Lies That Bind (Maeve Conlon Novels Book 2)

by Maggie Barbieri

  The kid was right. Maeve was exhausted, but she wouldn’t tell Heather that part of the reason was because she had been running away from a dog down a deserted street. “Oh, I’m okay,” she said, picking the remaining cookies off the sheet and putting them on a plate. Ever since the day she cut school, Heather had lain low, giving her mother a wide berth, even as she stayed cloistered in her room. To Heather, Maeve was just crazy enough to do something supremely embarrassing, something that would require her to move to another school district, or worse, transfer to Catholic school. The girl had learned the hard way; don’t push her mother too far or she would find out exactly what she was capable of. Maeve tried not to think about a possible connection between Billy, Tommy, and Heather. Oh, and Sebastian DuClos.

  “Where’s Tommy been?” Maeve said, ignoring Heather’s observation about her physical state.

  “Not around,” Heather said.

  “Where is he?”

  “Lacrosse camp,” Heather said, looking down at the table, the cookie on a plate in front of her, anywhere but at her mother.

  “Before school ends?” Maeve said. “Before Christmas vacation starts?”

  “He wants to get a scholarship to Duke so he’s going to lacrosse camp,” Heather said.

  Case closed. But to Maeve, it sounded like a lie. The school had a liberal policy when it came to student athletes, but letting a student go away on school time seemed out of character even for the Farringville school board. But if he was gone, Maeve was happy. Merry Christmas and all that. She couldn’t think of a better present.

  “And why was Billy looking for you?” Maeve asked.

  Heather shrugged. “Maybe to see if I was okay with that? I don’t know.”

  Lies. Every single thing that came out of her mouth was a lie. “Do you have homework?”

  “Do you have a sister?”

  Maeve tried not to react. It was jarring to her to think that she did but it was also up to her to try to make it seem as commonplace as possible, even if it wasn’t, to her daughter. “I might.” She put the cookie sheet in the sink, running water over it. “How did you know?”

  “I heard you and Dad talking.”

  Damn those thin walls and drafty windows. Maeve had been right to lower her voice when she had spoken to Cal about Heather but should have been more careful about discussing Evelyn. It wasn’t that she didn’t want the girls to know; it’s just that she needed to find the right way to tell them, to explain that although people didn’t send their children away now, at one time, they did. Implicit in Heather’s statement was that she was angry that she hadn’t been told. “I didn’t want to say anything until I was completely sure.”

  “And now you are?”

  Maeve pulled out a chair across from her at the kitchen table. “No. Not entirely.”

  Heather picked at the cookie. “Do you think she’s still alive?”

  Maeve thought for a moment, tracing some letters in a pile of spilled sugar on the top of the table. “Yes,” she said finally. “I do.”

  “You would know something like that, Mom,” Heather said. “Siblings know stuff. Sisters, especially.”

  “They do?”

  “Yeah. Like I know when Rebecca is missing home and not just because it says it on Facebook.” This was the longest conversation Maeve and Heather had had in months; Maeve stayed quiet while the girl talked. “So, I’ll text her and ask what’s up and she’ll tell me. Siblings know. Gabriela agrees with me.”

  “She does?” Maeve said, hiding the aggravation that accompanied the utterance of Cal’s wife’s name.

  “Yes,” Heather said. “Dad told her the whole story and she agrees with me.”

  “You sound sure. About siblings knowing.” Her daughters were obviously closer than Maeve knew; that was the good news amongst all of the other revelations she had heard lately.

  “I am sure,” Heather said. “It’s not telepathic or anything. Just feelings.” She finished eating the cookie and gave her mother her full attention, something Maeve was unaccustomed to. “Tell me the whole story. What you know.”

  When she was finished with the telling, Maeve wasn’t sure how she felt. Heather had remained impassive during the entire monologue—which was admittedly short; Maeve didn’t know a lot—but unlike her adult counterparts, those who had already heard the story, Heather didn’t offer an opinion. Maeve appreciated that. She just stared at Maeve with those deep brown eyes and listened. Maeve got up and went upstairs to the bedroom, returning with the only photo she had of her sister.

