1 Once Upon a Lie

by Maggie Barbieri

  The guy at the table wanted to know her “sign.” She made up a story about being on the cusp with Aries rising, which got him talking about her tendencies and why they were a perfect match.

  Sometimes, she was her own worst enemy.

  Her attention previously trained on Doug, Maeve now watched Rodney move fluidly through the room, wondering what he was really doing there. Because that was a man who, in a five-minute interlude, had managed to pique her curiosity, something no one had been able to do in a very long time.

  Maybe ever.

  CHAPTER 8

  Kids’ birthday parties were the worst.

  Maeve had to remind herself several times during a party why she had started this part of the business. Oh, that’s right—seventy-five dollars a head with a minimum of ten kids. Throwing just two parties a month paid her rent and kept her going. Otherwise, it was muffin by muffin, scone by scone, as Cal so wisely pointed out, and even with the free help her two teenage daughters occasionally provided, it was tough going. She had her one paid employee, but Jo preferred to work the “front of the house,” as she liked to call it, passing up the opportunity to spend an afternoon with icing-covered kids.

  After she’d hosted just a few, word had gotten out that a birthday party at The Comfort Zone was worth every penny, and soon Maeve was booking back-to-back parties every weekend.

  Too bad she hated kids, her own notwithstanding, although even they made her question her devotion to them from time to time.

  Before the party, she had visited her father again at Buena del Sol. She reminded him that he couldn’t leave the premises without her, even if it was just to go across the street to the deli to get a six-pack.

  He responded by reminding her that he was sixty-eight years of age and that he didn’t have to listen to anyone. He was a grown man.

  Once again, she didn’t have the heart to tell him that he was really eighty and that he did have to listen to her. And while he was a grown man, he was one whose brain didn’t fire on all cylinders. That conversation was like a broken record, and it didn’t matter how many times she told him; it only made her feel better for a short time and made him more determined to grab hold of his freedom. She had enough on her plate without tracking down another facility that wouldn’t just sedate him, strap him in a wheelchair, and wait for him to die. She kept all that to herself, though, extracting a promise from him—probably already forgotten—that he would stay put.

  Once, he had been a detective from whom other detectives sought advice; he had spent thirty years on the police force, working far longer than he had to to collect a significant pension. It was the work that he loved and that kept him at it. Some days, he would regale her with stories that she had never heard, and she was still surprised to find that she was fascinated; she thought she had heard them all. His gift had been his gab, as he liked to say, Jack Conlon being the guy who was called when all else failed, when even the right series of questions in an interrogation didn’t elicit the right answer in a given situation. He could find common ground with anyone, and that made him trustworthy to even the crustiest of criminals.

  He wasn’t a shadow of his former self; there were still flashes of that great sense of humor, and physically the old guy could probably take out men half his age. She wondered, though, how long it would be until he forgot her completely, looking at her as if she were the greatest mystery he had yet to solve.

  Going from her visit with Jack straight to the party had been a bad idea. It was hard to be festive for a bunch of little kids when all she could think of was the next time he was found on the side of the road by a passerby or a cop, a newspaper tucked under his arm, a six-pack swinging back and forth as he made his way to a destination he wasn’t entirely sure of. Home? If asked, he would have no idea where that was.

  She had a hard time getting her daughters to work the parties anymore, so today she was on her own; the girls had their limits, apparently. There were only nine girls for this party and they were fairly well behaved, the birthday girl’s parents’ bickering not an indication of the kids’ demeanors. One of the invited children hadn’t shown up, and it was clear that the father of the birthday girl—one Michael Lorenzo—was angling for a discount, one that Maeve was not prepared to give. The final count had come in the day before, as she requested, her policy set forth in the original contract that Cal had drawn up and that the parents had signed. Any no-shows on the day of the party were to be paid for in full, no exceptions. At the time, she’d wondered why Cal had worded the contract to make it sound as though any deviation from the final number would land the signer in the guillotine, but now she was glad for his legalese. It was right there in black and white, but that didn’t mean the fat guy in the Ed Hardy T-shirt wasn’t going to give her a hard time.

