Lies That Bind (Maeve Conlon Novels Book 2)

by Maggie Barbieri

  It seemed like a hundred years since she had last lived here.

  While she sat there, she pulled out her phone and did a search on the Gaelic name “Aibhlinn.” A site that was devoted to Gaelic names and their meanings came up immediately. She read the information out loud in the car.

  “Aibhlinn, pronounced ‘ave-leen,’” she said, “translates to ‘the longed-for child.’”

  Longed for.

  She thought back. Her parents had married in 1959, her father in his mid-to late-twenties, her mother a few years behind that. In that era, if an Irish-American couple who followed Church law weren’t pregnant within a few months of marriage, Jack had once told her, something was wrong. People talked. They asked questions. They wondered why there were no children.

  Aibhlinn was “longed for.” Prayed for. She had come quickly only to go away not long after her arrival. Had she died? Or was it something else, something more sinister? That’s why Maeve was here. For answers.

  She looked out the window at her old house. Where was Aibhlinn’s room? Where did she sleep? Was it the same room that Maeve had occupied years later? Did she brush her teeth on the same stool at the bathroom sink and eat her breakfast at the table under the cuckoo clock that seemed to have gone missing at some point between her living there and Jack moving?

  Most importantly, where did she go?

  It pained her that the Haggertys knew something she didn’t, something that they could hold over her like an emotional cudgel. She could almost hear Dolores Haggerty’s voice on that street, making her horrible presence known. “Where’d you get that shirt, Maeve? It’s ugly.” Or “Who cut your hair? A blind man?” Maeve had turned a deaf ear to her taunts and had remained confident and strong. She wanted nothing to do with Dolores Haggerty, something she didn’t feel comfortable saying out loud, even when Dolores asked her to be a bridesmaid at her wedding to Maeve’s cousin. “Too good for us?” Dolores had asked when Maeve declined. “You always thought you were. Your father didn’t do you any favors telling you how perfect you were.”

  I am better than you, Maeve had thought at the time. I’m better and smarter and kinder; all the things that you’ll never be, the qualities that will always elude you.

  Maeve tried to find common ground with Dolores but was never entirely successful; Margie had a softer edge and Maeve found it easier to tolerate her. She imagined it had been hard growing up in the house of an alcoholic and his shrill wife, two people who rarely uttered a nice word, even as they were processing toward the head of the communion line, confident in their goodness and religiosity. Maeve had had her own troubles, but instead of dwelling on them and letting them eat her alive, she had made herself become stronger and more loving, because when all was said and done, she believed in good.

  In being kind. In love.

  Poor Dolores, Maeve thought, as she headed south. She had been “fat” and “stupid” and worst of all, “useless.” The words stayed in Maeve’s memory in association of that time and place, those girls who were now women and mothers themselves. She wondered if they had learned anything, had carried anything good forward. Or if it was only dysfunction and verbal abuse, something that they had known so well and that was probably embedded in their own moral fiber.

  They had never had a chance in hell.

  The Donovan manse was as grand and foreboding as Maeve remembered from the last time she had been here, before Sean died, and even with Christmas lights and a perfectly manicured lawn, it still made Maeve think of a house from a horror movie. There were topiaries and professional plantings that were designed to survive winters in the tony part of the Bronx. She pulled into the driveway, right behind Dolores’s Mercedes, and walked to the front door, stopping to marvel at the landscaping. Just how much money did these people have? Maeve was lucky if she got one of the girls to cut the grass every two weeks in the summer. Maybe, like Dolores, she should get a team of gardeners.

  Nah, the perfection that Dolores was trying to convey just masked the darkness that permeated her life.

  A sneak attack was best; Maeve didn’t want Dolores to know she was coming so she could prepare her story, be ready with her lies. Although she could have started with Margie she decided to go with Dolores, the original messenger; she seemed so sure of what she had said that Maeve wanted to get her information first. Maeve wasn’t sure if Margie would tell her the truth, whereas Dolores would only be delighted to spill it, particularly if the story cast Jack or Maeve in a bad light. Why she had it out for Maeve’s family was beyond her. All Maeve could figure was that they were poison, all of them.

