She wondered if Detective Poole had found Mr. Moriarty yet, or his connection to Jack. He was the only guy Jack knew who had driving privileges, and she had been able to suss him out by spending only a minute or two thinking about it. Had Poole and his colleagues figured out Moriarty’s link to this yet?
As she waited on the myriad customers who came in that morning, some regulars, some just passing by on their way south on the adjacent highway, she wondered if Jack had it in him to kill anyone and if the NYPD saw something in him that she didn’t see herself. Did he give off the impression that he was cold-blooded enough to kill someone in a park, at night, and walk off, with no one the wiser? She kept returning to the same fact, and that was that an eighty-year-old with Jack’s failing faculties could not have pulled off something so sinister and so perfect. They would have to know that. Anyone with half a brain would know that.
Things settled into a quiet hum after the commuter traffic departed, and that was when Maeve caught up on her baking. Today, after putting three dozen cupcakes into the oven to bake and knowing she had exactly fourteen minutes until they needed to be pulled out, she opened the kitchen door so she could hear any foot traffic coming into the store and waited in the kitchen, a plan hatching in her head that was beautiful in its simplicity but maybe a little harder to execute than it seemed at first blush. She drummed her fingers on the countertop until the buzzer on the oven went off and she pulled the cupcakes out, putting them in a metal rack by the refrigerator to cool.
She went into the store and turned the OPEN sign to CLOSED. “Back in fifteen minutes,” she scrawled on a Post-it note before going out the back door, locking everything up tight, and heading the few short blocks to her house.
The kids would be at school for another four hours, but she didn’t need that much time. She went directly up to Heather’s room, the one with the door with the scuff mark on it from the time Maeve had gotten so angry at her younger daughter that she had kicked it open, leaving a mark that was wide and black and didn’t adequately do her ire justice at the time. She had been mad enough—but not big enough—to break the door in two. Sure, she could have painted over it, but she liked Heather to see it every time she entered her room, thinking that maybe she had just had the worst luck in the world to be born to a mother with an insane streak.
Maeve pushed open the door and went to work. For the first time ever, she was happy that Heather was a pack rat, saving every scrap of paper, every memento, and every McDonald’s Happy Meal toy she had ever come into contact with. They had had countless arguments about the state of her room, Maeve pointing to tidy Rebecca’s room as proof that just because you were a teenage girl you didn’t have to be a slob. The room had a distinct odor, one borne of decaying food stuck on plates under the bed, dirty clothes piled in the corner intermingled with the clean ones, and a variety of potions and sprays and creams that adorned the dresser top and were half-empty, their contents dripping down the sides of their canisters. One whole wall was covered with concert posters—Arcade Fire, Death Cab for Cutie, Adele—and Maeve wondered why she had bothered to spend close to eight hundred dollars getting the room painted a special-order shade of lilac to please her Oscar Madison of a kid. Maeve held her breath and looked at the mirror over the dresser, the one that held assorted ticket stubs and programs from the various sporting events and Broadway shows that her daughter had been to, searching for the ticket to the Yankees game that had serendipitously taken place the same night that Sean Donovan had met his Maker. Heather had gone with a friend from school, an outing that Maeve had approved because the parents were taking the girls on the train and would be with them the whole time. The family had also invited Rebecca, a nice touch. She scanned each and every piece of paper she came across, coming up empty.
This was not like her daughter. Maeve stood in the middle of the room, her hands on her hips, trying to get into the mind-set of a fifteen-year-old with an attitude. She pulled open the top dresser drawer, the one where Heather kept her underwear, and riffled through an assortment of tangled bras and panties, a few mateless socks, and, not surprisingly, a bag of joints, three in all, which Maeve stuck in her pocket.
This yoga thing wasn’t doing anything to calm her down. Maybe marijuana was the ticket.
Underneath an athletic sock that had seen better days, a hole in the big toe area and a brown spot on the bottom, was the golden ticket, so to speak, a stub from the game. Something exciting in Yankees history had happened that night, but Maeve couldn’t recall what it was; all she knew was that she needed that stub and now she had it.
