Lies That Bind (Maeve Conlon Novels Book 2)

by Maggie Barbieri

  And how to throw a mean after party.

  When it came to what was eaten after a good, old-fashioned Irish Catholic sendoff, one had to pull out all of the stops for the mourners. To some, it was more important than the actual funeral Mass, though Maeve wasn’t one of those people. Still, she felt as if she had to have something nice.

  They expected it. It was required. And she was sure that Jack Conlon would haunt her until the day she died if she didn’t send him off with a culinary bang.

  With that in mind, she booked Mickey’s, a watering hole not far from her house where she knew the owner. Mickey guaranteed her that he would kick out the drunks who sat at the bar in the middle of the day and provide a buffet befitting Maeve’s father and his appetites.

  There was Jack’s favorite shepherd’s pie, steam rising from atop the layer of mashed potatoes; a pasta dish; and chicken Francaise, a dish that Jack referred to as “fricassee,” even though a fricassee was something completely different. Maeve smiled as she put a piece of chicken on her plate, thinking of her father, adding some vegetables and turning to find a seat in the main dining area where Conlon mourners had taken all of the seats. The six tables that she had reserved were filled with friends and family, none looking terribly sad now that the funeral and burial were out of the way; a couple looked like they were well into their second or third Stellas, the DPW guys in particular. That helped the sadness of the morning wither away like the dead leaves that clogged the gutters outside the old village establishment. Who could blame them, these people who had come to pay their respects? Free food and booze. It took an iron will to turn down either, not to mention both.

  Jack would have been thrilled at the turnout overall but would have also noted who hadn’t shown up, whispering in a voice that everyone would have been able to hear, “Don’t let my dying interfere with your bocce game, De Luca!” or “I’ve only died, but that hair appointment needs to be kept, Bernice!”

  Maybe if she kept this running commentary in her head, she’d be able to keep a little piece of him alive and the hole that had opened in her heart would be filled with his memory.

  He had died in his sleep, just like he prayed for every day, and Maeve took a bit of comfort, knowing that he had drifted off, never to awaken.

  Before she sat down, Mimi Devereaux, Jack’s “main squeeze” at the home, as he had referred to her, stopped her. “So sorry for your loss, Maeve.” She had on a feather boa and thick orangey-red lipstick that Maeve felt sure had gone out of style around the time of Pearl Harbor.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Devereaux,” she said, her eyes locked in on the smear of lipstick that adorned the woman’s prominent front teeth. Look away, she cautioned herself, but she couldn’t. It was a cosmetics train wreck.

  “I just wanted to know, dear. How long do you think it will take to move your father’s things out of the apartment?” she asked.

  This isn’t happening. This woman isn’t asking me so that she can have someone else move in, Maeve thought. “Soon,” Maeve said. I’ll squeeze that in between getting ready for Christmas and the other life events that are sure to come up in the next few weeks, she thought. “Why do you ask?”

  “My dear friend, Stanley Cummerbund, is on the waiting list. Next in line for a place!” she said, clapping her hands together excitedly. “And he’d love to move in right away.”

  “Well, I’ll get right on that,” Maeve said. “As long as you and Mr. Cummerbund are happy, I’m happy,” she said, a smile on her face that belied the anger bubbling beneath her placid surface. She looked up at the ceiling. You hear this, Dad? She’s already moved on. I told you she was a hussy, that you’d never find a woman as good as Mom. My mother was a saint.

  “Oh, wonderful, dear.” Mrs. Devereaux smiled widely and Maeve took in the lipstick on just about every tooth in the woman’s mouth. “I won’t make any promises but I’ll let him know that it will be soon.”

  Maeve detached herself from the old woman and made her way through the dining room, careful not to stop and talk to anyone who wanted to order a cake, move into her father’s recently vacated apartment, or discuss current events. She just didn’t have the energy.

  Margie Haggerty waved enthusiastically, the underside of her arm flapping with the effort. Maeve made a mental note to wave to herself in the mirror when she got home; if that’s what middle age looked like, she had better get on the stick, and fast. “Here! Maeve, come sit here,” Maeve’s old neighbor from the Bronx beckoned, the chief mourner in her sights.

