Maeve now knew why she thought of Dolores the first time she had seen this woman; Regina Hartwell was Dolores in thirty years, right down to the dead, beady eyes. Now that they were talking, Maeve heard a hint of a brogue.
“Where is she?” Maeve took her left hand out of her pocket and pointed to the woods. “Is she out there? In one of those graves?” she asked, the last words coming out in a hoarse whisper.
“Could be. Maybe not. How much is it worth to you?” the woman said, smiling. Her teeth were large and even, tobacco-stained, the eyeteeth a little longer than the front ones. An animal’s teeth.
“You’re playing this all wrong,” Maeve said. “It’s what it’s worth to you. Because now that I’m here and I see what’s going on, I’m going straight to the police.”
“Go ahead,” Regina said. “My son’s on the local force. He knows a lot of Staties, too,” she said, making Maeve wonder if that was how Regina had stayed under the radar all these years. “Probably best not to tell him that you blew up his mother’s car.”
Maeve wondered if he had already been called and was on his way.
The woman looked at her, waiting for Maeve to crack. You’ll be waiting a long time, Maeve thought.
“You want to find your sister, though. You think I know something,” Regina Hartwell said, her gaze something that Maeve didn’t want to engage but had to.
“Of course you know something. Why else would Margie have sent me here?”
She shrugged, the ash from her cigarette falling onto the floor. “Good question. She is really messing up a good thing. Wish she had less of a conscience, hadn’t taken Catholic school so seriously.”
“If she had taken Catholic school seriously, she wouldn’t have stolen my house key. Slashed the tires on my bike. Been involved here.”
The old woman shrugged.
“‘A good thing’?” Maeve asked, inching closer. “What could be good about what seems like six or eight dead people buried in your woods? People whose families are still looking for them? What do you mean ‘a good thing’?”
She didn’t respond to Maeve’s question, dragging slowly on her cigarette; Maeve was sure that she would never get the smell of the cigarette or this house out of her skin, the fibers in her nose.
“Why didn’t you kill me that day, in the barn?” Maeve asked, sure that this was the woman who had fired that shotgun blast the first time she had come here.
“I just wanted to scare you off, not kill you,” she said. “But you don’t scare off. I wish I had killed you.” She arched an eyebrow. “Obviously. My sister-in-law always said that your father should have beat you more, told you who was boss. To get rid of that sharp mouth of yours.”
Maeve held her gaze. “I was beaten. Every day. But not by my father. My father loved me, unlike your sister-in-law and her husband and their daughters. They never loved those girls. That’s why they are the way they are now.” She took a few steps, making her way farther into the kitchen, noticing the dotted Swiss curtains hanging from the kitchen window, an incongruous touch of whimsy in a house of horrors. “You took my sister and then you took those people from Mansfield.”
“That’s what you’ve got wrong,” she said, fixing her rheumy eyes on Maeve. “Those people sent those kids willingly. Didn’t want them back. That’s why they were here.”
“I don’t believe you,” Maeve said.
“Believe what you want.” She pulled another cigarette from the pack and lit it from the flame on the stove. “They all had a proper Christian burial.”
“Where you buried them is not a sanctioned cemetery. Not by any church, I would imagine,” Maeve said. “Did you put holy cards in every grave?” She thought back to the cats in the garage, the holy card in the box.
Mrs. Hartwell opened her mouth, her lips pulling back from her teeth in a horrible facsimile of a smile. “Every last one. Pick up a holy card every time I go to church.”
Maeve’s eyes settled on the rat poison. “That?” she asked, pointing. “Is that how they died?”
“Natural causes. Every single one,” the woman said, baring those teeth again in a sinister approximation of a smile. “You think you know. You think you know what happened. But you don’t.”
“Illuminate me,” Maeve said.
“We were a family. I gave them a family. I took care of them. Sure, I needed help around here but what do you think would have happened to them after Mansfield?” She leaned in as close as she could to Maeve. “Huh? What do you think would have happened to them?”
