred to her while she put the finishing touches on the Rotary Club’s sheet cake, the process of snapping little florets onto its edges giving her time to think. “You want to help me with something?” Maeve asked.
Jo rolled her eyes and pointed at the baby.
“You can bring the baby,” Maeve said. “And I’ll tell you everything that happened yesterday on our way to where we’re going, because I know you’re just dying to know.” Maeve had been cryptic, citing a migraine as her excuse for not opening, but Jo knew her well enough to know that she was lying, the truth a much juicier tale that Jo would have loved to hear first thing. But there was work to be done, and Maeve had hung the story out as a carrot to get Jo to complete what she needed her to do before Maeve would give her one little detail of her excursion and the real reason she hadn’t come to work the previous day.
Jo rubbed her hands together excitedly. “A good story plus I don’t have to go home with Prince Poops-a-lot?” She jumped up and down. “This day just got a whole lot better. We’ll take my car.” Maeve started to protest, preferring the silent Prius, but Jo held up a hand. “Baby seat.”
Jo’s car was a used Honda CRV, a car that ate up a lot of gas, spewed a lot of exhaust, and smelled like its previous owner, a guy who had run a short-lived cigar shop in town. Jo had been desperate to find something cheap and reliable for chauffering baby Jack, and this car had fit the bill. The owner was a customer and had asked Maeve if she knew of anyone who needed a car like the one he was selling. Jo had jumped at the chance to have her own set of wheels; her husband used their staid Taurus as his commuter car.
“Does it still smell like cigars?” Maeve asked as they exited the store and went into the parking lot.
“It does,” Jo said, opening the driver’s door and unlocking Maeve’s. “Hold your nose.”
But the smell wasn’t entirely unpleasant, bringing Maeve back to a time when Jack would host his cop friends as well as some neighborhood guys and they would play poker, poker being a convenient excuse to get together, drink, smoke, and eat large Italian sandwiches from the deli around the corner, sandwiches Maeve heard more than one guy say his wife wouldn’t let him eat often. Maeve would hang around and collect the loose change that the men would throw on the table and lose after a bad hand, making neat piles for all of the men who attended, garnering a couple of dollars in dimes and quarters by the end of the night, enough so that she could make her own trips to the avenue to get candy the next day. Here in Jo’s car, she put her seat belt on and took a deep breath, the memory of those Friday nights curling over her in imagined, smoky tendrils and bringing back the names of the guys in attendance: Tommy Mulcahy. Eddie Martin. Gene Washington. Marty Haggerty.
She pushed the thoughts of the past aside as she and Jo drove through town. She spied Heather walking along the road that ran in front of the high school, wondering who was in the car that honked as it drove by, garnering a wave and a smile from Heather. The car pulled over, and Heather jumped in, seeming to forget that if she was going to go somewhere after school, she was to let her mother know. Maeve’s phone uttered a little ping inside her bag, and she pulled it out, seeing that she had a text from Heather.
Going to the library.
Somehow, Maeve didn’t think that was the truth, but what could she do? Commandeer Jo’s car and race after the late-model Honda, dark blue, license plate number EJK 413? She shook her head. Half of the village already thought she was a lazy slacker or worse for sending a sick girl home on her own, and the other half was sure she was an overprotective wet blanket of a mother who hovered over her children, suffocating them with her fears. She texted Heather back to be home in time for dinner and threw the phone into her purse and her purse onto the floor, thinking at the last moment that she had one other person she wanted to text.
She grabbed her purse and pulled out her phone again. She wrote to Poole. Anything on Barnham? Anything on my sister’s father? She hit SEND and then thought of something else. Anything on why I’m completely crazy and can’t leave well enough alone?
All she got in return was two frowning emojis in response to her first two questions and a smiling emoji to her final one. She didn’t take Poole for the emoji-sending type, but one thing she had learned about him was that he was full of surprises.
They stopped at a light and Jo reached back and tickled the baby’s feet. Despite her protests to the contrary, Jo adored her long-awaited son, the baby she never thought she’d have, and worshipped him in a way that Maeve couldn’t remember having worshipped her own children. Maeve turned around, looking at her father’s namesake, wondering if she imagined the mischievous twinkle in the baby’s eyes, the throaty giggle every time Maeve smiled. He was Jack, and Jack was in him; of that she was convinced. It was crazy, but she was learning that her crazy thoughts sometimes bore a hint of the truth. And if it made her feel better to think that even a small part of her father lived on in this little man, what was the harm?
The light changed. “Where to?” Jo asked.
“Have you ever heard of Laurel Lake?”
Jo leaned on the steering wheel. “Laurel Lake … is that that place out by Settler’s Bend?”
“I don’t know. What’s Settler’s Bend?”
“Oh, it’s this wooded area where the kids hang out and drink and smoke pot.”
Maeve raised an eyebrow. “And how would you know that?”
Jo didn’t even attempt a lie. “That’s where I find my dealer,” she said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to be a grown woman with a dealer.
“Of course,” Maeve said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Jo started the car as Maeve described the location. “Yes, that’s the little lake by Settler’s Bend.”