  “That’s her,” she said, handing the photo to Heather, who treated it with the care and gentleness that it required and deserved.

  Heather turned the photo over in her hand. “Another Gaelic name?”

  Maeve smiled. “Grandpa was very tied to his Irish roots.”

  “I’ll say,” Heather said, trying to sound out the name.

  “Aveleen. It’s Evelyn, if you Americanize it.”

  “She would have had a tough time in school. No one would have been able to say it or spell it,” Heather said. She pushed her plate away from her and finished her milk.

  “She wouldn’t have gone to school. Apparently she was … is … developmentally challenged.”

  Maeve got up and took Heather’s plate to the dishwasher. When she turned back around, Heather had pulled out her computer and had begun work on what Maeve figured was the mountain of homework that she tackled each night with the steady focus and precision of a surgeon, cutting her way through French before tackling History and then going on to Literature, giving everything the least amount of effort she could muster to complete each task. Heather had her troubles with Maeve, often ending up grounded after one transgression or another, but had started embracing the idea—her mother’s idea, really—that her ticket out of Farringville was a college far, far away. The University of Washington. Oregon State. Berkeley. Anywhere that was far from the little village that Maeve mostly loved—except when she didn’t—and, Maeve assumed, her mother. That realization, coupled with urgings from her sister, Maeve hoped, would transform her almost–juvenile delinquent daughter into something of a scholar, the recent cut day notwithstanding. Nothing like a small town and the prospect of escape to turn one recalcitrant snot bag into a reasonable student and person. Was it possible? Maeve hoped so.

  “Mom, look,” Heather said, turning the computer toward Maeve.

  Maeve looked at the computer screen; on it was a Web site whose entire home page was taken up by a beautifully drawn tree, one with branches that hung down and had links to other pages on the site. “Mansfield Support Center,” it said, and it took a few minutes for Maeve to read through the paragraph of description and understand what it meant.

  “It’s a support group,” Heather said, before Maeve finished reading. “For people who had family members who went to Mansfield.”

  The mere term—“support group”—made Maeve’s skin prickle uncomfortably; her “people,” as Jack always referred to them, weren’t open sharers. In fact, they didn’t share at all, which is one reason why she found herself in her current state—with a sister, without a sister. She leaned in over Heather’s shoulder and read the site more closely. The group was located equidistant from both Mansfield and Farringville, about an hour away from each, in a YMCA that Maeve had passed a few times on her jaunts north of the village. Their weekly meeting was the next night.

  “I’ll go with you, if you want,” Heather said. She scribbled down the address, day, and time of the next meeting on a Post-it, and handed it to her mother.

  Maeve slid the paper into her pocket and put her other hand on Heather’s shoulder. “Thank you. Let me think about it.”

  Heather, at that moment, reminded her of Jack, her sensitivity to her mother and her pain something that didn’t show itself very often. There were times when Jack was that way, but they were few and far between. There were times when he was completely lucid and normal, asking her about her day, remembering
the conversation. And then there were other times, especially near the end, when it was almost as if he didn’t know who she was.

  She looked at Heather, marveling at the moment, at what they were sharing.

  Heather looked back at her. “Can I have ten dollars?” She held out her hand. “And you never gave me the eighty dollars for the yearbook.”

  And just like that—as was often the case with Jack—the spell was broken.

  As she lay in bed that night, she did what she said she would. She thought about it. How much would she need to reveal, if she went to the support group? There really wasn’t that much to tell.

  But maybe someone there had something to tell her.

  CHAPTER 23

  The next night, after locking up the store, Maeve drove north and found the YMCA easily, her excellent sense of direction and memory of places visited not failing her. She pulled into the lot under a blinking streetlight, a habit undertaken long ago at Jack’s instruction.

