Lies That Bind (Maeve Conlon Novels Book 2)

by Maggie Barbieri

  “Happy new year,” he whispered in her ear, his lips brushing her hair.

  “Happy new year to you,” she said, grasping his fingers lightly. “Dinner? The girls cooked.”

  He put his hand on his stomach. “Went to the diner on my dinner break.” He followed her into the kitchen. “Thanks, though.”

  In the kitchen, away from the prying eyes of the girls, Maeve allowed him to kiss her, the two of them pressed up against the back door. She kept one eye on the opening to the kitchen, not really prepared to tell her daughters about Chris or why she might be in a clench with the town’s lead detective. She pulled away, smoothing down her hair. “I’m glad you came,” she said. “I wasn’t sure…”

  “If I would?” he said, finishing her sentence. He pulled out a chair and sat at the kitchen table, watching her open champagne and pour it into glasses, not a drop spilling over the tops. “I thought about it, Maeve: with the investigation going on, I thought it might not be a good idea to continue with this.”

  She turned her back on him, concentrating on the champagne. She didn’t like where this was going.

  “But I decided that it’s okay to be happy. It’s okay to have fun.” He stood and wrapped his arms around her waist. “It’s okay to do what we’re doing.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked, leaning back into his broad chest.

  “Hold up your hands,” he said, and when she did, examined them closely. “You have ten fingers. Five on each hand. That rules you out.” He nuzzled her neck. “And I just don’t see you as the kind of person who would exact that kind of revenge on someone, no matter what they did to you.”

  She stayed silent. He was wrong about that.

  “You’re a baker. You’re soft. You’re gentle,” he said, his whispers sending a tingle up her spine. “You’d never hurt anyone.”

  He didn’t know. And he never would.

  After one last kiss, Maeve put the filled glasses on a tray and entered the living room, passing out cider and champagne. Jo nudged Doug awake and gave him a long, passionate kiss to ring in the new year. Maeve introduced him to Chris. After everyone clinked glasses and took a sip, Jo held her glass up. “I hope this year brings you everything you ever wanted, Maeve Conlon,” she said.

  “Thanks, Jo,” Maeve said, clinking her friend’s glass again. “You, too.”

  Jo rubbed her belly. “It’s going to be exciting.”

  It was. For Jo and Doug. For Maeve, it was still an open question.

  The girls and Jo were singing along to some boy band on the television, causing Doug, Maeve, and Chris to vacate the room, going back into the kitchen. Doug pulled a folded-up piece of paper from the back of his Dockers. Jack’s Dockers. She still didn’t have the heart to tell him that he was wearing her dead father’s khakis, opting instead to compliment him on their fit every chance she got. He smoothed the piece of paper out on the table, Evelyn Conlon’s adult image floating into place in spite of Maeve’s tears.

  “That’s her,” he said. “To the best of the artist’s ability to go so many years into the future like this.” He handed Maeve an envelope with the original photo in it. He didn’t look at her when he said, “She looks like you.”

  Maeve nodded, wiping a tear away before it dripped onto the paper, marring the perfect image. She looked at Chris, who was staring at the drawing, and then back at her sister’s face, noticing the resemblance. In it, her sister’s hair was short, as it had been in the original photo, and her mouth was set in a grim line. But her eyes were lively, happy.

  “I’ll make her smile,” Maeve whispered.

  “Sorry?” Doug asked.

  “Nothing. Thank you, Doug.” Maeve turned and started to put some washed silverware away. She bagged up the garbage, asking Chris if he would bring it out back to the cans behind the house. When he was gone, she asked, “And the license plate, Doug?”

  “Regina H. Hartwell.”

  “Anything on her?”

  “Like what?” he asked.

  “Any moving violations? Arrests? Outstanding parking tickets?”

  It was clear from the chagrined look on his face that he hadn’t gone much further with his investigating.

