“It was different then, Maeve.” She got up. “Remember that. He was a good man.”
Maeve watched her as she ascended the few steps to the kitchen. Maybe she had misjudged Gabriela. Maybe she was more astute than Maeve had given her credit for being. Could it be that she was the only one who really understood what Jack had been thinking all those years ago?
In the kitchen, Maeve heard something large and metal clang to the floor and the sound of the baby crying. She held her breath until the baby appeared, unharmed but supremely pissed off, Gabriela holding him at arms’ length toward Cal. “Here. He keeps getting into trouble.” She went back to the kitchen. “And his diaper stinks!”
Maeve hadn’t misjudged her that much. Gabriela did not enjoy being the mother of a toddler, or being a mother at all. But her words, “remember, he was a good man,” rang in Maeve’s ears, and in her heart, she forgave her former friend just a little bit for upending the life that Maeve had so carefully constructed.
CHAPTER 32
It was dark and she would be back before the girls even knew she was gone so the plan was perfect. Years of owning her own business, of running on little sleep, had prepared her for this not-quite-daybreak visit to Rhineview the day after Christmas and back to the house that she felt certain held the answer to the questions she had. As she pulled on her clothes in her dark, drafty bedroom, feeling cold air seep through the old window jambs, she resisted the urge to shiver. The voice of the woman who had answered the phone that day she had called stayed with her. In it were years of knowing and not telling, of smoking in solitude, of crafting lies.
Maeve wasn’t sure how she knew that, but she did.
In her dreams the night before, her sleep fitful and troubled, Jack had met her at the gazebo near the river and instead of saying what she hoped he would say—“your sister is here”—or something to that effect, he handed her a loaf of bread, a challah. And told her that her donuts stunk.
Thanks, Jack.
Back to the challah dreams. In this one, the bread was a day-old challah from a Kosher bakery near her childhood home and she remembered its sweet goodness melting in her mouth as she walked home from school on Fridays, a warm loaf wrapped in paper and in her small hands, half of it gone by the time she entered the house. They weren’t Jewish, but she and Jack did buy a challah every Friday if only to have warm French toast the next morning.
When the bread was day-old.
In her dream, Jack handed her the bread and she thanked him. “It’s rye, not challah,” he said portentously.
She wasn’t sure what difference it made. Looked like a challah to her.
Maybe her subconscious was trying to tell her something. She wasn’t sure what, but it was leading her back to a time that maybe wasn’t so great in reality but for which she had one or two fond memories. Whenever she thought of her father, the memories were good. The smell of butter melting into a pan, the sound of bread drenched in beaten egg and cinnamon hitting the heat, the taste of toasted goodness hitting her tongue. Jack’s smile while she ate, refilling her cup of milk as many times as she wanted.
“You are a good girl, Mavy,” he said then and in her dream.
Not really, she thought, but I try.
As for her stinky donuts, she had no idea. Jack often complained about them, how they didn’t have enough sugar or they were too fancy, but she ignored him. She never left Buena del Sol without him finishing every last one she brought so he wasn’t that dissatisfied of a customer. In the dream, he handed her a bag and gave her a Bronx cheer to underscore just how much he didn’t like them.
She drove up the dark highway, careful to maintain the speed limit. The first thing she had done when she got in the car was to touch the gun up into the gap underneath the seat; she had no reason to suspect the husky-voiced woman was trouble, but she wanted to be safe. Next, she pulled her hair back into a tight ponytail, tucking it into the North Face hat that she had taken from the top of the closet and was sure belonged to Rebecca at one point before Maeve had made it her own. She zipped her coat up to her neck, in an attempt to ward off the chill that took a long time to leave the interior of the car, despite the heat being turned up to the maximum temperature.
One thing she loved about the Prius was how little noise it made, so as she slid into position, a hundred feet or so before the house, she knew that she hadn’t made a sound. When idling, the car was virtually silent and that made for some excellent clandestine snooping, the likes of which she was about to partake in shortly.