Finding the stub had been the easy part. Convincing Jack that it was his would be more challenging, but not impossible.
She hoped he had forgotten that he was a Mets’ fan.
CHAPTER 21
When she thought about it, Maeve realized she wasn’t a pothead and never would be. But she knew someone who was. She threw the bag of joints on the trunk in front of Jo’s sofa and watched her friend’s eyes grow wide. Maeve didn’t mention that between the gun and the joints, she was a walking class A or B misdemeanor; her knowledge of the penal code in New York wasn’t comprehensive enough to know which it might be.
“Help yourself,” Maeve said. “They’re all yours.”
“Do I want to know where you got them?” Jo asked, reaching for the bag.
“Nope.”
“Thank you,” she said, pocketing the bag. “If this is your way of enticing me back to work, you really don’t know much about smoking pot. Once you smoke a joint this size, you don’t really care that you have a job—if, that is, you remember you have a job.”
“I don’t know a lot about smoking pot and I’m going to keep it that way,” Maeve said. “How’s the head?”
Jo instinctively fingered the bald spot where the stitches held her scalp together. “Better. Hey, will you take me to get my stitches out on Saturday?”
It was the least she could do. “Of course. Maybe we can do dinner afterwards?” When Jo didn’t respond, she added, “My treat?”
“Sounds good,” Jo said. “Do you want something to drink?” she asked. “Eat?”
Maeve looked at her watch. “Can’t. I have to go see Jack,” she said. “But Saturday, definitely, okay?” She leaned over and kissed Jo’s head, the part where there was still hair and no stitches. The quick glance she got at the wound showed that it was healing nicely despite still looking angry and red.
Earlier that day, after their visit to the police station, Cal had dropped Jack off at Buena del Sol and come straight to the store. The store should have been busier than it was at that time of day, but the lack of customers allowed them to talk for a long time. Cal looked more concerned than Maeve was anticipating, something that troubled her. He wasn’t quite so flippant about this visit as he had been with the last one, and he had sounded concerned before they had gone. From the look on his face when he walked in the store, Maeve finishing up at the counter with a customer, she knew that things were about to get more complicated.
“Can we go in the back?” he asked, not wanting to have the conversation in the front of the store, with the chance that someone could walk in. Behind the counter, he made himself a cup of coffee and grabbed a muffin from the glass case.
Maeve grabbed a stool and pulled it up to the big table in the back. Cal stood, taking the wrapper off his muffin and eating a few bites before he began to tell her the saga of their visit.
“Did Jack go all Vinnie the Chin on them?” Maeve asked, sounding as though she were making light of the situation, when in actuality she knew just how bad this could be.
“And then some,” Cal said. “At one point he’s telling them exactly where he was and what he was doing on the night Sean was killed, down to what he ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and then he’s saying that he can’t remember what the year is. Does that sound normal to you?”
“Normal for my dad.”
“Do you have any idea why they might be look
ing at Jack for this murder, of all things?”
Her first thought was: Because he wanted to protect me. But then she realized that he was far too late for that, and would know it, even in his state of mind. Unless he was giving it one last shot.
Cal knew she was holding back. “You need to tell me everything, Maeve.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” she said, trying to sound definitive but ending up defiant. “There’s nothing. Nothing at all. Sean was my cousin and Jack’s nephew and that’s it. Jack had no reason to want to see him dead.” She laughed, but it was sad. “As a matter of fact, I don’t think Jack even knows that he’s dead.”
“Oh, he knows he’s dead,” Cal said. “He thinks he succumbed to Dutch elm disease. Now why would he think that?”
“He’s just pulling your leg, Cal. He doesn’t really think that.” But she wasn’t sure. Between protesting that he read the paper daily and knew what was going on and asking all his questions regarding Sean’s demise, she wasn’t sure what he thought exactly, what in his mind was real and what wasn’t. It also depended on when you asked him, and Maeve wasn’t quite sure why that was. “They’re done with him, right?”
