Lies That Bind (21 page)

One of them needed to be.

She walked back to the car in the dark and when she was buckled in, silently drove away.

I think I might be crazy, she thought, and not for the first time.

Maybe I should stop right now.

But she knew she wouldn’t.

CHAPTER 37

Maeve was home before daybreak, well before the girls decided to arise. They had no idea that she hadn’t been home, had been driving around an area miles upstate from where they lived, and touching dead cats. The holy card was tucked into the pocket of her jeans and when she got home, she extracted it from her pants and laid it carefully on her nightstand, right next to Rodney Poole’s card.

After she slept a bit, she would spend time with the girls, take them to the mall, the equivalent of a consumer cathedral for them, holy and special and the only place in which they didn’t fight with each other for extended periods of time. Maeve hated the mall but she wouldn’t complain. Her quality time with her father had been going to shooting ranges and then to the local Knights of Columbus for a beer with his cop friends before returning home. She wanted to make sure her girls had a more “normal” upbringing, whatever that was. She was sure it didn’t include shooting ranges; that much was clear.

In her bed, the down comforter wrapped around her body, she drifted off to sleep thinking about her father and his religious devotions that didn’t extend to him actually going to church. Prayerful and often espousing the teachings, he didn’t have much use for organized religion but a lot for the rituals that he had learned as a child himself. As she settled into a deep sleep, Jack returning to her at the gazebo with the day-old loaf of challah bread in his hands once again, she wondered if he was at peace.

“It’s rye,” he said again, admonishing her for her mistake.

It was after one when she woke up, feeling more refreshed than she would have thought, given her schedule. She realized, with a start, that she hadn’t thought of the store once in the past few days, and to not think of it was refreshing. Only passing thoughts of her landlord and Billy Brantley. Not a care about Tommy, playing lacrosse somewhere like his life depended on it. It meant, despite driving up north and finding dead things, that she was relaxing, if in her own demented way. She got up and got dressed, once again taking extra time to wash the stench of Rhineview out of her skin and hair.

The significance of the card, whether there was any or not, stayed with her as she towel-dried her hair. Downstairs, she could hear voices and a little commotion that could only mean one thing: Jo had arrived.

She was in the kitchen with the girls, where some kind of extravagant meal preparation was in the works. Maeve held her breath. These undertakings usually involved something burned and a pot that had seen its last use. They always required Maeve having to clean up a spilled marinara or exploding pea soup. She tried to keep her cool as she saw Jo open a package containing large salmon, raw, and instruct the girls how to bake it.

“Hey,” Maeve said, entering the kitchen. “I’m the only professional cook around. Want me to do it?”

“Had a hankering for the saltiest fish I could find,” Jo said, turning to face Maeve. “So Doug picked one up at the fish store that won ‘Best of Westchester’ for their salmon.” Behind her, the girls looked relieved that their mother was up and in their presence finally; they weren’t used to her not being awake in the afternoon. If she was still in bed, something was terribly wrong. “How complicated is it to cook salmon?” Jo threw herself into a chair, grasping at her belly. “Doug said I couldn’t cook it in the cottage because we would never get rid of the smell.”

Was it worse than the smell that two dead cats produced? Maeve wondered. If so, Doug had a point. Maeve was thankful to have the fish to prepare, if only to get her nose accustomed to something that would inevitably taste and smell delicious once she was finished with it. “And how is Doug?” she asked, her voice pleasant, not giving away the murderous rage she felt every time she thought of him sitting with Tamara from Dunkin’ Donuts.

“Great!” Jo said. “Loving birth class. He’s promised that no matter where he is or what he’s doing, he’ll make sure to get home for the birth.”

“First births usually don’t go that quickly, Jo.” Maeve pulled some greens out of the refrigerator and started to assemble a salad. “I’m sure he’ll make it to you if he’s not home already.”

“That’s what the birth class lady said,” Jo said, reaching over and plucking a cherry tomato from the container on the counter. “It’s weird. It’s like he woke up and decided that he really wanted to be a part of this.”

Like he woke up. That was one way to put it.

