She couldn’t deal with Rebecca and the empty bank accounts right now; she had too much to do. She had to think. She had logged on to the school account to make sure the tuition was paid and up to date; paying tuition was Cal’s responsibility and well, she knew how much he thought he had on his plate and how that could contribute to his dereliction of duties when it came to paying the bills that needed to be paid. But everything was fine.
Maybe she was going about this the wrong way; maybe she should widen her search. She got into her bed and dragged her laptop onto her knees and looked up any information she could find on the missing people, the dozen who had been lost when Mansfield closed. She searched through articles. The woman she had last spoken with was right: it was like they had vanished off the face of the earth.
There was a Facebook page started by one of the families, and on it, they asked for any leads, any sightings; photos of their missing relatives were on the banner at the top of the page. Maeve’s sister wasn’t in one of those photos, but was it possible that she had gone missing anyway? She guessed anything was possible. Maybe Jack hadn’t included her in the group that was missing; he could be like that, keeping things quiet. Keeping a few secrets.
“Don’t want to be a member of any club that would have me as a member,” he would say, even though being a member of the New York City Police Department was like being a member of a club, the men (in those days) sticking together like glue, helping each other out, watching each others’ backs.
Apparently, Margie hadn’t gotten the memo on that one, if the stories about her fall from grace were to be believed.
So, two possibilities existed: Evelyn was one of those missing.
Or Jack had known where she was.
CHAPTER 48
It was Saturday, early morning. She had five days remaining to figure things out, the store opening again on Wednesday.
She focused, figuring out her next steps. Vacation—from the store, from the search—had reinvigorated Maeve. She had stopped at the hardware store and bought a thick, metal carabiner, all the better to hook the shovel that Jo had given her to a belt loop on her jeans. The headlamp was dangling around her neck and her gun was tucked in the pocket of her pink down coat.
She was ready.
She realized, on the drive up, that she felt better than she had in months. She pulled up to her hiding spot, sliding the Prius in and locking it, keeping herself under the cover of the trees as she jogged slowly but deliberately toward her destination. The Rambler was gone from the front of the house and it only took her a few minutes of good, old-fashioned reconnaissance to wander around the property and look in a few windows to ascertain that the house was empty. She stayed away from the barn today; the house was more interesting to her on this cold morning, especially since it seemed like no one was home. She knew that what she had planned next would constitute breaking and entering but she didn’t care in the least. She had been lied to by so many people for so long that she didn’t care.
If she got caught, she would lie her way out of it. The house had been on fire. She had broken in to make sure no one was trapped inside. Something like that, but maybe a little bit more artful in its detail, its telling.
She tested the back door and found that it was unlocked. She forgot; she was in the country now. Inside of her still beat the heart of a city girl, the daughter of a cop. She was supposed to lock her doors, everyone was. She remembered most of the time, and when she didn’t, she could hear Jack’s voice in her head telling her to be careful, to make sure that she was safe.
As she already knew, inside the house was as dilapidated as outside, and bad smells—a conglomeration of rotten food, dirty clothes, and filthy conditions in general—came together in a way that made her eyes water. It was hard to imagine a place that smelled worse than a couple of dead cats but Regina Hartwell’s house did. Maeve stepped over a stack of newspapers, yellowing and old, and into the kitchen. Dishes were piled in the sink and the water dripped on plates that had crusted food on them. A box of rat poison sat next to a toaster oven encrusted with grime. It was like an episode of Hoarders come to life.
Maeve shivered in disgust.
If Regina Hartwell sold the place, or whatever happened to it after her death, it would be a teardown. Judging from the trees that outlined the property, there were several acres to be had here, maybe more if the line extended beyond the forest to the back of the place. There was no saving this place. Its time had come and gone. In its place would be gleaming new condos or a development with fake Tudors. That’s the way things went now.
