Lie in Plain Sight

by Maggie Barbieri

  And as he said, “I didn’t see her last night,” Judy Wilkerson was saying, “Heather never came to school,” and Maeve slid down the wall, feeling the floor beneath her turn to an ocean of sadness and grief, her ability to stand deserting her in one emotional tidal wave of terror.

  CHAPTER 36

  Chris Larsson, the man she loved but wouldn’t trust now with finding a missing cat, snapped his notebook shut. “So the last time you saw her was right before we spoke last night?”

  “Yes,” Maeve said. “She texted me that she was staying at her father’s, but she never showed up.”

  Cal was sitting at the counter, his head in his hands. Maeve picked up the baby and fed him a cookie to keep him quiet, knowing that sugar was not on the list of approved ingredients that the child could eat and not caring. “What do we do, Chris?” she asked.

  “Leave it to us, Maeve,” he said, and while she knew that that was the answer he had to give, she wasn’t confident that it was her best choice.

  After they left, Chris taking his two uniformed colleagues with him, Cal departed with the baby, now wailing lustily, in need of a nap or organic baby food. Maeve texted Jo, telling her the store would be closed for the rest of the day, but not telling her why.

  Then she texted Poole.

  His response was short. See you at your house.

  And then, as she arrived, running through the front door and screaming Heather’s name, Don’t touch anything.

  There was nothing to do but wait. She had never cleaned up the broken glass from the night before, a reminder of their last encounter, her and Heather’s, so she got out the broom and dustpan and swept everything into a neat pile, discarding it in the trash can, covering a half sandwich that Heather had made yesterday and never finished. The tears came fast and blinded Maeve, causing her to miss the trash can with her second delivery of broken glass and dirt, the contents of the dustpan drifting to the floor, creating another silty mess.

  She was sitting on the floor of the kitchen, her back against the door, the dustpan beside her, when Poole showed up, his kind face the only thing she needed to see, his calm presence grounding her in what was real, what was true, what needed to be done.

  “Cops say anything about coming over, looking at her room?” he asked, taking her hand and helping her into a standing position.

  She shook her head, not wanting to speak for fear of the tears coming again.

  “Good. I’m delighted in their ineptitude,” he said, cracking himself up. “Let’s go. Show me before they figure out that they need to be here.”

  “I don’t have much faith in the cops on the force,” she said, feeling immediately that she had somehow betrayed Chris, “but I think the chief is a little sharper.”

  He followed her up the stairs. “Then we don’t have much time.”

  Heather’s room looked like it always did: stuffed with clothes, books, and a variety of other items, but tidy in its own way. Poole walked over to the tall dresser right inside the bedroom door. “You mind?” he asked, pointing to the top drawer.

  Maeve shook her head. Once, she had done the same thing, searching through the drawers in the hopes of unlocking the key to the secrets that Heather held close and being none the wiser when she was done. Poole pulled a pair of purple rubber gloves from his pocket, gingerly picking his way through multiple pairs of underwear, bras, single socks, Tshirts. The next drawer revealed pajamas and a rogue pair of pantyhose that Maeve had bought the girl when she attended an eighth-grade dance, a few years before. Beneath that, sweatshirts. Below that, a drawer full of jeans.

  He was single-minded in his work, not disturbing too much, feeling around under the jeans for any items that didn’t belong. Maeve sat on the bed, watching him, wondering how this had become her life, how she sat in a room, her daughter missing, a detective who had once let her get away with murder now her trusted confidant, the only person who knew her darkest secrets.

  He turned, and in his hand was an envelope. “Let’s see why she’s filing things away with her jeans, Maeve Conlon.” He opened the envelope and dumped the contents on Heather’s bed. Out slid a couple of screen shots, two photographs, and another envelope, the flap tucked inside. Maeve looked at Poole.

  “Facebook screenshots,” he said. “Nasty stuff.”