  When Dolores answered the door, after looking through the peephole, Maeve could tell that cocktail hour had started at lunchtime, a few hours earlier. Or maybe at breakfast. Dolores seemed to be feeling no pain, as Jack used to like to say. Three sheets to the wind. Boxed.

  “Maeve,” Dolores said, holding open the door. “You’re the last person I expected to see.”

  And you’re the last person I want to see, Maeve held in, but there you have it. Deaths and funeral revelations make strange bedfellows. Dolores brought Maeve into the kitchen, outfitted with appliances that Maeve could only dream of owning. Instead of her ubiquitous blue suit, Dolores was in a tight velour tracksuit, her short auburn hair uncombed. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’m just back from the gym,” she said.

  If by “gym” you mean “bar,” then I believe you, Maeve thought. “Thanks for letting me in, Dolores.” She took a seat at the oak table in a sunny alcove in the kitchen. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said last week. At my father’s funeral?” she added when it was clear that Dolores had no recollection of what she had said or what the effect might be. “My sister?” The words sounded odd on Maeve’s tongue.

  “Oh, that,” she said, waving a hand. “So, you didn’t know?”

  Apparently, they were cutting straight to the chase. “Of course I didn’t know, Dolores,” Maeve said. “Would I be here otherwise? Would you have told me with such obvious relish?”

  Dolores swigged from a water bottle that Maeve was pretty sure didn’t hold water. She leaned against the counter and regarded Maeve coolly. “Need to rehydrate first.”

  The silence was more than uncomfortable; it was unbearable. Maeve looked down at the burnished wood and, using the Lamaze breathing that she now remembered how to do thanks to Jo’s class, she waited.

  “Retarded,” Dolores finally said, slurring. Maeve checked her watch. It was two o’clock on the nose.

  “Who?”

  “Your sister,” Dolores said, drinking some more.

  Like father, like daughter, Maeve thought, their language, their words spoken without any art or compassion. “We don’t use that word anymore, Dolores. Did she have Down’s syndrome? Something else?”

  She shrugged, and even that gesture looked off-kilter, blurry. “How should I know?”

  “When’s the last time you saw her?”

  Dolores looked up at the ceiling. “I don’t know. I was little. I don’t know what year it was.”

  “Please. Try to remember.” Maeve didn’t know why it mattered so much but she needed to know, needed the details so she could put the pieces of this puzzle together into one coherent whole.

  “I don’t know, Maeve,” Dolores said, as if Maeve’s questions were an incredible inconvenience. “She went away. She never came back.” She finished the “water” in the bottle. “I don’t know where she went. For all I know, she’s dead.”

  Maeve did her best to remain impassive. In her bag was the gun she had bought, the one that her old friend Rodney Poole had helped her get so that she could feel safe again. In control. In a display of bad judgment, she had retrieved it from its rightful place under the driver’s seat in the Prius and put it in her bag, and at that moment, her palms itched with her desire to take it out and use it.

  I could take it out and kill her and no one would be the wiser.

  Jo would say I had been at the store.
She would do that for me.

  Not one person would miss her, if I had to guess.

  But she didn’t act on that impulse, the one she justified in her mind. She held back the question that was on her lips: why hadn’t anyone told Maeve? Maeve, more than anyone, should have known the answer to that question, and when she thought about it, it was clear: her people didn’t talk about things, particularly ones that were unpleasant and required emotion. They preferred to sweep them away like crumbs on the table after Sunday breakfast, into the garbage, tied up tight, never to be seen or thought of again.

  “Dead. Maybe.” Dolores rolled over the words, trying them out, seeing if they got to Maeve.

  Maeve held her gaze, didn’t let her see that the idea of her sister being dead made her sick. “Thank you, Dolores,” Maeve said, standing. “It’s clear you have nothing else to tell me.”