Maeve didn’t know if she had the guts to go much farther into the space, afraid that the stuff that covered every flat surface would rise up and enclose her, suffocating her before she had a chance to escape. At the far corner of the kitchen were tanks; she recognized them as similar to those she had seen at Buena del Sol.
Oxygen tanks.
Mrs. Hartwell, if Maeve had to guess, had emphysema or what was now called COPD on the ads that touted relief from the symptoms. That breathing, the raspy voice, didn’t come from anything but someone who had smoked themselves into a few steps short of lung cancer. She didn’t know how to tell if the tanks were empty or full and didn’t want to take the time to figure it out, so she carefully picked her way through the kitchen and into the living room where the smell of musty upholstery and cat pee hit her nose like a sack of hammers.
Thank god for turtlenecks. She unfolded the material at her neck and pulled it up over her nose, breathing in the scent of freshly laundered clothing and her body wash, hoping that it was enough to stave off the horrible odor that permeated the living area. How did anyone live here? she wondered as she made her way through the house. The living room faced the front of the house and offered a great view of the road beyond; Maeve would know if Mrs. Hartwell returned and would have ample time to make a getaway out the back of the house and into the woods. She’d find her way eventually back to her car. She felt better knowing that there was an escape route.
Her phone vibrated in her pocket, her home number coming up. “Mom, it’s me.” Rebecca. “Do we have any milk?”
“Rebecca, I can’t talk right now,” she said, thinking that in her elder daughter’s case, that was a good thing. She had a lot to say and not a lot of time to say it, so the conversation was better put off for another day when Maeve didn’t feel like killing someone, anyone. “And if there isn’t any milk, you can walk to the deli and get some.”
Her sigh let Maeve know just how put out she was. Rather than get into a battle royale over Maeve’s absence and the lack of dairy products in the house, Maeve hung up.
Seconds later, the phone buzzed with a text. Chris Larsson. I miss you. She didn’t take the time to text back immediately, hoping she wasn’t breaking some code of dating etiquette in the twenty-first century.
She continued through the house, stepping gingerly. To her right, and behind a fireplace, was a small room with a window that faced the woods that encircled the premises, neater than the rest of the house, with a small desk and filing cabinet in it, a cushy desk chair. This room had been untouched by Mrs. Hartwell and her hoarding tendencies; it was clearly the domain of someone who was far more organized and who abided by stricter rules of cleanliness than the home’s main resident, the only person who Maeve knew lived there. Maeve looked at the desk and through some of the papers on its surface. A home insurance policy. Term life information. A renewal for the Rambler’s registration, a vehicle that had been on the road since 1967, a testament to American car-making in the last millennium.
Maeve opened the drawers of the desk, finding a collection of pens and pencils. Ah, so this is where Mrs. Hartwell’s junk collecting came to roost, she thought. Maeve pocketed a couple of Sharpies; they always went missing from the store. She suspected if she checked Jo’s desk drawers at the cottage, she’d find a stash of fresh pens in there, all purloined from The Comfort Zone. One desk drawer was stuck and Maeve yanked on it
to pull it out completely, finding that a box with a hinged lid was the reason it wouldn’t open.
She pulled out the box. In the distance, she heard the rumble of a car with a faulty muffler. The Rambler. Mrs. Hartwell was on her way back.
Maeve opened the box and looked inside. Underneath a holy card, one that had been taken from Martin Haggerty’s wake, was a stack of social security cards. Maeve riffled through them quickly even though the one on the top, bearing the name Winston Alderson, made her gasp.
She counted them quickly. There were ten social security cards, all bearing different names.
But none bore the name of Aibhlinn Conlon.