“Did you know that there is a group that meets every week to talk about these people? To see if others have found the missing?”
Regina shrugged. “Think what you want. We were a family.”
“And now they are all dead. All left in the woods,” Maeve said. She didn’t know what to believe but one thing she did know is that this wasn’t a family. And Regina Hartwell had taken those people from their families.
In her boots, Maeve’s toes had turned to ice. She thought back to the Monsignor at her local church and all of the hoops he had made her jump through—not to mention the carrot cake she had had to bestow upon him—to get him to bury Jack, someone the old priest hadn’t seen within his church walls, Jack having been a communicant at the church at Buena del Sol. Technicalities. That cemetery in the woods was homemade and no one knew about it, except for maybe Michael Donner. She wondered what role, if any, he played in all of this. She pulled Winston’s social security card from her back pocket. “And why this? The other ones?”
The woman’s face darkened. “Where did you find that?”
Maeve stayed silent. The answer was obvious.
“You broke into my house.”
“Door was open,” Maeve said. “I smelled gas.” That was her story and the one she would tell when she was asked how she came into possession of a social security card of a man who went missing from Mansfield and who was maybe buried in the woods in back of the house. “I was worried about you,” she said, plastering a sick smile on her face. Here it goes, she thought. Here’s where I start to lose it. And Rodney’s not here to stop me. She pulled the gun from her pocket and pointed it at the woman.
“And the car? How will you explain that?” she asked, keeping her calm gaze on Maeve and the gun.
“Nothing to explain. Kids. Hooligans.” She leveled the gun at the woman’s face. “Really boring around these parts. Kids get into a lot of trouble.” She took a step closer; she didn’t want to miss when she finally pulled the trigger. “I’ll probably bash in your mailbox on the way out just to make it look like an authentic teen job.”
“Not if I tell them the truth.”
Maeve smiled. “Tell who? Tell them what? And why start now?” She closed one eye, training her sights on the center of the woman’s forehead. The woman wouldn’t have time to tell anyone. She’d be dead and Maeve would have killed her. It was official: she was someone else now. “Where’s my sister?”
“Not a clue,” the woman said.
She has no soul, Maeve thought. The sight of the gun didn’t even elicit a flinch. “You’ve got five seconds and then I’m going to kill you.” Maeve knew it was a faulty gambit; she had used the five-second rule with the girls and had always failed. Using it with a hardened sociopath, someone who clearly had nothing left to lose, was going to result in failure. She felt it in her bones.
So, she would just kill her. The woman either didn’t know, or wasn’t going to tell Maeve where Evelyn had gone, if she was dead, so she served no purpose on this earth any longer, as far as Maeve was concerned.
To Maeve’s right, a figure appeared in the door that led from the kitchen to the living room. A man, holding a kitten, was in the doorframe, crying copious tears. “I told you that if you kill the mama, the babies will die!” he said, holding the kitten in his hands forward, its lifeless head lolling to one side, as proof of his theory. “Now this one is dead!”
Regina looked at the man, clad in jeans and
a white T-shirt, and threw a dismissive hand in his direction. She looked back at Maeve. “Big help around the house but really annoying when it comes to strays.”
Maeve walked toward the man, his distress over the dead kitten leading to a high-pitched wail. She studied his face. “Winston?”
He looked at her, his face weathered, lined. Wet. “I’m not allowed to talk to strangers,” he said.
Maeve wasn’t sure what she was seeing, if she could trust herself. Her mind went back to that day in the barn. She looked from the old woman to the man, the cat lolling listlessly in his big, rough hand. “You buried those cats in the barn. Why?”
Mrs. Hartwell snorted. “That was Winston. He didn’t want them to be outside. Like the others.”
Maeve wasn’t sure if she meant other stray animals or the people who were buried in the woods.