The girls poured drinks for everyone and gathered around the kitchen table, waiting for their mother’s attention to be moved from the food preparation to them. When Maeve was finished with her ministrations to the large salmon, she slid it into the oven and took her place at the table where she noticed a slim box, wrapped in brown paper, sitting in the middle of the table.

“What’s that?”

Jo shrugged. “Found it on the porch when I came up.” She pushed it toward Maeve. “How long for the salmon? And do you have any pumpernickel? Dill sauce?”

Maeve picked up the package. It had some heft. “Jo, as of fifteen minutes ago, I didn’t even have a salmon. Why would I have the things that should accompany it?”

Jo was disappointed. “Because you’re a cook and cooks have things like dill and pumpernickel around all the time?”

“Not this cook,” Maeve said. “I can do fifty things with canned tuna that will make your head spin but salmon is a different story, especially if you want particular sides.”

Jo took a napkin out of the ceramic holder on the kitchen table and pulled a pen from her messenger bag. “Heather, Rebecca. I’m giving you a list. A very specific list. And you must get these items and get them back here before this salmon is served.” She looked at Maeve. “How do you make dill sauce?”

Maeve took the napkin and jotted down a few items, pulling ten dollars out of her purse. “This should cover it. Hit the gourmet market. There will be less of a line and you’re more likely to find what you need quickly.”

“Don’t forget those pickles that I like!” Jo called after them.

“What kind?” Heather called back from her spot in the front hall.

“Cornichons,” Maeve said. Once she heard the car pull out of the driveway, its wheels making a sound on the gravel, she looked more closely at the package. There was nothing to indicate where it had come from. All it said, in black marker across the front, was her name.

The handwriting didn’t look familiar. She slid her finger under the tape holding the package closed, opening up the entire seal. “Did you see who left this, Jo?” Maeve asked.

Jo shook her head. “It was on the porch. No one around. Where do you think it came from?”

“Not a clue,” Maeve said, pulling the large book out.

Jo traced a finger on the quilted cover, cracked a little from age. “It’s a scrapbook,” she said.

But it wasn’t. It was a photo album. And in it were pictures that Maeve had never seen before, pictures of her mother when she was young, beautiful, and single, if the male suitors who surrounded her in the first few pages were any indication. Photos of Jack as a baby, his proud Irish-born parents holding their son up in front of other relatives for all to see. Photos of her parents when they were dating, darkly tinted lips on her mother, her ubiquitous red lipstick appearing almost black, Jack’s hair swept back in a slick-looking pompadour, something that Maeve never would have touched for fear of getting her hands dirty; it looked crisp and sticky but in style for the times. Jo remarked on every photo, noting how beautiful Claire Conlon had been, how a young skinny Jack looked surprisingly the same as an old man.

Maeve touched each page with care. The photos were held in place by little black triangles whose stickiness had long since worn off; some photos listed to one side or threatened to fall from their individual pages. One page held a group of articles, all clipped together with a rusty paper clip, all about the Mansfield Missing, the dozen who were gone and never found.

Maeve hastily turned the page, not ready to go there in her mind, not ready to explain to Jo and the girls what she had been thinking all along. Her sister had been one of the dozen missing teens and young adults, and seeing the articles that Jack had kept all these years solidified in her mind something she had thought but which she couldn’t give voice to.

Jo was oblivious to Maeve’s quick turn of the page. “Your parents’ wedding photo is gorgeous. They look like movie stars,” Jo said, tracing the line of Claire’s lace dress.

“I know,” Maeve said. “I’ve seen this photo.” She turned the page.

“And there’s your sister,” Jo whispered, the last words she said as she and her best friend flipped slowly through the first five or so years of a life neither knew had existed before a few weeks earlier. “She has your features.”

She looks like me, Maeve thought. That’s my sister.

CHAPTER 38

Jo and the girls went to worship at the altar of all things retail, leaving Maeve home alone. She pulled a photo from the album—the most recent one of Evelyn—and held it in her hands. She left another message for Doug. “Time to pay the piper,” she said. “Call me when you get a chance.”