  “Can you check?” she asked. She looked at him pointedly, reminding him with her eyes that they had a deal.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Anything. I want to know anything you can find out about this woman,” she said. “Or, I start making trips to Dunkin’ Donuts to make sure you’re not there.”

  “I don’t go to Dunkin’ Donuts anymore,” he hissed back at her. “I get my coffee from you even though you keep fingers in your refrigerator.”

  He left the kitchen in a huff in his dead man’s Dockers. She wasn’t sure why he didn’t understand the terms of their deal; she hadn’t set any parameters and he hadn’t agreed to any. It was open-ended and that’s the way it would stay.

  In the living room, the girls continued to carry on, screaming the lyrics of some song that Maeve was sure she wouldn’t be able to get out of her head for a long time, the chorus being that combination of catchy and annoying that was the hallmark of all the latest pop hits. She sat at the counter and stared at the picture for a long time, noticing that Evelyn’s nose had to belong to some distant relative and the shape of her eyes probably resembled Claire’s more than her father’s. There were certain things that made them look like sisters and others that suggested some recessive genes at work.

  “Happy new year, wherever you are,” Maeve said quietly before folding the picture up again and tucking it between two of her favorite cookbooks on the shelf above the kitchen table.

  CHAPTER 41

  Regina H. Hartwell.

  Maeve lay in bed the next morning and typed the name into her computer, after looking at old, grainy footage of the day that Mansfield officially closed. She hadn’t been able to do it until now, the thought of the remembered images from that time in her head and not pleasant to think about. The grounds were flooded with people, and school buses and cars could be seen in the background, some idling, most with passengers, their faces looking out at the cameras detailing their exit. Where were they going? It seemed disorganized, a hasty departure. No wonder some people had gone missing. It was also a wonder how something that happened in her lifetime could look so outdated, so ancient. Digital photography and film had really changed the landscape of documenting life’s important—and infamous—moments.

  There was nothing to suggest that Regina Hartwell had worked at Mansfield, nothing to give Maeve any indication that the woman even existed. The endless possibilities of the Internet suggested that one could find out anything, but most of the time, the reverse was true; what you were really looking for wasn’t available online. Maeve had gone through several links but they all led to a dead end; it was like the woman didn’t exist. She closed her computer and stared into space, the images of people leaving the institution on the buses seared in her mind. Many very young, most barely adults. She said a silent prayer that something had happened that had made it so her sister was somewhere else, somewhere safe.

  Downstairs, there was a knock at the door, and knowing that nothing short of a nuclear blast would get the girls out of their beds, Maeve struggled into a pair of jeans and pulled a Vassar sweatshirt over her head—sixty grand a year and all I got was this lousy sweatshirt, she always thought—padding down the stairs barefoot as she pulled her hair into a loose ponytail. Getting a haircut had been on her list of things to do over the holiday break, along with getting a facial, a pedicure, and a host of other grooming-related services that it seemed wouldn’t get done. Rhineview and Evelyn Conlon were starting to inhabit her every thought, her every action. The haircut would have to wait.

  Cal was peering in the front window, having made his way along the porch to investigate if they were all awake inside the house. He should have known better; the girls didn’t appear until after the clock struck noon or in the event of impending starvation. She opened the fron
t door, allowing him and a blast of cold air into the front hallway.

  “Morning,” she said. In his hands were two cups of coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts.

  “Did I wake you?” Cal asked, mistaking Maeve’s flight of homicidal fancy for a lack of consciousness.

  “No,” she said. “I was in bed. Reading.”

  “I’m so glad you take these two weeks off,” he said, stripping off his down coat and hanging it on the banister, something he had done years ago when he had lived here, despite the fact that there was a closet just steps from the stairs. He walked into the kitchen, Maeve trailing behind him. “Otherwise, you’d probably collapse from exhaustion.”