“We have places called Laurel Lake and Settler’s Bend in this town? Who knew?” Maeve asked. “I feel as if I’m living in a Laura Ingalls Wilder book.”
Once they got there, Jo pulled over to the side of the road and turned the car off. “So, what gives?”
Maeve told her what she had done the day before.
“Are you okay?” Jo asked. “And do you really think you should be spending your downtime looking for a missing girl?”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to be found, Maeve,” Jo said. “Have you considered that?”
“Runaway?”
Jo shrugged. “I am not easily scared, but Trish is a little scary, don’t you think? I probably would have hit the road, too.” Jo looked out the window. “So you were out here, by yourself, looking for a girl by a lake, a girl that the police can’t find.” She shook her head. “You know how crazy that sounds, right?”
Maeve ignored the last question and left out the part where she had followed a guy to a porta-potty in the woods. “I don’t know.”
“What do the police think?”
“Besides that I’m crazy?” Maeve said. “I can tell that they don’t believe me. Barnham has a significant other in the Farringville Police Department who is vouching for his whereabouts yesterday morning.” She opened the car door but turned back to Jo. “But I know what I saw.”
Jo held her hands up in surrender, Maeve’s tone defensive. “I believe you, sister.” But it was clear that she didn’t and that she was only joining Maeve on this journey so she didn’t have to go home and deal with a
baby alone.
Jo got the stroller out of the back of the car and loaded the baby into it. Maeve marveled at the giant wheels and the way the contraption was easily navigated over the rocky, bumpy terrain, every jolt making the baby giggle with glee. The stroller that she had used for both girls had the handling of a John Deere tractor, but these days, everything was better and made life more convenient where taking care of babies was concerned. They walked along the road, making their way toward Laurel Lake, the little body of water that Maeve hadn’t known had a name prior to the day before. They took the path that she had seen Barnham traverse with his kayak and stopped at the water’s edge.
Jo pointed to a big tree a few yards away. “Is that the tree you were hanging from?”
“Yes,” Maeve said, instinctively looking at her palms, where a few scratches remained.
Jo walked along the little sandy beach with the baby and stopped in front of the tree, calling back to Maeve, “I don’t see a sinkhole.”
Maeve trotted along the sand until she got to Jo. “What do you mean?” she said, walking up to the tree and feeling around the ground. Jo was right: no sinkhole. In its place was smooth ground, a nice mound of fresh cover where a big hole had been the day before.
“Someone filled it in,” Maeve said, looking around the area. She knelt down and touched the ground, letting fine gravel and musky-smelling dirt filter through her fingers.
Jo started back toward the paved path. “You’re a weirdo, you know that?”
Maeve ran after Jo. “That doesn’t seem strange to you?”
“Nope. What’s strange is why you would be out here in the middle of the night wandering the streets looking for a girl who is on every single television channel, whose disappearance is an Amber Alert, and who everyone in the state is probably looking for. Anyone in law enforcement, anyway.” She hitched the stroller over a little root and took the baby back onto the road. “Even Doug knows about this, and he’s in the city.” She turned and looked at Maeve. “Oddly enough, he says Poole’s been talking about it, too.”
“Poole?” Maeve said. No one knew about her relationship with Poole, not even Jo, and that was the way it was going to stay.
“Yes. Rodney Poole? Doug’s partner?” Jo said. “He said Poole has a weird fascination with the story, too, and has talked about it.” Jo pushed the stroller toward the car. “You are two of a kind. Too bad he’s married,” she said.
Not for long, Maeve thought. And they were more similar than Jo would ever know.
“I have a boyfriend,” Maeve said. “Remember?”
“Yes, and you should be spending the early-morning hours with him, not running up and down deserted streets looking for a girl you don’t even know.” Jo turned suddenly, the stroller doing a wheelie and listing the baby sideways. “Is it because people are blaming you?”
“What have you heard?”
“Just what you told me.”
“That’s it?”
Jo’s expression told her that it wasn’t, that people were talking and they were saying things that weren’t true, repeating the words as if they were gospel. Maeve Conlon was a bad person. She had refused to pick a young girl up at school.
“What do you care what people say anyway?” Jo asked. No one cared less about what was being said about her than Jo. She loved to gossip but didn’t care what other people said about her. To Maeve, that was her gift.
“I just do,” Maeve said. “Particularly when it concerns a young girl who everyone seemed to have forgotten about.”
The baby was getting antsy, his happiness at being outside for a jaunt in his stroller slowly being replaced by hunger or, if his rubbing his eyes was any indication, exhaustion. Jo pulled a lidded cup from a battered diaper bag and handed it to him. He took it from his mother, eyed it suspiciously and flung it a good distance down the street after letting out a primal scream that cut through the silence of the wooded area. Jo ducked.
“Kid has the makings of a relief pitcher,” Maeve said.
“Yeah. He gave Doug a black eye two weeks ago when he threw a toy.”