Maeve looked down at the headlamp in her hands. When Jo had given it to her, Maeve had stared at it incredulously, kind of like how she had stared at the shovel; apparently, in Jo’s mind, it would be helpful if the lights went out and Maeve needed to ice a cake in the dark, something that had never happened and was likely never to be an issue, people not really requiring cakes when the power went out. They usually had other concerns, and if they were like Maeve, they began with how they were going to keep their wine chilled. Maeve had left the lamp in the glove compartment of the Prius, wondering if there would ever come a time when it would be needed, and now she decided that this morning was the day. She pulled it on over her hat and switched it on after getting out of the car, casting a glow on the dirt road that went farther than she’d imagined it would.
She grabbed her gun from under her seat. She wasn’t sure if she really needed it, but she took it anyway. It made her feel safer, more secure, and those were feelings she needed to embrace right now in the dark and cold.
She was trespassing. She knew that. But another thing she knew is that she wouldn’t rest until she found Evelyn, or figured out what had happened to her. She was like that, making sure that all of the loose ends were tied up and that anything that needed to be known was discovered. Other people would have been more concerned about the finger and its owner but Maeve had other things on her mind now and finding a nine-fingered denizen of her sleepy village wasn’t one of them. She hadn’t seen Sebastian DuClos—she kept their meetings to a minimum—but she was sure that he had something to do with the finger and its placement.
She reached the edge of the property and looked at the house, set back from the dirt road, its ramshackle structure looking forbidding and eerie in the early hours of the morning. A car, the same one that had been there the first day she had come by before the support group, sat in the driveway. A Rambler so old, it was a wonder it was still drivable.
She hadn’t reminisced this much in years but every step she took and everything she passed—a tree here, a low shrub there—reminded her of something from her childhood. The flora and fauna of my mind, she thought. Maybe she wasn’t getting enough sleep after all. She wondered if her subconscious was in overdrive, hoping to remember something from her childhood that would lead her to Evelyn Conlon, the longed-for child, her long-lost sister. There was nothing there, though; she was sure of it. Anything that was there would have come to the forefront of her brain by now and taken her down a different path than the one she was on.
The house was dark. She headed toward the barn off to the side and behind the house, nestled in among a copse of trees that had long ago lost their leaves, which now crunched beneath Maeve’s snow boots. She was drawn to the barn; she wasn’t sure why.
Siblings know.
Did they? Did she?
In the still, early-morning air, her feet made more noise than her car did and she took care to step gingerly through the deep piles of dead leaves that had fallen and collected around a structure more dilapidated than the house itself. The door to the barn was heavy and off-kilter, making it hard to open. Maeve did her best not to make too much noise opening it just slightly; it was times like these when she was glad she was small and could sneak through an opening that wouldn’t fit a larger woman.
Inside the barn, she trained her headlamp on various items contained within its drafty walls. Large gaps existed between the ancient slats that held the building together, and the wind w
hipped through, throwing up a fine silt of dust and dirt. She walked through, keeping the light of her headlamp low so as not to be seen by any passersby—as unlikely as they would be at this hour—through the gaps in the wall boards.
A large wooden table sat in the middle of the room and there were various items on it, some that Maeve didn’t recognize, others that were perfectly at home in a barn: small rakes, shovels, and other items one might use to dig a garden. Some twine. An electronic deicer for a car. A gas can. Nothing sinister, nothing valuable, nothing that would give her pause.
A noise outside, however, made her stop in her tracks. She knew better than to jump immediately to the conclusion that it was a car backfiring.
Shotgun blasts made a sound all their own.
CHAPTER 33
One way in, one way out.