Regina Hartwell’s shoulders slumped a bit. “I guess he can bury that one, too.”
Maeve turned and looked at Mrs. Hartwell. “Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to take Winston and bring him somewhere safe.” Maeve could only imagine what would happen when Winston’s aging body gave out and his usefulness to the Hartwell house had come to an end. While she wanted to believe that the others had died natural deaths, like Regina claimed, she couldn’t. “Winston, please wait for me by the front door.”
“He won’t go with you,” Mrs. Hartwell said, sure of it. “He only listens to me.”
Maeve turned to him. “I knew your mother, Winston. She loved you very much and wanted only the best for you.”
He looked at her, confused. “My mama is dead.”
She is now, Maeve thought, but she wondered how long ago he had been told that she had died. It had been years, if she had to guess. She looked at Mrs. Hartwell. “I’m going to take Winston somewhere safe, get him checked out. And then I’m going to come back with the police. And deal with you.” The old woman had no car. She lived in the middle of nowhere. There was no way for her to leave. Maeve spied the woman’s cell phone on the table and grabbed it, throwing it to the floor and crushing it with her boot.
Something changed on Regina Hartwell’s face, something that indicated that she was done. Done with Maeve, done with Winston, done with the life that was leaving her every day, if the cough and the pallor and the oxygen canisters were any indication. She looked at Maeve as she turned the stove on again, all four burners, this time not igniting the flames. She grabbed a box of matches from the counter.
Maeve looked at Winston. “Run, Winston!” she said as the old woman attempted to light a match to throw onto the stove. Her hands were shaking, making it difficult to get the proper angle and force to get first one, and then the next four matches to light. Maeve didn’t want to wait and see if the fifth one would be the charm, so she pushed Winston toward the front door, the dead kitten flying from his hands and onto a stack of newspapers. He was confused but he did what Maeve said. She ran past the piles in the living room to the room behind the fireplace and, needing something, anything, to prove the horrors this house had harbored, she grabbed the box of social security cards from the desk drawer, along with every file she could carry. She ran toward the front door, using her body to ram him out onto the porch and down the steps, ice having formed as the sun went down and the temperature dropped, the two of them rolling down the few short steps and onto the front lawn. Maeve dragged him up by the collar of his T-shirt and pulled him behind her, finally getting to the street. On the driving pad, the car was smoldering, most of the fire and flames having turned to black smoke, plumes curling up into the air and disappearing into the black night.
Good. She’d kill herself, Maeve thought. Now I don’t have to do it. She was relieved at that thought.
The house blew up in spectacular fashion just as she reached the Prius with Francine Alderson’s son in tow.
CHAPTER 51
Maeve called Cal while she was driving, her hands shaking. It took her four tries to say his contact information to her phone, her voice not sounding like her own. She put the phone on speaker because the Bluetooth wouldn’t work at the same time as the radio, the music coming from her speakers seeming to calm down the man next to her. “You need to help me. I’ll explain later,” she said, as she drove like a bat out of hell away from the house, Winston in the passenger seat crying and repeating that he wasn’t allowed to talk to strangers. Or drive in their cars. Or go anywhere without Regina. He was cold. He didn’t know Maeve. She turned to him. “Do you like music, Winston?”
He nodded, shivering in his shirt sleeves. If she had to guess, he was a little older than she was, but the years of living in the Hartwell house had taken their toll. He looked like an old man, his hair long and unkempt, his teeth missing in a few places.
“What kind of music do you like?” she asked.
Cal was confused. “Who are you talking to?”
“Winston,” she said, but that didn’t really offer any indication of who the man was or why he was in the car. “Cal, find me the address of the nearest social services office, or child protective services or something like that. And then I need you to walk me through the directions.”
Winston snuffled loudly. “I like music.”
Maeve turned the radio up. The song that the girls had been singing on New Year’s Eve—the one that got stuck in her head and wouldn’t let go—was playing. Maeve adjusted the heat so that it was blowing hot air directly at the shivering man.
