Maeve smiled. “So, wine after?”
“Most definitely,” Jo said.
They left the cardboard on the table under the tent and walked to their cars, agreeing to meet at The Comfort Zone to pick up Kurt’s order.
They worked quickly, the thought of opening a bottle of wine after the workday something that reminded Maeve of the old days when it was just her and Jo, milking any opportunity to get together to socialize after a long day at the bakery. The baby had complicated things, which didn’t come as a surprise. And after the week she had had, Maeve needed her friend.
At Kurt’s house, the back door was open, just as he had promised. Maeve arrived first and started moving platters of cookies and cupcakes from the car; Jo had the quiches. In the tidy house, grander than Maeve was expecting the head of the DPW to own, the counters gleamed with a high gloss and the stainless appliances were spotless, without a fingerprint in sight. Kurt kept his house as he did the village: clean, picked up, and neat.
Maeve put the platters on the counter and walked around the kitchen, waiting for Jo to arrive. She peeked into the living room, seeing a large stone fireplace against the far wall, photos arranged above it, showing Mark as a child as well as the daughter that Kurt had mentioned having lost. Behind her, she heard the door slam as her eyes focused on the largest photo in the room, a photo of a girl in her teens, smiling on the beach, her brother at her side.
Jo stepped into the room. “Wow, she looks a lot like Heather.”
CHAPTER 44
Maeve begged off the second glass of wine by professing exhaustion.
Jo looked disappointed, whining, “But I never get out anymore.” She stared into the bottom of her glass and then looked at the half-empty bottle, giving Maeve a not-so-subtle hint that she didn’t want the night to end.
“I’m shot, Jo,” Maeve said, yawning to prove her point, adding a groan at the end to underscore just how tired she was.
“Well, okay,” Jo said, getting up reluctantly from the couch. She stretched. “I guess I’m kind of tired, too, and I’m sure tonight is the night that Jack decides that a three-o’clock round of peek-a-boo is in order.”
Maeve stood on the porch and watched Jo drive away in her smelly, secondhand car, waiting exactly ten seconds after the taillights disappeared into the inky night to go back into the house and grab her laptop, doing a search on the accident that Kurt Messer had told Maeve about a few days earlier.
Sixteen years ago, a time when Maeve was busy taking care of the girls, in a marriage that still had a lot of life left in it, the Messer family—widower Kurt and the two children he was raising alone, teenage daughter Caitlin and son Mark—had been in a two-car accident on the parkway right at the Farringville exit, a crash that had left only three survivors. Kurt and Mark had been questioned and released; Kurt’s inability to control the car coming around a curve was the likely cause of the accident, though no charges were filed.
There was one survivor in the other car, a two-year-old named Jesse Connors. An autopsy revealed that his father, Bennett Connors, had been intoxicated way beyond the legal limit.
The only reason the story was even relevant, that Maeve could find something about it so many years later was that a stone that had been laid anonymously at the site and that had stayed there for many years, had washed away in a recent storm, landing on the lawn of a Farringville resident five miles from where the accident had occurred, a testament to the force of the raging water that had flowed through the town that stormy weekend.
That and the fact that Bennett’s family was now involved in another matter, this one concerning his brother’s illegitimate daughter.
There was a photo of the Messer trio, a professional shot in which the absence of a mother loomed large but Jo was right: Caitlin Messer looked just like Heather. And a little like Taylor. And even more like the girl who had gone missing from Prideville. Not a lot to go on, but just enough. Maeve closed the computer and breathed in deeply.
I used to be the woman who had the gun.
I used to think I would have a mission and that it would be to save the innocent souls.
I’m not her anymore.
She stood. “Or maybe I am,” she said aloud in her big, empty house, grabbing her wallet and keys and heading out the door. One thing she knew for sure was that every single person involved in this case—her daughter included—had lied, and she felt as if only she could get to the truth of the matter. It was probably stupid and probably beyond her capabilities, but she had to try.