Jo strapped the baby, now completely distressed and agitated, into his car seat and not seeing anywhere to turn around, drove down the length of the road to the turnaround at the dead end. There were a few cars parked there, a couple of guys packing up fishing gear and heading home for the day after hauling in some fish; Maeve wondered, were they even edible? What grew in those little bodies of water anyway? The baby wailing in the backseat distracted Maeve but not enough so that she missed two other people standing at the reservoir’s edge, one in a smart pantsuit and the other in a sport coat, the two of them talking intently and looking alternately from the shoreline to the wide expanse of water.
They hadn’t seemed to believe her yesterday but they now seemed to believe her enough, apparently, because there was no other reason for Suzanne Carstairs and Chris Larsson to be standing on an almost-deserted beach at dusk, standing close and talking in a way that suggested there was more to this visit than an early-evening stroll.
CHAPTER 28
Maeve pulled into the parking lot of the store the next morning, right after hitting the pothole that Kurt Messer had promised to repair; she usually remembered to avoid it. She cursed loudly as the Prius dipped precipitously into the hole and climbed out, then pulled into her usual parking space, wondering if the village had gotten any of the messages she had left on the DPW’s voice mail. She guessed no. Muttering to herself about high taxes and what she deserved as both a citizen and a business owner, she let herself into the store and stabbed at the alarm keypad, her eyes falling onto the bulletin board over her small desk where she tacked up orders for the week, sometimes forgetting to pull down the ones that were already completed. A thought occurred to her, and she threw her purse down on the counter, riffling through the finished orders—the ones that were marked PAID AND DELIVERED—to find the one that she needed.
Thank God for Kurt Messer and his cupcake order. She held the slip in her hand and had started dialing before realizing that the head of the DPW probably wouldn’t appreciate getting a call at home at barely six in the morning, despite the hours he undoubtedly kept as head of the group that picked up garbage before the sun came up, cleaned the streets in what seemed like the middle of the night to Maeve, who’d been awakened more than once, and collected leaves when the more diligent residents put them out at the curb. She slid the slip of paper into her jeans pocket, donned her apron, and got to work, checking the clock frequently so that she didn’t forget to call later in the morning.
The store was small, and she had been doing this a long time, which was why she could handle the morning rush on her own. She was like a well-oiled machine, making just the right number of muffins and scones, having enough coffee for her thirsty customers and taking time, once that rush had ended, to make some new cakes and quiches; she’d make more when Jo finally arrived near lunchtime. Deliveries were becoming a problem, and letting Jo take on the responsibility of getting the baked goods where they needed to go in a timely fashion was a recipe for disaster because her friend—as sweet as she was—had a very short attention span that could find her meandering the highways and byways surrounding Farringville when a straight line back to the store was really what Maeve needed her to follow.
She sent Heather a text: Please come by when you can.
She hadn’t seen her daughter the night before, her door shut and music playing softly, indicating that she didn’t want to be disturbed. That was fine with Maeve; she hadn’t wanted to be disturbed either, tired from the events of the last few days and looking forward to a date with a glass of wine and her laptop.
In bed last night, the Brunello making its way down her throat and warming her to her core, she had spent some time tracing Jesse Connors and his adoptive father, wondering just what a man like Charles Connors had seen in Trish Dvorak, a local girl who was much younger than he was. His graying hair and a lined face spoke to a man in his sixties, a
full two decades older than Trish, if Maeve’s guess was correct. He went to the gym and was in good shape for a man of any age, and Maeve thought that almost two decades earlier, when the affair had taken place, he had probably been a real catch. Beside him in the photo was a well-put-together wife, the kind Maeve recognized from having lived in Westchester for as long as she had. Toned. Buffed. Facialed. Blond. Maeve wondered whether if she had played the role better, the role of wife to a corporate attorney, she would look like this now instead of the way she really did. Frumpy. Messy. A little dowdy and doughy. Mrs. Connors was not someone Maeve had ever met, but she knew her type. She didn’t strike Maeve as someone who would frequent The Comfort Zone, the number of carbs in what Maeve pumped out every day being more than this wraith of a woman could handle.
Maeve still couldn’t understand why Trish was struggling financially, and by extension Taylor as well. Obviously the man had wanted to keep his paternity a secret and had gone to great financial lengths to make that happen, but with Trish broke and college looming, something in the mother had snapped, and she was demanding more. From him. From Maeve. From Cal. She was thinking about all of that when Chris appeared in the back of the store ten minutes before she had to open, clearly chagrined that he had had to cancel their date the night before.
He apologized as soon as he walked in.
“It’s okay, Chris. I was exhausted last night,” she said, handing him his usual: a blueberry muffin and coffee, light and sweet. She worked on a tray of muffins, arranging them to her liking, then carrying them into the front of the store and putting them on the counter. When she returned to the kitchen, he had a hard time meeting her eye. “You look tired.”
“I am,” he said, pushing the muffin away as if he didn’t have an appetite. “Do you know Jane Murdock?”
Maeve searched her overstuffed brain for a face and came up with one. “The owner of Chrysanthemum Jewelry?” Maeve asked. She refrained from adding, The store with the name no one can spell?
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