“First births usually don’t go that quickly, Jo.” Maeve pulled some greens out of the refrigerator and started to assemble a salad. “I’m sure he’ll make it to you if he’s not home already.”
“That’s what the birth class lady said,” Jo said, reaching over and plucking a cherry tomato from the container on the counter. “It’s weird. It’s like he woke up and decided that he really wanted to be a part of this.”
Like he woke up. That was one way to put it.
The girls poured drinks for everyone and gathered around the kitchen table, waiting for their mother’s attention to be moved from the food preparation to them. When Maeve was finished with her ministrations to the large salmon, she slid it into the oven and took her place at the table where she noticed a slim box, wrapped in brown paper, sitting in the middle of the table.
“What’s that?”
Jo shrugged. “Found it on the porch when I came up.” She pushed it toward Maeve. “How long for the salmon? And do you have any pumpernickel? Dill sauce?”
Maeve picked up the package. It had some heft. “Jo, as of fifteen minutes ago, I didn’t even have a salmon. Why would I have the things that should accompany it?”
Jo was disappointed. “Because you’re a cook and cooks have things like dill and pumpernickel around all the time?”
“Not this cook,” Maeve said. “I can do fifty things with canned tuna that will make your head spin but salmon is a different story, especially if you want particular sides.”
Jo took a napkin out of the ceramic holder on the kitchen table and pulled a pen from her messenger bag. “Heather, Rebecca. I’m giving you a list. A very specific list. And you must get these items and get them back here before this salmon is served.” She looked at Maeve. “How do you make dill sauce?”
Maeve took the napkin and jotted down a few items, pulling ten dollars out of her purse. “This should cover it. Hit the gourmet market. There will be less of a line and you’re more likely to find what you need quickly.”
“Don’t forget those pickles that I like!” Jo called after them.
“What kind?” Heather called back from her spot in the front hall.
“Cornichons,” Maeve said. Once she heard the car pull out of the driveway, its wheels making a sound on the gravel, she looked more closely at the package. There was nothing to indicate where it had come from. All it said, in black marker across the front, was her name.
The handwriting didn’t look familiar. She slid her finger under the tape holding the package closed, opening up the entire seal. “Did you see who left this, Jo?” Maeve asked.
Jo shook her head. “It was on the porch. No one around. Where do you think it came from?”
“Not a clue,” Maeve said, pulling the large book out.
Jo traced a finger on the quilted cover, cracked a little from age. “It’s a scrapbook,” she said.
But it wasn’t. It was a photo album. And in it were pictures that Maeve had never seen before, pictures of her mother when she was young, beautiful, and single, if the male suitors who surrounded her in the first few pages were any indication. Photos of Jack as a baby, his proud Irish-born parents holding their son up in front of other relatives for all to see. Photos of her parents when they were dating, darkly tinted lips on her mother, her ubiquitous red lipstick appearing almost black, Jack’s hair swept back in a slick-looking pompadour, something that Maeve never would have touched for fear of getting her hands dirty; it looked crisp and sticky but in style for the times. Jo remarked on every photo, noting how beautiful Claire Conlon had been, how a young skinny Jack looked surprisingly the same as an old man.
Maeve touched each page with care. The photos were held in place by little black triangles whose stickiness had long since worn off; some photos listed to one side or threatened to fall from their individual pages. One page held a group of articles, all clipped together with a rusty paper clip, all about the Mansfield Missing, the dozen who were gone and never found.
Maeve hastily turned the page, not ready to go there in her mind, not ready to explain to Jo and the girls what she had been thinking all along. Her sister had been one of the dozen missing teens and young adults, and seeing the articles that Jack had kept all these years solidified in her mind something she had thought but which she couldn’t give voice to.
Jo was oblivious to Maeve’s quick turn of the page. “Your parents’ wedding photo is gorgeous. They look like movie stars,” Jo said, tracing the line of Claire’s lace dress.