Cal shrugged. “That’s anyone’s guess. I can’t help feeling that they’re using him,” he said.
Maeve got a chill but refused to shiver, holding herself perfectly erect. “Using him?”
Cal shrugged again. “Forget it. It’s nothing. I don’t think they’re serious about him, but I’m not entirely sure and that’s what’s bothering me.” He took another swig of his coffee. “Listen, I’m sorry about the other night.” When she didn’t respond, he added more detail; he had let her down on numerous occasions, so he was going to have to be more specific. “Heather? The party?”
“Oh, that,” Maeve said, reaching into her jeans pocket and pulling out the bag of joints. “And we now have this.”
Cal wasn’t as shocked as Maeve would have expected. A simple “Oh” was all she got.
“‘Oh’?” she repeated.
He quickly rearranged his features into something approximating concern and horror. “We have to deal with that.”
“And this is why, Cal,” Maeve said deliberately, so that there was no misinterpreting her feelings on the subject, “we have to crack down on Heather. She’s headed for trouble, and I’m not content to sit back and watch.”
He pulled out a small pad and a pen from his jacket pocket. “Give me her schedule for the next few weeks.”
“There is no schedule,” Maeve said. She thought that was obvious. “When she’s with me, she stays home. When she’s with you, she stays home. It’s as simple as that.”
She wasn’t sure what he wrote down, but he jotted something on the pad. For a supposedly smart guy, he was pretty dense sometimes.
She thought about their conversation as she drove away from Jo’s, now three joints lighter but still troubled by Jack’s repeated questioning by the police. She headed straight for Buena del Sol, where she hoped she could catch Jack before he went to dinner, if only to check what he was wearing.
Doreen was manning the front desk again and had her faithful companion, Caesar, in tow. She gave Maeve a big smile, one that Maeve tried to return but was so forced, it made her cheeks hurt. “Jack Conlon?” she asked.
“Is he expecting you?” Doreen asked.
“No. I’m his daughter. I’m just dropping in.” Hadn’t they been through this before? Maeve looked around the lobby of the facility and noted that a lot of residents had guests this afternoon. It was when the lobby and the surrounding grounds were empty that she felt Jack was in the wrong place, thinking that this was where family members stuck their elderly relatives to die. But today it was full of life and everyone seemed happy, even those who were being pushed in wheelchairs or getting around with the help of walkers. Still, she felt impatient and nervous and had to get to Jack’s room to execute her plan.
Doreen looked at her sadly. “Mr. Conlon isn’t answering the phone in his apartment, nor the page I sent out,” she said after a few minutes. She looked at Maeve expectantly.
Maeve felt that old flutter of fear, the one that started in her throat and slowly worked its way down to her stomach. “He’s not?”
“Nope,” she said, checking her log. “And it appears that he didn’t sign out on any of the excursion buses.”
So, no trip to the grocery store, no outing to Woodbury Common with the rest of the more ambulatory residents, no excursion to Mohegan Sun. Jack was on a walkabout. Maeve beat it back to her car without saying good-bye to Doreen or her stuffed simian companion and headed back the way she came, this time sticking to the roads closest to the river so she could spot him easily.
The road along the river, however, was empty of pedestrians, a fact that relieved Maeve in one way—the road was not suitable for walkers—but concerned her overall. Where was he? She took a chance that he had gotten to his favorite destination before she had arrived at the facility, so she headed to the walking path along the water, hoping that she could spot him easily. This late in the day on a weekday found the river walk almost empty, a few people taking dogs out for a pre-dinner walk, one or two kids riding bikes under the watchful eyes of parents, one woman pushing a jogging stroller. She scanned the thin crowd for a sign of her father, jogging along the path in a pair of clogs wholly unsuitable for running, and had reached a bend in a path before she spotted him.