  She leaned against the counter, peeled the lid off her coffee, and took a tentative sip. Lukewarm. Just what had brought Doug to the lesser Dunkin’ Donuts in the first place? Tamara’s wily charms? Surely it wasn’t the coffee. Now that he knew about the finger, he’d never come back to The Comfort Zone, destined for a life of crappy coffee and mediocre donuts. “What brings you here on this lovely day?” she asked, attempting a smile.

  He reached into his pocket before sitting down at the kitchen table. “Here.” He handed her a folded-up piece of paper. “It’s a list of group homes in the tri-state area, but goes up as far as Ulster County.”

  She took it and stared at, incredulous. The names and addresses of each home, along with the organization that ran it, were listed in neat type on the unlined piece of paper. “Who did this?”

  He smiled. “Well, you might find this hard to believe, but Gabriela had her assistant do it. As a freelance project. She paid her to stay late and put the list together after work.”

  Maeve chewed on her thumbnail while looking at the list. “She did?”

  “Yes,” Cal said, jiggling the handle on the powder room door, just inches from where he sat at the kitchen table. “This still broken?”

  “Yes,” Maeve said distractedly, scanning the list. It represented a lot of legwork. Time. She couldn’t do this by herself.

  It was like he read her mind. “We can help you.”

  “How?” she said, seeing several places in Westchester that she didn’t know existed.

  “We can call them.” He jiggled the handle. “This has been broken since I left,” he said, the blame in his voice directed at her, not at the fact that he left before fixing it and a host of other items in the old Colonial. “I don’t think they’ll tell us anything so we have to figure out how to do this. How to cut through the red tape.” The handle fell off in his hand. “That wasn’t what I wanted to happen.”

  What he wanted to happen and what actually happened rarely aligned. She scanned the list and felt overwhelmed by both Gabriela’s gesture and the enormity of the task of calling every place, inquiring after Evelyn, if they could even do that. He was right: there were likely laws in place to protect people like her sister.

  If she was still alive.

  That question entered her thoughts more and more and she didn’t like it. But visiting that barn and seeing Regina Hartwell had taken the wind out of her emotional sails a bit. She had to admit to the fact that she felt a little discouraged, “weirded out,” as the girls would say. She couldn’t shake the feeling that something sinister happened in Rhineview, in that house, and that her sister was a part of it.

  “What do you think?” Cal asked.

  “About what?” she said, looking at him, forgetting that he was even there. She could feel the cold counter pressing into her sore back and she stood up straighter, putting a hand to her spine where a depression had formed from the hard countertop.

  “The same knob or something more antique-looking?” He shook the doorknob in front of her. “I think we should go with something more of a crystal cut. Let me know and I’ll go to Home Depot.”

  “Whatever you think,” she said, taking another sip of coffee. “Lots of places on this list.” She looked at him, seeing him. “Gabriela, huh?”

  “Yep.” He wanted to say something else, probably something like “See? She’s not all bad” or something like that, but he held back. “All her. Her idea.”

  “I’ll call her. I’ll thank her.”

  “Like I said, I don’t know what we need to do to find out if your sister is there, or even if there is anything we can do, but I’m working on it.” He juggled the doorknob parts, one hand catching the knob, the other catching the guts of the lockset.

  She rubbed the spot on her back, exhaustion pressing down on her. “Thank you.”

  The moment was strange between them. She wasn’t used to be him being selfless, and he wasn’t used to her accepting his help. He stopped juggling. “So, crystal cut?”

  “Sure, Cal,” she said. “Anything so long as Heather doesn’t get stuck in there again. The last time, she had to climb out the window over the toilet and into the backyard. Scarred her for life, she said.”

  “Yeah, I could see how that could scar you,” he said, their easy banter returning. “I’ve kept a copy of the list, so as soon as I figure out some of the finer points of looking for someone in a group home and you have some time to spend on this, we’ll get to work.”

  She walked him to the front door and he slipped on his coat. “I have to say, Maeve, that I’ll never know why Jack didn’t tell you about her. About Evelyn,” he added, as if there were any doubt as to who he meant.

