Lies That Bind (Maeve Conlon Novels Book 2)

by Maggie Barbieri

  At the time the news about Mansfield broke, Maeve lived in a nice row house with a nice father and although she endured other horrors, living incapacitated in filth and despair was something she didn’t know. It seemed to upset Jack to a far greater extent than it should have, now that she thought about it. It was disturbing and vile but it was far away from them and their lives. Now she understood why he had reacted the way he had.

  Chris leaned back against the counter and crossed his arms over his chest. “I don’t remember it on television, but for some reason, I do remember hearing about the place.”

  “I remember my father’s words to this day. ‘Those poor souls. God help them.’” She didn’t remember anything beyond that—no searches, no conversations, no desperate phone calls—just sadness, tears, and a little bit of brokenness that entered his body and stayed for a while.

  “What happened to the place?” Chris asked. “The actual location?”

  “It’s a SUNY,” Maeve said, because she had looked it up right after Margie left. “Specializes in the arts. Dance. Music.” She had also learned something else while digging around on her computer, the orders that she needed to fill having to wait. “Some people went missing when it closed.”

  Recognition dawned on Chris’s face. “The Mansfield Missing. I remember hearing about them.”

  A dozen young adults, or maybe more; the twelve had been identified by their families as having never come home once the place closed, but according to reports, there could have been more who disappeared. No one knew. Which left Maeve wondering if her sister was among those who had vanished in the wind once the doors had slammed shut. The record-keeping had been shoddy, the administration mostly uncaring, the workers scattering far and wide to avoid questioning and maybe prosecution. Some thought a fire in one of the outbuildings was responsible for the missing persons, but others thought a more sinister plot was at work. It all added up to finding a needle in a haystack, years later.

  Maeve answered the questions before he asked. “I don’t know if she was one of them. I also don’t know why my parents would have sent her there.” Lacking anything else to say or do, she handed Chris a cannoli. “Try this for me.”

  He took a bite. “Only if I have to,” he said, closing his eyes at the taste of the luscious cream, the crispy shell. “Amazing.”

  “I’ve got to find her, Chris. I remember my father’s reaction that day and I don’t remember much,” she said, lying about her memories. “He was crying. I wonder if she went missing.”

  “I’ll help in any way I can,” he said.

  Maeve could tell by the way he said it that he thought she needed protecting. She didn’t have the heart to tell him, standing there with a hint of ricotta cream on his lips, that now that she was grown, she could take very good care of herself. And she didn’t need protecting.

  “Did you find Billy Brantley?” she asked, changing from one sordid subject to another. It was worth a try.

  His face clouded over a little bit but he tried not to give anything else away. “Um, yes.”

  “Spill it, Larsson,” she said.

  “Nothing to spill,” he said. “Tommy Brantley’s brother. A little pot in the house. Crazy parents.” He finished off his cannoli. “Last I heard, he was trying to go straight after a few high school dust-ups. Get his GED.”

  “He never graduated?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason. So did he have an alibi for the afternoon of the breakin?” she asked.

  “I’m almost embarrassed to tell you,” he said. “He was at a meeting, too. Again, confidential.”

  She started laughing, but there was no merriment in it. “Am I the only person in town who isn’t in a twelve-step program?”

  “Maybe?” he said. “I’m not either, by the way.” He paused. “And in case you were wondering,” he said, “we’ve got nothing on the finger yet.”

  “What does one do with a severed finger?” Maeve asked.

  “The only thing a small-town detective could do,” he said. “I turned it over to the county crime lab.” He stood, ready to go. “Well, that and look at every pair of hands in town for the one that has only nine fingers. You’d be amazed at how many people are missing a finger or part of a finger.”

  “Really?” she asked.

  “No,” he said, laughing out loud, the sound of it breaking the tense mood that had stayed after Margie’s departure.

  She wondered about his self-deprecation, if it masked a really sharp investigative mind. Only time would tell, she thought. She wasn’t sure which answer she wanted when it came to him. His ignorance of her—of what she had done, of what she was capable of doing—was bliss. He just didn’t know it.

  She had worn a mask most of her life—loving daughter, devoted wife—the one that let the world believe she didn’t have any scars. She could never let him see who she really was, and wondered if he had the ability to find out on his own.

  CHAPTER 20

  Chris went back to work, two cannolis in a bag for later, and Maeve went to her desk to review the orders that she’d need to fill before the holidays began in earnest. But her discussion with Margie was still on her mind, her quest for more information like a hunger she couldn’t sate, so she pushed the stack of orders aside and went to her computer, Jo still in the front of the store to deal with the light foot traffic that the midmorning usually brought.

  The Mansfield Missing. She went back to them. A dozen young adults, different ages, sexes, and ethnic backgrounds, were never located once the facility was closed. Was the fire to blame? Did they wander off before it closed? Or had something more sinister happened? The institution’s administration were at a loss to explain what had happened. One of them had even gone to jail, dying there years before.

  There was a lot more information in various places but Maeve didn’t have time to search them all. Some people had shared the names of their missing loved ones, but others, citing privacy, did not, leaving Maeve to wonder if Aibhlinn “Evelyn” Conlon was on the list.

