Lies That Bind (Maeve Conlon Novels Book 2)

by Maggie Barbieri

  CHAPTER 13

  She dug through the remaining boxes, Jack’s things, for the next few days, whenever she had a free moment. In what was left, Maeve found nothing else to suggest that there was another child in her father’s life. Tonight she sat on her bedroom floor, items scattered around her, and scanned the detritus. She would keep the photo albums and some of the holy cards; forgive her if she wanted the one marking Martin Haggerty’s death out of her house as soon as possible. Why Jack had kept it was beyond her. She looked at the wallet-sized photos of newly married couples that must have come in thank-you cards throughout the years; she recognized a few of the couples but not the others.

  Maeve crossed her legs and took a sip of wine from the glass on the floor next to her. She didn’t hear Cal enter the room, his old bedroom, and she looked up only when he cleared his throat.

  “Is it okay that I’m in here?” he asked. He had taken to wearing glasses instead of contacts and looked like a “hipster.” At least that’s what the girls said. They were heavy, black-rimmed frames and made him look a little silly, in her opinion.

  “It’s okay,” she said, patting the bed behind her. He sat down and she moved so that she was facing him. “What’s going on?” She hadn’t told him about the breakin or that she had been hit over the head; she found that the less Cal knew about unpleasant things, the better. She didn’t want news getting out about the breakin because she couldn’t have anything jeopardize her business. That, and she couldn’t stand the look of pity that would wash over his face, the one that told her that if she just had a man to take care of her, everything would be okay.

  I did have a man, she always wanted to yell, and he left me for someone who smelled better and didn’t jiggle in all the wrong places when she walked.

  He pulled an envelope from his pocket. “Here’s a check from one of your dad’s insurance policies. I knew someone at the insurance company in town and they pulled a few strings to get it cut quickly.” He handed it to her. “It’s a little one but it’s a nice chunk of change.”

  She opened the envelope; three thousand dollars. That would come in handy, especially since the oven in the store was making a racket when she turned it up past four hundred degrees. “Thanks.” She handed him the glass of wine. “Here. Take this. You look like you’ve had a long day.”

  “Thanks,” he said, looking around the bedroom. “This room still drafty?”

  “Yep,” she said. “Maybe I’ll use some of this to get new windows.” She patted the envelope on her lap.

  They sat in companionable silence, a state she couldn’t have imagined several years earlier when he had announced he wanted out of the marriage, his love for her now focused on someone else. Someone younger, prettier, and more successful. She hadn’t cried then and she wouldn’t cry ever because really, it was just a waste of time. It was clear when he told her, and even before that, that he had already moved on. There was no turning back.

  But now, they were fine. Friends, even. Maybe they should have never married, staying the good friends that they had become when she was fresh out of the Culinary Institute and he was a lawyer at a firm in Hyde Park, the only job he could get at the time. They co-parented pretty easily these days, even if she thought he was too lenient and he, in turn, thought she was too strict. The girls likely saw them as two people who acted like grown-ups and if they couldn’t be together, that had to be good enough.

  “Hey, I may need your help,” she said, lowering her voice. Heather’s bedroom was on the other side of Maeve’s bathroom and sound traveled. That’s how she knew that Heather had been deep in conversation on the phone with her sister when Maeve had entered her own bedroom an hour earlier, the hunger strike still in effect.

  Heather would crack eventually. Maeve’s girls couldn’t go three hours without eating, never mind skipping dinner altogether.

  “With?”

  “Heather issue,” she said, relaying her conversation with Mr. Jackson, her run-in with Tommy.

  “I hate that kid Tommy,” Cal said, and for him, those were pretty strong words. This from the man who was perpetually “disappointed” with bad behavior rather than stark, raving mad like his ex-wife. “He’s trouble. I thought they broke up?”

  “Me, too,” Maeve said. “But he was here today even though Heather knows the rule: no visitors unless I’m home.”