  “And if someone comes after you, Mavy, give them everything. Your purse, your wallet, whatever they want. Better to be safe than sorry. Things can be replaced,” he used to say. “But you can’t.”

  She knew that and had absorbed most of his commonsense rules about safety, even if she didn’t follow every single one of them every single day. Sometimes she crossed against the light and one or two times, she hadn’t worn her seat belt for the short trip home from the store.

  She hadn’t always listened, but she had been a good daughter and that had to count for something.

  And she always had a gun. That counted for a lot.

  The fake Christmas tree in the lobby of the Y struck her as both joyful-looking and depressing at the same time, multicolored lights blinking furiously, tacky glitter and garland on every strand. Maeve hurried past it, feeling guilty that she hadn’t bought her tree yet from the local Lions’ Club who sold trees in the grocery store parking lot. Inevitably, it was always dead and losing needles from the moment it was attached to the top of her car and by the time Christmas was over, was basically just a trunk with some brown branches. She tried to buy a tree that fit the size of the living room but usually came home with something too big and too fat; out in the parking lot, all of the trees looked smaller than they really were.

  There was a community room in the building where the support group was held; Maeve found it after making a few wrong turns, the strong smell of chlorine and the sound of echoing shrieks announcing that she was getting closer to the pool but likely farther away from the room where she needed to be. When she did find it, she was surprised to find thirty chairs in a large circle already set up, most of them filled. She took a place next to a young woman who looked like she had been crying long before Maeve had arrived. On the other side of Maeve was an older lady who smelled like talcum powder and tea, a comforting combination.

  The elderly woman, white-haired and frail, had a walker by her side. Maeve wondered how she had gotten herself there, as she seemed to be alone even though she also seemed to know everyone in the room. She introduced herself and the woman smiled.

  “I’m Francine Alderson,” she said. “Nice to meet you, Maeve. That’s a lovely name.”

  “It’s Gaelic,” Maeve said. “It means ‘warrior queen,’” she told her, blushing slightly. Saying that always embarrassed her but she had found that it was always the next question after inquiring about the name’s origins. The name Alderson rang a bell; the woman’s son was one of the missing. It was one of the few names Maeve had turned up, remembering it from the Web research she had done.

  “Irish, dear?”

  Maeve smiled. “With this face? Was there any doubt?” she asked, pointing to the dusting of freckles across her nose. “And you?”

  “From north London, originally.” She smiled at Maeve. “I haven’t had an Irish friend in a long time. Isn’t that hard to believe?”

  The leader, a young woman who looked as if she had just gotten her social work degree, brought the group to order. “Welcome. I see we have some new members tonight. Let’s introduce ourselves.”

  Maeve froze involuntarily. This part was always hard for her, any kind of public speaking. That’s why she baked. It was solitary; she could be alone with her thoughts. No one expected a soliloquy on the finer points of making muffin batter. When it was her turn, she stood and faced the crowd of friendly faces, people all willing to listen to her story, to hear it spoken aloud as only she could speak it.

  She had listened to some of the other new members talk about themselves, their relatives. Some were siblings or a generation removed, now more knowledgeable and informed about developmental challenges and what they meant. For most of the people who spoke, it was hard for them to understand why parents or grandparents sent their children away and why they let them live in such dire conditions.

  But Maeve couldn’t judge because she didn’t know.

  And she had a few questionable decisions in her past as well.

  “I had a sister. Her name was Aibhlinn.” Her voice sounded raspy, like it didn’t really belong to her. “Evelyn, translated. It means ‘longed-for child.’” She told the group that she had just learned of Evelyn’s existence but didn’t go into detail as to why. The sympathetic looks on the other attendees’ faces nearly made her crack but she managed to hold it together.