  She thought back to her conversation with Margie. Could Maeve trust her? Was Margie as altruistic, as helpful, as she seemed to be? Wanted to be? Maeve couldn’t be sure. She typed her name into the search engine and waited to see what she would get in response. Maybe the information that turned up would give Maeve the answer she was looking for.

  “Disgraced cop.”

  “Mishandled evidence.”

  “Discharged from duty.”

  It wasn’t a huge story; it couldn’t have been, because Maeve didn’t remember reading about it. It had happened over a decade ago but even then, if she had read about it, Margie’s name would have rung a bell in Maeve’s overtaxed mind. The story was simple: after searching an apartment and confiscating drugs, Margie having been on a drug task force at the time, she took a detour and had a drink with a colleague, one Ramona Ortiz, at a bar in Washington Heights. She got drunk. She hit a telephone pole. And when her colleagues were called to get her out of the jam she had gotten herself in, it became clear that the chain of custody had been broken and any work that had been done on the case thus far—with the help of the FBI and DEA—had gone to crap, leaving her holding the bag, as it were. Or not.

  And now? With the law degree that she had gotten after she had been discharged of her duties, according to a later article, she had opened up a little office, specializing in workman’s comp cases, but that information didn’t shine any light on Maeve’s real questions about her former neighbor. Was she good? Was she bad? Or was it a combination of the two, like it was for so many people, Maeve included?

  She was going to tread lightly.

  Cal walked in as she was closing the computer; he had just finished a stint at the gym, judging from the sweaty T-shirt peeking out from under his hooded sweatshirt. He knew his way around and poured them each a large cup of coffee before taking a seat at the butcher-block counter, his usual spot when he dropped in for a chat. He
had grabbed a muffin as well, taking a large bite. Maeve started a cake batter, pulling a container of ganache out of the refrigerator, suppressing a shudder when she thought about the finger in the baggie.

  “Where’s Devon?” Maeve asked. Maeve was unused to seeing Cal without his latest progeny.

  “Sitter,” Cal said. “I needed to get to the gym,” he said, patting his trim midsection.

  You wanted the younger wife, Maeve thought. That kind of decision comes with a hefty price tag, namely daily spin classes and dead lifts.

  He looked up at the ceiling, changing the subject. “Listen, I did a search. No death certificate for Aibhlinn…”

  He mangled the pronunciation. “Aveleen,” she said, saying the name phonetically. “Or Evelyn, if you want to Americanize it.”

  “Right. I searched both. I searched by middle name as well.” He balled up the wrapper and held it in his hand. “There’s always the chance her name was changed. There’s always the chance she’s dead.”

  Why he could not understand that it pained her to hear that her sister might be dead—after all, she had just learned about her—was a mystery to Maeve. She held her tongue, pursing her lips tight. She didn’t want to say anything that might push Cal away, make him not want to help her more.

  “Is there anything else we can do?” Maeve asked. “To try to find her?”

  Cal considered that. “Yes. Lots of things. But anything you undertake will take time and money,” he said, adding, “two things you don’t have a lot of.”

  “You sound like you’re talking to a client,” she said.

  “Maeve, your dad would have told you about her if she were alive,” he said. “I think she’s dead.”

  “Stop saying that,” she said, and the catch in her throat caught him by surprise.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just don’t know why…”

  “I’d be invested? Want to find her?” she asked. “Take one minute, Cal, and think it through.” She had never thought him to be lacking compassion, but in this instance, his lack of understanding spoke to its absence in his personality.

  “You’re just hurting right now,” he said.

  True. It was an old wound, one she didn’t know she had.

  “I don’t want you to hurt anymore.”

  “Then help me.” She told him about her conversation with Margie. “Mansfield. Do you remember that place? The investigation?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It was horrible there.”

  “She was there. I don’t know where she might have gone after it closed.” “If she was still alive” went unsaid. She looked at him. “Help me.”

  He didn’t answer but in that silence was his complete assent.

  “One last thing,” she said, “and you can’t tell a soul.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Jo found a finger in the refrigerator the other night.”

  He spit the last of his muffin into a napkin and let out a little gag.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I cleaned everything. Everything has been sanitized. And it was in a baggie.”

  “Oh, I feel so much better,” he said, throwing out the napkin. “I’ve got to ask you, Maeve? Are you in the Mob?” He smiled but he looked a little wary of her.

  “No,” she said. “Does this sound like a Mob thing?”

  “Definitely,” he said. “What about your landlord? Is he mobbed up?”

  “How would I know that?” she asked.

  He went to the back door. “See if he has nine fingers next time you see him. That ought to let you know.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Good advice, Cal, she thought, as she sat on a darkened street in a wealthier part of town, watching cars drop by Sebastian DuClos’s stately home, stay for a brief moment, and then speed away into the night. She had left after dinner, whipping up something easy when she got home and eating with Heather, all in silence as usual, still no closer to figuring out what Billy Brantley had to do with any of this or where things stood with Tommy.