  Dolores pointed the empty water bottle at Maeve, her eyes narrowing so that they were almost closed. “See? You’re no better than us. You’ve got your secrets, too. Your perfect family,” she said, laughing. “Not so much, huh?”

  Maeve started for the front door.

  “There was never any difference between us, Maeve,” Dolores called after her. “You always thought you were better than us, but you weren’t. You with your cupcakes and your doting father. Your perfect life. You were no better than us.” Dolores followed her into the hallway.

  Maeve put her hand on the door, gripping it until her knuckles turned white. Don’t tell her what you did. Don’t go to her level.

  “You could have been a friend to my sister, but you weren’t,” Dolores said.

  “I was a friend to your sister,” Maeve said, remembering holding the younger girl’s hand—only a grade behind Maeve—and taking her to the school nurse so she could get herself together before class, her squished bagged sandwich in the other hand. Maeve had given her part of her lunch, thinking momentarily that she shouldn’t, given what Margie had done. But she wasn’t like that, wasn’t raised like the Haggerty girls to be sneaky and, worse, mean.

  Dolores went in for the kill. “They sent her away, Maeve. What parents do that to their child? A child like that?”

  She didn’t know. And she didn’t want Dolores’s theories either. She closed the door behind her, breaking the top off of one of the garden topiaries as she walked by, if only to give a small measure of relief to the vengeance that was like a living, breathing thing pounding through her veins.

  CHAPTER 12

  Maeve turned onto Broadway, the blood still pounding in her temples, and pulled to the side of the road to take a few deep breaths. God, why did it have to be them, the Haggertys? Why did they have to come back into her life and bring with them all of the memories from a childhood she wanted to forget? She banged on the steering wheel. This wasn’t fair.

  She picked up her phone, on the seat next to her, and saw three missed calls, all from the same number. A voicemail had been left while she was in Dolores’s house, and while she sat there, her car idling, she listened to it. It was the assistant principal at the high school; Heather hadn’t shown up that day.

  She called the main number at the high school, and the secretary put her right through. “Mr. Jackson? Maeve Conlon. I understand we have a delinquent student?” she said, trying to keep her tone light but thinking that the minute she laid eyes on Heather, she was going to let her have it, although she didn’t know exactly what that meant. Corporal punishment was out and grounding was merely a ploy to make Maeve feel more in control. Heather was a second-story man, scaling the trellis in the back and leaving the house in the dead of night more than once. Heather thought that she lived in a gulag, where to her, what she considered rights were mistaken for privileges that were earned and the house rules weren’t fair because her older sister was a “loser” who had never had any friends anyway. Not true, Maeve had pointed out on more than one occasion; Rebecca had been an athlete and a scholar and had had plenty of friends from both endeavors. So what if her Friday and Saturday nights included her staying at home or going to a movie with a friend? It didn’t mean that she was a loser. And it didn’t influence Maeve unduly in following through with the rules and curfews she had set up when she didn’t know that Rebecca would be a homebody and Heather would be someone whose expertise at tapping a keg made Maeve’s heart sink just a little bit.

  Mr. Jackson wasn’t as convivial as Maeve would have hoped. “I am very sorry for your loss, Miss Conlon, but I also get the paper and know that your father was buried several days ago. Therefore, unless you send Heather in with a note explaining her absence, the day will be a cut. An illegal absence.”

  The little shit. “Thank you, Mr. Jackson. I’ll discuss this with Heather when I get home.”

  “And the note?” he asked.

  “As you said, the day will be a cut. My father was indeed buried several days ago.”

  On the ride home, she didn’t know what made her angrier: her conversation with Dolores or the fact that Heather had cut school. She called Jo and begged her to do the close by herself; she had things to take care of. She pulled into the driveway with such velocity that she had to stop short before she hit the retaining wall, gravel spraying up and hitting a cat on the neighbor’s lawn. She wondered if that was the cat who used her backyard as a litter box. If so, nicely done, Prius.

  She stormed in the house, marveling at how much better anger felt than sadness. Than grief. When she stepped into the front hallway, she heard voices at the top of the stairs, coming from one of the bedrooms. They were loud. And someone was crying.