  The screenshots were taken on a date in July and mentioned Taylor. The slut. The whore. And a lot of other words and phrases that Maeve didn’t know but that were clearly not flattering or kind. She looked up at Poole. “Awful.”

  “And this one?” he said, holding one of the photographs. “Know these kids?”

  “Yes,” Maeve said. “I do know that one,” she said, pointing to Jesse Connors. “And yes, that one, too,” she said, pointing at Tim Morehead. “The other one’s a henchman.”

  “Henchman?” Poole said, raising an eyebrow.

  “That’s the only thing I can think to call him,” Maeve said. The other photo, which Poole slid into view, was the three boys’ names written on some institutional wall somewhere—Maeve guessed the high school—with the words RAPIST LIST written in black marker above the names. “So Rebecca was right,” she said, feeling sick that in wanting to keep her daughter’s name out of the investigation, she had kept key information to herself.

  Poole read her mind. “Trust me, Maeve. They already know.”

  “So how come that’s not in the media? How come I haven’t seen anything about that?”

  “They connected?”

  “They have money. At least the Connors do.”

  “That may be it,” he said.

  “Are you so sure they know?”

  “They’re cops. They know.”

  She laughed in spite of the situation, more from the thought that the Farringville PD could know something before the two of them did than out of any sense of hilarity over the situation. “I don’t know, Poole. That’s not a given.”

  Poole picked up the items and looked at her. “Let’s go downstairs. That poster is giving me the creeps,” he said, pointing to a poster from one of the more disturbing Harry Potter movies.

  They sat at the kitchen table, the envelope between them, not wanting to open the last piece of the puzzle for fear of what it might reveal.

  “Coffee?” she asked.

  He shook his head, pulling the flap open on the envelope and taking out a letter and unfolding it carefully. He spread it out on the table in front of them.

  Behind them, the screen door flew open, and Jo burst in, talking before she saw that Maeve had a guest.

  “What is going on with you?” she asked, her footfalls heavy in the hallway. “Closing the store two days in one week? That’s no way to make a living. We’ve got bills to pay, sister!”

  Maeve turned to face her. Jo stopped short in the kitchen doorway. “Rodney?” She looked from the older man to Maeve. “Rodney Poole? What’s going on?”

  If I told you the truth, you’d never believe me, she thought, but instead of voicing what could only be described as fantastical, she went with the next best thing: a lie. “My cousin’s murder. New evidence,” she said.

  “Doug never mentioned anything about that,” Jo said.

  Poole said, “I’m working a different angle.”

  “If I were you, I’d work no angles,” Jo said, looking at Maeve. “You know how I feel. I don’t care who did it, and I hope that asshole rots in hell.” She looked at Poole. “Sorry. That’s just how I feel.”

  “I understand, Jo,” Poole said. He was quick on his feet, making the whole thing seem normal. “I didn’t tell Doug, because it’s just a waste of our time. But I had to ask Ms. Conlon here if it had any legs.” He swept all of the photographs into a pile and made a neat stack. “Sorry to take up your time,” he said to Maeve. “This is over now. I’ll see myself out.”

  Jo watched Poole walk down the hallway to the front door, and when he was gone, out of earshot, she turned to Maeve. “What is going on?”

  “Heather is missin
g,” Maeve said, and the stress of that, along with the tension of acting out what she felt was a pretty convincing play for Jo involving Poole, brought the tears again, fast and furious this time.

  Jo sat in the chair that Poole had just vacated and put her head in her hands. On the table, Maeve’s phone pinged loudly, and a quick glance at the screen indicated that Poole had texted her already, his number but not his name visible.

  Give it all to the pd.

  But she didn’t want to; she wasn’t sure why.

  They hadn’t had a chance to look at the note that was in the second envelope, and Maeve didn’t want to open it in front of Jo; she pushed everything to the far edge of the table, away from her friend’s prying eyes.

  “Maeve, this is bad. Two missing girls…,” Jo said, trailing off. “Now that I’m a mother—”

  Maeve held up a hand. “I know. Stop.”