She was restless, far more than she had been before, but the photo album had awakened her desire to get to the truth as quickly as possible. Looking through those pictures made her feel like time was running out, though she wasn’t sure why. A sense of urgency replaced a feeling of exhaustion, and before she had time to think, she had unearthed an old coat of Heather’s that no longer fit her and sat at the bottom of the closet—pink with a furry collar—donned it, and warmed up the car. Her own coat had lost far too many down feathers to be useful anymore.

Jo texted her and said that they were having such a good time that they were going to have dinner at the mall, a development that gave Maeve time to do what she had been mulling over since they left.

In Rhineview, she didn’t hide today, pulling right into the parking space next to the old Rambler in front of the house. Before she got out of her car, she jotted down the license plate number. Might as well give Doug a full list of items to check out rather than just one thing at a time.

She hoped that whoever was inside didn’t have easy access to the shotgun that she had heard let out a loud report two days earlier. In the pocket of Heather’s childhood down coat was her own gun, locked and loaded. With the photo of Evelyn in her pocket, she mounted the front steps of the house and rapped on the front door with one gloved hand, her other hand in her pocket and fondling the cold steel of her gun.

“Mrs. Hartwell?” she called, peering in the windows that lined the porch. Inside, the house was as unkempt as the outside, piles of newspapers and magazines strewn about what would have been called a “parlor room” when the house was built but which was now where a giant television sat atop a cheap entertainment cabinet. Maeve brushed some frost off the window to get a better look when she caught movement from inside the house. She stepped back and waited in front of the door.

An old lady, her face looking much like those of the women Maeve had grown up around, weathered and Irish, looked back at her from inside the house, her shaking hand parting the curtain that gave a small measure of privacy to the inside of the house.

“Mrs. Hartwell?” Maeve asked.

The hand holding the curtain, shaking wildly now, disappeared and Maeve heard the bolt on the door turning. The woman opened the door a crack.

“My name is Maeve Conlon and someone named Margie Haggerty gave me your name. I’m looking for my sister.” Maeve stepped closer to the door but not close enough to be threatening to the old woman, who obviously didn’t welcome Maeve’s arrival on her front porch. “Please. Her name is Evelyn Conlon. She lived at Mansfield in the 1970s.”

The woman stared back at Maeve, her blue, rheumy eyes giving nothing away but stoic, silent determination.

“Please. You’re the only link I have,” Maeve said.

“I don’t know anything,” the woman finally said, and Maeve recognized her voice as the woman she had spoken to a few days before when she had called the number Margie had given her.

“Margie Haggerty. I don’t know how you know her, but she said you worked at Mansfield. I think,” she said aloud for the first time, “that my sister might be one of the Mansfield Missing.”

The woman let out a lengthy cough, one that rattled from deep within her, sounding like something was terribly wrong inside her large, soft body. The resolve that Maeve had when she had driven up here—to get into this house and get answers—slowly drifted away as the woman’s face hardened with her own steely determination. “I know nothing. Go away.”

But that wasn’t the truth and Maeve knew it. She tried once more. “Evelyn Conlon. She would be in her fifties now. Probably blond, maybe gray.” Maeve didn’t know, so she had to guess. “Blue eyes? I don’t know for sure.” Maeve pleaded with the woman. “That’s what she would look like, I think.”

The print on the woman’s blue housecoat was a cheery pattern with cherries on the collar, belying the hostility of the wearer. “Get off my property.”

Maeve stood firm.

“I’ll call the cops.”

“And tell them what?” Maeve asked.

“That you’re trespassing. That you’ve been harassing me.” She let out another cough. “That you’ve been here before.” She pointed out toward the road. “Out there. In my barn?” she said as if to remind Maeve.

One last try. “My father is dead. My mother died a long time ago. My sister is the only living person from my immediate family,” Maeve lied. No reason for this woman to know about her girls. “Please.”

“I know nothing,” the woman said, slamming the door in Maeve’s face.

“You’re lying,” Maeve said to the closed door. “You’re a liar.” But there was nothing else to do but leave.

The woman’s face stayed with her all the way home, the hardness and the meanness around her eyes—blue like her own—reminding her of someone she had chosen to forget.