  She went to the second floor. Heather’s door was closed but she was inside with someone else. Maeve tapped lightly on the door, right over the Reflektors poster, and called out to Heather. “Heather? Are you in there?”

  Whoever was in the room fell silent and the sound of shuffling feet and, eventually, murmured tones came through. She knocked again. “Heather? Open up.”

  The door opened but it wasn’t Heather. Tommy Brantley, his skull-and-crossbones tattoo on full display on a small but bulging bicep, opened the door and gave Maeve a hard-eyed stare. “Mrs. Callahan,” he said, sounding much older than he was. Maeve was surprised to find that he was only a few inches taller than she was, but sturdily built; he hadn’t looked as imposing those times she had seen him from the safety of her living room when he sped up and picked Heather up for a “date.” If he wanted to, and it seemed that he might based on the flush in his cheeks, from where he was standing, he could have easily pushed her down the steps. She took a step to the right and looked into Heather’s room.

  Heather sat on her bed, her head hanging. “Tommy was just leaving, Mom.”

  Tommy gave her a hard look. “I was just leaving,” he said. He raced down the stairs and to the door in a split second.

  She watched him go out the door, the screen slamming behind him. When she was sure he was gone, she went into Heather’s room. She knelt in front of her. “He didn’t hurt you, did he?” she asked. Heather’s face was covered by her lank, dark hair.

  “No!” she said. “How could you even think that?”

  Maeve stood. “We’ve been over this, Heather. This does not seem like a good relationship. You never seem happy when he’s around, or after you’ve seen him.” She pulled her daughter up off the bed. “Tell me what’s going on, why you cut school today.”

  Heather stood before her, mute.

  “And who is Billy? He came by the store today, looking for you,” Maeve said.

  “He’s no one,” Heather said.

  Maeve stood there, looking at a kid who had sprung from her loins all piss and vinegar, a baby with an attitude. Not much had changed. “I’ll be downstairs,” Maeve said. “You have ten minutes.”

  “And then what?” she asked.

  “And then…” she started, and realized there was no “then.” She admitted it to herself, hoping it didn’t show on her face, and it felt weak. She had nothing. She couldn’t accuse hi
m of anything; she couldn’t call the police. He had been in her daughter’s bedroom and she had been crying but that was all she had. It was horrible to feel so powerless.

  She went down to the kitchen and poured herself some wine in a tumbler; a dainty wineglass wouldn’t do. She drank half of it down and slammed the glass onto the table just as Heather appeared in the doorway.

  “Am I in trouble?”

  “Unless you give me a reasonable excuse as to why you cut school today, then yes.” Maeve pushed her wineglass around on the table. “And a reasonable excuse is ‘I had malaria’ or ‘I was so sad about breaking up with my hoodlum boyfriend.’” That had pushed it too far and she knew it, but seeing her daughter cry, because her boyfriend had made her, made Maeve feel a little less than genial toward Tommy. “Is it Grandpa?”

  “I can’t talk to you,” Heather said. “I will go back to school tomorrow.”

  “Listen, Heather,” Maeve said, standing up and going to the refrigerator, “going to class and getting good grades are your ticket out of here. Don’t forget that,” she said, looking inside to see what she could make for dinner. “And you know our house rules; no one comes over unless I’m home.”

  “But you’re never home,” Heather said.

  Maeve didn’t have an answer for that. “House rules. They are always in effect.” She drained her wine. “Now, who’s Billy?” she asked, but Heather was already on the move.

  “Who’s Billy?” she called after Heather, but she was gone. Christmas vacation was coming, and for all of her impotence in dealing with Heather’s transgressions, Maeve knew that if it took every ounce of strength she had, Heather would be staring at the four walls of her bedroom for those two weeks. She wouldn’t be leaving the house.

  Maeve stood in the kitchen for a long time, looking at the closed front door at the end of the hallway. Finally, she opened the refrigerator. It was dinner for one, as it turned out.