  Cal made a face that indicated how he felt about that rule. “She’s a teenager and a cranky one at that. But I think it’s okay for them to have people over if you’re not here.” He brushed his ridiculously long hair out of his eyes. “Face it, Maeve. You’re not here a lot. Kid would never have any friends over if you enforced that rule all the time.”

  She didn’t feel like having this argument. “Do you know someone named Billy?” she asked. “He came to the store, looking for Heather. He works for my landlord, I think.”

  Cal’s face grew dark but not because he knew anything. “Billy? No. Did you ask Heather?”

  No, Cal, I didn’t ask Heather, she thought, but didn’t say. I would never ask our daughter the most obvious question to ascertain this guy’s identity. She nodded. “Of course I asked Heather. She’s not talking.”

  “Keep me posted on this. If you need me to kill Tommy, I will,” Cal said.

  Maeve smiled. He was starting to sound like her.

  “No. Really,” he said. “This is getting on my last nerve.”

  Finally. She saw a spark in him, something that told her that he was more than a little disappointed in one of his daughters, would back her up when the parenting push came to shove.

  “I have a sister,” she said suddenly.

  He smiled. “I could swear I thought you said you had a sister.”

  “I do. Aibhlinn. It means ‘longed-for child.’”

  Cal looked confused, understandably. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Maeve rehashed her conversation, if it could be called that, with Dolores. By the end, Cal looked as stricken as she had felt that first day, the day of the funeral, when Dolores had first uttered the words.

  “How do I find out if someone died?” she asked.

  Cal thought for a moment. “Search death records, death certificates, I guess. I’ve never thought about it really. I was a mergers and acquisitions guy.”

  “Can you help me with this?” she said.

  “You want to find her.”

  “I do.”

  “Okay.” But he looked uncomfortable at the thought; she wasn’t sure why. “Is this how you’re going to spend your Christmas vacation?” he asked.

  “Probably.”

  Cal loved corporate law. In his former line of work, although he worked with a large group of lawyers, paralegals, and support staff, his clients, for the most part, were nameless, faceless members of a corporation that he would likely never have to meet. He had chosen it specifically because, as he had once told Maeve, he was a “softie, not a killer.” He couldn’t look across the table at some cuckolded husband or wife and insist that they—not the adulterer—pay alimony. Or go to bat as a defender, knowing his client was in the wrong. Corporate law, to him, was numbers, facts and figures. So for Maeve to ask that he help her with something as messy as a missing—or possibly dead—developmentally challenged sister and for him to agree was something neither of them ever expected.

  She didn’t have to wonder if he loved her anymore because she knew that he liked her and that was enough.

  She showed him the photo. “That’s my sister. In the christening gown.”

  He studied it for a long time. “She’s probably dead, Maeve. I hate to tell you that,” he said.

  “Why would say that? What makes you so sure?”

  He handed the picture back to her. “That you never knew. That Jack, even as his mind was going, never said anything. Don’t you think that’s weird?”

  On the face of it, it was. But Cal grew up in a different environment from her; his was tony, upper class, educated. Peop
le went to therapy when they were sad, talked about their emotions when they couldn’t get a handle on them. Told each other things and sorted other things out. Didn’t wear their anger proudly and unabashedly.

  They didn’t keep secrets. Unless they were sleeping with your friend and didn’t want you to know; then, they were champs at keeping secrets.

  That was something he never understood about her and her family, how things happened—“my mother was killed in a hit-and-run” was said with the same emotion as “please buy bread when you go to the store”—and were rarely spoken of again. His people talked about feelings and ran the gamut of emotions, not just from anger to sadness, as her people sometimes did.

  “Do you think maybe you’re attaching more meaning to this because then you don’t have to deal with your loss?” he asked.

  Here we go, she thought. Let’s take a stroll down Therapy Lane, right at the corner of Feelings and Emotion. “I don’t know, Cal. Think about it. You’d be curious. You’d wonder. You’d want to find her, too, if she was all you had.”

  “You have the girls. You have Jo. You have me,” he said automatically, immediately chagrined. “Well, you know what I mean.”