She wished she had scoped this out a bit more, had used her head. But she could be impulsive, she knew that about herself, and not having a plan had gotten her in hot water before. It looked like it had again. She switched off the headlamp and stayed low to the ground. Outside, the sound of boots crunching on the dead, frozen leaves made her take cover behind a large tractor in one corner of the barn, moving along the ground slowly and carefully, cautious of making even one sound. She knelt beside the massive front wheel of the tractor.
She slowed her breathing, telling herself to get comfortable because she would likely be there a long time. It was still dark out, but black was turning to gray, meaning that dawn was close at hand. She hoped that she wouldn’t have to stay so long that daylight would break and take away any cover she might have had.
The door to the barn was still ajar and Maeve could tell by the movement of dust motes in the air that someone had entered. That, and the sound of raspy breathing, the hoarse inhales and exhales reminding her of the voice of the woman she spoke to a few days earlier when she called to inquire about Evelyn. She stayed perfectly still and waited, thinking that the person might call out to her or give some indication that she was in the barn. There was nothing, though; just some movement at the opening to the barn, a quick movement of some items on the long wooden table, and then an almost silent exit. The person left, sliding the barn door closed, leaving Maeve inside, her bones rattling inside her skin with fear.
Whoever this was, whoever resided in this house, wasn’t very curious. Maeve would have searched through every inch of the barn if she suspected someone was in there. And then, when she found them and ascertained that they were up to no good, which was the only conclusion to draw of someone hiding behind a tractor, she would likely shoot them. That was her way. Fortunately, the person with the shotgun didn’t share Maeve’s curiosity or bloodlust, two good things for her.
Outside, the Rambler came to life, its noisy muffler indicating that it likely hadn’t been changed in several decades. It drove off in a noisy clatter, down the street, past Maeve’s car, and to parts unknown. She looked at her watch and waited five full minutes before standing up, creeping out from behind the tractor, and then breaking into the fastest sprint she could away from the barn, down the road, taking care to run behind the first layer of trees that flanked the roads so that she wouldn’t be seen by a passing car, unlikely as it seemed one would come by at this hour in this deserted part of town.
Using her hands to bat away errant tree branches and still-attached dead leaves before they could hit her in the face, she reached the car in record time. Tomorrow, or maybe even later today, that sprint was going to cost her. She couldn’t run like that anymore, not that she ever could, and if she had to predict, her night was going to consist of a bottle of Brunello, two Aleve, and the heating pad. When she thought about it, though, there were worse ways to spend the night.
She reached the car and started it immediately, hanging a quick U-turn on the dirt road and speeding away from the house, not looking in her rearview, not taking the time to stop fully at the one stop sign she hit at the far end of the road, not admiring the Christmas lights in the main village. It was pedal to the metal until she hit the highway, and once out of the jurisdiction of Rhineview and away from any cops who thought it interesting that a woman in a Prius was back for a second time and might need to be followed, she slowed down and watched the sunrise, hoping her breathing would return to normal by the time she got home.
It returned faster than that. But with it came the realization that something in the barn had left its olfactory mark on her.
It took some time to enter her brain but she knew what it was, just not why it had taken her so long to realize that the smell permeated the car. Fear? Was it possible that her body and mind, in this case, could only focus on survival, on getting out of Rhineview as soon as possible? Maybe.
She thought about where she had been standing, her place next to the tractor, the long, arced mound of dirt where she had planted herself.
It had been a small grave, and whatever was beneath it had likely been dead for a while.
CHAPTER 34
After that early-morning excursion, she needed a shower and sleep, in exactly that order.
She went upstairs and into the cold of her bedroom, thinking about the insurance money beneath her mattress and vowing to make the call to get the windows replaced. Maybe Cal was right, she thought as she showered for longer than usual, the smell of the grave having invaded her nose; maybe she shouldn’t care that the money had been returned but she knew she would never be comfortable with that. After drying off, afraid that the draft would bring with it pneumonia if her hair wasn’t completely dry, she got into bed, climbing under the down comforter and falling into a deep and dreamless sleep. It seemed like only seconds later when she awoke to find Rebecca standing over her with the portable phone, but a misty-eyed glance at the phone told her it was nearly one o’clock in the afternoon.