  Jo didn’t know what to do, had no clue what to say, so she got up and started cleaning Maeve’s kitchen, putting on a kettle of water to make tea. The Farringville police, namely the chief, Larsson, and one uniformed cop, arrived sooner than Maeve expected, showing up on her front porch mere minutes after Poole had left, his quick visit seeming like something Maeve had imagined.

  Jo leaned back from the sink and looked down the hall. “More cops.”

  Maeve eyed the photos and the note in the envelope. “Jo, do me a favor? Let them in?” she asked.

  Jo dried her hands on a dish towel and started down the hall. Maeve had only a few seconds to open the note and read it.

  She had less time once she read the note, the cops now in her hallway, to shove everything back in the envelope and put that between two of her favorite cookbooks on the shelf above the table.

  She tried to bring her breath back to normal, her voice to a calmer cadence, but the words on that note, anonymously written and coupled with the photographs that she and Poole had looked at, had shaken her to her very core.

  The note was short and to the point: Get them.

  CHAPTER 37

  “How’s your relationship with your daughter, Maeve?” Suzanne Carstairs asked in the same tone as if she had said, “Do you like shrimp?”

  “If you’re thinking she ran away, she didn’t,” Maeve said, but she didn’t sound convincing even to her own ears. Chris Larsson stood behind his boss, his arms crossed, a look that combined concern and confusion evident on his face. Jo had disappeared, not wanting to be part of this line of questioning, giving Maeve her privacy to discuss whatever it was that needed to be discussed with the police.

  “Well, we have to consider that possibility. You argued before she left?” the chief asked, knowing full well that they had because that’s what she had told Chris not two hours before.

  Yes. But that’s nothing new. “Yes. We argued. You have a teenage daughter. You argue?”

  The chief laughed. “All the time.” She looked at her notepad. “We’ve checked out all of the usual haunts. But we’ll keep looking.”

  Chris looked at a spot over Maeve’s head, anything not to look directly at her. “We’ll need to search her room, Maeve.”

  “Of course.”

  “Take anything that might be of interest.”

  Maeve willed her gaze away from the bookshelf above the kitchen table and nodded.

  As the two officers walked down the front hallway, they were greeted by Cal, who noisily protested the search of Heather’s room, something that didn’t surprise Maeve. While the three discussed the reason for the search—which to Maeve was evident and didn’t require explanation—she texted Poole to let him know what the note said. When he didn’t reply after a few minutes, she put her phone in her pocket and went out to the backyard to get away from the noise, heading for the picnic table that she should have put at the curb for pickup years ago but still sat under the shade of a big tree, every year becoming more decrepit and splintered, probably a haven for carpenter ants. She sat atop the table and looked out at the little slice of river that could be seen when the leaves started falling, eventually becoming a mulched mess beneath her feet.

  Behind her, she heard the rusty gate swing open; she was expecting Jo and a barrage of questions. But there was only one.

  “Mom? Am I in trouble?”

  Maeve didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so she did both. Seeing Heather brought up contradictory feelings. On the one hand, she could have killed her. On the other, she wanted to tell her to run the other way, that the police were inside, that they wanted to talk to her and wouldn’t let her go until she told the truth.

  After Heather told her story, no one was really sure what the truth was, but one thing was clear: Heather wasn’t where she said she had been.

  Stacy Morris—the girl Heather professed to have spent the previous night with—was a worse liar than Heather. “Yes, she was here,” she had told Chris Larsson when he questioned her, but her mother, Donna, another divorcée in the village who had once tried to bond with Maeve over their single status, had no recollection of seeing Heather Callahan in her house the night before. She did admit that a bottle of wine and an Ambien may have clouded her recollections, or lack thereof, but no, to the best of her knowledge, Heather had not been there.