  “Yes,” she said, letting him off the hook. “I know what you mean.”

  He walked to the bedroom door. “Yes, get some new windows. I don’t want you to wake up with pneumonia.” He turned back and faced her. “I’ll let you know if I find anything out.”

  “Thanks, Cal. You’re a good egg,” she said, and meant it.

  He chuckled ruefully. “I think the jury’s still out on that one.”

  CHAPTER 14

  That night, she was tired but she was also antsy. So after tossing and turning in her bed for the better part of two hours, she got up and decided to do what she did best.

  She baked.

  In her small kitchen, the old cabinets, original to the house, needing to be replaced, the faucet’s drips tuneful against the cast-iron sink, she pulled out a Bundt pan and set about making a German chocolate cake, wondering about her sister. Did she like cake? Wherever she was, did the people she lived with take good care of her, love her like Jack would have, should have?

  With Christmas a little less than two weeks away, she thought about where Evelyn might be, who she might open presents with, and decided, after feeling that choking sensation in the back of her throat, the one that preceded a strangled sob, that she would try not to think about that anymore. Maybe Cal was right. Maybe she was dead. And the thought of that, coupled with the loss of her father, filled Maeve with a sadness that was depthless.

  After the cake was in the oven, she opened her laptop, going straight to social media to find out who the mysterious Billy was and what he might have to do with Heather.

  What no one knew was that Maeve had a fake Facebook profile.

  A fake Twitter account, too.

  She was still figuring out Reddit, otherwise she’d be set up there, too. Pinterest (if only for the home improvement ideas she would never get to), Tumblr, Foursquare. Instagram. Snapchat. She had them all. And none of them bore her real name.

  She was the only person who knew that the photo of Veronica Kurtzman really belonged to a model from the winter 2006 J.Crew catalog, that Veronica didn’t live in Garrison, that she didn’t date Troy Nettles (he was a fake, too, even though he didn’t have his own Facebook profile like Veronica), and hadn’t seen Beyonce eight times “and counting!” But Veronica knew things that Maeve wouldn’t know normally, namely that Rebecca had tried her first beer at Vassar only hours after Maeve had dropped her off for her freshman year and that Heather’s boyfriend Tommy was mercurial and constantly breaking up with her daughter and then getting back together with her.

  He was trouble, plain and simple, if his recent DUI, as reported in the local paper, was any indication.

  Maeve had tried everything to get Heather to stay away from Tommy, but it was no use—the girl “loved” him, she once told Maeve, and he wasn’t “as bad as everyone thought.” Maeve thought he might be worse. At first, Cal, in his infinite wisdom, told her to keep her opinions to herself, her mouth and thoughts driving the girl straight into Tommy’s arms. Maeve knew that that could be true but she was worried, more worried than her ex seemed to be. Shouldering that burden alone weighed on her.

  The last few days had been busy and challenging, so she was behind on what was going on in town. Her usual reconnaissance. She caught up on the latest party invite—it was this coming weekend at Alexandra Cortez’s place out by the Farringville River—and gossip. Marie Dunworth had broken up with Frankie Alonso. Tyler Banks was “hooking up” with Stacey Trainor.

  Jo told her that she had read an article—in Frou Frou no less, edited by Gabriela Callahan, the new Mrs. Cal Callahan—that said that Facebook had become the parents’ online domain and kids were finding different places to post pictures and thoughts. You’d never know from what Maeve gleaned from her “friends’” posts.

  “Huh,” Maeve had said at the time, finding the article and reading it herself. She had made sure to read up on the new sites that were cropping up, hoping to stay one step ahead of her daughter and her Internet presence. Fortunately, in the case of Heather Callahan and her “boyfiend,” Tommy, as Maeve had taken to thinking of him, the memo hadn’t gotten to them yet. Heather’s page was up and open, meaning anyone could see her postings and photos, though Tommy’s wasn’t. But that didn’t mean that he and Maeve—um, Veronica—weren’t still friends.