“Mrs. Harrison from Buena del Sol,” she said, handing her mother the phone and leaving.
Maeve propped herself up on the pillows; her back was already tightening up after her run through the woods. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Harrison. Did I forget something in my father’s apartment?” she asked.
“No, not the apartment,” the woman said, terse as ever. “Just the storage unit.”
“Storage unit.” Maeve had no idea that one existed on the grounds of the facility.
“Yes. Every resident has a small storage unit. Your father had one. In it were three boxes and a bicycle.”
A bike. Okay, Maeve thought; that’s definitely something I don’t need. “I’ll be right over.”
“Take your time. Mr. Moriarty graciously volunteered to take the items and put them in his apartment until you could get them. But I just wanted to let you know that you owe us an additional one hundred and three dollars for the extra days that the items sat in our facility’s unit.”
Of course she did. Buena del Sol got you coming and going, and in this case, Jack was long gone. They had one last pound of flesh to extract from her and her father—even in death—and they were determined to collect the sum. She had already gotten a bill for the extra days she had taken to clean out his apartment, having broken a Buena del Sol rule of which she was unaware. She got up and took another shower, taking care to wash her hair thoroughly to get rid of any residual barn odors, and when she was dressed, headed over to the facility in a baggy Vassar sweatshirt that Rebecca had given her on visiting day that fall.
She asked for Mr. Moriarty at the front desk. She pretended to linger casually while waiting, but while the woman was calling the old guy to tell him he had a visitor, she eyed the list of residents on the computer screen and noted that Jack’s room was now inhabited by Stanley Cummerbund, just as Mimi Devereaux had desired. Jack would be howling if he heard that one, and knowing that brought a smile to her face.
She pulled out her checkbook and wrote a check for the cost of the overage on the storage unit and handed it to the woman at the desk, someone she had never seen before, while she waited for Moriarty. He ambled down the hall a few minutes l
ater, three boxes on a rolling cart, the bike wheeling along beside it.
The bike was pink. And it had been hers. She didn’t remember moving it into the facility and wondered what had possessed her father to bring it along, but there it was, streamers coming out of both handles, a large “sissy bar,” as they were called when she was a kid, at the back of the seat. She barely had room for the things she currently had in her own house; where was she going to put an old bike? And it wasn’t like she could foist it off on Cal; Devon was a boy and what self-respecting boy rode a bike with pink streamers? Never mind that everything that Devon rode, wore, ate, and played with was top of the line and made from all-natural, organic products. For all she knew, he already had a tricycle made from kale.
Her mind went back to her childhood once again, the one place and time she was trying to put behind her, the bike sparking a memory that she had long repressed. She had gotten the bike for her birthday—she didn’t remember which one—and had locked it up in the backyard, the tiny garage at the end of the driveway holding Jack’s car, a lawnmower, and a host of other scary, cobweb-adorned things that Maeve couldn’t identify and didn’t want to. The morning after, when she had gone out to ride it, the tires were flat, slashed all the way around, exposing the rims. Across the fence and beyond the driveway that separated the two houses, she had spied Margie Haggerty assiduously avoiding her gaze.
Moriarty gave her a quick hug. “Hope you don’t mind, Maeve, but that old battleax Harrison was setting up a howl about getting Jack’s stuff out of storage and she said she couldn’t reach you.”
Maeve had not one message from her before today’s phone call.
“So, there are these three boxes and the bike,” he said.
She pulled the lid off the top box and peered in. It was a mishmash of papers and bills, not the orderly pile of items that had been found in the boxes in his apartment. She would go through everything when she got home, not while she was here in the lobby of a place she never wanted to return to. “Thanks, Mr. Moriarty.”
Lies That Bind (Maeve Conlon Novels Book 2) Page 15