“I know,” Maeve said. “I’ve seen this photo.” She turned the page.
“And there’s your sister,” Jo whispered, the last words she said as she and her best friend flipped slowly through the first five or so years of a life neither knew had existed before a few weeks earlier. “She has your features.”
She looks like me, Maeve thought. That’s my sister.
CHAPTER 38
Jo and the girls went to worship at the altar of all things retail, leaving Maeve home alone. She pulled a photo from the album—the most recent one of Evelyn—and held it in her hands. She left another message for Doug. “Time to pay the piper,” she said. “Call me when you get a chance.”
She was restless, far more than she had been before, but the photo album had awakened her desire to get to the truth as quickly as possible. Looking through those pictures made her feel like time was running out, though she wasn’t sure why. A sense of urgency replaced a feeling of exhaustion, and before she had time to think, she had unearthed an old coat of Heather’s that no longer fit her and sat at the bottom of the closet—pink with a furry collar—donned it, and warmed up the car. Her own coat had lost far too many down feathers to be useful anymore.
Jo texted her and said that they were having such a good time that they were going to have dinner at the mall, a development that gave Maeve time to do what she had been mulling over since they left.
In Rhineview, she didn’t hide today, pulling right into the parking space next to the old Rambler in front of the house. Before she got out of her car, she jotted down the license plate number. Might as well give Doug a full list of items to check out rather than just one thing at a time.
She hoped that whoever was inside didn’t have easy access to the shotgun that she had heard let out a loud report two days earlier. In the pocket of Heather’s childhood down coat was her own gun, locked and loaded. With the photo of Evelyn in her pocket, she mounted the front steps of the house and rapped on the front door with one gloved hand, her other hand in her pocket and fondling the cold steel of her gun.
“Mrs. Hartwell?” she called, peering in the windows that lined the porch. Inside, the house was as unkempt as the outside, piles of newspapers and magazines strewn about what would have been called a “parlor room” when the house was built but which was now where a giant television sat atop a cheap entertainment cabinet. Maeve brushed some frost off the window to get a better look when she caught movement from inside the house. She stepped back and waited in front of the door.
An old lady, her face looking much like those of the women Maeve had grown up around, weathered and Irish, looked back at her from inside the house, her shaking hand parting the curtain that gave a small measure of privacy to the inside of the house.
“Mrs. Hartwell?” Maeve asked.
The hand holding the curtain, shaking wildly now, disappeared and Maeve heard the bolt on the door turning. The woman opened the door a crack.
“My name is Maeve Conlon and someone named Margie Haggerty gave me your name. I’m looking for my sister.” Maeve stepped closer to the door but not close enough to be threatening to the old woman, who obviously didn’t welcome Maeve’s arrival on her front porch. “Please. Her name is Evelyn Conlon. She lived at Mansfield in the 1970s.”
The woman stared back at Maeve, her blue, rheumy eyes giving nothing away but stoic, silent determination.
“Please. You’re the only link I have,” Maeve said.
“I don’t
know anything,” the woman finally said, and Maeve recognized her voice as the woman she had spoken to a few days before when she had called the number Margie had given her.
“Margie Haggerty. I don’t know how you know her, but she said you worked at Mansfield. I think,” she said aloud for the first time, “that my sister might be one of the Mansfield Missing.”
The woman let out a lengthy cough, one that rattled from deep within her, sounding like something was terribly wrong inside her large, soft body. The resolve that Maeve had when she had driven up here—to get into this house and get answers—slowly drifted away as the woman’s face hardened with her own steely determination. “I know nothing. Go away.”
But that wasn’t the truth and Maeve knew it. She tried once more. “Evelyn Conlon. She would be in her fifties now. Probably blond, maybe gray.” Maeve didn’t know, so she had to guess. “Blue eyes? I don’t know for sure.” Maeve pleaded with the woman. “That’s what she would look like, I think.”