  Maeve checked Heather’s page for a Billy and hit pay dirt on the first try. “Billy,” or “Will” as he was known on Facebook, was indeed a local.

  Tommy “Boyfiend” Brantley’s older brother.

  The cake out of the oven, cooling on the top of the stove, she grabbed her keys.

  The Brantleys’ house was large and beautiful, the kind of old house that Farringville was known for, a colonial with a large wraparound porch and a bank of windows in the back that looked out over the Hudson. She didn’t know the family but Jo had told her that Mr. had started a hedge fund that made a ton of “dough” and Mrs. got drunk during the day a lot while playing bunco with other well-heeled Farringville women. The couple hosted epic parties, many of which ended with naked adults diving into the heated swimming pool. Jo had been there once for a party with her former husband, Eric, and it was at the Brantleys where she had first witnessed him kissing someone on the waitstaff of the local catering company and thought that just maybe, marrying him had been an epic mistake.

  Maeve didn’t know what she expected to see while sitting there on a darkened street, but she wanted an image of the house and the surrounding area in case she ever needed to come here again. Tommy Brantley and his relationship with Heather was something she thought about a lot. It was keeping her awake at night and she was running out of ways to deal with it. While showing up and threatening him at gunpoint wasn’t really an option—because really, even for her, it was just unseemly to threaten a teenager—it remained in the arsenal of her imagination and made her feel better, if only for a little while.

  A car drove slowly down the street, its headlights blinding her for a minute. When it pulled into the Brantleys’ driveway and she could see well enough to ascertain that the driver was Billy, she reached under the seat and pulled the gun out from its hiding spot and tucked it into the back of her jeans. She looked at the car but couldn’t tell if it was the same car she had seen in the parking lot that night at the store. She wasn’t sure if he was dangerous, but she wanted to be safe.

  She approached the front gate, professionally wrapped with fresh garland, and opened it, surprising him on the front lawn. Sensing them, a spotlight came on in a stark blaze, giving both of them a bleached-out look.

  “Hey, Billy,” she said, a small woman confronting a much larger man, him not knowing that one false move would change both of their lives forever, the gun solidly in the back of her baggy jeans, “we need to talk.” She leaned in close and took a deep
sniff, looking for telltale signs of garlic, but all she could smell was some cheap cologne with a hint of sweat.

  He backed away. “Are you smelling me?” he asked.

  Why he looked so afraid was beyond her, but she guessed that in his mind, the thought of seeing a woman, a smear of chocolate across her cheek, standing on his front lawn and smelling him, was disconcerting at best. Or maybe it was that he knew that the last time he had seen her, he had blindsided her, bashing her over the head after breaking into her store. If she weren’t so curious about him and his pursuits—not to mention why he had come to find Heather—she would have laughed out loud at the ridiculousness of the situation. “Ma’am?” he said. Although he looked innocent enough, he was related to Tommy Brantley and worked for Sebastian DuClos. In her mind, he had two strikes against him. “Are you sick?”

  “Sick?” she asked. “What does that mean?” What did he know about her exactly?

  “Nothing, ma’am.”

  “Call me ‘ma’am,’ call me Maeve, call me Mrs. Conlon,” she said, “but please don’t lie when you tell me why you were at my store looking for my daughter. Or if you broke in and hit me over the head.”

  He tried to walk past her, but she grabbed his arm. “I don’t need to talk to you,” he said, the polite façade gone. “And I didn’t break into your store.”

  “You actually do,” she said. “Or I’ll make your life a living hell.”

  She wished he hadn’t laughed in her face.

  Strike three.

  Her palms itched, the gun in her waistband hot against her skin. “I may look like someone’s chubby, middle-aged mother, Billy, but I’m telling you right now: leave Heather alone.” She smiled. “It’s better that way.”

  A cloud of concern crossed his handsome features and she wondered what she looked like, if she could replicate whatever it was that showed on her face and made him look repulsed. Frightened.