The other side of town, the side where houses were big and spaced far apart, where Taylor Dvorak’s car had been found, seemed even darker than where Maeve lived, closer to the heart of the sleepy village, where lights could be seen from the railroad and the sound of commuter trains whizzing by was something she didn’t even register anymore. Out here, you could be in your house and never hear a sound from any other house, from the occasional car that sped past; the houses were set back from the road, private in a way that Maeve had never experienced. Her Bronx neighborhood was one where you could get away with nothing—oh, except abusing a little child for years if you were her cousin, Sean Donovan—as everyone in the neighborhood seemed to hear and see everything and would let your father know if you punched Dermot O’Brien in the face (he’d called you a “fat cow,” after all) or if you had declined helping Felix McElroy with his math homework (he just wanted to copy the answers). No, back here, no one would hear a thing, and not a soul would know if you were happy or sad, depressed or elated, sharing everything with the world or keeping a secret.
Maeve parked on the road and stared up at Kurt Messer’s large house, waiting to see if his after-party was still in full swing, if he still had an errant guest or two. But curiously, the house was dark. He must have run out of beer, she thought, because in her own experience, there was no quicker way to end a party than to run out of booze. Or it was the boss’s party and the guys had made a polite showing but had headed into town for the real party, at a local place in the village where beers were cheap and the jukebox was loud.
Something wasn’t right here, or anywhere in this neighborhood. It was ground zero for the police department’s investigation, yet they still didn’t know anything, and Maeve wondered if they ever would. In her sneakers that still weren’t broken in, her heart beating a little too quickly in her chest, she walked up the driveway, under the cover of some tall trees that lined each side, and approached the house. She was right: Not one light was on in the house, not a sign of life inside.
I’m in luck, she thought. Whatever had started here was over, and the house was desolate. She moved a little to her right and was thinking about going back inside when a floodlight bathed the yard in bright, LED illumination, as if night had ended and day had begun. Without thinking, she dived behind a big stack of wood, logs for Kurt to use when winter fell on Farringville and the temperatures dipped into the teens. From behind the wood, she listened, her back up against the scratchy bark, and heard the sound of heavy footfalls approaching.
“You should have died that day. Not her,” the voice said. Kurt.
A moan followed that proclamation, and when Maeve peered around the edge of the wood stack, hearing the voices farther in the distance, she saw the back of one man hauling another man in a fireman’s carry over his broad shoulders.
“Do you know what you’ve done? What you caused?” he asked.
The floodlight’s power extended just as far as the edge of the grass, and by the time Maeve looked to see who was out there, their bodies were merely silhouettes in the moonlight. The man, who Maeve was sure was Kurt, flung the person he was carrying to the ground with seemingly no regard for his welfare and kept walking, past an old picnic table and another stack of wood, behind which he disappeared. In the distance, Maeve could see a rotting tree house, the steps missing risers, the floor sagging in the middle. She watched as Kurt, standing beneath it, pulled a rope from the ground and lifted a door.
Kurt dragged the tall, lanky boy along the grass, and when he arrived at the door to whatever lay beneath, he pushed him in, slamming the door shut and walking toward the house, brushing dirt from his pants, clapping his hands together to dislodge whatever still clung to them. He came closer, and as the flood reengaged and lit up the backyard, Maeve realized she was wrong. It wasn’t Kurt.
It was Mark.
And as he passed the stack of logs, where she sat unnoticed, he started talking on his phone, his voice different now, normal. The voice that told Maeve how much he loved her cupcakes and the one he used when he called her daughter.
“Hey, Heather. So glad you answered. I’ve been trying to get you. Want to grab a quick bite? You know, celebrate Founders Day?” He laughed. “I know. It’s not a place where I would live either, but it’s all we’ve got right now. Pick you up at your Dad’s?” He waited. “Oh, okay,” he said. “I get it. I don’t feel like answering twenty questions either. See you at the usual spot.” Another second. “I love you.”