  “I don’t know, Cal,” she said.

  “He wore everything on his sleeve.” He shrugged. “Never took him for a secret-keeper.”

  She didn’t want him to know that she was the biggest secret-keeper of all.

  And apparently, she had learned from the best.

  CHAPTER 42

  Maeve napped before heading out to the support group the next night, the first meeting of the new year, and felt rested and calm when she got there. The list that Cal had given her sat on her nightstand with the growing stack of items related to her investigations: the piece of paper that Margie had given her, Rodney Poole’s card, a couple of notes she had jotted to herself. Directly below her, in the kitchen, it was Rebecca who was now stuck in the bathroom, calling for her sister to rescue her, a plea that went unanswered. But Maeve was too tired to get out of bed, too spent to unwrap herself from the down comforter that she had bought at that Pottery Barn sale all those years ago. Rebecca went to a good college and had gotten almost a perfect score on her SAT exam; surely she could figure out a way to get out of a small powder room without needing her mother’s assistance?

  She listened to the conflict brewing in the kitchen while in that in-between state of sleep and wakefulness. Heather arrived on the scene and, noticing that part of the doorknob was gone, something her sister hadn’t noticed, tortured her sister for a few minutes, saying that the fire department would need to be called and hadn’t Rebecca dated one of the volunteers in high school? Didn’t the breakup go badly? Would he really be willing to save the imperiled Rebecca from the confines of the powder room? Maeve smiled as she listened to the drama play out below her, wondering if she and her sister would have had a similar relationship had they grown up together. Would they have joked and played pranks on each other? Would Jack have had to break them up from arguing, or joined in with them when they laughed hysterically at the other’s puns? She was starting to feel like she would never know, and that took the smile off her face.

  The sounds of roughhousing emanated from the kitchen and shouts of “Mom!” rang out. She pulled the comforter over her head and tried to go back to sleep. The best thing she could do in situations like this was to let them work things out on their own.

  She didn’t want them solving problems in the ways that she once had, but the shouting and screaming got to be too much for her to ignore. She got out of bed and went downstairs in bare feet, standing in the doorway to the kitchen, her arms folded. They were on the floor, the taller Rebecca on top of Heather, who had a few pounds on her sister but seemed to be incapable of fighting back. Maybe that was because Rebecca had her sister�
�s arms pinned above her head. Maeve walked over and pulled Rebecca up by the belt in her jeans.

  “Stop it. Now,” she said, taking a small measure of satisfaction when she saw that both girls now looked scared instead of angry. Waking their mother, they knew, was like waking a sleeping ogre, and the fear in their eyes was a testament to what had happened when they had tested her limits. Her own strength surprised her. Was there some kind of law of nature that supported the fact that no matter how old your children got, you could still toss them around like you could when they were toddlers, picking them up and removing them from dangerous—and annoying—situations? She pushed Rebecca back toward the stove and hoisted Heather from the ground. “I expect more from you,” she said, handing Heather a napkin to wipe her running nose. “You are sisters. And while you don’t have to like each other, you have to love each other.”

  Protests and angry accusations began but Maeve shut them both down. She sat at the table. “You disappoint me,” she said, bringing out the big guilt guns.

  Nothing like an irate mother to bring two siblings closer together. Heather joined Rebecca by the stove.

  “Do you know how lucky you both are?” Maeve asked. “To have each other?” Suddenly, it wasn’t about them but about her, her only-child status, her lack of an extended family. “You need to be kind to each other and take care of each other.”

  Heather began to cry in earnest. “You’ll find her, Mom,” she said, blowing her nose.

  “It’s not about that,” Maeve said, although she knew it was. “Be nice to each other. That’s all I ask.”

  The girls skulked off, leaving her to stew about other things, other mysteries besides why two seemingly incompatible human beings had become sisters. Why they couldn’t get along. She had to recharge her batteries, find the energy necessary to start this search again. She called Cal before leaving for the support group.