  Mrs. Lorenzo had seemed like an agreeable woman when she had come in to book the party and then again to sign the ironclad contract. Maeve hadn’t been able to put her finger on it, but she found the right word when she compared the wet dish towel in her hand to the woman sitting on a chair by the kitchen door. “Sodden.” That’s all that Maeve could come up with. Today Tina Lorenzo wore a tight-fitting top that despite its fit seemed to be trying to pull away from the woman’s skin. Although she was fairly fit, Maeve wanted to tell Tina Lorenzo that a shirt that tight was off limits after your thirty-fifth birthday. Maeve didn’t need to see her eyes, always hidden behind dark sunglasses, to know that they spoke of pain and of sadness. Her body told a tale that no one but Maeve—or someone like her—would be able to guess. Whatever “it” was, it was there and on this woman; there was no hiding it. The woman pushed a lank lock of hair behind her ear, taking in the party from her perch on a stool that Maeve used when icing her cupcakes. She didn’t seem overjoyed at what seemed like her little girl’s dream party. She didn’t seem happy with the half-eaten cupcake in her lap on a crumpled paper plate.

  As a matter of fact, to Maeve she didn’t even seem alive.

  Maeve poured another round of juice into the girls’ cups, brushing past the birthday girl’s mother and feeling an electric jolt of depression as her back touched the woman’s knees. That was everyone’s mistake: they thought depression meant that you were dead inside, that there was no spark. There was a spark all right, Maeve thought; it was just a spark that deadened you from within with each passing day, taking energy from its source.

  The father was yammering into his cell phone, presumably talking to one of the parents of the missing child, threatening them with an invoice if they didn’t show up at the shop within the next thirty minutes to pay for the party their kid was missing. By the way he was talking, though, Maeve determined that there was no one on the other end of the conversation and that what he was doing was just for show.

  She shot him a look, thinking, So that’s how you want to play it?

  “The Comfort Zone?” he asked the imaginary person on the other end of the conversation. “More like the Suck-Ass Zone.”

  Classy.

  One spilled juice and nine overly decorated cupcakes later, it was time for the cake. As Maeve passed by the mother again, her arms laden with a heavy three-layered cake just as Tiffany, the birthday girl, wanted, she noticed a bruise peeking out from the side of the sunglasses, a mark that the woman had taken great pains to hide behind a thick layer of gloppy makeup. Inexpertly applied, it only brought more attention to what Maeve could see was a fresh injury and one that would take a few days to show its true colors.

  She put the cake on the stainless-steel table, around which sat the perfectly behaved children, and picked up her cake knife, the one with the serrated edge that made the cleanest cut. She smiled at the group. “Girls? I just need to run outside for one quick minute to get some candles I left in my car,” she said, fingering the box of candles that sat in the front pocket of her apron. “I’ll be right back.”

  Lorenzo looked at his watch and tapped the face, letting her know who was in charge.

  You think
so, huh? she thought as she exited through the screen door. Let’s see.

  Outside, it was easy to pick out the minivan that had transported the dysfunctional family to the party, the family with the child who was afraid to get icing on her hands, the mother who either endured abuse or had had a run-in with the old standby—the doorknob—and the father whose silly fashion sense betrayed a sinister side that Maeve could almost smell on him. The minivan—with a Mad River Glen bumper sticker on the back—was the only other car in the back parking lot, parked beside and almost on top of her sensible but aging Prius in which she found the candles. She wedged herself between the two cars, and she indulged in a fantasy in which she ran the knife down the side of the van until she got to the end; it was far enough down on the body of the car that it wouldn’t be noticed immediately. In her mind, the final flourish came when she carved “F U” right above the fender.

  But she didn’t do any of that. She’d had every intention of doing it when she had left the store but knew what would happen if the car was found with a scratch on it. First, Mr. Lorenzo would take her to task for allowing people to drive erratically in the lot, as if she had any control over that. With her luck, he’d blame it on Jo and then Maeve would really have to kill him. Then, he’d take out whatever pent-up rage was left on his wife and possibly his kids. He had no self-control, while she had it in spades, and that’s what separated her from him. With a satisfied smile on her face, she walked back into the store, the candles held tightly in her hand.