The print on the woman’s blue housecoat was a cheery pattern with cherries on the collar, belying the hostility of the wearer. “Get off my property.”
Maeve stood firm.
“I’ll call the cops.”
“And tell them what?” Maeve asked.
“That you’re trespassing. That you’ve been harassing me.” She let out another cough. “That you’ve been here before.” She pointed out toward the road. “Out there. In my barn?” she said as if to remind Maeve.
One last try. “My father is dead. My mother died a long time ago. My sister is the only living person from my immediate family,” Maeve lied. No reason for this woman to know about her girls. “Please.”
“I know nothing,” the woman said, slamming the door in Maeve’s face.
“You’re lying,” Maeve said to the closed door. “You’re a liar.” But there was nothing else to do but leave.
The woman’s face stayed with her all the way home, the hardness and the meanness around her eyes—blue like her own—reminding her of someone she had chosen to forget.
She wondered why she couldn’t stop thinking about Dolores Donovan.
CHAPTER 39
Maeve had no interest in Sebastian DuClos dropping by the store, and with the first of the year approaching, she drove over to Wendell Lane, dropped her rent check off at his house, and beat a hasty getaway. He wasn’t home, thank God, so she stuffed the check into his mailbox, which was overrun with catalogs, bills, and other things that had been delivered.
Looked like Sebastian hadn’t been home in a few days. No sign of Bruno either, or the people who had been driving in and out of the street, hastily getting what they needed and taking off for parts unknown.
Later that evening, she met Doug at Mickey’s, after he got off work but before he went home.
“How are you feeling about things?” she asked, truly interested. “Better, I hope?”
He pushed a black-and-white photo toward her. “This helped.”
She had already seen it. It was a photo from Jo’s latest sonogram, their baby boy front and center, his thumb in his mouth. “What? The other ones weren’t good enough?” Maeve asked, knowing that Jo had had several sonograms prior to this one; this latest one was just to gauge how her amniotic fluid, which had decreased a bit over the last few weeks, was holding up. Maeve was preparing herself for the inevitable “bed rest” edict that was sure to come from Jo’s doctor and which would leave Maeve shorthanded at the bakery.
“He has her profile,” Doug said. “Jo’s.”
He did. The donor egg was from Jo’s cousin and showed that the boy was going to favor his mother’s side of the family, at least in the short term and before he truly grew into his features. “Well, look at that,” Maeve said. “I hadn’t noticed before.”
“Maeve, you’re not going to tell, right?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “Even though I’m not entirely sure what there is to tell.” She spotted a customer from the store at the front door and gave her a wave. “What did you do, Doug?”
“Nothing happened,” he said, but she wasn’t sure she believed him. “It was just…”
“A distraction?” she asked.
He nodded, glum. “Yes. A distraction. From all of this.”
“Here’s the thing, Doug: most people would find the prospect of a beautiful wife and a healthy baby on the way something of a…” She searched for the word that Jo often used to describe her good fortune. “Is it mitzvah?” She didn’t think that was right.
“Don’t look at me,” he said. “I was a Hebrew school dropout.”
She decided that, Yiddish words aside, she needed to be clear with him. “I’m not sure how I’ll do it, or what I’ll do, but I will hurt you if you do anything to upset this new life that Jo has created. She loves you. She has always wanted a child. She has always wanted a devoted husband.” She waved to another customer from the store, keeping a smile on her face as she threatened her best friend’s wayward husband. “Got it?”
He knew he was caught but he tried to hang tough in the conversation. “You’re threatening an officer of the law,” he said, his inner Barney Fife making an appearance.
“You bet I am,” she said. She wondered why he didn’t tell her to take a hike in more pointed terms, to mind her own business, but something in her tone and on her face told him that she wasn’t really prone to hyperbole. She would hurt him if this didn’t work out, if he didn’t work out. He nodded, if only to get her to stop talking.
