Lies That Bind (Maeve Conlon Novels Book 2)

by Maggie Barbieri

  Cal knew the whole story and listened intently. “I hope it wasn’t her, Maeve,” he said.

  Another massive understatement from her clueless ex. “Me, too, Cal.”

  Cal was wearing a tool belt, something almost as incongruous as the time Maeve had seen Gabriela wearing sweatpants. “A tool belt?” she asked. “Is this a job that requires multiple tools?”

  Cal had never been the handy sort so Maeve was surprised he had any tools, let alone a tool belt. He studied the lockset and pulled out a long page of directions. She pulled out some cupcakes; he looked like he would need sustenance for the job. He fiddled with the pieces for a while and started to assemble the doorknob and its component parts. After a half hour, two cupcakes, and a prolonged spate of profanity, he instructed Maeve to go into the bathroom.

  From her perch on the toilet seat, she continued her conversation with him. “So, not a dime to Rebecca this semester. She can eat in the dining hall and scrounge up old ChapSticks and use those before she gets another cent from either one of us.”

  “Uh-huh,” Cal said, focused on his task.

  “Twenty-five hundred dollars,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Yep.” He clicked something into place. “Try it now.”

  The room was so small that she could sit on the closed toilet lid and touch the handle. She jiggled it, attempting to let herself out. “Doesn’t work.” She looked around the bathroom. She needed to give the girls a list of things they needed to do in her absence; she was tired of being the only person in the house who noticed when they were out of toilet paper and when they needed to clean out the shower drain upstairs. Two girls with long hair equaled lots of potential plumbing problems. She would leave a toothbrush beside the list; the grout around the sink was in desperate need of a cleaning and who better than her lazy daughters?

  Beyond the bathroom door, she heard Cal grunting and groaning, the strain of replacing the doorknob far greater than she would have imagined. He called in through the opening in the door where the knob would go, one of the components holding the door closed and locked. “Maeve, sit tight. There’s someone at the door.”

  When he returned to the kitchen, he was accompanied by another man; Maeve immediately recognized his voice, the cadence that of someone from farther upstate than where she lived.

  So Michael Donner wasn’t missing, just biding his time until he could come visit Maeve and either tell her everything he knew or kill her.

  Her money was on the latter.

  “She’s indisposed at the minute, Mr. Donner,” Cal said. “Oh,” he said, a little concern creeping into his voice. “Of course.”

  A chair scraped away from the kitchen table and Cal sat down, his back blocking the view she had from the powder room and, if she was on the same wavelength as her ex-husband, blocking her from harm.

  “No need for that,” Cal said. “Let me know what you need and I’ll get it.”

  Maeve stood up in the bathroom, her bare feet making no sound on the tile floor. In a basket next to the sink were a variety of hair care products and appliances; she slid a travel curling iron into her front pocket. She got up on the toilet top and with one quick movement, opened the window above it, hoisting herself out as quickly as she could. Jo had been the champion gymnast in childhood, before she had gotten so tall; Maeve was the clumsy little person with no coordination but no one would have known that by the way she silently threw herself out the window, onto the picnic table, and then to the ground. The girls had been locked in the bathroom so many times now that they had an escape route all planned: the picnic table was beneath the window, and although Maeve was several inches shorter than her daughters, she landed easily onto its surface, her feet hitting a stagnant puddle of cold water.

  It was cold out and she wasn’t wearing shoes. But she did two things before she entered the house again, as quietly and as stealthily as she could. First, she extracted the gun from beneath the seat of the Prius, the place she had returned it to after seeing Jimmy Moriarty. And then, she let the air out of the passenger-side tires of Donner’s car, the same one she had seen a few weeks ago in Rhineview when they had met the first time. She would have loved to blow it up, the same way she had destroyed Regina Hartwell’s old Rambler, but this was her neighborhood, her home. She wouldn’t bring evil to the place she loved.

  But she was a little worried at how much she was enjoying thinking about blowing things up.