  “Now who wants a piece of chocolate cake?”

  CHAPTER 9

  Maeve wanted to remind Julie Morelli that when they were in yoga class, and corpse pose in particular, there was no talking.

  She would have liked to put Julie in corpse pose for good, but that wasn’t polite. Even Jack, who had met her in the store once, couldn’t stand her, and he didn’t remember anyone long enough to form an opinion. Julie was different, though. “Could talk a dog off a meat wagon,” he liked to remark in her presence, but she was too stupid to realize he wasn’t talking about canines and hamburgers in general. Maeve always thought that no jury in the land would convict Julie’s husband—also known as “the Mute” to Maeve and her friends—if he smothered her while she slept, the only time her mouth wouldn’t be working overtime. Maeve turned her head to the right and smiled at Julie, when in her heart she wanted to tell her to shut the hell up.

  Julie took Maeve’s smile to mean that talking was now appropriate. “So sorry about your cousin,” she said. News traveled fast. Maeve had told only one person besides Cal—Jo—that Sean Donovan, the guy whose murder had been all over the papers, was her first cousin. Maeve had been counting on the fact that there would be nothing to connect her to him and on the fact that over two weeks later, the media attention would start to wane. Apparently, she had been wrong. “Were you close?”

  Maeve looked back up at the ceiling, her legs stretched out, her arms held tightly at her sides. That was the funny thing about yoga: although Maeve had taken it up for the relaxation it supposedly provided—and to replace the meditation on Sunday that going to church used to provide—she was more tense than ever when she left, and Julie Morelli had nothing to do with that. Maeve wondered if she was just wired to be continually wound-up. While everyone else in the room was close to a comatose state, she and the woman on the next mat with the mouth that wouldn’t quit were wide-awake and not focused on their deep breathing.

  Julie was still talking. “Kids? Wife? Did you see him on holidays? Did you grow up together? How was the wake? The funeral?” The questions kept flying, so fast that Maeve had a hard time keeping up.

  Maeve could dig a hole.

  “Is his wife set financially?”

  And push Julie in.

  “And the kids? Will they be able to go to college?”

  And then shoot her in the head.

  “Did anyone see who did it?”

  Nobody would be the wiser.

  She was enjoying the fantasy so much that she didn’t hear the soft voice of Tamara, the yoga instructor, bid everyone “namaste.” Namaste, my ass, Maeve thought. Get me the hell out of here. How did you translate that into Hindi?

  Maeve rolled up her mat and stood. Julie grabbed her in an embrace and pulled her close.

  “I don’t think there is anything worse than losing someone you love so violently,” she whispered into Maeve’s ear, Maeve’s diminutive frame looking as if it were being swallowed whole by the almost six-footer.

  Yes, there is, Maeve thought, but she remained silent. And she had never said she loved him.

  “Such a violent, violent death,” Julie cooed. If Maeve didn’t know better, she would think that Julie was actually getting turned on.

  As she got into her car, the unseasonable October heat enveloping her like a wet blanket, she thought about the new one she was going to rip Jo. It’s not that her relationship to Sean Donovan was a secret, but Julie Morelli? Not telling her was a given. She thought Jo understood that the fastest way to keep the gossip moving in town was to tell Julie. Maeve had certainly kept her mouth shut during Jo’s very public, and very painful, divorce from Eric, but everyone had found out the gory details regardless. How? Maeve had given Jo one guess when her friend had come to her in tears. Julie Morelli knew it all and had told everyone.

  Cal knew. So did Gabriela. Maeve was sure, though, that neither would say a word. Cal was discreet and Gabriela couldn’t give a damn about anybody but herself. She had probably already forgotten that Sean had been Maeve’s cousin; she was like that.