He tried to throw her off, not really knowing who he was dealing with. “Anything about the finger?”
“Not one more word,” Maeve said as she eyed the bartender drifting toward them. “That’s between me, God, and the Farringville police department.” When he looked suitably chagrined, she slid the photo she had brought along toward him. “So, here’s the story,” she said, even though she knew Jo had shared most of it with him. He knew about the finger; why not give him all of the details on her sister? “I have a sister. I don’t know where she is. This is the last photo I have of her. She looks to be around six or seven. Is there someone at the precinct who could do some kind of drawing of her, letting us know what she looks like now?”
Finally, Maeve saw a scintilla of excitement pass across his face, something she hadn’t seen when he and Jo had gotten engaged, when they had announced to Maeve that they were having a baby. Deep in his heart, Maeve thought, he’s a detective; he likes to figure things out. She was expecting to have to cajole him, or worse, remind him of their deal, not taking into account that he was nosy, a byproduct of the Job.
He studied the photo. “I can do that.” He finished off his beer and ordered another round for both of them even though Maeve had barely touched her wine. “Tell me more.” He already had the basics from Jo and needed her to fill in any missing details, anything she had discovered in her own search and investigation.
“There’s nothing to tell, really. I don’t know why she was sent away and I don’t know where she is.”
“Is she alive?” he asked.
“Don’t know that either.”
He shook his head sadly. “Went through this with my partner a few years back.” He threw a couple of twenties on the bar and asked the bartender for change. Maeve was surprised. In their relationship, Jo was the spender and Doug was the saver, something that annoyed his wife. “Poole?” he asked. “You remember him, I guess.”
Maeve nodded. “I do.”
“Lost a brother in the foster system,” he said. “The kids were split up after the mother went to rehab in the sixties.”
Maeve waited for the happy ending but there was none.
“Found him in Sing Sing. He’s still there.” He took in her crushed expression. “Sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have told you that. But your sister isn’t in Sing Sing. It’s an all-male prison,” he said, as if that would take away the sting of what he had said.
God, you are a complete dope, she thought, and in that m
oment wondered if he was a little challenged himself.
“It’s fine,” Maeve said, starting on her first glass of wine. The kitchen door swung open behind her and loud salsa music burst forth, breaking the pall that had settled in between them. She pulled a piece of paper out of her purse. “And here’s a license plate number. I’m pretty sure I know who it belongs to, but just want to make sure I know the name exactly.”
Doug smiled. “That’s an easy one.”
She almost apologized for blackmailing him into service but then didn’t; the thought of him happily seated on a bar stool not two miles from his home with a blonde with a home dye job still made her boil, if only a little bit now that some time had passed. She wasn’t going to be able to do this without somebody’s help; might as well be his. Cal had proven to be incapable of any critical thinking on his own in terms of finding a missing person, so she might as well use Doug.
“Don’t tell Jo,” Maeve said.
“I won’t,” he promised. He stood, smoothing down the front of his pants.
“New Dockers?” Maeve asked. The shade of his pants was a little less khaki and a little more stone-colored. They looked familiar.
“Yeah,” he said, a smile breaking out on his face. “Got them at Goodwill. Two bucks. I bought a whole bunch. Must have been seventeen of the same kind.”
CHAPTER 40
“Happy new year!”
Maeve was surprised that Jo seemed the least tired of all of them that night and had made it to midnight full of energy. She went into the kitchen and got some champagne glasses down from the cabinet, pulling out some sparkling cider for the girls and her pregnant friend, and a split of champagne for her and Doug, who was sound asleep in a chair by the fireplace.
Rebecca looked disappointed with her sparkling cider.
Chris Larsson showed up a minute after midnight, work having called him in at the last minute. He gave her a chaste kiss on her cheek, her daughters watching his every move toward their mother with an intensity that was making him nervous, if his stiff posture and demeanor were any indication.
Lies That Bind (Maeve Conlon Novels Book 2) Page 17