  She had lived in this house long enough to know which floorboards creaked, which were silent. How to open the screen door without giving anything away. How to hug the banister so that no one would ever hear you on the stairs. She loved that element of surprise.

  Michael Donner was standing in the opening of the kitchen, his gun trained on Cal’s trembling body. God bless the guy but her ex wasn’t cut out for home repairs or this kind of violent confrontation. Fortunately, he had Maeve for that, but even she jumped a bit when Donner pointed his gun at Cal and fired.

  Fortunately for Cal, Donner had terrible aim. It turned out to be a warning shot, even if he hadn’t intended it to be.

  While he did miss Cal, he did manage to hit the box of ornaments that were still sitting in the kitchen, despite Maeve’s repeated requests to the girls that they put them away in the basement. She needed someone tall to do it, one of them, but her pleas had fallen on deaf ears. The box had sat there for the last several days, the policeman in the Santa hat, her favorite and a reminder of Jack, peeking out of the top. Michael Donner, with his terrible aim, had shattered that ornament, one that she had had since she was small and that reminded her of her father.

  It was all she could do not to blow the guy’s head off. She was behind him. He would never know what hit him. But she’d likely have to gut the kitchen when it was over; blood splatter was bad enough. But brain splatter was impossible to get out, if what she had seen on television was true.

  Donner fired again, hitting the ceiling.

  Maeve stuck her own gun in his back. “Drop the gun,” she said. She only needed to say it once. The voice that came out of her throat sounded unnatural even to her but to Donner, it must have sounded like that of a demon. When he followed her first command, she ordered him to kick the gun toward Cal, who was bleeding from a wound over his eyebrow. The bullet had taken out a chunk of one-hundred-year-old plaster that had hit him square on the forehead. “Pick up the gun, Cal.”

  Cal did as he was told, holding the gun in one hand, a dish towel in the other pressed to his injury. He moved toward the back door and stayed there, his eyes trained on the much larger man and his ex-wife, someone he had never really seen before. Not like this anyway. She pushed Donner into a chair and slid the gun into the back of her pants pocket at the same time.

  She grabbed the largest knife she had—a Wusthof seven-inch chef’s knife—from the magnetic strip next to the stove and crawled up on the table, sitting cross-legged in front of Donner, who had a look on his face that told her that he may have stumbled across the one seemingly mild-mannered suburban mom with a murderous streak.

  He’d be right.

  “Why did you come here?”

  “To talk,” Donner said. “To explain.”

  “If you just came to talk, why’d you bring a gun?” Maeve asked, chuckling when it was clear that he didn’t have an answer. “So, you came to threaten me or to kill me. Why?” He didn’t have an answer to that either, so she tried another tack. She held the knife to his chin. “Where’s my sister?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. He turned his head slightly and the knife grazed him, drawing a thin line of blood. He looked to Cal for support. “I don’t know.”

  Cal stood, as if in a trance, the gun dangling at his side.

  She pushed the knife deeper into his chin, drawing more blood. “Where’s my sister?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was she one of the other people in your sister-in-law’s house?” Maeve asked.

  “I have no idea.”
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  She slapped him hard. “Was that my sister in that house? Little, blond, blue eyes?”

  The slap jostled his memory. “I don’t know.”

  “Who was there?” she asked. She raised her hand again. “Don’t make me use this knife. Please,” she said, the entreaty more to herself than to him.

  His memory was suddenly sparked at the sight of the knife, her intention to use it telegraphed between the two of them. “It was someone else. Hispanic. Black hair. A woman. Not your sister,” he said. “The woman had died. Jeannie. She was dead already. That’s why I went to Regina’s.”

  Maeve looked at him, incredulous. “To bury another body?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Maeve adjusted her legs so she was more comfortable. “Want to know what my nickname was in culinary school?” When he didn’t answer, she continued. “Guess,” she said.

  “I don’t know.”