  She pulled in behind the store. Once inside, she peeked through the porthole in the kitchen door, seeing that Jo was perched on a stool, reading the local paper. Maeve knocked on the glass and beckoned Jo back into the kitchen area.

  The paper tucked under her arm, Jo greeted her warmly. “How was yoga?”

  “How was yoga?” Maeve asked, pulling a knife from the magnetic strip above the sink. “Julie Morelli couldn’t wait to ask me everything there was to know about Sean’s death.”

  Jo tried to hide the fact that she knew where Maeve was going with the conversation. “Really?” she asked, playing it cool.

  “Really,” she said, opening the refrigerator, taking out a carton of eggs, and slamming them down on the counter. When she opened the container, three were broken.

  Jo flinched. “I’m sorry.”

  “It may be hard for you to understand this, but I really don’t want to be associated with the man who was murdered, with his pants down, in Van Cortlandt Park. What don’t you understand about that?” she asked, feeling a momentary flicker of remorse when she saw tears well up in Jo’s eyes. If she had learned anything about herself over the years, it was that it took a while for her anger to dissipate, and until it did, she had to let it out, one way or another.

  “His pants were down?” Jo asked, her eyes wide.

  Maeve shot her a look that let her know they weren’t going down that path.

  “I made a mistake,” Jo said. “That’s all I can say.”

  Maeve put down the knife and gripped the sides of the counter. She breathed in the scent of the cupcakes that Jo had baking in the oven, a scent that brought her back to the first kitchen she had ever baked in in the semidetached house on Independence Avenue, right off the main drag and around the corner from the park. She thought about Jack tasting her first homemade cupcake and bragging about it and her to his brother in the living room. She remembered being in the kitchen and Sean taking one, pretending he was going to eat it, but pressing it into her mouth instead, acting as though it were all great fun until she started crying, loud, gasping sobs, her bottom tooth, the first adult tooth that she had, chipping in half. He told her father she had fallen. She had been eight years old. After a few seconds, in which she erased the memory of her cruel cousin and replaced it with those of her father, she raised her head. “It’s okay,” she said. Jo was crying openly now. “It’s okay,” she repeated.

&
nbsp; “I would never do anything to hurt you,” Jo said, making her way around the counter.

  Maeve held up a hand to stop her. If Jo hugged her now, she would crack into a million pieces. “I’m sorry. I just want to distance myself as far as I can from this. It would be bad for business…,” she started, looking at Jo. “It will be bad for business,” she amended. Because the cat was already out of the bag, and in due time, everyone would know.

  CHAPTER 10

  Maeve was wrong: it was great for business.

  She never could have anticipated what the murder of her cousin would bring her in terms of profits, but it seemed as though everyone wanted to pay their condolences to her and, while doing so, place an order.

  “I’ll have two dozen of the mini chocolate cupcakes,” Sarah Teitelbaum said.

  “Four dozen of the large gingersnaps, please,” Carolyn Bain said when she called.

  “Can you make one of your chocolate cream cakes? Enough to serve thirty people?” Barbara Worthen asked.

  Sure. I can do all of that and then some, she thought. Even the distributor had contacted her again, out of the blue, and asked if her operation had grown at all since the last time they spoke. She didn’t honestly believe that he had called because of the murder, but maybe her luck was changing. That first day after it seemed like everyone knew, she posted record sales and was able to put half of the next month’s rent in an envelope under the register drawer. Might as well pretend it wasn’t there; if she kept it in her possession, it would be gone before the month was over.

  She had smoothed things over with Jo, too. Nothing like making change for a fifty-dollar bill, or even a hundred, to make her forget that one slip of the tongue had revealed something she had wanted to keep to herself forever. She even gave her friend and only employee that afternoon off to study for the upcoming test she would be taking; a master’s in social work was something Jo had always wanted but never had time for when she was married. Now on her own, she had decided to pursue her dream. The Comfort Zone was Maeve’s dream come true, but not Jo’s. Hers was to help the less fortunate, those in need of assistance. Maeve’s was to keep everyone well fed; she guessed that she could also make the world safer, just in a different way.