CHAPTER 49
Above her, Maeve heard floorboards creak, but rather than stay to find out who was there and what they might do to an intruder, she shoved Winston Alderson’s social security card into her back pocket, pushing the box back into the desk and slamming the drawer shut before she tore out of the house through the back door, knocking over a canister of oxygen before she hit the porch. Outside, she wondered why she only grabbed his card, why she panicked and didn’t keep them all. His was the only name that was familiar to her, in her quick glance through the stack; his was the only one she really cared about, she decided. She steeled herself for the loud bang that would accompany the explosion that was sure to come if the oxygen canister was full, but none came. She ran across the backyard and took cover in the dense woods, hearing the car drive up to the parking pad out front and coming to a stop.
She rested behind a large fallen oak, the trunk providing cover for her shaking body. She lay down on the ground, flat, sure she couldn’t be seen, and tried to slow her breath. She folded her hands on her chest and looked up at the sky. After she heard the back door slam again, Mrs. Hartwell using the kitchen entrance, there was no sound that came from the house, nothing to indicate that the woman was going to pick up her gun and stalk Maeve until she found her, shot her, and killed her. Maeve wondered if the oxygen canisters tipped over often, especially when they were empty, if that occurrence was her cover. She had waited too long inside the house, her curiosity at what was in the box and then what those social security cards might mean causing her to take a chance that she couldn’t afford to take.
She murmured the names she could remember but found she could only come up with one additional name, the rest of the names, the letters that formed them, swimming in front of her eyes. Eileen Mackin. Damn it. There had been one more familiar name. She had to be the sister of Lorraine, the woman at the support group who Maeve liked but who had told her that her hunt was fruitless. Fruitless, huh? Maeve thought. Well, look at what I found, she thought, putting her hand to her pocket. She wished she had thought to take every card in the box, but she had panicked, which, given the circumstances, she had to believe was the appropriate response.
Still, she was disappointed in herself.
She sat there for so long, she might have fallen asleep; she wasn’t sure. Time had a way of bending itself here, making it seem like hours had ticked by when it had only been a few minutes. She willed herself to move.
It seemed straightforward: head south in a straight line toward the car. But it turned out to be harder than she thought it would be, the light playing tricks, coming through the trees at odd angles, making it seem like she was walking the right way but instead taking her deeper into the woods. A cloud covered the sun and the nervousness started to form a tight band in her gut, forcing her to sit down and take stock of the situation.
She looked up at the sky. “There’s the sun,” she whispered to herself. She looked behind her but couldn’t see the house anymore. “So that’s west.” She looked at her phone; even though there was no service out here in the woods, she knew the girls had downloaded a bunch of apps—many that she didn’t need and were related to beauty and grooming—and wondered if there was a compass on there. She scrolled through the screens on her phone. There wasn’t. But there was a flashlight app and she turned that on, surprised at how much light it threw on the ground in front of her. That would be far more helpful than the eyebrow-plucking chart that Rebecca had downloaded in a not-so-subtle hint to her mother about her wayward brows.
She walked for what seemed like an hour but was really fifteen minutes, according to her phone. And she was getting closer, she thought, because she could hear a door slam in the distance, not too far away. Her heart went from a dull pound to a racy pitter-patter but that was better; she was getting her sense of direction back and felt confident that she would be out before it got completely dark.
She was nearly in line with the house; she could tell by the break in the trees in the distance and the sound of the back door opening and closing. She trudged in what she hoped was the right direction.
“I’m almost there,” she said, turning to make sure that her inner compass was correct. In the distance, like a mirage, she spied a row of crudely cut pieces of wood planted in the dirt and, abandoning her plan, she walked toward them even though she knew she was going in the wrong direction, the dread at this discovery like a delicate web descending over her from above.
She stopped and surveyed the line of what she now saw were crosses, all white, all roughly hewn and hammered together at one midpoint on each. Some had initials; others didn’t. They were spaced apart, not unlike headstones at a cemetery.
It took her a minute to comprehend what she was looking at and to realize that she was backing away from them, not walking toward them. She backed into a large tree trunk, falling over and landing hard on her butt, wet seeping through her jeans and onto her underwear, reigniting the dull pain in her hip. Momentarily stunned, she sat there, staring at the crosses, finally getting up slowly and testing her legs.