“Cal, you’re going to have to speak loudly because I’ve got music playing.”
“I can hear it. And you’re going to tell me what’s going on, right?” he asked. “So I don’t worry?”
“Nothing to worry about,” she said. “Everything is fine.” Next to her, Winston had warmed up a little bit but had listed to one side of the seat, his head resting on the window, singing a song different from the one on the radio, to himself. It was “London Bridge.”
Cal worked the computer while Maeve drove into the town, passing the fancy restaurants and shops, and finally, pulling over to get the information she needed. Before she went back to Cal, she turned to Winston. Her thoughts were jagged and disjointed, and when she started talking, she hardly made sense even to herself. “Winston, a girl. Maybe who looked like me. Was she there?” she asked. “Did you know someone named Evelyn?”
But she had lost Winston, alone with his thoughts, protecting himself from the conflict that he had seen in the house between Maeve and Regina, the carnage that ensued after they escaped.
“You’re close,” Cal said. “If you’re in town, head toward County Road 214 and then hang a right. You should see a brick building on the right after a mile or two. It’s the municipal building and houses the police station and a host of other offices, including social services for the county.” Before he hung up, he asked her a question. “Do I want to know what you’re doing?”
Same old Cal. In for a penny but not for a pound. “No. You don’t.” She thanked him for his help and hung up. His directions had been very clear and she found the town’s municipal building within minutes.
Winston had fallen asleep and Maeve shook him awake. “I miss Regina,” he said, when he woke up. “Will she be here?”
She was the only person he had known for the past few decades, so he didn’t know that he didn’t have to miss her, that she had kept him from his mother. Maeve took his hand and led him into the building, walking down the long hall until she found a door with a sign etched into the glass indicating that she had found the social services arm of the municipality of Rhineview.
A pleasant-looking woman, chubby and bespectacled, sat at the reception desk. Behind her was an office, its door closed, where one of the social workers sat. “Can I help you?”
“Yes,” Maeve said.
The woman finally focused on the duo in front of her, the petite woman with the wild look in her eyes and the disheveled ponytail and the slightly older man who was rocking in place, not wearing a coat, and somewhat di
soriented. She stood.
“May we see the person in charge?” Maeve asked. “The head of social services or whoever is someone that can help me? And this gentleman?” Winston needed a doctor; Maeve was sure of that. Beyond that, she wasn’t sure what to ask for on his behalf.
The woman looked alarmed. “Well, yes.” As she said that, the door to the office behind her opened and a tall man came out, looking more than a little surprised to see Maeve and not hiding his shock at seeing Winston. The woman pointed to the man. “Mr. Donner here will be happy to help you.”
Maeve backed away from the high desk that separated her from the two people who worked in the department. In her panic, she had forgotten about him and the fact that he worked in social services. But the look on his face—guilt mixed with confusion—let her know that this wasn’t going to turn out well, that he had a hand in what had gone on at that house. It was written all over his face.
Donner looked concerned at her presence as well, at seeing Winston outside of his sister-in-law’s house. Maeve could tell that underneath the calm façade, a panic was brewing and he was feeling trapped. His eyes darted from Maeve to Winston and back again, his receptionist looking at all three of them with confusion.
“Mr. Donner?” she said. “This woman…”
“Yes, Kathy. Thank you,” he said. Maeve felt the seconds ticking off in her brain as she anticipated his next move. Would he play it cool and bring them into his office or would he dismiss her and the man she had brought in, unwilling or unable to help? Would he call the police and have her arrested? The gun felt hot in her pocket even though she knew it wasn’t.
“This is a problem, Miss Conlon,” he said. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to see my director about how to handle this situation.” He pushed open the half-door that separated the reception area from the office and walked out of the office at a pace that suggested to Maeve that he was leaving.
Lies That Bind (Maeve Conlon Novels Book 2) Page 23