  Mickey’s was small and Maeve couldn’t pretend that she hadn’t seen Margie, which is how she found herself sandwiched between Margie and her older sister, Dolores, who was encased—because, really, that was the only word for it—in a dark blue pantsuit that was surely from the Hillary Clinton collection at Nordstrom. They had been neighbors a long time ago when they were all younger, and while Maeve would have said they were also “more innocent” back then, it wasn’t really true.

  Dolores, six years older, had never been innocent, and Margie’s innocence was still in question. And Maeve’s innocence had been stolen early on by the man Dolores eventually married—Maeve’s first cousin—but he was dead now and Maeve didn’t have to worry about him anymore.

  Maeve looked at her plate, piled high with food. She was starving. When had she eaten last? She couldn’t remember and it didn’t matter. She dove into the shepherd’s pie, hoping that by concentrating on eating, she wouldn’t have to talk to Margie or Dolores. She looked over and smiled at her daughters, seated with their father and his wife, otherwise known as Mrs. Callahan #2, at a table tucked into a far corner.

  “Very nice of you to come,” Maeve said, managing to add a smile to the sentiment. There was a sordid history between the two families, though Maeve wasn’t sure how much the sisters knew of it. That Dolores’s husband, Sean, had abused Maeve. That their father, a drunk, had run Maeve’s mother down in a hit-and-run, something that had remained a mystery until recently for Maeve. That Martin Haggerty had left her mother to bleed to death on a Bronx avenue, never telling a soul until he was near death about what he had done.

  Margie clasped Maeve’s hand in her own freckled one. “We wouldn’t have missed it, Maeve. We … I … loved your father.” She even managed to produce a tear or two. “He was a kind man.”

  “Yes, he was,” Maeve said. “Contrary to…” But she bit her tongue, remembering their serpent-tongued mother. But then again, Fidelma Haggerty hadn’t had a nice word to say about anyone; she hadn’t reserved her vitriol for just Jack. “How are things, Margie?” Maeve asked.

  “Everything is great,” she started, keeping an eye on her sister; Maeve had her back to Dolores and wasn’t troubled in the least by not showing good manners in this case. Dolores was well on her way to getting sloshed and Maeve didn’t even like her when she was sober, so it was downhill from here.

  It was only the feeling of a cold splash on her leg that interrupted Maeve’s concentration. Beside her, Dolores had upended her glass of Chardonnay onto Maeve’s skirt, soaking it through.

  “Sorry,” Dolores slurred. Instead of helping Maeve clean it up, she motioned to the waitress busing the tables. “Another wine, please,” she called out.

  Maeve blotted her skirt the best she could with her napkin and another one, slightly used, from the now-empty space across from her. Nothing like a drunk woman at a somber event to clear a room or diminish her once-ferocious appetite. She pushed her plate away and focused on a wormhole in the knotty pine paneling, a blackboard hanging on it touting the homemade desserts from The Comfort Zone! and took a deep breath. Just how long were these things supposed to go? She looked at Margie, the safer and more sober of the two sisters, but it was Dolores who wanted her attention. Her wine had been delivered and the glass was almost empty.

  Margie leaned in close to Maeve. “It was Sean’s death,” she said, her voice so low that Maeve could hardly hear her. “She’s been drinking ever since. It’s becoming
a problem.”

  Maeve didn’t respond. It wasn’t becoming a problem; clearly it was already a problem. Dolores had married Sean Donovan; there had to have been massive amounts of alcohol involved, his wealth and success notwithstanding.

  Sean’s was the last funeral she had attended before her father’s. She hadn’t expected them to happen so close together but she was starting to figure out that life didn’t happen the way you planned it. Mrs. Callahan #2 was a testament to that fact.

  Dolores pulled Maeve close, attempting to tell a story about Jack that Maeve wasn’t sure cast him in the best light. “So, he got our tree and then lit a cigarette and the whole thing went up in flames,” she said, holding Maeve’s gaze even though Maeve wasn’t really following the story. “My father put it out with his hands. His bare hands.”

  Maeve tuned out, studied her plate of food.

  Dolores shook her head at the memory, at Jack’s supposed carelessness. “Almost burned our house down.”