  Heather was sticking close to home and that worried Maeve more than when she wanted to break free and explore the nighttime world of Farringville, like usual. She was in her room when Maeve got home from the store, and stayed there until dinner. After dinner she returned to her room, shutting the door, closing off the world outside.

  Maeve called Jimmy Moriarty at Buena del Sol before she left, getting his answering machine. She tried to sound casual, light. But what she wanted from him was any information he may have had about Evelyn, any indication that Jack had told him something about the sister Maeve didn’t know she had.

  Tired of sitting in the car, she tucked her gun into her pants, thinking again of why she felt the need to carry. Sean Donovan, she decided. He had stripped away the vestiges of security that she felt growing up around her wonderful father, leaving her paranoid, nervous. Afraid some of the time. Having a gun made her feel in control and like she could handle anything, even if it were totally at odds with how she felt about firearms in general.

  She was different. He had made her so.

  She backed the Prius up to the end of the street and, keeping to the side where there were no streetlights, walked along the road, the people in cars passing her not seeming to pay any mind to the small woman wandering alone on an otherwise deserted street. Was this middle age now? Did you become invisible to the general public? She wondered about that.

  Sebastian DuClos’s house sat kitty-corner to the road, at an odd angle. Sideways, really. She waited until there was a break in the action and walked up the driveway, snaking around his car, the one with the noisy engine—a Jaguar, she could now see—and going to the back of the house, staying as far away as she could, and at the edge of the property, the Brantleys’ motion detector reminding her that when it came to security, most Farringville residents had her beat in spades. Her own house boasted a busted front porch light and a powder room window that anyone could enter if they had the desire.

  The deck was raised off the ground and beyond it was a brightly illuminated kitchen where Maeve could make out DuClos and no one else. She wondered who was manning the front door, answering when the people driving the cars that were buzzing in and out of the street stopped to check in.

  Or to buy, she thought.

  There was no other explanation for the beehive of activity that was Wendell Lane, a street where there were only two other houses, both up the street and closer to the main road than the DuClos manse. He was perfectly situated; cars could drive up and not disturb the other residents, their houses tucked away in wooded areas far up the street. Maeve stood in the backyard, inching closer to the house to see if she could get a look.

  She ducked under the deck. Beneath it was a weirdly lit basement, and as she crept closer, she wondered exactly what was happening down there. Tanning? Tomato growing? She couldn’t tell but, her body on alert, she heard the sliding glass doors to the kitchen open above her and footsteps on the deck just a few feet from her head. Was that garlic she smelled? She couldn’t tell. She held her breath, not daring to make a sound, plotting her getaway in case she was detected.

  She pressed herself against the house’s brick foundation and waited, hearing the jingle of a dog’s collar and the click of nails on the wood above. She heard labored breathing, the hallmark of a bigger dog, as well as a gate opening on the stairs above, and the dog making its way to the grass below.

  Oh, Jesus, she thought, hearing the heavy footfall and the jingling getting closer. She sprinted from beneath the deck, across the backyard toward the street, hearing the dog bark and begin its pursuit of her, the collar’s jangle, a warning to her, getting faster as the dog ran behind her.

  “Bruno!” she heard DuClos call out, whether to silence the dog, call him back, or sic him on her, she wasn’t sure. But she ran like her life depended on it, hoping that even with her short legs, she could outrun the hound.

  She crawled through a hedge, feeling the nip of teeth on the hem of her jeans, gett
ing to the other side. She ran across the street, deep into the woods on the other side of the house, finally coming to rest against a fallen tree stump.

  This is stupid, she thought, almost saying it aloud. In her head, she heard her father’s voice say the same thing. “You’re right, Maeve. This is stupid. Go home.”

  She reached the car a half hour later, after she was sure no one would be looking for her, and drove away. When she was a safe distance from Wendell Lane, she did a search on her phone.

  Huh, she thought. So that’s what they were. Hydroponic grow lights.

  She’d learned a lot about her landlord tonight. Garlic lover. Dog owner. Tomato gifter. Pot grower?

  CHAPTER 22

  There was one pay phone left in town and it was next to one of the many nail salons in Farringville. Maeve pulled the car over and dialed 911, disguising her voice, adding a little accent for good measure, letting the police know that there was a tremendous amount of activity on Wendell Lane at the DuClos house, hanging up before the officer could ask any more questions.

  When she got home, Maeve threw together a cookie batter, scooped them onto a sheet and put them in the oven, the smell of which wafted up to Heather’s room, making her emerge from her bedroom and break her silence. “Want a cookie?” Maeve asked when Heather entered the kitchen, handing the girl a warm cookie. She expected Heather to drift off after she got a few cookies, to continue her silent treatment.

  Hmmm, Maeve thought, when Heather sat down at the table. Playing it safe. Being the good girl. All fine offensive strategies after the last few days. She looked for any sign that the girl was lovelorn, missing her boyfriend, but she seemed on an even keel, dare Maeve say happy?

  No, she wouldn’t go that far.

  “What happened to your pants?” Heather asked.

  Maeve looked down. Bruno had taken a wide swath of denim with him after chasing her. She was just thankful it hadn’t included any flesh. “I don’t know.”

  “You look tired,” Heather said.