Her insides crystallizing in a compound of fear and intense dread, Maeve waited until she heard his footfalls on the driveway fade away before sprinting across the backyard and toward the tree house, trying to stay in a spot that didn’t engage the floodlight. At first, she couldn’t find the door, its shape not visible under the grass, but then she saw a thick piece of sod, a little greener than the rest of the grass, tamped down on top of the door. She lifted the grass, surprised at her own strength, and observed the rope that lay beneath it. The door was another story, an old hatch cover from a boat, or so she thought, the light from the moon doing nothing to make things clearer for her, to make her understand why, when she finally did pry the door open and look down into the gaping maw of hell, all she saw was evil.
CHAPTER 45
Jesse Connors wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t conscious either.
Taylor Dvorak was alive and awake, though, and she screamed when she saw Maeve’s face, her own visage recognizable even under a layer of dirt and blood. Maeve leaned in as far as she could, her eyes landing on things she didn’t want to acknowledge, a stack of bones in one corner, a skeletal hand sitting in the dirt. “Taylor, you need to stop screaming,” she said, although what she wanted to do was join in, take the opportunity to just go completely insane with the girl and never return from the mental abyss. It would be easier that way, easier than leaning into this tableau of death, trying to figure out a way to get both the girl and the unconscious boy out of this hellhole. She reached in and took the girl’s hand, a mistake; Taylor had adrenaline flowing through her veins and was stronger than her several weeks underground would have led Maeve to believe she would be. She struggled with the girl for a few seconds, the cell phone in her pocket falling into the dark hole, the screen lighting up as it cracked and then went dark. She wrested her hand out of the girl’s and stood, closing the trapdoor to block out the screaming, which filled the night and disrupted the silence she would need to focus on the plan. In the stillness, she heard a car pull up the driveway and watched, from across the wide expanse of lawn, Chris Larsson get out of his Jeep, alone and moving as if he were just arriving late to a barbecue rather than responding to Maeve’s 911 text.
She wanted to call out his name, but something stopped her—the other form that appeared on the driveway and started to speak to him, Chris imploring whoever it was to put the gun down, to come to his senses, to be reasonable.
His voice grew loud. “I’m just here to see your father,” he said, the lie leaving his lips.
“He’s not here,” Mark said.
While Mark was occupied with Chris, Maeve crept back to the stack of logs, hoping she could get to the house to find Kurt, a phone, or, even better, a gun. The men were still talking, Chris still trying to reason with someone Maeve now knew was completely out of his mind, someone who pretended by day that he was nice, helpful, but who by night and any other time he felt like it was capable of horrible, evil things.
Someone who hid his true identity in plain sight.
“I don’t understand what’s going on here, Mark,” Chris said. “I don’t know why we’re having this problem.”
“Get off my property.”
“Well, see, now, I can’t,” Chris said. “You’ve got a gun, you’re holding it on me, and that presents a problem. I’m a police officer, Mark,” he said in a tone that suggested he was talking to a child, someone mentally incompetent, which Maeve guessed he was. Mark was out of sight beyond the edge of the garage, but Maeve could see Chris moving toward him, going closer than she thought he should, her instinct telling her not to do that, not to put his hand on his waist and touch his own gun, not to make the movement to take it out, not to try to be the hero here.
When she heard the shot ring out, and saw him crumple to the ground next to his Jeep, a car in which they had steamed up the windows several times, she stifled the gasp that nearly escaped her parched throat.
Mark came into view, nudging Chris’s motionless body with his shoe and then placing what was a very large shotgun against the closed garage door. He knelt down, his breath coming out in ragged chuffs, and attempted to pick the larger man up and toss him over his shoulder, but gave up after a few tries, coming to the conclusion that dragging him was his best bet. Blood leaked from a gaping wound in Chris’s midsection, and Maeve prayed—to her mother, her father, to anyone who was dead and would listen—that he was still alive.