  She moved the knife and nicked his jawline. “Don’t say that again.” She stretched the arm not holding the knife. “Sweeney Todd. You know why?” When he didn’t answer, she explained. “Because I was the best butcher in the class. Great with a fillet knife, too. Could clean and carve a pork shoulder, anything really, in under thirty seconds.” She smiled at the memory. “Got an A in the class. Cal, did you know that?”

  Behind her, Cal let out a little squeak to let her know that he didn’t know that. “I’m calling 911, Maeve,” Cal said, his voice, and his sense, returning to him.

  She ignored him. “One last time. Where is my sister?” she asked, slowly and deliberately.

  He answered in kind. “I don’t know. I never did know. I never knew who those people really were.”

  She studied him. “You know how much blood there is in a human body?” she asked. She didn’t know but was curious. Behind her, she heard Cal hang up the phone.

  “No.”

  “Me either,” she said. “I was just wondering what the cleanup will be like when I cut you open.”

  Cal vomited noisily into the sink. When he was done, he begged her to stop. “Please. Stop. The police will be here soon.”

  “Why did you come to the support group? To find out what we knew? What I knew? To find out if we were close?” Maeve asked.

  His silence told her everything she needed to know.

  Maeve waved the knife around in the space between her and Regina Hartwell’s brother-in-law. “Coming here was a bad idea,” she said. “No one threatens me or my family in my own home and gets away with it. No one comes to find out what I know and silence me,” she said, guessing at his motive. She stared into his eyes, to see if there was any humanity there. “You kept those people isolated in a house far from civilization.”

  “Nobody wanted them,” he said.

  “Tell that to the people at the support group. The people you lied to,” Maeve said. She felt a darkness grow inside of her, and the fear in the man’s eyes grew to the point where if Maeve wasn’t fueled by bloodred rage, she would have felt sorry for him. Laughed, even, at the roundness of his close-set eyes. In the distance, she heard sirens, so she got off the table and put the knife back on the magnetic holder, confident that Cal could keep the gun trained on him. “Jail is a better place for you than out there,” she said to Donner’s back, gesturing toward the outdoors. “Because I would find you. And I would kill you.”

  Cal was pressed up against the back door, not sure who he was more afraid of: the guy who had come to hurt his ex-wife or his ex-wife. By the look on his face, it was even.

  “What did you do with Regina? Why did you have those people?” she asked.

  “Money. We kept them alive with fake identities and got money. From the state. We used the social security numbers of people who had died at Mansfield toward the end, whose deaths hadn’t been recorded. People who didn’t have families. Weren’t wanted. Regina needed help. The house was big. The yard, too.”

  “It couldn’t have been that much that you were getting,” Maeve said.

  “It wasn’t,” he said. “But it was enough.”

  “And when you were done with them?”

  “Some got sick.”

  “And the others? You killed them?”

  “No!” he protested.

  But that was all he said before a commotion erupted on the front porch, signaling that this part of her nightmare was now over.

  Three officers entered through the front door, their guns drawn, Chris the first guy through the door. He wrinkled his nose when he got to the kitchen, Cal’s upended dinner sitting in the sink. He didn’t ask how the tall man sitting in the chair came to have a wound that looked like a slice along his chin.

  “We’re okay, Chris,” she said, leaning against the counter nonchalantly.

  “She threatened me! She has a gun!” Hartwell said. Blood dripped from the spot on his chin that she had cut.

  Maeve pulled the curling iron out of her pants pocket. “You mean this?” she said. “Chris, get him out of here and I’ll tell you what happened.”

  By the back door, Cal was on his knees, his hand holding the gun outstretched. “Someone please take this from me.”

  “And I think we need an ambulance,” she said, pointing at Cal and the blood-soaked kitchen towel that was over his wound.

  After the cops dragged him out, she gave Cal a glass of water and spoke to Larsson in the living room, telling him what she knew, what Donner had told her. “So nothing on your sister?” he asked.

  “No,” she said.

  She thought about the past several weeks, about her father. She missed him now, more than ever, and wondered why before coming to the conclusion on her own. She had nothing left.

  She looked at Chris. “I give up,” she whispered.