  “Well, all’s well that ends well, right, Dolores?” Maeve said. The Haggerty house remained standing, after all.

  Dolores pulled on the sleeve of Maeve’s black turtleneck. “Do you know what you should do now?” she asked, her wine-soaked breath wafting up to Maeve’s nose.

  Next to her, Maeve felt Margie freeze. She couldn’t imagine how she could make restitution for a thirty-year-old Christmas tree, but she’d be interested in what Dolores had in mind. “No, Dolores. What should I do?”

  “You should find the other one,” she said, slurring so that all the words ran into each other.

  Maeve was confused. “There was another tree?”

  Margie reached out and grabbed Dolores’s arm. “We should go.”

  “The other what?” Maeve asked. The food that she had pushed away looked gray and unappetizing; she put a napkin over it, giving it a peaceful death. Having Dolores Donovan around would be great for the diet she would start immediately following today’s feast.

  “The other one,” Dolores said, finishing off her drink in one long swallow. The outside of the glass was coated with food and greasy fingerprints.

  Maeve waited. “The other what, Dolores?” she said, her voice getting louder, her impatience growing.

  Margie leaned across Maeve and took her sister’s face in her hands. “Enough, Dolores.” She turned to Maeve. “We’re very sorry for your father’s passing. We’ll talk soon.”

  No, we won’t, Maeve thought. We won’t talk soon and we’ll resume the lives that we want to live. Mine is absent of yours, in case you’re wondering. She hoped she wasn’t wrong about that. This had to be the last time she would see them.

  “The other one,” Dolores said, not to be deterred. She picked up a glass of beer from the place beside her; Mr. Moriarty, Jack’s best friend at Buena del Sol, had been sitting there just seconds earlier but had beaten a hasty departure to parts unknown when it was clear that things were going to unravel. In his place remained an unfinished beverage; Dolores took a noisy slurp.

  Margie pulled two coats off the hook behind the table and dropped a Mass card on the table. “We’re very sorry for your loss, Maeve,” she said. She threw her sister’s coat over her shoulders. “Your father was a nice man.” She turned to her sister. “Dolores. Now.”

  Dolores stood on unsteady feet, catching herself with a hand to the edge of the table. “You need to find her.”

  “Who?” Maeve said, aware that she was yelling. The other guests were staring. Whatever was happening needed to stop; maybe a raised voice was the only way to get Dolores’s pickled brain to pay attention. After all, raised voices were the Haggertys’ stock-in-trade. Maybe Dolores didn’t know how to respond to anything else. Maeve’s daughters, Rebecca and Heather, still sitting with their concerned father, turned and looked at her. “Who?”

  Dolores smiled. “Your sister.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Maeve raced into the street, stopping on the double yellow line, a car coming so close that her hair whipped in its wake. The Haggertys were out of the parking spot before she had hit the sidewalk, Margie’s old Honda speeding away under the threatening storm clouds, her sister in the backseat, her face the last thing Maeve saw before she felt the touch of her oldest daughter’s hand on her arm.

  Rebecca put an arm around her. “Mom. It’s cold. Come inside.”

  Maeve waited until they were out of sight, standing in a misty rain that should have felt colder when it hit her skin, but her face was hot; she was burning up. The words “your sister” rang in her ears, Dolores’s voice not unlike the screeching sound that the neighborhood women’s grocery carts—and their voices—made outside the bedroom window of her childhood home on a tree-lined street in the Bronx. “The butcher had pork on sale, Mrs. McDermott. Fifty-nine cents a pound.” “Thank you, Mrs. Blaine. Don’t forget to get your church raffle tickets.” If Maeve closed her eyes, she could imagine she was back there, sitting on her bed, her chenille bedspread lumpy clumps of cotton beneath her, the sound of neighborhood business being attended to, children’s voices wafting up as they played in the streets. You could do that then, play in the streets. Those thoughts, jumbled up with the unpleasantness of her encounter with the Haggertys, roiled around in her brain.