Mark gave up halfway to the cellar in the ground under the tree house and was directly in Maeve’s line of sight. She stopped breathing until he resumed his trek, Chris’s body limp, the blood draining from him, and waited until he was at the tree house before running in a straight line to the driveway and to the gun propped against the closed garage door.
He was on her as if there hadn’t been half a football field between them, the sound of his breath close behind indicating that he was nearly to the spot on which she stood, the spot where she turned, stood her ground, and pointed the gun. He looked surprised and put his hands up, smiling as he did, not knowing a few things about her.
Jack Conlon raised a girl who could shoot.
And Jack Conlon raised a girl who believed that sometimes, wrong in the eyes of the law was right in the eyes of God, or the universe, or whoever you believed in.
Jack Conlon raised a girl who didn’t flinch when others might, who made split-second decisions along with others that were more thought out.
And lastly, Jack Conlon raised a girl who didn’t close her eyes when she shot, making sure that it counted and she could see the soul leave the body of the person whose life deserved to be taken.
She dropped the gun, marveling at how one minute Mark Messer was danger and evil personified and now, with half his head missing, he was a threat no more.
CHAPTER 46
“I don’t believe you,” Suzanne Carstairs said, and it wasn’t the kind of disbelief at what Maeve had done and what Carstairs and her entire police department couldn’t do.
She didn’t believe Maeve’s story even though everything Maeve had told her was the truth, right down to when she shot Mark Messer in the head. She left out the part where she didn’t feel a morsel of regret.
But it was the truth, for what it was worth. From the inside of what had been Chris Larsson’s cruiser, she watched as Kurt Messer’s body was carried out from the house. If she had figured out what was going on in the nick of time, he had figured it out just a bit sooner. Mark must have shot him before going on to kidnap Jesse Connors and punish him for … what? Raping Taylor Dvorak? Being in the car that caused his sister’s death? Maeve didn’t know, and she was too tired to ask.
Carstairs repeated what M
aeve had told her.
“Something like that,” Maeve said. “It’s all kind of a blur right now.” In the darkness, she could see the pain on the chief’s face. She would feel that pain, too, but right now, something approaching shock mixed with disbelief had her thinking that Chris Larsson would come lumbering toward her, putting his big, beefy hands on her face, now blazing hot, and give her a kiss. A long kiss. One that would go on forever and would let her know that she had opened her heart enough to be loved by this kind, simple man, that she wasn’t as complicated as he thought and could make him happy.
That there were good parts with her.
“He raped her, didn’t he?” Maeve asked. “Jesse Connors.”
The chief stayed silent for a few beats. “Not him. The other one. Judy Wilkerson’s grandson. We think. Couldn’t prove it. Jesse was there, though. Not sure he did anything to stop it, although he claims he did.” The chief pulled a cigarette out of her bag and left it unlit, putting it between her lips. No one but a professional smoker could talk with a cigarette dangling from their mouth; the chief was one of them. “Lucky for Morehead we picked him up or he’d be in that cellar, too, right now. Maybe worse.”
Maeve turned fully in her seat. “Morehead?”
“Bunch of assholes. With good attorneys. He said, she said. Works every time,” Carstairs said, a tear slipping down her cheek.
“But there were witnesses,” Maeve said. “Social media…”
Carstairs held up a hand. “Stop right there. It’s done. No one saw anything, would go against these kids. Happens all the time, Maeve. Taylor had no one to stick up for her.”
Except Heather, Maeve thought. She turned back around, faced the windshield, looked out at the flashing lights atop the police cars, turning lazily in the fog. “You speak from experience.”
She nodded, the glow from the myriad police lights on the street casting a greenish tint to her skin. “I do.” She reached up and hastily wiped away the tear. “Anyway, I don’t know why you were here…”
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