She buried them here, she thought, unhooking the shovel from the carabiner at her waist. She started with the freshest grave, the one with the initials “E.M.,” and started digging, fueled by the adrenaline streaming through her blood like a thick, energetic ocean of power. It had been warmer than usual, some days even reaching the high forties, and the ground was hard but not impossible to break. She pushed the little shovel into the packed dirt, knowing that this would take a long time and that it would eventually get dark, but she wanted proof of what had happened here so that she could tell everyone what she knew to be true: this would explain what had happened to those people all those years ago.
She dug until her back ached, and her stomach roiled, muffled cries coming out from behind her clenched teeth. She stopped when she got to a hand, white and frozen solid, polish on its nails, not a foot below the cold surface.
She took off, running out of the woods.
CHAPTER 50
Maeve knew that Mrs. Hartwell was in the house because she knew that the old woman relied solely on the Rambler for transportation. She went into the barn and found an old gas can, one with just enough gas to light a fire, along with some fireplace matches, the same brand as the ones that had been in Devon’s mouth on Christmas Day. These, fortunately, weren’t soaked in toddler saliva and worked just fine, Maeve found, as she doused the front seat of the car with gas, threw a match in, and watched from a distance as it started to burn.
You’re trapped now, she thought as she watched a kaleidoscope of beautiful colors embed in the black smoke that rose from the car. She smiled at the beauty of the carnage, thinking that this might help subdue the buzzing, the impending murderous rage that was sure to come when she saw Regina Hartwell. Maybe this will help, she thought, as she stepped back.
Maybe this will be enough. Maybe this will make me feel better about what you’ve done and I won’t feel like I have to go further.
She went around back and entered through the kitchen again, crossing through the trash-filled mudroom and across the threshold into the kitchen. Behind her, the car blew up with a satisfying crack, making Maeve smile. Her hand was thrust in her jacket pocket, Heather’s old pink down coat from the eighth grade; the thought of her grazing her gun with her fingers while
looking like a little snow queen was ludicrous and incongruous. She kept her hand there, ready to strike when necessary.
The time was coming. She could feel it.
She hadn’t knocked, preferring the element of surprise, but she figured that the sound of the Rambler exploding announced her arrival just fine. The woman was sitting in the overloaded kitchen, her chair jammed between the table and the stove, a gas appliance, which she had lit so she could have a cigarette. Maeve wished she remembered even one thing about her junior-year chemistry class and if oxygen was flammable; if the woman’s complete disregard for smoking in the room with two canisters—empty or not—of pure oxygen was an indication, the answer was probably no.
Mrs. Hartwell regarded her coolly. “You’re that little snot that lived down the street. You’re the one who wouldn’t let my niece ride your precious pink bike,” she said. “You lived by my brother and his wife. It took me a while, and some digging, but I finally figured it out. You were the one whose father spoiled you rotten.”
Maeve stood by the door to the mudroom, her hands in her pockets.
“Conlon, right?”
She nodded.
“I remember you. Your parents, too.” The old woman sneered at her, the sight of Maeve angering her in a way that Maeve didn’t understand.
“You took my sister.”
Regina Hartwell took a long drag off the cigarette, which precipitated a prolonged bout of coughing. One elbow on the table, one on the counter next to the stove, her legs were splayed, making her look relaxed and uninterested in their conversation. There was a stack of magazines, yellowed and old, by her elbow. Rock Hudson, young, tan, and fit, was on one, a testament to its age. “Took her where?”
“To Mansfield.”
She started laughing, which only served to start the coughing again. “Yep. You got me. Took her to Mansfield. Best place for her at the time.” The cigarette hung from her lips; Maeve noticed that around her neck was the tubing that she likely used when she was hooked up to the oxygen. “Your parents didn’t know what to do. They begged me for help.”
Lies That Bind (Maeve Conlon Novels Book 2) Page 22