  Chris threw his hands up. “I don’t know what to tell you, Maeve.” They were in her kitchen, him standing by the back door, looking as if he wanted to make a quick getaway from the house and Maeve—and stay away forever. Maeve sat at the kitchen table, the envelope with Heather’s photos and the note tucked in between her Jacques Pepin cookbook and The Joy of Cooking. Cal had gone home, the drama over, at least for now, leaving Maeve, as always, to deal with the fallout of another situation involving her youngest, his middle.

  Maybe that was it. Heather was a middle child now. Didn’t middle children traditionally have issues with fitting in with the family, not knowing their place? Maeve would have to search for yet another overpriced self-help book that would help her figure out why her daughter had turned into a secretive, sullen, moody cluster of cells.

  “I’m worried about her” was the last thing she said to Chris before he left.

  “You should be” was his response.

  Heather was in her room, and Maeve was steeling herself for the inevitable fight that would ensue. She didn’t say anything about what she and Poole had found, keeping that information to herself. She just didn’t have the energy for it. She texted Jo, letting her know that everything was back to normal and Heather was home. She sat at the edge of the couch, preparing herself for when Heather emerged from the bedroom, but when she did finally come down, after forty-five minutes or so, Maeve was even less prepared for what her daughter had planned.

  Heather had packed a bag, larger than any bag that Maeve had ever seen her pack for an overnight at her Dad’s, and appeared at the bottom of the steps after the door slammed and Chris Larsson went back to the station house. Maeve didn’t need to ask where she was going or why; it was clear that she was moving out and heading to Cal’s for good.

  “What did I do?” Maeve asked.

  Heather couldn’t look at her, facing instead toward the wall, her back to her mother. “I can’t live here anymore with you.”

  “Why?”

  Heather slumped a little bit, her spine caving in as she resisted the urge to cry. “You’re not here,” she said.

  “I’m here now.”

  “No. You’re not here. Even when you’re here,” she said. “It’s always something else. Evelyn. Chris. Now Taylor. You’re never here.”

  “And Dad is?” Maeve asked, feeling as if her insides were being crushed, making it hard for her to breathe.

  “Yes. Dad is,” she said and hoisted the bag over her shoulder.

  “Where did you go last night?” Maeve asked.

  “In a few months, you won’t be able to ask me those questions, and I won’t have to answer them.”

  “Because you’ll be eighteen?” Maeve asked.

  Heather nodded.

/>   “You’re going to go out on your own? Live your life?” Maeve asked.

  “I don’t know, but you don’t need to know where I was last night. I was fine, by the way.”

  “You’re dating Jesse Connors,” Maeve said, and the look on Heather’s face, as usual, was inscrutable, unknowable. Maeve thought she’d make a great CIA agent.

  “No. I’m not,” Heather said, shifting the bag from one shoulder to the other.

  “The police said you were.”

  “The police don’t understand hooking up,” she said.

  It always came back to that, Maeve thought. Grown-ups just don’t understand.

  “And I feel as if you’re doing your own investigating in your own way,” Maeve said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I just want you to be safe,” Maeve said.

  “You’ve made that clear. About a thousand times.”

  Outside, Maeve saw Cal’s minivan at the curb, but she didn’t follow Heather outside or speak to her ex-husband, whose smug face she could see even at this distance, even with a screen door and the length of the front walk between them.

  It was a long time before she moved, the day turning dusky and finally dark, and it was only the phone ringing in the kitchen that got her moving. “Heather?” she said when she reached the phone on the sixth ring, hoping that the girl had had a change of heart, that they could work things out and Maeve hadn’t been catapulted into living life alone too soon in this big house.

  “No, Maeve, it’s Kurt Messer.”

  “Kurt, hi. Thanks for fixing the pothole,” she said. “You really didn’t need to send Mark out at five in the morning.”

  “He came out at five in the morning?”

  “Yes. Too early. But thank you.” She wondered if this was a personal call or if the store phone had forwarded the call, something she had programmed it to do after hours. Sometimes people thought of things late at night—for instance, they needed a cake the next day and had forgotten to order one—and she didn’t like to miss those calls. “What can I do for you?” she asked, her voice sounding tired and weak to her own ears.