  When she sat down, she found Mrs. Alderson’s hand on her own, her fingers intertwining with hers, the papery skin warm and comforting. Maeve looked down and watched a tear, for someone she had never met but who she was now desperate to find, land on the old woman’s thumb. She heard the crowd welcome her, all saying her name. She didn’t realize it when she was driving up or when she had entered the building, but she had a link to this group that could never be broken.

  Mrs. Alderson was the one who suggested that Maeve join a small group for coffee at a local diner before she went home. She checked her watch; it was eight thirty and she was exhausted from her workday as well as the group session. She hadn’t gone into too much detail about her sister mainly because she couldn’t. She didn’t have a lot of details. But she listened and learned from the others who were there, wondering the whole time if Heather was right.

  If siblings knew.

  At the diner, spread across two booths, the people, predominantly women, mostly her age or a bit younger with the exception of Mrs. Alderson, chatted about a variety of things unrelated to Mansfield or their relatives. Maeve wondered why but figured if she kept attending, she’d find out. Was it because they left their pain at the YMCA? Was that all they could do to keep going in the face of such disturbing knowledge? She didn’t know, but she realized she had been starved for this kind of camaraderie, an interest in her beyond what she baked and when she baked it, what was for dinner, when she would drop Heather off at Cal’s. The fact that she owned The Comfort Zone brought smiles to many of the faces surrounding her. Did she make quiche? And was she the one who had the amazing cinnamon buns that one woman’s sister had told her about? Yes and yes. Maeve smiled, drinking enough coffee that she swore it would keep her going for several days or more.

  After a few minutes, a story or two about a relative did emerge, and she found out that of the eight people there, all had had siblings at the institution, with the exception of Francine Alderson.

  The old woman pulled out an old photo. In it, a young man in black pants and a starched white dress shirt was standing in front of the building, his mother by his side. Mrs. Alderson hadn’t changed all that much since then; her face was lined but she still retained a youthful sprightliness that Maeve had never possessed, despite her elfin size. “That’s my Winston,” she said. “I named him after my favorite prime minister.” He was handsome. Tall. Strapping, even.

  The group fell silent. This was a conversation, a recitation, the rest of them had heard before.

  “He’s still alive,” she said. “I know it.”

  Maeve could tell by the interest the others gave their food or the way the
y stared into their coffee cups that not many agreed with her. Maeve looked closely at the photo; Winston would likely be in his fifties, if not early sixties, by now. She handed the photo back to the older woman. “Thank you for sharing that with me,” Maeve said, because that’s all she could think to say. She couldn’t, in good conscience, assure the woman that her son was alive; she couldn’t assure her that they would be together again. She now knew how Cal and Jo and her girls felt about the revelation about Evelyn; who could swear to Maeve that she was still alive? She couldn’t do that for Francine Alderson. But she could let her know that she appreciated being introduced to Francine’s son via the photo. Winston mattered to her.

  The group broke up shortly thereafter. Maeve learned nothing from the women about what may have happened to anyone who had lived at Mansfield, least of all Evelyn, but she was happy she went. Of the remaining seven people, none had found their siblings. All were looking.

  All had hope.

  She would go to the support group again. And again. Maybe she would learn something eventually. And if not, maybe she would learn where to put the feelings that now were layered over her usual feelings of love for her daughters, dedication to her store and her craft, loyalty to Jo.

  She had thought that the feeling of duty to someone other than herself was gone, that it had died with her father. She was glad to find out that it hadn’t.

  CHAPTER 24

  Maeve drove home along darkened Farringville streets, wired from the coffee and the experience. She drove down Wendell Lane again but the street was quiet that night, the DuClos house dark and closed up. The same was true of the Brantleys’. Did everyone go on vacation all of a sudden, all at once? Maeve envied the lives of people who could pick up and go whenever they wanted.

  When she got to the house, it was after eleven and she was surprised to find the porch light on and Heather in the living room, a gorgeous, fresh tree upright in the stand.

  Maeve stripped off her gloves and coat and hung them on the hook behind the door. “Hey. What’s going on?” she asked.