  CHAPTER 56

  “Is that the last suitcase?” Maeve asked Rebecca, pushing the other things that had already been loaded into the Prius farther back into the hatch. The backseat was down, giving them some more room. Although Cal had volunteered to drive Rebecca back, Maeve had insisted. She and her oldest had a lot to talk about and the hour trip would give her the time she needed to have a very pointed conversation—okay, it was really a monologue—with Rebecca about fiscal responsibility.

  The day was sunny but cold and in the harsh light Maeve could see that Rebecca’s eyes were red and watery. Maeve knew why she had been crying: she had been caught. It was plain and simple. It had nothing to do with impending homesickness and it wasn’t sadness over going back to school; she had told her mother several times that she couldn’t wait to get back to Poughkeepsie, away from her mother and her rules. The tide was turning; it seemed that the freedom she had had at school had turned her into that recalcitrant teen that Maeve had been waiting to emerge since she had turned thirteen.

  She was a late bloomer, it seemed.

  “That’s the last suitcase,” Rebecca said, pulling a wadded-up tissue from her pocket and blowing her nose noisily.

  “Did you say good-bye to your sister?” Maeve asked, checking her purse for her wallet, her keys. The night before, she had sat with Rebecca in the kitchen, supervising the numerous job applications that the girl had filled out: CVS, Boston Market, some retail stores at the Poughkeepsie mall. If she were going to beef up her accounts again and have money for those necessities like shampoo and school supplies, she’d need a job, something she never anticipated. The crying had started then and hadn’t stopped since, it seemed. The blotches on her face were another hallmark of a night spent sobbing.

  Maeve turned as Heather burst from the house, running down the front steps. “Wait,” she called. Maeve expected a battle to ensue over Rebecca’s absconding with one of Heather’s shirts or Heather forgetting that she had borrowed five dollars from her sister.

  As Maeve pushed the items closest to the edge into the trunk, she watched their heads come together, their whispering emotional and dramatic.

  This burst of sisterly love warmed Maeve’s heart, but that feeling was short-lived. There was a confe
ssion to be made, right here on the sidewalk, and one that Heather felt compelled to get off her chest thirty seconds before her sister left for school for another poverty-stricken semester.

  “It was me,” Heather said. “I took the check.”

  “What?” Maeve said. “The insurance check?”

  Heather nodded. “Yes. That check.”

  Maeve was confused. Heather’s bank accounts had never been as robust as her older sister’s, the younger one being far less frugal and sensible about money overall. “How did you cash it?” Maeve ran through a variety of scenarios in her mind as to how that could have been accomplished but none of them made sense or seemed like plans that Heather could have pulled off herself.

  “Tommy knew a check cashing place in Prideville.”

  Maeve saw red. She looked around the neighborhood, hoping that there was no one to witness what would surely be her last and final meltdown. Because she was going to kill one of them and then likely drop dead of a heart attack. “And they cashed it for you? How? Do I even want to know?” Heather must have forged her mother’s signature. The check-cashing store had not asked for identification. It was all there on the girl’s face.

  Heather didn’t respond. Apparently, it had been easy and Maeve didn’t want to know.

  “I took the money out of my account to repay you,” Rebecca said, hoping that the flush that was rising in her mother’s cheeks could be allayed by more news on this front. “I had to help her.”

  She was wrong; the flush in her mother’s cheeks grew deeper, blotchier.

  “Wait,” Maeve said. “Back up. Do I want to know why you needed three thousand dollars?” She knew the answer to that question. It was “no.” This is where the story is going to make me throw up, right on the street, Maeve thought. This is where it all falls apart and we all have to leave town.

  Rebecca looked at Heather. “Do you want to tell her?”

  Maeve pointed to the house. “Let’s not do this out here. Let’s go back inside.” Before Rebecca could protest that they needed to leave for Poughkeepsie immediately and not one second later, Maeve shut her down. “School will be there whether we get there at four or five or even eight o’clock tonight. Or ever. Zip it.”