He was sitting on a bench that was positioned above a cluster of rocks at the water’s edge, gentle waves lapping at the outcropping. His eyes were closed, his face turned up to the last rays of the sun, seemingly oblivious to anyone around him. It wasn’t until Maeve touched his arm—momentarily afraid that she had found him too late, postcoronary—that he jerked awake, his vision clearing after a few seconds, a smile lighting his face as he realized who was sitting on the bench next to him. Rather than look at him, she turned and faced the water.
“Went a-wanderin’ again, Dad?”
“Figured I was owed a wandering after the morning that I had,” he said.
“And what kind of morning was that?” she asked.
He folded his arms across his chest. “Now there’s a question you don’t need to ask.”
Which was his way of telling her either that he couldn’t remember or that he remembered every last detail of his questioning and didn’t want to talk about it.
“The thing I don’t understand is why they care so much that that little puke was killed. He had it coming,” Jack said, remembering enough about Sean—she wasn’t sure what—that his anger toward him came bubbling back up to the surface, something Maeve hadn’t seen in a long time. “I always told you that anyone who hurt my little girl would come to no good,” he said cryptically. She didn’t know what he thought he knew or what he remembered.
She felt another shiver go up her spine. She was shivering a lot lately. “What does that mean, Dad?”
“It means nothing. It means I don’t remember. Something bad happened.…” He closed his eyes again. “It means I don’t know why they’re looking at an eighty-year-old man with a bad memory for a murder. How in God’s name would I have gotten myself to the Bronx?”
His frustration seemed to be clearing his mind, his take on the situation more on point than at any other time. She thought about the ticket stub in her pocket, wondering how she was going to get it into his wallet or his apartment at the facility.
“You didn’t hurt Sean, Dad,” she said, even though she didn’t think he was unsure of that point.
“I hope I didn’t,” he said. “But frankly, I don’t care if I did or if they ever catch who did. He was bad.” After a few seconds, he looked at her worriedly. “You didn’t do it, did you?”
She laughed. “Now why would you think that, Dad?”
He shook his head and stared out at the mountains on the other side of the river. “I don’t think that. I think any one of us in the family had motive. Kid stole money from my brother Brian, you kn
ow.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Wrecked his mother’s car, too.” He closed his eyes as if to stop the memories that at other times he reached for. “You don’t think they’re going to put me in jail, do you, Maeve?”
She tried not to let her heartbreak show on her face. “No, Dad, I don’t.”
He tried to laugh it off, but she could hear genuine concern there, right below the glimmer of bravado. “Because I don’t think I would make it. I mean, I’m still built like a guy half my age…,” he started.
“Yes, well, if you keep up these daily three-mile walks, you’ll be built like a guy a third of your age,” she said. “Dad, you’ve got to stay put at Buena del Sol.”
He snorted dismissively. “It’s landlocked. You know how I hate that.”
“So, I’ll come get you and we can walk the river after I close the shop. How about that?”
“Sounds fine. Won’t happen, but it sounds fine,” he said. “You’ll get too busy with the girls or you’ll stay open late to do a cooking class, and the next thing you know, it will be winter and I won’t have seen the outside of Buena del Sol in four months.” When he saw that she was getting upset, though not necessarily disputing his prediction, he patted her knee. “Forget it. I don’t want to make you feel bad. But you already do enough to make sure I’ve got it good. I’ll try not to mess up.”
She pointed toward the end of the walk, the spot where the path ended and a mosaic-tile oval made people turn around and start back toward the parking lot. “Race you to the end?” she asked.
He looked at her shoes. “With you in clogs? You’re on,” he said, bolting up from the bench and starting a slow trot toward the end of the walk. For an old guy, he was surprisingly fast, and Maeve had to hoof it to keep up. When she reached him she was out of breath, but he wasn’t so he slowed down. They jogged the rest of the way and part of the way back, Maeve begging him to stop halfway; they walked to the car slowly, allowing her to catch her breath.
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