  She had been an anomaly then, an only child, motherless, the neighborhood women clucking around her, making sure her hair was cut the proper way, her knee socks cuffed at just the right place. Her father adored her and she adored him because it was just the two of them, making them the smallest family on the block. More than one woman had criticized Jack for the way he was raising her, a “ragamuffin” among good, holy little girls, someone for whom baking had become a respite, albeit a solitary one. He never cared about what they said. To him, she was perfect. She was his. He told her so every day.

  She wouldn’t go back inside. Couldn’t. Standing there, frozen to the spot on the street, watching cars pass in front of her, she thought of one memory that would stay with her and resurrect itself every time she heard their names: Dolores and Margie. Margie and Dolores. The Haggerty sisters. Fidelma and Marty’s girls.

  Her mind went back decades, the world now fading from her consciousness.

  “Big step,” Jack had said when he handed over the key to the house, a Partridge Family key chain holding the key that opened their front door. She was nine. “Now, do you remember what to do?” he had asked.

  “Come straight home. Lock the door behind me. Do my homework. Don’t use the oven,” she had said, having memorized the routine so that she wouldn’t let him down. She knew her father worried about her, worried that she wouldn’t be able to execute those few steps with any kind of accuracy, and that bugged her. She was smart and responsible. She begged him for the chance to prove that.

  That first day when she arrived home, she searched her book bag but the key was missing. Even though she had touched it throughout the day and made sure it was still there, it was gone. Her heart sank as she pulled every book out of the bag and searched the pages, hoping against hope that it had gotten stuck, that she had really not lost it. It had to be there.

  When the rain started to fall, light at first but eventually turning heavy and unrelenting, she went next door to the Haggertys’, a place she never wanted to go. Mr. Haggerty drank. Mrs. Haggerty was mean. And the girls? Well, they were their own set of problems. Dolores had answered the door, a sullen teenager with a mouth set in a perpetual sneer.

  “I lost my key,” Maeve had said, her knee socks ending a few inches below her plaid uniform skirt and not providing any protection against the chill that accompanied the rain. She was so cold that she couldn’t get the next sentence—“Can I come in?”—out.

  “Too bad,” Dolores had said. “What do you want me to do about it?” Her already developed and ample chest strained against a St. Barnabas volleyball sweatshirt, Dolores’s heft coming in handy on the court, Maeve imagined years later.

  “Who is it?” Maeve heard Fidelma Haggerty call from the kit
chen.

  “It’s no one,” Dolores had called back, turning her attention back to Maeve. “No one at all.”

  Behind her on the table in the front hallway was Maeve’s key, the Partridge Family key chain a dead giveaway. “That’s my key, Dolores,” she said as a guilty Margie slithered by, slipping the key and key chain into the pocket of her jeans.

  Dolores turned. “I don’t see anything,” she said before slamming the door shut in Maeve’s face.

  Jack got home at ten o’clock that night and found her sitting at the picnic table in the backyard, soaked to the skin but not crying. She had cried all afternoon; no tears left. He had carried her inside and dried her off, making her a cup of scalding-hot tea that burned her tongue and singed her throat when she sipped it, but she didn’t really feel anything at all at that point.

  She never told him about the girls’ cruelty. She had gotten good at keep secrets from a young age.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy. I lost the key,” she said, because she knew that if she did tell what she saw and what she knew, her life would become ten times worse than it already was. He would go to the Haggertys. He would fight with Mr. Haggerty. Dolores would make her life more of a hell than it already was. She was smart enough to figure that out.

  When Jack did call his sister-in-law to find out if her cousin Sean was available after school to take care of Maeve, he asked her why she didn’t go to the Donovans’ first, why she didn’t find someone at home so that she could sit in a warm house rather than on a picnic table in the rain.

  At nine, her first inclination was to lie. “They weren’t home.” They were home, and if she had gone there, there would have been more pain from Sean, her abuser, more than she had already endured. So, she lied to her father and she could see on his face that he didn’t believe her, the first crack in the trust that was between them.

  He had wondered about that; she could see it on his face. He wanted to believe her but couldn’t. But one thing he never wondered about later is why his little girl never cried even when she was hurt or sad. That question never came out of his mouth. And she never really cried again, the ability to show fear or sadness something that had been tortured out of her all those years ago.